beatrice_otter | (Reply)

I don't think anyone but a gentile would want to write this fic, honestly.

Steve might assume Tony was Jewish, but it's not a given and not even likely. Intermarriage was already a thing in the 1940s, especially among the high-flyers like Howard and the celebrity types. Steve would have a sense of Howard's secularism and certainly in Howard's history with (non-Jewish) women and would probably think it odd if Howard had made that kind of return to faith. He would make no assumptions that Tony was Jewish and, if Tony was technically Jewish, that he cared about being Jewish.

Jewish assimilation is a choice, not something forced upon people to hide their true selves. It's not a parallel to homosexuality where Jews were simply waiting for social mores to progress to a point where they could be themselves in public. It's a conscious and willing decision to put aside the rules of your faith, leave the community of faith, and live like everyone else. Historically, the community of faith was absolutely necessary to ensure survival because endless pogroms and laws against Jews even in 'enlightened' states meant you needed group protection, but in 20th Century America, you didn't and, free from it being a life-or-death choice, people like Howard chose to live apart from it.

You and I have different readings about Tony; I don't think he's a dick about most things and I can't imagine him caring enough to be a dick about this. His family history is not in need of discovery; Howard's got a Wikipedia page. Tony knows who his grandparents were.

Also, and this matters, for American Jews, our pre-America 'heritage' is usually murky, untraceable, and unimportant to our lives. Almost all of us are Ashkenazi Jews and we're in America because our forebears were chased out of somewhere in Eastern Europe for being Jewish. We have no ties to a hometown or to a country because that origin point was happy to see our forefathers leave and our forefathers were eager to put it behind them. It didn't matter in America; among Ashkenazi Jews in New York, it mattered a lot more if you were Litvak or Galitzianer than if you'd come from Vienna or Minsk and the latter details tended to get lost. And any trace that might have remained back in the Old Country was probably obliterated by the Holocaust and WWII.

(I can tell you what country my maternal grandparents came from, but not where in Poland, nobody in my family can because we don't know, the story changed, and our family was in flight. It's not uncommon for early 20th Century Jewish families to have the first few kids born in the Old Country, one or two born in England or somewhere else in transit, and the last few to be born in America. That happened with three of my four grandparents' families.)

TL;DR, Tony is unlikely to have any interest in researching his roots beyond what he already knows and, were he to try, would be unlikely to find anything.