I am not a particularly religious person, if “religious” is defined by observance of ritual, adherence to dogma and belief in theology. I curse more than I pray, forego services more than I attend, and put more energy into feeling guilty about my lapses than into remedying them. Yet there is no doubt that my upbringing in a religiously observant family defines who I am, just as it defines millions of American Jews whose ties to the ancient faith and its way of life are less spiritual than cultural.
Tradition — marking Passover, the High Holy Days, Hanukkah and the rites of life passage in the ways prescribed by edicts thousands of years old — offers context and comfort, no matter how conflicted the search for God.
I may not keep a kosher home, as my parents do, but I know why keeping kosher is more than some anachronistic throwback to the days before refrigeration. I may not speak Yiddish, but I’ve heard it all my life and can interpret from context much of what I hear. I may not be a Holocaust survivor or share the uniquely complex experiences of the children of survivors — but I was raised to understand the implications of the Holocaust for all Jews. I may not live in Israel, but I know what its continued existence represents to world Jewry.
I’m fortunate to work in a part of the country with a large Jewish population, heavy on retirees and Holocaust survivors, so there’s never a dearth of material or sources. My stories range from decoding the intricacies of the dietary laws or analyzing the meaning of forgiveness during Yom Kippur to the Holocaust survivors suing the Swiss banks to recover family assets seized by the Nazis. I accompanied a Bergen-Belsen survivor to the death camp where she nearly died as part of a series on ceremonies marking the 50th anniversary of WWII' s end.
Profiles of people who happen to be Jewish — whether a bank president, a radio talk-show host, a lawyer couple suing the tobacco industry or a retired high school teacher who donated $2 million to the University of Miami — were richer because I shared experiences, a world view and a common background with the subjects. And common backgrounds can lead to uncommon lines of inquiry. Or a book.
At the end of 1993, I saw “Schindler’s List” for the first time, in a Miami Beach theater filled with Holocaust survivors. Their reactions to scenes of the Krakow ghetto and the Plaszow concentration camp fascinated me as much as the film. I was compelled to find several Schindler survivors and write about them. It became clear almost immediately that Steven Spielberg’s film about a heroic Nazi war profiteer and the doomed Jews he saved would cause a sensation and had the potential to profoundly influence the way non-Jewish Americans thought about the Holocaust. Suddenly, the country was transfixed by a subject that few had wanted to talk about — or listen to — for a half-century. Suddenly, survivors who expected that their horrific stories would follow them, silently, to the grave, were willing and even eager to unburden themselves.
I wrote several short profiles of local Schindler’s List survivors for The Miami Herald a package that evolved into the book ’ “Schindler’s Legacy: True Stories of the List Survivors.” Nearly all of the three dozen Polish Jews interviewed for the book asked me the same question: “Your parents, they are survivors? Your grandparents? No? Then why are you writing this book? Why are you interested?”
Had I not been Jewish, and thus able to reassure these understandably suspicious, fearful people of my intentions — had we not been able to converse in the kind of cultural shorthand that members of a homogeneous group use — the project never would have succeeded.
Which brings the discussion full circle: because of the book, I’ve been asked to speak at dozens of synagogues, nonprofit-agency functions, book fairs and schools — junior high through college level — which in turn has expanded my universe of sources for newspaper stories about Judaism.