Finding Judaism My Way: One Man’s Lifetime Jewish Journey
I was born into a first-generation American family of very ethnic but non-observant Jews in the then Jewishly dense West Philadelphia neighborhood of Wynnefield. My parents assumed that I would attend Hebrew School after public school, hate it, and, like their peer’s children, suffer with Jewish learning for five arduous years, endure the bar mitzvah ordeal, then quit Hebrew school. They expected that as a young adult I would marry an ethnic but not inconveniently religious Jewish woman. My parents’ social circle was entirely Jewish—totally secular—yet socially Jewish.