When I was in sixth grade, my Sun­day school teacher had our class draw tal­ly marks, fill­ing sheets of paper. We cov­ered the walls of our class­room with these pages. This was an exer­cise in empa­thy and designed to illus­trate just how many Jews were mur­dered dur­ing the Holo­caust. At twelve, I did not under­stand the con­cept of six mil­lion. But what I did under­stand was my con­nec­tion to each tal­ly mark.

How­ev­er, I knew lit­tle about my Sephardic roots, grow­ing up in a reform Ashke­naz­ic com­mu­ni­ty in New Orleans. We drove on the Sab­bath and ate food that was not kosher. But when I was six­teen, my fam­i­ly moved back to our ortho­dox Syr­i­an Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty in Brook­lyn and, overnight, every­thing I had known changed.

In Chi­ma­man­da Adichie’s Ted Talk, ​“The Dan­ger of a Sin­gle Sto­ry,” she warns that the way to cre­ate a sin­gle sto­ry is to show a group of peo­ple as only one thing over and over again. That sin­gle sto­ry, what­ev­er it may be, is what that group becomes. This leads to stereo­typ­ing and sim­pli­fi­ca­tions, which at best are incom­plete and at worst, not true.

Jews are a diverse peo­ple, with a nuanced and mul­ti­fac­eted his­to­ry, yet we have been stereo­typed for cen­turies. Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ties around the globe do not nec­es­sar­i­ly dress the same way, share val­ues, lifestyle choic­es, or eat­ing habits. The breadth and diver­si­ty of Jew­ish life has been depict­ed in numer­ous TV shows like Sein­feld, Schitt’s Creek, Friends, The Mar­velous Mrs. Maisel, Shtisel, and Unortho­dox but these sto­ries some­times rely on tropes and gen­er­al­iza­tions as well.