I have a Half Roma (father) half Ashkenazi Jewish (Mother) character who's parents met while working together on the Holocaust Museum being opened in DC(90s). I currently have her family being very disapproving of the marriage, and his brothers disliking her family for being snobs, as background tension for his childhood. Are there any resources or feedback on racial tensions and religious tensions I am missing between the two groups? I really want to get this right, as I love the character.
Writing about tensions between Jewish and Rroma in-laws
I’ll be blunt: there are tensions? If there are, I am completely unaware of them. What I usually see is Jewish Tumblr and Twitter users reminding each other to remember that we stick together with Rroma people because of shared bullshit, and speaking out to educate random non-Rroma gentiles (and each other) not to use the g-slur. I would also find it totally reasonable that Jewish characters might be anti-Rroma by accident or uneducated about Rroma people even being a real thing because of not knowing any better, like if someone hadn’t educated them, or if they were anti-Rroma because people who aren’t Rroma can be anti-Rroma, not specifically because they’re Jewish.
Jewish people sometimes have religious tension over interfaith marriages because our parents get freaked that if we marry gentiles we’ll all die out. There’s a such thing as marrying someone of another faith but promising to bring the kids up Jewish. I know more than one person who came out and their parents were like “okay, fine, but still marry a Jew.” The other reason parents get freaked out is that deep down sometimes it’s very hard to believe that a gentile really does think we’re human and okay and not secretly plotting between ourselves to take over the world. Like, you know that General Order 66 thing in the third Star Wars prequel where suddenly all the stormtroopers just know what Palpatine means, and start killing all the Jedi? Some gentiles think we’re up to shit like that so the idea of marrying a gentile means worrying that deep down inside that’s what they or their family think of us. You know what, though? This is very similar to some of the toxic mythology about Rroma people out there. So if both sides believed the non-Rroma gentile slander about the other side, then maybe that’s where the tension comes from, too.
But can we talk about this “both sides hate the other” idea for a second? I don’t know your background, but if someone who’s not a member of two marginalized groups chooses to write a story that makes both of those groups look bad for giving each other trouble, that makes me a little uncomfortable. Think how awkward it would be for a straight cis guy to write about the tensions between lesbians and bisexual women. It would almost seem as if lesbians and bi women were each other’s biggest problems, rather than straight people and cis men specifically perpetrating the most discrimination and systemic oppression against all women who love women.
Now, as I said, I don’t know your background–if you’re Jewish or Rroma yourself, find a writing buddy of the other group and together you can talk about ways to make your story really ring true–if that’s a realistic conflict in the first place, anyway.
By the way, there’s no reason you can’t have family tension that doesn’t have anything to do with people’s ethnic background. Personality differences can happen within marginalized communities just like anywhere else, and plenty of people don’t get along with their family’s in-laws or find them snobby or not good enough. Just make sure your fictional in-laws’ “objectionable traits” aren’t directly derived from lazy stereotypes.
–Shira
