In the last five years, the Arab-American Association of New York, which celebrated its 10th anniversary in December, has quintupled its budget to a half-million dollars, drawn from individual donations and foundation support from the likes of the New York Foundation, the Union Square Awards, and the Brooklyn Community Foundation. It is the front line of American acculturation, if not integration, for tens of thousands of ESL-hungry Arab immigrants from Palestine, Morocco, Algeria, and beyond. The organization plays more or less the role that Abraham Cahan’s Forward played for the immigrants of Eastern Europe a century ago.

The executive director of the organization is Linda Sarsour, 31, a Palestinian-American mother of three who wears the hijab and plans to become the first Arab-American on the New York City Council when she runs in 2017, after the local seat opens up. Sarsour, who took over the organization in 2005 and has raised its profile tremendously—she was honored in December as one of 10 Champions of Change by the White House—travels a lot on behalf of the association. The young woman who runs the association day to day, juggling budget memos, the census, and calls from the BBC is all of 24 years old. Her name is Jennie Goldstein, and she is a Jew from the Upper West Side.

“Everything without precedent, or controversial—it lands on my desk,” Goldstein explained when we met. “When Linda’s out, I’m the last answer. I make it rain.”

***

Goldstein has blue eyes and dirty blonde hair, a startling sight among the hijabs worn by the other female staffers. The organization occupies what was once an obstetrician’s office, which explains the waiting area out front and its maze of small, fluorescent-lit rooms. Goldstein’s office is festooned with a poster of a Palestinian hip-hop band and a sign from a protest of the NYPD earlier this month. (“#wtfnypd,” she scrawled on it in Magic Marker as I stood there.)

Goldstein joined the Arab-American Association in 2009 through AmeriCorps after graduating from Middlebury, where she studied international economics. “When I was offered the position, I thought, ‘hell yes,’ ” she told me. “I had seen the posting on the Middlebury career services site, and I just knew that it was my job. I didn’t speak Arabic, but I could wrangle large groups of people. I didn’t come here because I’m a rabble-rousing activist. My interest was in community building. In college, I had to persuade you to come see the band. Here, people are bursting through the door asking for services. It was a real mandate. But it’s been scary to build services you’re not a part of.”

Goldstein’s father is Jewish and her mother is Protestant. Growing up on the Upper West Side, she lit candles for Shabbat on Fridays; she went to church with her mother on Sundays. Being raised by parents of different faiths never confused her because she was never asked to keep anything straight. She accompanied her mother on Sundays because she liked being with her, and she memorized the Lord’s Prayer as a 6-year-old because it “was part of the vernacular of educated people that I wanted to know.”

But she was given enough to go on: The family split what she called “the three major Jewish holidays”—Passover, Rosh Hashanah, and Thanksgiving, she explained with a laugh—between her father’s brothers. On Yom Kippur, Goldstein would fast with her best friend, who was also half-Jewish. “School was closed, so we’d go to Macy’s and try on clothes because we felt skinny because we were fasting,” she said. “And then we’d go to a Jewish deli on the Upper West Side and eat dinner.” Her mother was usually the one who harassed her father to light candles on Friday night. “For my mother, the point of religious tradition is tradition. That’s more important than which exact code of ethics it is. As a kid, I saw the church as a community center.”

Continue reading: Smoking shisha in Queens

Recently, however, not long after our seventh wedding anniversary and the birth of our first child, we got some unsolicited marriage advice from Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. It arrived in the form of a series of videos produced by the Ministry of Immigration and Absorption as part of a campaign to encourage Israelis living abroad to return to the Jewish state. Each video depicts a different scenario of Israelis in America with their American partners and families, and the threat to their national identity if they remain there. One video shows the young daughter of Israeli parents mistaking Hannukah for Christmas.

