LAWRENCE BUSH ORAL HISTORY

jayne pearl: So, this is Jayne Pearl, and today is Tuesday, March 20th, 2012. I'm here at the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts, with Lawrence Bush, and we're going to record an interview as part of the Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project. Larry, do I have permission to record this interview?

LAWRENCE BUSH:Yeah, by all means.

JP:Thank you so much. So, let's dig in. Can you briefly describe what you know about your family background?

LB:I know that my father was born in White Russia, came here when he was four years old, and tells a -- told a story of his first episode of conscience when 1:00he first arrived, and he had a bag of apricots that he was holding for the family, and he ate the whole thing. And his folks looked at him with great disdain, and he suddenly realized what it was to eat more than he should. So, my dad came here when he was four. My mother was born here. Her mother, born in 1894, came from Mohyliv-Podils'kky, along the Dniester-Bessarabia border, Romania, that area.

JP:Um-hm.

LB:She came here supposedly -- my grandmother was a storyteller. I wrote a novel about my grandmother called "Bessie" because I wouldn't trust her for an oral history. It had to be a fiction. But the story is that she was arrested and sent to Siberia at the age of twelve, escaped from Siberia and came here when she was about sixteen, maybe fifteen, and then eventually went back once the Bolshevik 2:00Revolution broke out and was a nurse in the Red Army for a couple of years. At which time she also got pregnant with my mom, lost her husband, and managed to get back to the United States with my mother, the baby. So, that's what I know. I have a picture of her father in my office who was supposed to be a rabbi, but everyone's father was a rabbi, it seems, but I'm -- you know. And I know that my grandmother witnessed a pogrom in her childhood, witnessed a family member being killed in shul. And I know that my father's family were -- his parents came over, and they were -- he was a baker or something like that. My father came from a family where he was the youngest of eight children by eight years. The nearest son to him was eight years. He was the late accident. So, he had a lot of elder sisters and brothers.

JP:Hm. And do you know anything more about their life in the Old Country and how 3:00they came to this country, especially your grandmother who escaped Siberia and --

LB:Yeah. I don't know my father's story in terms of his family's emigration here. I know that my gra-- the story of my grandmother, the story she told, was that her older brother Julius -- that wasn't his Yiddish name -- had a printing press in the basement. And when the gendarmes [French: police officers] showed up, she was the one home, and she took the fall at the age of twelve or thirteen. She claimed to have met "Babuskha" Breshkovskaya in Siberia, as well as Vera Figner, two revolutionary women who I've, you know, Wikipedia-ed. And she escaped, as many did, supposedly befriended a priest and a priest's daughter and got on a train and made her way back to civilization, and I don't know how 4:00she then came to the States.

JP:Interesting.

LB:After the revolution, the story was that a -- American sea captain gave her transport out, with a sense of pity of this poor woman lost and probably with typhus and so on -- gave her transport to the United States again. Again, you know, I don't know what's -- my grandmother also claimed to have met Lenin at a rail station and helped nurse him through a toothache. So, I don't know (laughs) about my grandmother's stories, but it's a good novel. (laughter)

JP:So, once your parents married, can you describe the home that they created and in which you grew up?

LB:My parents were communists, as was my grandmother. My grandmother was a -- in the American Communist Party from its founding, late 1921, '22. My parents were 5:00in the Party until probably Khrushchev's speech -- '57, '58 is when most of the American Jewish communists who fled during the '50s fled. I do remember the FBI coming to my apartment in Forest Hills when I was about eight, looking for my grandmother. That's when I first found out that my parents were doing something that wasn't common. My father was a pharmacist; my mother was a -- eventually she was a speech therapist and public school teacher as a speech therapist. And my grandmother was always close to the family, so I really have my grandmother's voice in my ear. And she was the -- she was a very loving presence in my life. My folks had a very tempestuous marriage and split up for a while, came back together -- it was a much more difficult household, full of arguing. And my -- 6:00what else -- oh, oh, and so Jewishly, I was raised as a secular Jewish kid. I went to the Parkway Jewish Shule, an IWO shule [secular Yiddish school] in Kew Gardens, for three or four years, where I learned basic Jewish history, alef-beys [Hebrew alphabet], Yiddish song, dance. Didn't become fluent by any means in Yiddish. I mean, this was a Sunday, two, three hours of a day. Interestingly, my wife of thirty-six years was a student there too, but only for one semester, and then she went off to dance school and arts and so on. I stuck around. Didn't go to the mitlshul [high school]. And had a secular Jewish bar mitzvah the way the school did it and the way the family did it. Which was 7:00basically --

JP:And what do you remember from that?

