My father was born in 1959. He grew up in Brookline, Massachusetts, right by the city of Boston. His mother – my nana – was, to use my father’s words, “all about” Jewishness. “The temple community was important,” he told me. “That was everything to her… making sure we went to synagogue every Saturday, come hell or high water, blizzard or not. It was huge.”
I was interviewing him for my book, Bad Jews, a roughly 100-year history of American Jewish identities. The title was a phrase I had often heard Jews throw at one another and, at least as often, apply to themselves.
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