Personal Statement - Andy Schwebel

The customs hall in Israel’s Ben Gurion airport is imposing. To get there, you must roll your baggage down a steep ramp beside a tall, cold sandstone wall, which would take Joshua a lot of trumpets to blow down. Once you’re inside, it feels like a nuclear bunker. When I was there in 2019, the lines were painfully long; I was sandwiched between my mother and some Spanish retirees who grumbled along with me about the wait. Of course, there was a short line for people with Israeli passports - fair enough. However, an airport employee in a blue vest was walking around the hall; whenever he saw a non-citizen wearing a rekel or some other obviously orthodox garment, he’d escort them into the quick lane. I have had a Bar Mitzvah, but even if both, rather than one, of my parents were Jewish, and I went to synagogue with some regularity, I probably wouldn’t dress in such a way to get me into the citizen line. But still, being stuck in line with a bunch of goys, when I myself knew they were fellow Jews, was a visceral reminder of my status as a stranger in my own promised land.

I had a similar experience in China, the homeland of my other parent. When I stepped off the high-speed train after a short ride to my grandfather’s hometown, a small cabal of Public Security Bureau officers were scanning the crowd and pulling everyone out who didn’t appear Chinese, so that they could scan their passports. My mom is no longer a Chinese citizen, but they let her keep walking; I was tracked by the Chinese surveillance state, again a stranger in my alleged homeland.

Coming of age with Trump in the White House, I used to feel bitter about America. I thought I was a child of the world, stuck in an excessively conservative, inward-looking society. Growing up in Alabama, all it takes is eyes and an open mind to see the lasting impact of slavery and racism. The highways I drive on, for example, were constructed to cut black people off from economic and social opportunity. Using them, I felt an acute civic guilt; there was no way this could be my real home.

But my experiences in China and Israel, and a deeper, recently acquired appreciation for American history, have changed my mind. In 11th grade, I learned how James Madison was initially opposed to the Bill of Rights. “Parchment barriers,” he called them, nice but toothless and unenforceable. Ultimately he ended up drafting them, because he realized that their existence would prove invaluable in shaping our republican culture. Madison owned slaves, but his amendments have indeed been used through history to point out American hypocrisy, and to shape the more equitable society we live in today. The political potential in America for a just society is built on a foundation created by slaveholders.

Understanding the link between history and politics helped me understand myself. Just as Madison’s slaveholder society is long past, so too are my personal links to my storied ancestors. But, like my republic, I live in the shadow of the optimism of history. The cliché is true: what my Jewish and Chinese ancestors have in common is that they saw this land as a land of opportunity, where I, their descendant they couldn’t have predicted, could grow up with the world as his oyster. So I owe it to them not to lament the history lost in me, striving to be a Jew or Chinese I can’t be, but instead to make myself the best American I can. Indeed, to be an American is to believe in ideals, rather than tribes. If my peers and I grow up to be engaged citizens, government for, by, and of the people shall not perish from the Earth.