LB:-- no Torah reading and no religious trappings, but you'd make a speech -- this was at the family bar mitzvah. And for school, it was a play, and we did -- I don't remember the content of it. I remember my brother's more. I could kind of recite pieces of that. But I was definitely embedded in a Jewish milieu -- which I'm still embedded in, for "Jewish Currents" magazine -- that was progressive and kind and ethically-minded equals Jewish. With a certain superiority about being nonbelievers, a certain arrogance about being nonbelievers, that I as a baby boomer, surrounded by people whom I respect who have kind of come to their own spirituality and religion, I don't carry that arrogance anymore, but I was raised with it. I would say the great deficit of the Jewish education was we were never once brought to a synagogue. We were 8:00never once given education in the liturgy in what our people do, even if we don't, when they're doing Shabbos, when they're do-- you know. And so, really, I didn't step foot in a synagogue until good friends of mine were becoming bar mitzvah. And then, it was a mortifying experience. I didn't know which way the tallis went on, I didn't know how to keep a yarmulke on my head -- it was just embarrassing, discomforting -- and discomforting all the way through. I mean, here I am a, you know, a professional Jew for thirty years, as a magazine editor, a writer, an artist. This is my beat. But when I step into shul, I still feel like a -- eleven-year-old kid not knowing what to do. And I've argued within the secular Jewish movement, the remains of it, that they owe it to their kids to make them comfortable, so when they go to a Jewish household for Shabbos, whatever they're doing, they'll be comfortable. They know about candle 9:00lighting; they know -- even if they don't want to say it, they know how to say it. They know what to do at a funeral. They -- didn't happen.

JP:It's also interesting that just as Reconstructionist Judaism encourages the congregants to go back to the texts to know what they're reconstructing and how to reconstruct it for today and for them --

LB:Right.

JP:-- that as intellectual atheists --

LB:Right.

JP:-- that you weren't brought back to what as atheists you were supposed to be rejecting.

LB:Right. No, there -- you know, it was -- I was born in '51. So, I'm going to shule in the early '60s, late '50s. And Camp Kinderland too. And it's -- the secular movement is still operating under the assumption that they can be a world unto themselves. Which it was in my grandmother's day; it was in my parents' day. They had their choruses, their schools, their camps, their work societies. They had a world -- they didn't need to transmit to their kids -- 10:00they knew what they were rejecting, and they didn't have that sense of -- that continuity would require opening the doors more. They didn't -- and, you know, I don't know that I would have understood it either. I understand it now as kind of an avant-garde secularist. But -- so very few Jews of that milieu became deeply involved Jews. They became deeply involved secular Jews to the extent that that supplies an identity for them, great. But many of them, many of my contemporaries and so on, their own kids, et cetera, are less and less connected. Unique to the secular Jewish movement that's not. I mean, you know, you find the same thing in every wing of liberal Judaism. So, their errors were not by any means unique.

JP:So, were there any remnants of Jewish religion or culture in -- well, 11:00religion, specifically first, in your home? Like --

LB:My grandmother. There was no Shabbos in my home. There was -- there were some Passover seders, but it really wasn't until I joined my wife's family, when I was twenty-two, twenty-three, that we've annually had a seder. In fact, we have three seders now. We've had a friends' seder for thirty-six years with the same group of people and two family seders. They were influenced by -- they had Workmen's Circle cousins and -- as well as linke people, communist people, and they blended it. They had a ritual life. My family was much more hit-and-miss, as I remember. Relied upon the shule for whatever we were going to have.

JP:Wow. And what was your community like as you grew up?

