for about seventy-five people, buying a small present for every guest, asking every family to contribute some form of entertainment: song, poem, or skit. Who can forget Steinem tap-dancing in our living room, or New York Times editor Max Frankel delivering a lecture on the Maccabean revolt? My siblings and I wrote new Hanukkah-appropriate lyrics to a medley of Broadway show tunes. From West Side Story: “When you’re a Jew, you’re a Jew all the way from your first little bris, to your bar mitzvah day. . . .” From Evita: “Don’t cry for me, Antiochus . . . the truth is I burned the latkes. . . .”
I loved these traditions—our crowded living room full of families I’d known forever and our more intimate nightly family powwow around the menorah. But Jewish identity, per se, wasn’t at the forefront of my mind until I was twenty-four and it was tested. For a year, I’d been dating a Catholic named Michael who cared a lot about his Catholic heritage. Mom was sure I’d soon abandon the Jewish people and start baptizing my babies. She blamed herself; she’d failed to give me enough Jewish identity to want to preserve it. She cautioned that I’d end up caring later, more than I did in my twenties, a warning that felt unnerving. Despite her sadness, I moved to Palo Alto with Michael when he was admitted to Stanford Law School.
The relationship ended nine months later. In part, I began to feel the fault lines more than I’d expected or that I could explain to him. It wasn’t just that when I took him to my aunt Judy’s seder in Palo Alto, I realized that everything familiar to me was foreign to him; it was the ineffable gaps that reminded me that we didn’t come from the same “stuff.” He knew more about his faith than I did about mine, so it was hard for me to visualize our religious future together. How would I teach our children what I didn’t know myself? Our conversations on the topic were strained. He thought I was overdramatizing our differences; I thought he wasn’t being honest about how hard it could become.
I cried a lot when I packed my bags and flew back to New York, despite my parents’ loving welcome. Walking back into my childhood bedroom with its Laura Ashley wallpaper felt like failure; I’d left less than a year ago with fanfare and a certain degree of courage, to strike out on another coast. Now I was home without an apartment or a job. I had also come up against an unfamiliar realization: my Judaism mattered. Or at least, I was being forced to decide whether it did. I could shrug off the question for a while longer, join a gym, schedule dinner with friends, job-hunt. But it would keep circling back, perching on my shoulder like an insistent parrot, “You have to deal with me.”
Which is not to say that I truly dealt with it until 1997: the moment I was looking at my newborn son at his bris (circumcision). This necessitates a rewind to 1993, when I had a blind date with a wonderful Skokie native named David Shapiro and married him eight months later. I had never felt such an instantaneous certainty about knowing someone without knowing them, of looking forward to talking to someone for the rest of my life. He had a Midwestern genuineness, a keen sense of humor, a fascination with history, and a devotion to family. Our family parallels felt like no coincidence: we both had parents with strong, uncomplicated marriages; I’m an identical twin, and Dave has identical twin sisters. Dave is three years younger than his twin sisters, and Robin and I are three years older than my brother, David. We had an instant shorthand and ease together.
On a sunny October morning, Dave proposed to me at the Lincoln Center fountain, pouring champagne from a bottle into two flutes, playing our favorite song on a portable CD player: “I Could Write a Book,” by Rodgers and Hart.
David wanted a small wedding, so we culled the guest list to the bare minimum (not easy—I have regrets), picked a pre-high-season date with lower airfare to St. Lucia, and asked my Yale classmate Mychal Springer, by then an ordained rabbi, to come marry us. We exchanged vows on a mountain so windy, I thought I might blow off. Mom had requested a wedding canopy, and the island resort seemed to enjoy creating its first “hooper,” as the St. Lucians referred to it—the huppah (canopy for weddings). It was important to me to be under one; all my ancestors had been, and I wanted to relive the Fiddler on the Roof wedding scene, having watched every Broadway iteration since 1969, memorized the movie, and played Chava (the rejected daughter) in a college production.
When our first child, Benjamin, arrived in all of his robust nine pounds, twelve ounces, something powerful reared its head as I watched his swaddled self, capped in a miniature yarmulke, held aloft by the mohel who performed the “surgery,” Phil Sherman. (Phil is famously theatrical but he gets the job done fast, with an improvised pacifier of sweet wine for the infant, minimal baby-wailing, and plenty of shtick). I’ll never forget the questions that echoed in my head as Ben was being blessed: “Do you really understand why you’re doing this? Does this mark the start of your Jewish family, or are you just checking the box?”
The bris conveyed a decision I’d never made. We scheduled the ceremony because that’s what Jews do: host a bris on the eighth day of a boy’s birth, invite friends and family to come witness, bless, and then eat. I cried that morning because I was hormonal, true, but also because Ben was the newest tiny Jew, joining a tenacious people that many were determined to eliminate. And I cried at my deficits: how little I knew, and how late I’d have to learn it if I chose to start now.
This was the moment that led me to write my first book, Stars of David: Prominent Jews Talk About Being Jewish, an anthology of face-to-face interviews with Jewish celebrities about whether they cared about Judaism. Sure enough, these public figures had wrestled with similar vacillation—discarding what was inherited; feeling part of a tribe or indifferent to it; owning or abandoning tradition; mastering rituals or never learning them; navigating the patchiness of observance, the shame in stereotypes, the riddle of Israel.
No fewer than sixty-two people agreed to talk to me for the book, including both Jewish Supreme Court justices at the time, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer; actor Dustin Hoffman; director Steven Spielberg; opera legend Beverly Sills; comedian Gene Wilder; writer and director Nora Ephron; Star Trek’s Jewish duo, Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner; Olympic medalist Mark Spitz; and three of my former bosses at 60 Minutes: Mike Wallace, Morley Safer, and Executive Producer Don Hewitt.
In the midst of what proved to be intense, intimate conversations, I realized that I hadn’t answered the questions I was posing: How much does being Jewish matter to you? Do you care what religion your children are? Do you feel a personal weight because of our hard history? Are you pro– or anti–gefilte fish?
Then I was jarred by my interview with Leon Wieseltier, the wild-haired, erudite writer, who grew up Orthodox and is fluent in Jewish scholarship. I sought him out because I know he’s unapologetically opinionated and I didn’t want my hand held. But as we sat on chairs opposite each other in his spare office, the bluntness of his message was still bracing. He was entirely unsympathetic to the idea that I, and many of my interviewees, might be unmoved by, and uncommitted to, Judaism:
“The problem is that most American Jews make their decisions about their Jewish identity knowing nothing or next to nothing about the tradition that they are accepting or rejecting. We have no right to allow our passivity to destroy this tradition that miraculously has made it across two thousand years of hardship right into our laps. I think we have no right to do that. Like it or not, we are stewards of something precious.”
I left this interview feeling both depleted and energized. I picked up Wieseltier’s book Kaddish and underlined a line I’ve kept with me: “Do not overthrow the customs that have made it all the way to you.” The proverbial lightbulb went off.
I began weekly Torah learning with a young rabbi, Jennifer Krause, who had taught my parents’ study group and who hails from Tucson. It soon became a highlight of my week as I began to understand how random Bible stories connected, how family dysfunction was timeless, how right and wrong was clarified in our ancestors’ mistakes. Torah references suddenly popped up everywhere: novels, political