It may be hard for the Israeli government to believe, but after 34 years of life as a committed American Jew, Lisa can consistently distinguish between Christmas and Hannukah, and she even knows which holiday we celebrate. Though Liel did exchange his passion for Krembos for a love for Malomars, he commemorates Israel’s Memorial Day each year, reflecting on the friends he’s lost. Lisa understands the importance of Yom Hazikaron and empathizes. But the American spouse in one of the Israeli government videos doesn’t: A pony-tailed American dufus, he mistakes his Israeli girlfriend’s yahrzeit candles for mood-lighting. As the video ends, a voice-over says, “They’ll always remain Israelis, but their spouses won’t always understand what that means. Help them come back home.”

Once upon a time, we used to believe that Israel could be our family’s part-time home. But this advertising campaign is just the most recent indication that Israel has no intention of making us feel welcome. From the Rotem Bill, which seeks to make a small group of ultra-Orthodox Israeli rabbis the final arbiters over all Jewish rites, to the recent spate of anti-democratic legislation in the Knesset, over the past few years we’ve felt as if Israel is moving further and further away from the values—tolerance, plurality, and civility—that we believe are integral to Judaism as well as to our own lives. The videos are a painful reminder of this shift.

***

When we first got married, we spent a lot of our time traveling between New York and Tel Aviv. We were frequently met with a less-than-hospitable welcome at Ben-Gurion International Airport. On one occasion, Lisa was detained for nearly an hour, and on another she was subjected to a long and humiliating series of questions about her parents’ religious affiliation and other deeply personal matters. But we didn’t care: This intrusive screening, we rationalized, was the price Israel has to pay for its security.

Hanging out with friends and family on the beach or in cafés, we sometimes tried to talk about our life in New York, where being a part of the Jewish community is important to us. We attend services occasionally, are involved with numerous Jewish organizations, and spend a lot of our leisure time going to Jewish cultural events. To our Israeli friends, our interests sounded laughable. When Lisa wrote a novel about a Jewish-American teenager’s first encounter with, and burgeoning love for, Israel, she was told by several Israelis that no Israeli would ever read it—that Americans are just too naïve to be taken seriously.

Equally ridiculed as the book Lisa had written were the books she’d read: Like many American Jews, she grew up on Leon Uris’ Exodus, a fact that was repeatedly mocked by our Israeli acquaintances. Hearing the book belittled in a Haifa café, we realized how absurd it was for American Jews to idolize Uris’ Israeli protagonists for their dismissive attitude toward the book’s gullible American characters. And now, it was us being belittled by modern-day Ari Ben-Canaans for not being tough enough, real enough, Israeli enough.

It was a recurring theme in our conversations with Israelis: We heard countless times, from even our most fervently secular friends, that if we really cared about being Jewish we’d move back to the Jewish state. We found this logic offensive, but we still believed that we could build a bridge between Israel and the Diaspora, and we dreamed of raising children who would be as at home in the Rehavia neighborhood of Jerusalem as they would on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

***

An interesting, and often ignored, element of Israel’s new campaign is that, beyond insulting videos, the government is offering substantial benefits for Israelis who decide to return. Particularly sought-after are former Israelis like Liel: The website associated with the campaign emphasizes the incentives awaiting any Israeli who holds a doctorate from a major American university—part of a plan to fight Israel’s serious brain drain. Yet rather than highlight these attractive offerings, and take other steps to bring people like us closer to Israel, the Israeli government has chosen to tell us that the most fundamental choices of our lives—whom to marry and where to live—are irredeemably flawed and dangerous for the Jewish people. The cure? Make aliyah and abandon other key aspects of our identities—even, possibly, our spouses—save for Israeli nationalism. The campaign, then, is much more than tone-deaf PR. It is an indication of Israel’s troubling mindset, which, as our friend Gal Beckerman noted, is frighteningly similar to that of the old-world Jews that the early Zionists mercilessly mocked: the Jews who see nothing but danger and fear outside of the small and stifling Pale of Settlement.

