Finding harmony: Rabbi May Ye’s exploration of Chinese American and Jewish identities

By Carolyn Bick
NORTHWEST ASIAN WEEKLY

Rabbi May Ye

It’s hard for Rabbi May Ye to say how her identity as a Chinese American weaves into her practice of Judaism and her Jewish identity.

A child of Jewish Holocaust survivors on her father’s side and a first-generation Chinese American mother, Ye grew up in a small town in Maine, without much crossover in that realm. Even when she tried to get involved in the Jewish community in her undergraduate studies at Western Michigan University, she found that “no door would ever open for me.”

“I would try to go to Hillel or Chabad, and I would try to connect with a local rabbi and ask, ‘Is there any family that might take me in for a Shabbat dinner?’” Ye recalled. “And I was just told  ‘No,’ repeatedly, over and over. I didn’t look the ‘right’ way, as an Asian American.”

Ye—whose work includes extensive teachings on social justice, and who has received several awards for her social activism in her rabbinic practice—is Kadima Reconstructionist Community’s newest rabbi, joining longtime community rabbi David Basior. She, like the other members of Kadima, practices Reconstructionist Judaism, a branch of Judaism stemming from Conservative Judaism.

Unlike other forms of Judaism, Ye said, one of the core tenets of Reconstructionist Judaism is that it rejects the idea that the Jews are the chosen people. This is particularly important in the framework of Ye’s own religious practice, which she speaks of as inextricable from her work for social justice.

But the confluence of the two—indeed, her religious practice, as a whole—is a fairly recent development. Even though her father was (and still is) an activist and a vocal proponent for Palestinian human rights, writing letters to the editor of the small town’s paper, Ye’s household remained firmly secular.

“My paternal grandfather was incarcerated in the concentration camp at Dachau. I definitely heard stories about the Holocaust and gentle nods to Judaism from my dad in my childhood, but it was never a part of my life growing up,” Ye said. “We were very secular, meaning we didn’t observe Shabbat, we didn’t go to holidays, I didn’t go to Torah school—I really didn’t do anything.”

Ye originally went to school for music, majoring in classical piano performance in undergrad. So it was a bit of a surprise to Ye and her parents when Ye—then in her late teens or early 20s, she said—decided, almost overnight, to visit the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College as a prospective student. She had just come home from a summer session in Middlebury College’s Hebrew program, one of her attempts to connect with her Jewish roots. While at the program, she stumbled across the college in the course of looking up one of the college’s rabbis, and seeing that he had gone to the Reconstructionist college.

“I have this vivid memory. I was at home at the time, home in Maine,” Ye recalled. “I was looking up the college on my computer, and I ran upstairs to my parents, and I said, ‘Hey, I could be a rabbi!’ And we all laughed because there was no world in which that wasn’t a joke. Right? Like, this kid that grew up secular, has never done anything, literally anything with Judaism is saying that she’s gonna be a rabbi. We all laughed about it.”

But it wasn’t a joke.

“A few days later, we’re walking on the beach, as you do in Maine. … I’m walking ahead on my phone, and I’m continuing to look up the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College … and I come across a page that says that there’s this prospective student institute—so I look it up, and they will fly you out for free and put you up for free,” Ye continued. “And so I walked back to my parents, and I’m like, ‘Should I go to this thing?’ And we’re, all of us, still confused.”

Two things sold Ye on rabbinical school. The first is that the day she got to school, former President Donald Trump was elected, which felt like a sign. The second was that the group of prospective students collectively decided to hold a teach-in about Standing Rock. She realized that this is where she could explore the intersection of her desire to do social justice work—specifically, anti-Zionist work and work for Palestinian liberation—and community service.

But this doesn’t mean that everything was easy, after that. Ye was one of the few people of color at the rabbinical school—but, until she got there, neither “person of color” nor “Jew of color” were labels she had heard, much less considered. Neither was something she chose for herself.

“I grew up strongly identifying with being Chinese American or Asian American, but I never had this language of person of color, until I got to rabbinical school. And then every single white faculty, staff, or administrator decided, ‘May, you’re a Jew of color,’” Ye said. “And it was like, ‘What?’”

