By Shira Rachel Danan

We sat on chairs made for children in a sticky Belgrade classroom in June, fanning ourselves with our massive course readers.

I would spend the next three-and-a-half weeks traveling through Serbia, Kosovo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Croatia with the other students—twenty-two Palestinians and Jews from American universities—as part of the Vision Program run by Abraham’s Vision http://www.abrahamsvision.org/ . There, we would engage in comparative conflict analysis, attending lectures on the Balkan Wars, workshops on issues in conflict studies, and intergroup dialogue sessions.

On day one, we were sweaty, jetlagged, and not at all prepared for what was to come.

The staff split us into groups, and proposed a thought experiment. Begin by writing down eight aspects of your identity.

I chose three easily: “Jewish,” “American,” “woman.”

Boy, my mother would be proud.

After thinking for a moment, I added: “student.” Then: “Texan.”

Number six: “Israeli.” After all, I thought, my father is Israeli, my family Israeli, one of my passports—Israeli. Sure, I had never actually lived in Israel, but in many ways, I strongly identified as a citizen. Didn’t I? When pressed?

And for that matter, number seven: “Moroccan.” My family had lived in Morocco for hundreds of years before moving to Israel. Morocco is in my blood, I thought to myself.

Only one left. How about something more personal? “Writer”? Or “theologian”? (I was a religion major, after all.) With a little fudging, that could be one: “writer/theologian.”

Why wasn’t everyone else done yet? How long could it take to write down eight words?

A moment later, the staff—a mix of Jews, Muslims, Palestinians, and Israelis—informed us that aliens had taken over the earth. They would let us live, the staff said, but first we had to give up two of our eight identities.

Obviously, “Moroccan” was the first to go. The connection there had always been tenuous. If asked, I would explain that I was really Moroccan-Israeli. Maybe I could just put “Foreign,” I thought, but I didn’t know how the aliens would take that.

“Texan” was not terribly interesting and “American” pretty much covered that anyway. Goodbye, “Texan.”

But the aliens were not appeased, the staff said. Two more identities had to go.

“Student” was merely a temporary state of being. Of course, I considered myself a life-long student of the world, but that was probably covered under “writer/theologian.”

And “woman” was really just a fact of life, not an identity I needed to express to the group.

Once more, the aliens demanded we throw away two more identities, and select a final pair to present to the group. The aliens were apparently aggressively interested in the intersection of identity-politics and conflict resolution.

I had four identities left: “Jewish,” “writer/theologian,” “American,” and “Israeli.”

I hesitated over “American.” I had just spent a year in England, and visions of New York in the rain danced in my head to the soundtrack of a Woody Allen movie. To be American seemed lovely, but it did not set me apart.

I wanted to keep “Israeli.” But if I were to turn to the group and say, “I am Israeli,” would I believe my own words? Was it something I had felt before or an identity I wanted to have in this room where nationality mattered not a little?

Couldn’t I just keep them all? Man, I hated these aliens.

I kept “writer/theologian.” I wanted to be a writer, and I wanted to be a thinker. I also wanted everyone in the room to think that I was smart.

And that left “Jewish.”

For all the questioning, reimagining, and truth-stretching I had to do to keep other identities in the ring, Jewish was one identity that was not optional.

It was not a choice. It was not a conclusion I came to by considering how I wanted this group of Jews and Palestinians to see me.

If I threw it away, I imagined the aliens would take one look at my remaining identities and throw me in an intergalactic rehabilitation facility, where I would be forced to look at photographic stills of my ancestors in the shtetl and my ancestors in the mellah, sing Cheeri-Bim/Cheeri-Bom, and tread broth in a giant vat of matzah ball soup until I cried out “Okay, yes! I am a Jew! I swear if you let me out of this cage, I’ll donate to the JNF!” [Jewish National Fund, ed.]

They were doing a number on me, these little green spacemen.

And so that is what I told the group. Whatever identities might come and go, of these things I am certain: I am a writer, and I am a Jew.

That was only the beginning.

The month that followed was an uncomfortable and often painful experience, as my convictions about just what it meant to inhabit those two identities were continually challenged by my peers and by what I witnessed in the Balkans.

Each day, people I knew to be rational, friendly, and smart disagreed with me about some fundamental spiritual or social justice concern. I was forced to justify my opinions or abandon them.

Being given this space—far from home and the status quo—to assess our individual selves, our communities, and our ethics was vital. As college students, we were on the brink of making choices in our lives that would determine who we would be and where we would go. The process of reexamining ourselves in the context of others left us immeasurably better equipped to make politically and socially conscious decisions.

We sat in a circle of chairs in a hot elementary school classroom in the former Yugoslavia.

Where we went after that was up to the group.

Shira Danan is a regular contributor to The Onion and Gelf Magazine. She has a B.A. in Religion from Columbia University and lives in New York.

This essay was submitted to Tikkun's Under 25 Writing Contest in the summer of 2009. The other essays can be found here or hit the back button if you got here from the Writing Contest intro page.