Often, we feel real remorse for abandoning this struggle we believe is so important, the struggle for Israel’s soul. Often, we feel as if we should brave the hurdles and the insults and jump back into the fray. But time, parenthood, and an Israeli government that seems dedicated to dismissing families like ours and driving American and Israeli Jews apart have all weakened our resolve. We cherish our family’s Jewish identity and our community, as do most American Jews we know. But our Jewish identities, and our sense of peoplehood, are based on inclusion—not exclusion and condescension. As long as Israel refuses to acknowledge this basic premise about the nature of Jewish peoplehood, we can’t call the Jewish state home.

Birthright shout-outs, panelist love, and baseball metaphors? It was a movingly unguarded moment during the largely formulaic event, which was moderated by Rabbi Shmuley Boteach and brought the conservative House Majority Leader to that bastion of liberal, urban Jewry, the Upper West Side. Though there was some early politically-charged raucousness from the crowded sanctuary of the West Side Institutional Synagogue, which Boteach quickly silenced, the event was mostly free from controversy, save for a “Fox News” comment yelled by an audience member when Cantor later said the media was “self-professedly to the left.”

The real surprise for some came when Cantor first spoke, revealing an unmistakably Southern accent that ricocheted through the speakers and reminded the crowd that, unlike the Brooklyn-born Steinhardt, this panelist was hardly a local. But there Cantor was, far from D.C. on a Sunday night, explaining his political positions to a crowd that while veering conservative (judging by the excited applause when he referenced the recent NY-9 Republican upset) is far from his usual supporter base. It begs the question (again) of just what Cantor’s political plans might be.

Related: The Gentleman From Virginia
Earlier: Eric Cantor Thinks Big
What Makes Cantor Run?

I could rebut most of the commenters’ objections to my David Brooks-inspired list of what is haimish and what is not. (Oh, and for the record, it was inspired not only by Lenny Bruce’s routine but also by Norman Mailer’s essay on hip.) However, “artcohn” has my number, writing, “Neither the Upper West Side, nor the Upper East Side of Manhattan are haimish. Bensonhurst and Flatbush in Brooklyn, and Kew Gardens Hills and Rego Park in Queens are haimish.”

He is completely right. This was horribly myopic of me. I apologize. (Seriously.) “artcohn” gets a copy of Sherwin B. Nuland’s Maimonides biography, because he is wise; and I get one, too, that it may teach me wisdom and humility.

Notes on Haimish
Maimonides

Sally Goodgold, Civic Advocate Who Practiced ‘Bagel Diplomacy,’ Dies at 82 [NYT]

The Singers had been family friends since I was 10 years old, when my mother interviewed Isaac for an article in the Washington Post. He and I struck up a friendship, and subsequent invitations for tea and living-room chocolates in his apartment in Surfside in Miami Beach became one of the highlights of my Jewish education. I remember one afternoon in particular, when I brought along my Torah portion to rehearse for him and his wife, Alma. Isaac recited his own Torah portion along with mine—as if it were a Jewish opera or a call and response prayer. I remember being impressed that more than six decades after his own bar mitzvah, Isaac was able to recite every word from memory.

My mother and I regularly met Isaac at a drug store soda fountain in Surfside, for his favorite food—grits, which probably reminded him of kasha—while I had a grilled cheese and fries that he and I would share. “I think we merge with the life of the universe,” he once told me, during a conversation about life after death. “When a bubble bursts over the ocean, the water in the bubble falls back into the sea. It goes back to its source. It really does not disappear.”

Several years after Isaac has passed, I received a call from Alma—we both lived in Manhattan by then, she as a widow and me as a graduate student—asking for help. She needed someone to sort through all the clothes she still kept in their apartment at Broadway and 86th Street. As compensation, she offered to give me one of her husband’s typewriters—a gift of extraordinary meaning to an aspiring young writer who had learned so much about life at a young age from his books. What might it be like to roll Rodin’s sculpting tools in your hands, or to hold Marc Chagall’s surviving brushes over a blank canvas? Wouldn’t it be inspirational to play a few bars on Larry Adler’s favorite harmonica, or forcefully connect with a strong chord or passage on Rachmaninoff’s writing piano?