LB:I grew up -- it was interesting. I spent my first four years -- which I 12:00barely remember, of course -- in St. Alban's, which was a -- African American neighborhood, which my parents and several other white communist families moved into deliberately to try to kind of stop white flight and keep it an integrated neighborhood. Didn't work, but -- so I grew up in this black neighborhood for my first four years. Then, we moved to Forest Hills, which was all Jews. All Jews all the time. And -- you know, no longer, but it was. So, that on Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, when I would go to school -- I -- my parents sent me to school on Rosh Hashanah, Yom Ki-- I would be with the one Irish kid, the one (laughs) Italian kid, and a substitute teacher. That was it. The class was otherwise empty. And this was before the schools closed for the Jewish holidays in New York. They didn't then. But -- so that was an interesting phenomenon. I was not 13:00encouraged to stay home and dress up and walk around the neighborhood on the High Holidays. We ignored them. And then, in -- before high school, I moved to another part of Queens, Jamaica/Springfield Gardens, where there was a brand new high school -- highly integrated scene. Far less Jewish, though certainly there were Jewish kids. And -- does that answer the question?

JP:Yes, very well. Can you tell me about your friends?

LB:(pause) I had an older brother. I still do. Three years older. We were very close. And so, we tended to hang around with this small gang of kids. One thing that's very striking is at P.S. 196 in Forest Hills, my best buddy in school -- I mean, this was a loving relationship -- once we went home -- he lived three blocks away -- we never saw each other on the streets. Kids -- you know, you 14:00hung out on your block in Forest Hills. That was an interesting thing. 'Cause I remained friends with him all the way through, but we didn't hang out together back then except in school. My friends were mostly Jewish kids having bar mitzvahs, and I'm talking about boys, 'cause that's the age I was playing ball, I was hanging out with boys -- reluctantly. Having their bar mitzvahs reluctantly. Almost envying me my secular freedom.

JP:Did you envy anything about their home life or religious life?

LB:No. No. I di-- I was not that familiar with it. You know, Halloween was much more important in that neighborhood. You knew where to go to get the goodies. I feel like my soul was awakened by a girl who was the daughter of survivors and who was, even at that age, an actress and an artist and who, around twelve, I 15:00really fell in love with and began hanging and having the soulful conversations with her rather than playing ball. And I didn't -- I didn't meet her parents, I didn't have acute consciousness of her as the daughter of survivors, but I knew there was horror there and that it infused her family life. And she was -- she remained an actor and did some really wonderful one-woman show about being the daughter of survivors and so on, and --

JP:What was her name?

LB:Leeny Sack is her name. I still know her a little bit. She lives out in Ithaca. So, she was an important awakening.

JP:You tell a story in your --

LB:Wouldn't give me a tumble. She was not my girlfriend. (laughter)

JP:You tell a story in your book "Waiting for God" about a conversation your 16:00mother overheard when you asked a friend, "Do you believe in God?"

LB:Right. Now, this is a very -- this is a story my mother used to tell all the time. So, as I say in the book, it's -- I'm not sure how sharp it's my memory, how much it's hearing her stories, but I vaguely remember very young age sitting with the daughter of a family we were very close to. So, she was the family ki-- you know, not a friend that I found, but -- like a cousin. And I -- yeah, I said to her, "Do you believe in God?" And her response was, "Oh yes, and Mighty Mouse too." And I don't really remember how I reacted. I don't remember if she was -- if I thought it was silly, if I thought it was profound -- but my mother's love of that story, I say in the book, indicates their ideology: that people who believe in God are believing in Mighty Mouse. They're believing -- they're foolish. They're childish. Or -- or they're deceitful. 'Cause they're kidding. 17:00They're faking it. How that accounted for the likes of Martin Luther King or Gandhi or other profound leaders who they would've cheered for and who they followed who really derived their inspiration from religious texts and sources and faith, I don't know how my parents worked that one out. But I was raised with, as I said, that kind of, We the atheists are the enlightened ones. And now the book is subtitled "The Spiritual Explorations of a Reluctant Atheist." 'Cause I am -- I feel like, Ah, too bad. Too bad I can't -- even with Kaplan's ideology -- I edited the Reconstructionist movement's magazine for thirteen years, "Reconstructionism Today." Not "The Reconstructionist," but the little -- the bathroom magazine, I edited. And I read a lot of Kaplan, and I really do feel in many ways like a Reconstructionist. I believe that to the extent that we 18:00can, Jews should be kind of maximally connected to the tradition, 'cause it's a great philosophical tradition. It's a source of ethics; it's a source of inspiration. But even Kaplan's theology is a bit too much for me.

