Keith is a professor in the Department of Journalism and Media Studies at San Diego State University. She has worked for her two foreign governments at the Spanish Embassy and the Kuwaiti Consulate General. She has been published in The New York Times, Kveller, McSweeney's, The Nosher, Scary Mommy, Uptown News, Sammy Chess & Psych Meds, PJ Library, Medium, and BLUNTmoms. You can find her articles at jessicakeithwriter.com.
I sell lavender at the county fair, stand in for a magic teacher, act as a Jewish elf, and work the night shift in gift baskets across the hall in an office suite rented out for freelance porn shoots. His business involved shipping Christmas presents.
When the economy crashed in 2008, I literally spent a year begging for peanuts. I have a master's degree in international education, he has 10 years of experience advising students at a prestigious university, and my temporary job was packing peanuts. When we ran out of Styrofoam stuffing, it was my job to get the eight-foot-tall refill bags out of storage at the back of the building without scaring the homeless men sleeping in the alley. Treated as expendable, I felt like a Jewish elf, wondering what kind of boss would pack a holiday box for the Grinch and only hire women to go down the alley at night to buy peanuts. I wondered.
As an unemployed Jewish woman, I prayed for an opportunity. All I needed was one person to give me a chance. But every door I knocked on was closed. It took almost a full year for me to get my only job offer. It came from a Muslim man who was the cultural attaché at the Kuwaiti consulate. Aiming to expand the embassy's education department, the country's Ministry of Higher Education was launching a new department in Los Angeles. Our office is the cultural division of the Consulate General and was established primarily for Kuwaiti students studying at American universities on the West Coast. Their government awarded scholarships to promote cross-cultural understanding. Kuwaiti nationals wishing to study abroad who meet the minimum qualifications will receive the ultimate reward: a full university scholarship. American universities were stunned to hear that the Kuwaiti government had paid for the “full ride.” But as a Jewish woman, I was already very aware of this whole picture. This educational opportunity is known to Jews as tikkun olam, which is about healing the world through action, in this case by fostering intercultural relationships.
When I first started this job, I didn't know where Kuwait was on the map or why everyone was asking, “Do you know you're Jewish?” Although I didn't speak Arabic and didn't know anything about Kuwait, I believed I was professionally prepared. My role was to advise students academically and help them adjust to the culture shock of living on an American university campus. My job was to practice the Jewish values of Ahavat Ger and to welcome strangers. My Jewish family history instilled in me that we were all once strangers. And it is our moral obligation to do our part to make tomorrow better than today for everyone.
From the beginning, the phone rang from a Kuwaiti student who needed guidance to navigate a new world. When a 17-year-old freshman, a devout Muslim, called, I could hear his voice cracking over the phone, even though there was a crowd of students around him, and he felt alone. That's what it means. University was his first time away from home, and he found himself surrounded by Jaeger bombs and girls walking down the hallway wearing only bath towels. “We are on this journey together,” I told him. I created a space for him that he didn't have before, a space for him to share his experiences of loneliness and reduce his disconnection. He wasn't ready to stand out, but we were united in the fact that there was space for everyone in the room. I knew early on that the benefits of this job were not in the form of his 401(k), but in the opportunity to show gemilut hassadim (sharing kindness).
I continue to carry these lessons with me now as a professor at San Diego State University. My Jewish heritage there reminds me that we need allies in the community to make change happen, that our voices must be used to amplify those that are not being heard. Masu. Practice Life Neighbor and remove barriers.