“There are three,” Alma said matter-of-factly of the typewriters. “One of them you can take with you after we’re done.”

It occurred to me that it might make more sense for her to donate them to a museum or a university library, but I knew I’d be an excellent caretaker. And admittedly, I hoped having Isaac’s typewriter in my modest apartment on West 113th Street might serve as a sort of talisman or magnet to draw some of the complicated, mysterious women he had written about so vividly in Enemies, A Love Story and The Magician of Lublin.

***

I passed through the massive gated archway on the Belnord’s south entrance and went up to her apartment. Alma came to the door slowly and didn’t smile as she greeted me. She was older than I had remembered, and her face seemed frozen in a frown of resignation and loneliness. A pang of guilt reminded me of the other reason I had volunteered for this assignment. I had walked past this enormous stone building on West 86th Street nearly every day on my way to what I still called “the 1/9” and had often seen Alma pulling a wire cart full of groceries and other sundries as I rushed to catch the subway. Had I not been habitually racing to wherever I needed to be in those days, I would have stopped to help, I reasoned.

But this Saturday would be different. I would be there for as long as Alma needed me. After an obligatory plate of prune pastry and marzipan, she explained that this was going to be a disposal operation, rather than a sorting-and-packing job or prep work for a charitable donation.

“You don’t want to save everything?” I asked, puzzled.

“I did save everything,” she replied flatly. “How much longer must I keep it?”

Several people had apparently made promises to stop by and cart off whatever she had left to various organizations, but they never arrived, and Alma had gotten tired of waiting; she wanted everything out.

“You can take whatever we don’t throw away,” she said.

She then beckoned me to follow her into a room that was already piled high with turquoise seersucker jackets, blue rubber tennis shoes, and old, worn straw hats. Ah, the straw hats with turquoise blue bands! They seemed a part of a blue-and-white uniform Isaac wore in his days of walking in the ocean breezes of Surfside. Could a man’s life be reduced to this? A stack of hats, a pile of socks, and some frayed undershirts?

“You should try this jacket,” Alma said, attempting to drape one of his seersuckers over my shoulders. Alma seemed to want to believe that his jackets would fit like the proverbial father’s hand-me-downs but, alas, it was at least two sizes too small. The jacket, along with everything else that didn’t fit—shoes, slacks, belts, and even his undershirts—went into the trash bags unsorted, in armful after armful for the garbage truck.

As I helped gather everything for the garbage collectors I thought about happier days with Isaac and Alma in their sunny Florida living room, where he and I would ponder the meaning of the universe, Spinoza’s teachings, and ghosts. But on this lonely Saturday afternoon in the New York present, there were no philosophical discussions of metaphysical reality. Only the sad and halting “yes” or a “no” in regard to what should stay and what should go among the remnants of a man who regaled millions with stories of Old World dybbuks, malevolent spirits, and often rakish protagonists visiting their complicated, passionate mistresses.

In that room a passage from The Cafeteria, one of Isaac’s short stories, came to me:

“I have been moving around in this neighborhood for over thirty years—as long as I lived in Poland,” he had written. “I know each block, each house. There has been little building here on uptown Broadway in the last decades, and I have the illusion of having put down roots here. I have spoken in most of the synagogues. They know me in some of the stores and in the vegetarian restaurants. Women with whom I have had affairs live on the side streets. Even the pigeons know me; the moment I come out with a bag of feed, they begin to fly toward me from blocks away.”

“What would they think of him now, reduced to a pile of undershirts?” I thought, as I glanced around the room for the typewriters.

As the afternoon wore on, I wondered if the belongings of someone whose work had been translated into so many languages and whose visage had been memorialized in enormous caricature on a wall of the Barnes & Noble on 82nd Street should be better preserved—or at least acknowledged with a prayer for such things. Was there a yizkor I could say after tying up the twist-tie on each bag?