JP:Yes. You ta--

LB:Reluctantly, I say that.

JP:Right. So, besides the Communist Party, what other organizations or institutions were your parents, your grandmother involved with while you were growing up?

LB:Mm. I don't know. Oh yeah, I do know. My father was a pharmacist and was very involved in the organizing of 1199, the union, which originally was a drug and hospital workers' union. Druggists were the first ones they organized. So, 1199, which always had a strong cultural component, even before the Bread and Roses program that they started, was a bit of a cultural center. We went to holiday 19:00shows there; I remember getting toys and being entertained at 1199. We always went to the Labor Day parade. I have an art piece called "Yarmulke," which is -- has these two pictures of, again, family friends wearing the paper 1199 hats, little union cap that people would wear at parades. And that's the yarmulke. And it -- and it's a nice piece because that is, in fact, the head covering that I -- made me feel reverent, while the Jewish head covering I don't wear. It doesn't -- I don't want to cover my head in synagogue. So, there was that. And they were involved in the Civ-- I mean, I stayed home with my grandmother in '63 for the March on Washington while my parents went. I was twelve, and I didn't go, for whatever reason. There are many ways in which I was a young baby boomer. And so, I watched the older kids go south for Freedom Summer, go to Washington, 20:00while I was -- with a certain sense of relief, maybe -- staying home, 'cause I was young. They were involved in their circles of activist friends. And one thing I distinctly remember was that back in the day, some people would come to your apartment door collecting for the United Way or for canc-- you know, cancer charities. There were very few charities back then. I mean, it's astounding how much we're expected now to sustain as givers of tsedakah in our society. And my father always refused to give anything at the door, saying that if we gave, the government won't take care of this business, and as a leftist, he believed this is the business of government. So, let's not take the part of it. And it took me writing a book called "Jews, Money and Social Responsibility" and learning about 21:00the ways of tsedakah to realize, I think my dad was wrong. I think that yes, we have to agitate for the government to be socially -- to provide the safety net and be the defender of people who need the defense. But it's our responsibility -- not only our responsibili-- it's our responsibility to redistribute our own wealth, 'cause we don't own it. And it's also humanizing to do that. While to say no, to turn away from the outstretched hand, is deadening. And the tradition says that tsedakah saves from death. My interpretation of it is, Yeah! Giving saves me from dying. I know what it is to walk down the street and block out, and I know what it is to give, and I'd much rather have that moment for the few quarters it costs. So, there -- this is one way in which my parents were not informed by the rich content of Talmudic Judaism, of normative Judaism, that I 22:00have been. I've allowed it in. I think there's great wisdom in our ethical tradition.

JP:Other institutions and organizations -- you attended Camp Kinderland and -- which focuses on equality and peace and community and social justice.

LB:I went to three camps. I went to Kinderland, Woodlands, and Hurley, all of them leftist camps, Kinderland the most Jewishly committed. I never liked summer camp 'cause I wanted to be home with my friends. I was only able to go for two-and-a-half or three weeks, so I never kind of had the feeling of, I possess this place; I belong here. And camp was always structured, like school. What I really wanted was to just be set loose in the country with a net, collect bugs, wander around, and have a contemplative summer and make friends that way. So -- 23:00plus they always sent you in the lake at nine in the morning for a swimming lesson, when it was freezing cold. It was this old European body thing that I -- so I never liked camp. I didn't form the attachments. At Kinderland, there was a guy, Herb Krugman, who came around on an easel, did chalk talks, where he would tell you stories and illustrate them while -- and it was always mysterious what he was drawing and how it emerged. And I thrilled to that. At other camps, Woodlands had wonderful musicians among the counselors, some pretty well-known ones. And -- so there was -- and of course, Pete Seeger showed up to -- in the height of McCarthyism or at the end of McCarthyism at these places and became a hero to us. So, there were elements of camp I loved. But while a lot of red diaper babies have this deep sense of, Ah, camp was where I could feel safe, and 24:00camp was where I was with my own and so on, it's not a feeling I share.

