“To be a good Jew, you need to believe in one God, or fewer.”
some Rabbi, somewhere
When I was growing up in upstate NY we were all alike. A few kids were noticeable because they were Catholic. One Mennonite classmate was downright exotic. There was one doctor in town; he and the teachers were special because you knew they had gone to college. Once every summer we had a visit from an old friend of my mother’s and when she married a Jew he was the only non-Christian I had ever met. That’s how I remember it. It was only when as a high-achieving high school student and spent a summer at Syracuse Universtiy studying geology (it was the only NSF program I was eligible for as a sophomore) and the summer after junior year at Cornell (my Math classes were interrupted when the professor returned to Israel for the 6-day war) that I experienced ethnic diversity. My cousins and I were the first generation of our family to go away to college and I remember my grandfather warning my mother to be careful because I might meet “someone from Oklahoma” and never come back. He was not wrong, and he even got the “O” right.
Reading about Bernie Sanders’ secular Jewishness (including this article) brings wonderful memories of the women on the paternal side of John’s family, role models for me since I met them in the early 70’s. As Mensheviks, the family had left Russia in the early 20th century fleeing both the Czar and the Bolsheviks. His gradmother, widowed young, lived with her never-married sister. Two other sisters, also long-time widows, lived together as well and were actively campaigning for left-wing causes well into their eighties. I didn’t meet the men of that generation but I’ve been hearing stories about them for years. For both the women I knew and the men I did not, my impression is of irreverance, humor, varying levels of commitment to leftist politics, and, above all, intelligence.
I loved the Larry Davis impression and the “Sanderswitsky sketch on SNL. I admire the way Bernie Sanders is balancing honesty and political good sense with regard to his faith.