Had his spirit been present in the room that day, Isaac might’ve simply shrugged. He had told me many times in my youth that “women are the only people who take life seriously. Men know it’s a joke.” The day’s purge was the wish of his widow, who had certainly earned the right to make such decisions. Alma had supported Isaac in the early days when they were first married by working as a salesgirl at Lord & Taylor while Isaac stayed home to write. She had also stayed with him over the years despite his detachment while writing and in defiance of his other romances. “Ours is a real marriage,” I remembered him once telling my mother.

Alma interrupted my reverie: “Do you want some lemonade?”

“Sure,” I said.

***

Several hours later, I finally stumbled across the typewriters in a closet. There was an old Royal with many of its keys mashed down and its teeth all jumbled and seemingly fused together. There was a second, white plastic manual typewriter that looked like it might be a starter toy or somebody’s idea of a “portable” device back in the 1970s. And finally, there was a beige IBM Selectric that used a center-strike ball.

Noticing my lingering fascination, Alma sighed heavily and told me that the typewriters had already been promised to others and that she was sorry she could not let me have one after all. I was unable to hide a twinge of surprise.

“Really?” I asked. “Not even the mangled old Royal with its snarled keys?”

I stared at the typewriters half-expecting them to emanate shafts of light and spiritual energy, like the lost Ark of the Covenant. Without possessing one of them, how would I ever be empowered by Isaac’s mystical literary powers and be energized with whatever charisma had made him such an intriguing figure to so many people?

But the situation itself was the prize—a turn of events straight out of one of Isaac’s own short stories: A young man, a writer even, is crushed to learn that some things are forever out of reach, that promising ventures often have disappointing outcomes, and that so many journeys that should lead on to fortune take the brave and fearless down winding roads to unhappy endings. I had wanted to take possession of a mystical object that would afford temporal (and possibly libidinous) benefits by mere ownership, but, at the end of the day, I saw much more clearly how our experiences and setbacks inform truly great works of art.

“I see,” I said, trailing. “No problem.”

What else could I say to the widow who had been through so much?

As I walked east along Isaac Bashevis Singer Boulevard toward Central Park, it occurred to me that I would have to seek out experiences to generate my own stories, buy my own seersucker jacket—one that fit—and be on the lookout for the mysterious women living along the side streets. I reflected also that, in any event, Isaac had actually composed many of his best fables and universal allegories while sitting on a couch, writing longhand in pencil.

Reed Martin is the author of The Reel Truth: Everything You Didn’t Know You Need to Know About Making an Independent Film and a former business case writer in the Global Research Group at Harvard Business School.

Baker has written three previous books, including In Extremis: The Life of Laura Riding, a Pulitzer finalist, and The Blue Hand: The Beats In India. The latter book had been completed but not yet published when Baker, searching for a new subject, stumbled across Jameelah’s papers in the New York Public Library’s Manuscripts and Archives Division. “[I]t was the dissonance of a lone Muslim name, among the commonplace Jewish and Christian ones, that waylaid me,” wrote Baker. Inside the archive’s boxes, she found Jameelah’s books, her impressive early artwork—she had briefly studied with George Grosz at the Arts Students League—and, most important, a trove of letters that seemed to map out their author’s bizarre journey.

But as Baker would discover, Jameelah was an utterly unreliable narrator, and her letters were often deliberately misleading. As a biographer who relies on archives, Baker grew increasingly unsettled as she realized just how untrustworthy the record Jameelah left really was. “That was really devastating to me—it made me realize how much faith I have in archives to be truthful,” Baker says over brunch in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, where she lives with her husband, the novelist Amitav Ghosh. “And of course that’s ridiculous. People lie in letters all the time.”

Her challenge, then, was to construct the book in a way that mimics her own process of discovery. To do so, she adopted a daring, unconventional narrative method—just how unconventional isn’t clear until the very end. Some readers will object when they realize the liberties she has taken with some of her sources, but her approach succeeds in creating a hall of mirrors that forces the reader into constant reassessments. “The form of the book is where the meaning is,” Baker says. “This is really about making narrative sense of a life.”