JP:Wow. You have written -- you mentioned your brother Russ. And you've written in "Waiting for God" that he converted to Christianity --

LB:Yeah.

JP:-- some thirty years ago. Can you des-- can you explain how your family reacted to that decision --

LB:Hm.

JP:-- and what led up to that?

LB:My brother was a somewhat tortured soul. And suffered through adolescence, a teenag-- a very creative tortured soul. I mean, he really was an older brother. He turned me on to folk music and rock and roll and late-night radio and "MAD Magazine" and all the things an older -- he was extremely creative. Fertile imagination. And a leader in that way of a lot of kids. But the combination of 25:00hard luck, psychedelic drugs, envy, my difficult parents, et cetera, my brother really was a depressed human being. So, his conversionary experience was -- could have been any of a million religious orders and/or cults. If it had been a Hare Krishna person who had come on to my brother sympathetically; if it had been a Hasid -- it might have been any of these. Instead, it was someone out in Colorado -- my brother was out in Colorado at this point -- from this thing called the Holy Order of M.A.N.S, "mans," which was an American Christian sect. You know, I've Googled it since. At its max, it had about three thousand members. And my brother was swept up in it. And for eight years, he was a -- I 26:00guess a monk. He worked during the day at Goodwill Industries or whatever, and he wore clerics at night and lived under vows and so on. I visited him in various cities where they had houses -- you know, Peoria, Illinois; Denver, Colorado; et cetera. I judged it was not a cult. There was not a charismatic leader; there was not love bombing. There were not all of the things of cult life that I was aware of. And when my brother wanted to take permanent vows and become a priest, they said to him, No. You're having a really hard time with this vow and that vow, and these vows are not meant to impose a life on you. So -- and my father was dying at that time. So, they basically said, Go home. Make us your church. Don't become a priest. And the fact that they didn't suck him in, they didn't take him, even though he wanted it, was -- I was right. It was not a cult. And ultimately, the Holy Order of M.A.N.S. merged with the Orthodox 27:00Church here in America, the American Orthodox Church. So, they defrocked their -- the women priests. They adopted this ornate liturgy. And now my brother, who's still in the church, can go to a Greek Orthodox, Russian Orthodox -- he can be mainstream and recognize the liturgy and so on. And for -- I would say that probably his religious conversion saved his life, 'cause I think my brother could have been a suicide at some point. He was depressed enough, and -- my parents' reaction was basically -- my mother tried to stay in touch in a maternal way, sending him supplies and trying to make the phone calls here and there. My father was too offended by his conversion and sent him a copy of Bertrand Russell's "Why I'm Not a Christian" and thought that that would make a 28:00difference. And I -- you know, I was already now twenty-one, twenty-two, when all of this was coming down. I traveled and visited him in different places and kept the relationship going. When he was kind of giving up his worldly possessions, I took shipment. And -- and we all survi-- the family survived this long alienation, to a large extent. I mean, and he did -- did he get home in time for my father's actual death? I don't think so, but he got home in time for the funeral.