Ye said that this latter three-word label “was really confusing. Because it was also coming with a lot of opportunities and a lot of money,” but it also meant that other people—white people—seemed to have placed her into a specific box in which they needed her to be. Ye said that they seemed to need her to be in this box, as a way to simultaneously explain away her support for Palestinian liberation and show her off, in a tokenizing way.

“And it doesn’t really end there when you have other identities, such as being Chinese American or a young woman,” Ye said.

Her stance on Zionism and Palestine came to the fore twice during the first year of her studies at school. Ye said that she has always been loud, never one to silence herself. And so, following two posts on her personal social media where she called attention to Palestinian human rights, Ye found herself talking with her advisor about the posts. She had been labeled an antisemite.

“‘May,’” Ye recalled her advisor saying. “‘You’re going to have to submit anything political that you want to post on your private social media pages to me for approval.’ Yes. My advisor was the most radical person at that institution and was on my side as an anti-Zionist.”

“‘Absolutely not,’” Ye refused. “‘I’m not submitting anything for approval. What world is this?

This is called censorship.’ And we had a back and forth, and we had to agree to disagree about this being censorship.”

“And I just looked at my professor and, in very classic ‘me’ way, I said, ‘And what happens if I don’t comply?’” Ye said. “And she just looks at me back, and she says, ‘May, I really want you to become a rabbi.’”

“I’m like, ‘Hmm, got it. Message received,’” Ye continued. “And so I was censored until the day I graduated.”

Throughout the years as a student and rabbinical intern, even though her main focus was on her studies, Ye continued to think about how her Chinese American and Jewish identities could find equal, natural footing with one another.

Ye started to experiment with different ways of melding these identities in ways that felt as though neither took precedence over nor was treated as primary to the other. She recounted for the Northwest Asian Weekly the story of one particular experiment she tried for Havdalah, the Jewish Saturday night ritual that marks the close of Shabbat.

On Havdalah, Jews smell the besamim, the fragrant spices, which are meant to symbolize and impart sweetness for the coming week. These fragrant spices often consist of a range of herbs, such as cloves, anise, cardamom, and nutmeg. While cooking one day, Ye realized that she could put a personal spin on the besamim, in an attempt to start to bring her seemingly disparate identities together.

“When I cook, I always and forever start with the same three ingredients, because that is what my mother taught me,” Ye said. “Any dish starts with soy sauce, sesame oil, and white pepper.

And I was like, ‘Hey, what if I use those things as my besamim?’ Those are things that, to me, smell like home, smell like my culture, smell like being Chinese. And so I put them all in like a little Tupperware and I used it for the next time I did Havdalah.”

She then recreated this practice with a group of fellow Jews of color in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, asking the participants to each bring the fragrances that, to them, represented home. What participants brought ranged from wet cornmeal to seasoned salt to freshly cooked jasmine rice.

“It was just so beautiful to be able to pass these besamim around the room,” Ye said. And yet, she is still not quite sure she hit the mark. 

“I still don’t know if I successfully, completely woven together what it means to be a person of color and a Chinese American Jew and the Havdalah ceremony. Because it’s still—we’re using the Debbie Friedman tune, right?” Ye mused, citing a popular white songstresses’ Havdalah song that many Jews the world over (this writer included) know and sing, in some form. 

“We haven’t changed the words. We’ve made this little slight alteration [to the ritual],” Ye continued. “And so, I still wrestle with if that’s still mainly Jewish, but [with] a touch of Jew of color added. This is, I feel, like the space that I’m constantly exploring.”

Ye graduated in 2023, landing at the New Haven, Connecticut-based Mending Minyan, a Jewish community whose values and goals aligned with hers. She recently moved to Seattle to join Kadima, and said that she is excited to continue this exploration in a place with so many Asian American and Pacific Islander communities. But, beyond that, she doesn’t know what this journey will look like. Perhaps her Judaism and her Chinese heritage will be separate—but, then again, she said, perhaps not. Perhaps they will simply remain separate for now, and naturally come together in the future.

“I don’t fully know how these things are woven together in my being, because they felt so separate and disconnected or forced together, at times when they’ve been together,” Ye said. “It’s a journey that feels really good when I’m able to be in exploration with other people who identify as Jews of color.”