Not that Jameelah’s life ever makes complete sense. Growing up in the 1940s and 1950s, Peggy Marcus was an awkward, outcast, agonizingly sensitive girl haunted by the legacy of the Holocaust. Like another semi-famous Jewish convert to Islam, Lev Nussimbaum—subject of the best-selling The Orientalist—she initially lionized Arabs out of a sort of Zionist pan-Semitic solidarity. “I am convinced that the Jews and Arabs will cooperate and together create a new golden age such as occurred in medieval Spain,” she wrote at one point.

Of course, that didn’t happen, and the wars that followed Israel’s creation drove her to despair. Partly, like other Jewish critics of Israel, she recoiled at the chasm between her parents’ civil rights liberalism and their anti-Arab racism. “At Smith College, Mother learned to abhor race prejudice,” she wrote. “Not only does she believe that Negroes deserve complete equality of opportunity, she also feels that social intermingling is acceptable and to be encouraged. … So why are the Arabs any different from Negroes?”

In some ways, Jameelah seems like the archetypical self-hating Jew, someone whose qualms about Israel barely mask darker and more destructive impulses. But this doesn’t explain why she didn’t simply become a radical leftist—a natural trajectory for an alienated girl like her. That’s where religion came in. As a girl, Jameelah had a fierce spiritual hunger, which Baker sees as something distinct from mere neurosis. In her assimilation-minded, Ethical Culture family, such impulses had nowhere to go. “There was no language to describe what she was going through, which was a spiritual crisis,” says Baker. “She had a huge desire for a religious life.” Had Jameelah’s parents sent her to a rabbi instead of a shrink, Baker suggests, things might have gone very differently.

And yet, reading the book, one wonders where the line between spiritual crisis and nervous collapse really is. As The Convert proceeds, the extent of Jameelah’s mental instability becomes increasingly clear. By the time she sails for Pakistan, she was barely functional. Her exasperated parents had cut her off, and she couldn’t support herself. Unattractive and terrified of sex, she had little prospect of ever finding a husband. So, when the Pakistani cleric Mawlana Mawdudi invited her, a Muslim sister marooned among the infidels, to join his family, it was a lifeline.

Jameelah had corresponded with a number of prominent Islamists, including Said Ramadan, the son-in-law of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna, and Sayyid Qutb, the intellectual grandfather of political Islamism. It was Qutb who suggested she write to Mawdudi, the founder of Pakistan’s Muslim revivalist party Jamaat-e-Islami. He was impressed by the clarity and intelligence of her prose and by the zeal behind it. Thinking little of the West and less of Jews, he was easily convinced that her wicked family had cast out their virtuous daughter for no good reason. His shock on meeting the difficult, opinionated, and erratic woman he’d asked into his household was, apparently, profound. So was Jameelah’s realization that even in the idealized community of the faithful, she didn’t fit in.

Still, they kept her. Unlike her own family, Mawdudi and the people around him took care of Jameelah. He had “given her another chance to make a life, a not insignificant gift and perhaps a greater and more profound indictment of the West than anything to be found in his books,” Baker writes. Jameelah eventually became the second wife of one of his associates, and from the safety of purdah, she churned out influential books and articles denouncing Western decadence and celebrating jihad and martyrdom. In exchange for giving up her unwieldy liberty, she found a secure place in the world. And that, of course, is the promise of conservative social orders that value group cohesion over individualism. “There are some people who really can’t deal with too much freedom,” says Baker.

There is, paradoxically, a strong streak of American arrogance in the way Jameelah set herself up as the arbiter of true Islam. In their book Makers of Contemporary Islam, the scholars John L. Esposito and John Voll quote her attacks on Islamic reformers, who she describes as “the mediocre end-product of their circumstances … the result of an overwhelming sense of inferiority which engulfed the East after its humiliating capitulation under the feet of the imperialist West.” Though she was an outsider and a woman, she felt no compunction about dismissing scholars and politicians who’d spent their lives grappling with Islam. This blithe sense of entitlement was itself a result of the imperialist West, though Jameelah seemed oblivious to the irony.