JP:It's --

LB:And I'll say -- I'll say -- that my brother was the first person who I dialogued with religiously. He was the first person I loved who -- and honored and respec-- I mean, this -- as I said, this guy turned me on to all the good things in life -- who now was embracing the Bible. So, all of a sudden I said, 29:00"You know, I really should read the Bible! I live in a culture -- I have to read this thing." And where I had to dialogue with somebody who I admired about religious issues and who put me through a lot of changes and doubts myself. So, I really valued having that, you know, pricking against my thick skin. Which wasn't so thick. And it opened me up from my parents' variety of secularism into a much more respectful secularism. I mean, I'm an odd duck. I've been serving religious movements, basically, for most of my working life. I was the speechwriter and consultant to the president of the Reform synagogue movement for more than a dozen years, writing speeches and sermons that thousands of people would be swept away by. And what I realized was that it was the -- my insistence on making a humanistic translation of Biblical texts, of Talmudic 30:00texts, et cetera, that made me effective. Because most of the people out there are living in a great state of doubt and ambivalence when it comes to anything having to do with God. Whether they're members or not, they live -- and so when you hear a spin on the story that acknowledges that this is metaphorical, and what is it -- that deals with it as an artist might, rather than deals with it as a revealed truth, that's very satisfying to people. So, there is -- you know, my Jewish secularism is a Reconstructionist insofar as I really do want to be engaged with the tradition. I've often said my favorite spot in America -- one of them, at least -- is the Pacific redwoods. Very gorgeous park, primeval forest. And the redwoods have very little pinecones, very small cones, and they only gestate when confronted by a fire, apparently. Forest fire causes the 31:00renewal of the forest. And I think of my humanism. I think of the -- approaching the tradition with skepticism as that fire. And unfortunately, there are too few creative secular Jews participating in that. Instead, most of them have lapsed into ignorance. I wish there were more folks who responded to the call to, Let's not let God be the gatekeeper on the Talmud. It's full of dialogue about how we should live together. It's not about God -- not what counts about it. And I'd like to see more of that. That's my work.

JP:So, we've covered a lot about your background. And today, you're the editor and publisher of "Jewish Currents" magazine, where you worked for many years before, and then took a --

LB:Yeah. Technically not -- (drops mic) oh, sorry.

JP:Oops. Yup.

LB:Not the publisher. I mean, I -- there's -- I'm the editor of "Jewish Currents," and there's a not-for-profit organization that is the publisher that I'm the treasurer of.

JP:Okay.

LB:There's a board. Yeah. "Currents" is sixty-six years old. And I was the assistant editor to the eternal editor, Morris Schappes, from, like, 1978 until '83, '84, when I left the city. And then, spent twenty, twenty-five years working in the Reform and Reconstructionist movements and the Jewish philanthropic world and so on, getting my education and doing this strange dance of being a secularist in liberal Judaism. And then, I returned to "Jewish Currents" as the editor in 2002, the end of 2002, when I wanted to kind of return to the secular Jewish community, and I knew the magazine was really desperate for a pinch hitter.

JP:Hm. And it's a -- it seems like it's a good fit because it focuses so much on 33:00Jewish and political themes but from a more secular perspective.

LB:Yeah. I mean, my column, until -- it's still extant -- my column is called "Religion and Skepticism," and it's the place where the magazine gets to actually educate my own generation, the main readership I'm going for, about the tradition, about the fact that there's an atheist in the Talmud, who's the scribe, and the fact -- or what is -- Madonna's into Kabbalah? Well, what is Kabbalah? And so, there's really a need for doing what I didn't get in shule, trying to give a fundamental education in what's Judaism. But the magazine is primarily -- yes, secular, cultural, historical magazine, with a lot of contemporary politics. The word "secular" is a complicated word. It's on our 34:00masthead; it says, "A secular, progressive voice" or "A progressive, secular voice." If I had my druthers, I'd probably remove the word "secular" because -- for people who are not of that movement, and it's a very small movement, in terms of how many shules are left and so on -- "secular," I think, means "rejecting of religion." It's like a negative. It's a no. It doesn't just mean "worldly" anymore. And plus, the word "secular" -- I mean, who's not secular? If you look at the Lubavitchers' outpouring of cultural stuff, they know what's on -- they used to put out a comic book called "Mendy and the Golem." And they were very hip. They knew about Yankee Stadium and Star Wars and all of that culture that -- enough to parody it the way "MAD Magazine" used to. So, who's not secular? It's not a useful term. But I know that its veteran -- the veteran 35:00readership of "Jewish Currents" would be deeply offended to remove -- it's their denominational identification. And I just try to minimize the damage of the word and maximize its use. It's a tricky word now.

JP:Wow. Let's talk a little bit about Yiddish. (laughs) I know that you aren't fluent in Yiddish.

LB:I'm not not -- it's not that I'm not fluent in Yiddish. I don't speak or read Yiddish.

JP:Okay.

LB:I don't.

JP:But your parents and grandparents did?

