What does a Jew look like?

When Jewish men don’t wear kippot and tzitzit and women aren’t in sheitels and long skirts, can you tell a Jew from a non-Jew just by looking at them?

At the Jewish Outreach Institute convention held in early December in Atlanta, Jewish professionals and leaders were able to select from a variety of learning workshops.

One such workshop was “Connecting to Our Diverse Populations.”

No, they were not discussing how to reach out to day school families and religious school families, Ashkenazi and Sephardic, or parents of young and old children.

The speakers addressed how to connect with populations that are underserved among unaffiliated Jews — intermarried couples, multicultural families, gay men and lesbians, teens and grandparents.

Jen Chau, a young woman with dark skin, hair and eyes, was the first speaker. Her father is Chinese. Her mother is an Ashkenazi Jew. And though Chau identified herself as a Jew from the time she was a child, it was an uphill battle to get people to treat her the same way.

She shared a dream she had at age 10. She looked Jewish, she had a Jewish name, and everyone knew and believed her.

But when she woke up, it wasn’t true. She still resembled her Chinese father, and her last name was still Chau.

At religious school and synagogue, her peers questioned whether she was Jewish.

“In that space I found it was not OK to look the way that I did,” Chau told the group.

Everything hit home the day of her bat mitzvah. Her father participated in her bat mitzvah practice, and the family was planning for him to be on the bimah when she was called to the Torah. But the night before the service, her family received a phone call: The synagogue made a decision that in order not to promote intermarriage, he couldn’t participate.

“That was a very clear message that I was not supposed to be here, that I was not supposed to be in the community,” said Chau, who spent most of her bat mitzvah day crying. “It really was a hurtful situation and one that made me pretty sure as a12-year-old that I didn’t want to be a part of this.”

While Chau continued to participate in Jewish activities with her family, she still found herself having to defend the fact that she was Jewish at her New York high school, where the A-crowd was called the “Jew Crew.”

She remembers one boy challenging her to sing Passover’s four questions to prove her identity, and even after her flawless execution, he said someone must have taught them to her.

“I was always in the situation of really wanting to defend myself,” Chau said.

By the time she went to college, Chau didn’t participate in Jewish life.

But she and a friend decided to venture to a “latke study break” one night.

When Chau walked in, someone approached her to welcome her. “Who are you here with?” the person asked.

The assumption that she couldn’t be there for herself turned Chau off right away. She never went back.

At 20, Chau returned to the rabbi at the synagogue of her bat mitzvah and broke down, telling him how hurtful the event was. He explained to her that his concern was for the continuity of the Jewish people and her hurt was just because of the faulty memories of a 12-year-old.

Chau was shocked. Here she was, pouring her heart out about how much she wanted to be accepted as a Jew, and he was talking about Jewish continuity. She thought there were people like her “who very much want to be a part of the Jewish community — I know from other people that I’ve met along the way,” she said. “They’ve been turned away time and time again because they don’t look the way they are supposed to look.”

After all her trying, Chau has decided not to be an active part of the Jewish community. She said she wanted to be a part of the community without having to be an activist.

“Unfortunately, all of the involvements I have had with the Jewish community have resulted in me leaving,” Chau told the group at the JOI convention. “I am an independent Jew who does things with my Jewish friends and my family who are meaningful to me.”

Chau has started a nonprofit organization for people of mixed heritage called Swirl (www.swirlinc.org). The organization serves mixed communities in New York, Boston and San Francisco.

If Chau never tries to affiliate with the Jewish community again, perhaps her story will make others more sensitive to the fact that just as you can’t judge a book by its cover, you can’t judge a Jew by the color of her skin.