The woman who emerges from Baker’s book is not likable. She is shrill, manipulative, and prudish, though there are glimpses of another, softer, less dogmatic person in the letters she wrote to her parents over the course of three decades. For Baker, trying to inhabit Jameelah was a painful process, and her opinions about her subject remain in flux.

“I was close to a nervous breakdown for a large part of writing this book,” Baker says with a laugh that suggests she’s not being entirely hyperbolic. Jameelah mostly stopped writing in the 1980s, but—at the risk of giving away one of the book’s surprises—Baker eventually discovers that Jameelah is still alive. She’s started sending Jameelah books, most recently the Israeli novella Khirbet Khizeh, about the expulsion of Palestinian villagers during Israel’s creation. They’re not friends, exactly—in fact, Baker found being in the same room with her nearly unbearable. But their lives are now intertwined. “I think I’ll always probably be arguing with her,” Baker says.

• The Palins are going to Israel! No but it’s really happening. Likely this spring. [Page Six]

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• Israel will likely nearly double its oil and gas taxes following its major off-shore energy finds. [WSJ]

• An Upper West Side synagogue received a bomb threat pledging New Year’s Eve devastation (so, phew). [JPost]

• The bombing of an Egyptian Coptic Church that killed 21 drew the Anti-Defamation League’s condemnation. [JPost]

PD: Let’s try a happy topic. What are your plans for Halloween and Thanksgiving with the kids?
JG: Thanksgiving is tough. Kate has custody on Thanksgiving, but I will stop by to see my kids. Halloween I don’t have custody. Hailey [Gosselin’s post-Kate love interest] handles my schedule. It’s kinda weird, but I can confide in her. She’s my best friend. I lost a lot of friends; people burned me left and right.

PD: And Christmas?
JG: Christmas, yeah. This is the first year I will celebrate Chanukah. Hailey is Jewish. Everyone in my life is Jewish now, my attorney. I love it. I’m now half Jewish and half Korean. The family values are great. On Christmas, I’ll see my kids during the day for a couple of hours. …

PD: Tell me more about your interest in Judaism.
JG: I just went through Rosh HaShana and Yom Kippur and learned about the new year and every Friday is the Shabbat dinner. I love challah bread. I’m learning about Jewish food, going to Zabar’s. I love that place. I’m learning about kosher and when not to order a bacon, egg and cheese and make an ass of myself. …

PD: Are we going to see you converting to Judaism?
JG: I talked to Rabbi Shmuley a couple of times. He has nine kids.

Jon Gosselin Loves His Kids, His Girlfriend and the Jews [ParentDish]

One of my mother’s most vivid early memories is of the Nazis trying to break down her door. She was five, and the door was the big, heavy front one on the house she was born in, a few yards from the Arno in Florence. It was 1944. As she tells it, the Nazis, who were occupying Florence and had ordered the evacuation of her neighborhood, pounded on the door for some time, while she, her mother, and her older sister cowered inside the house. (Her mother was part of the Resistance; her father, a surgeon in the Italian army, had died in Africa two years before.) But the door held, and the Nazis eventually went away.

Things were different for my father. Unlike my mother, he was Jewish, and in 1943, when he was nine, he, his parents, and his older sister left their home in Milan for a mountain village farther west. The village was called Valmosca, meaning Valley of Flies. It was no longer safe to be Jewish in Italy, so with the help of a colleague of my grandfather’s they lived under a fake surname in Valmosca until the end of the war. My father says that, despite frequently going hungry, he basically enjoyed his two years in hiding, because it was the one period in his life when he got to spend a lot of time with his father. (They went blueberry picking together.) One day the Nazis came to their door. His mother let them in, and when they entered the kitchen, his father yelled at them to keep their dirty boots on the rug—couldn’t they see the floor had just been cleaned? The Nazis checked the family’s forged papers, found them to be in order, and moved on.

