![]() ![]() I make less of a distinction between Judaism and Christianity than many people. No matter the external forms of worship, or lack thereof, my grandparents were Jews, and no more capable of changing their essence than any other pair of mortals. It isn’t an accident that almost all of my close friends are Jewish: our sensibilities align. I didn’t understand how Jewish I was until I moved to New York and married a WASP. KH: Yes, especially as a cultural heritage distinct from that of Protestants or Catholics. YZM: Do you feel any strong connection to your Jewish background now? Right or wrong, they did their best to assimilate. For my mother, and then me, they turned their backs on their religious heritage to shield us from anti-Semitism. Each lost family in the Holocaust as a couple, they abandoned Judaism once they had a child. Not physically threatened, but the object of genuine prejudice with real consequences. ![]() KH: My mother’s parents, two elderly European Jews, had been reviled as Jews all their lives and all over the world: Old and New, East and West. ![]() ![]() YZM: You were raised by your maternal grandparents, who were Jewish, yet you were not raised Jewish and you wrote that you didn’t connect to your Jewish heritage until after you left your grandparents’ home. ![]()
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