My parents met in the medical library at the University of Florence when they were students there in the late 1950s. Before they married, my mother converted to Judaism to appease my father’s family. (Her own mother had moved to Los Angeles by then.) In the mid-’60s they moved to New York City, where I was born and raised. We weren’t observant. Growing up, I was as ignorant of the clichés of New York Jewish life as I was of Judaism’s substance, and though my older brother and I were sent for a year to Sunday school at an Upper West Side synagogue, my only memory of it is a day I now know to be November 20, 1977 (I was seven), when a TV was rolled into the basement room where my class was held, and we watched hours-old news footage of Anwar Sadat shaking hands with Menachem Begin on the tarmac in Israel. My father, who was dropping me off, wept.

My brother and I have always been close—we were born just 15 months apart—yet his interest in, or at least awareness of, Judaism has always been keener than mine. When he was in sixth grade and I was in fourth, I read an essay he wrote for school about our father’s father, titled “The Life of an Italian Jew.” The pride that came through in that title and in the essay surprised me; I’d never thought of putting the words Italian and Jew together. When he was 12, my brother told our parents he wanted to be bar mitzvahed at the Wailing Wall, because the bar mitzvahs of his classmates had more to do with materialism than with belief. I respected his reasoning, but as a burgeoning atheist I was baffled: why would he want a bar mitzvah? In Israel, a couple of days after the ceremony, my father and brother went to visit Masada. I’d come down with something, so my mother and I stayed behind in our hotel room with an issue of Newsweek. (I remember reading a profile of Richard Pryor, having to ask what the phrase “pleasures of the flesh” meant.)

When I was 12, I told my parents I didn’t want a bar mitzvah. They suggested that I should, because someday I might regret not having one. I assured them I wouldn’t. (I don’t.) I was in my fourth year at an Upper East Side boys’ school, where we recited the Lord’s Prayer every morning and sang Christmas hymns every winter. I had spent six summers at an athletic camp in Maine where all the campers went to church every Sunday; the Catholics were driven to a Catholic church, while the rest of us walked to a Baptist one nearby. The only time I recall my Judaism coming up at camp was when an older camper named David Cleary grinned down at me and said, “Kike.” Like the kid in Salinger’s “Down at the Dinghy,” I had no idea what it meant, but I knew it was supposed to hurt.

Apparently it wasn’t exposure to conflicting religions that led me to atheism, as that exposure didn’t affect my brother’s beliefs. He didn’t attend the boys’ school I went to, but he was with me all six summers at camp, and he accompanied me to that Baptist church even after his bar mitzvah. (I remember little about my mornings in church, aside from the crushing boredom, but it occurs to me now that I’ve probably spent more hours of my life in churches than in synagogues.) Since then, our respective convictions haven’t wavered: my brother married an observant Jew and sends his daughters to a religious school; I married a Catholic and hope my two-year-old son will make his own religious choices. My parents seem more puzzled by my brother’s path than by mine. But the subject tends to come up only when we’re making plans on a Friday or Saturday.

Recently Rabbi Jeremy Kalmanofsky of Congregation Ansche Chesed in New York was quoted in the New York Times as saying, apropos of Bernard Madoff, that “what it means to be a religious person is to be terrified of the possibility that you’re going to harm someone else.” That sentiment, with its echoes of Buddha, the Torah, and Christ, is something I can get behind. (Of course, one could substitute “secular humanist” for “religious person” and make the same assertion.) My admiration for so much Jewish thought is wrapped up in my mind with my father’s years in hiding and my mother’s feeling pressured to convert. I’m also reminded of a scene in a horror movie that I watched at far too early an age (11, to be precise). In An American Werewolf in London, the Jewish protagonist has a nightmare in which his home is invaded by Nazi werewolves. Before his eyes they slaughter every member of his family. The night I saw the movie with my parents and my brother, I couldn’t sleep. Back then, I didn’t know why.