LB:They -- my parents and grandparents did, though not so actively and certainly not so actively with me. My connection to Yiddish -- I like to say I don't speak Yiddish, but I speak Yiddishkayt.

JP:Um-hm.

LB:'Cause I have a connection to the language and the counterculture that it embodies. The magazine has a column called "Mameloshn," which is really 36:00something that I inaugurated. It's Yiddish poetry -- sometimes prose -- in Yiddish in transliteration and in translation. And the transliteration's there for the sake of the likes of me, who might want to try to study it so we could see if we could read the Yiddish, have the transliteration as -- you know. And the magazine has a long history of valuing and promoting and talking about the history of Yiddish. Our transliterations are Yiddish transliterations of the Hebrew words. So, we spell "bar mitzvah" m-i-t-s-v-e, the YIVO spelling of the Yiddish pronunciation of bar mitzvah. You know, bar mitzvah! We spell "Hanukkah" k-h-a-n-i-k-e, which is really peculiar, but it's the YIVO spelling of the Yiddish pronunciation of Hanukkah. In the "Jewish Inventions" book, one of the inventions is a 613-page book that explains how to spell Hanukkah, you know? 37:00(laughs) A lot of spellings. But -- so the magazine sensibility, which I share, is that the Yiddish language embodies Diaspora, universalist, deeply Jewish, rebellious values. And in a way that Hebrew does not. I was raised with a bias about Hebrew, thinking of it as kind of this truly foreign tongue, bourgeois, clean-limbed in some way that Yiddish was funky. Yiddish was "MAD Magazine!" I mean, "MAD Magazine" used a lot of Yiddish in -- and that was, you know, the Bible of my generation of kids trying to learn about culture. So, Yiddish remains that, and I guess all we're trying to do is remind Jews that we have 38:00more than one Jewish language, that this one is the folk language that still has creativity and currency and a profound literature. And that, while it's historically necessary and grand that Jews now have a nationhood represented by Israel, embodied in Israel, there's still something about being a diasporist people. There's something about not being normalized like any other nation, being a counterculture and seeking to continue what has been centuries of Jewish difference: international people, literate people, humanistically inclined people -- aspects of this. It's worth keeping that alive, that there -- that if 39:00Jews have a role to play in the world, a progressive role to play as leavening in this world, it's much more as the Jews of old, the Jews who speak Yiddish, the Jews who invented Esperanto, the Jews who have made all of these creative contributions to the universal culture through science and art and socialism and so on. Rather than the Jews who are now delivered safely to the homeland and have to exercise power. I'm not putting down power, you know. I'm not obliterating what happened to Jews without power. We're just trying to keep alive the idea that power's not definitive of -- of our gift.

JP:Well said. I'm curious about this column. Was this something that existed and you inherited, or is it something --

LB:"Mameloshn"?

JP:Yeah. That --

LB:No, we inhe-- we created that. I created that.

JP:Interesting.

LB:I don't conduct it. I can't conduct it. It's conducted by Barney Zumoff, who's a four-time president of the Workmen's Circle and has translated eight, nine, ten volumes of Yiddish writing. So, he's eminently qualified, and he brings in other translators. But the idea that we should have not just English language about Yiddish but actually have some Yiddish in each issue and include it as a learning possibility, as a tool for learning, was a late invention.

JP:So, can you tell us a little bit more about your family's attitude towards Yiddish and your community's attitude towards it?

LB:I don't know. I don't know if I really can. I think -- I don't remember my folks speaking it. Here and there, popping out with it. I have my grandmother's 41:00Yiddish intonations in English in my ear. One of the -- when I wrote "Bessie," it has a first-person voice as well as a third-person voice. Every few chapters, this eighty-eight-year-old woman is talking in the first person. And I put quotestation [sic] marks around those parts. And I'm sorry I did that, although I'm complimented by the fact that many people think I tape-recorded my grandmother, as we're doing now, that it was an oral history. It wasn't. It was that I grew up in her lap, and I -- I can talk like my grandmother. I won't do it now, but I hear -- I hear that kind of Yiddish through English. That's as close as I got to really being literate.

JP:Yeah, I was just gonna ask you to speak as her. (laughter)

LB:I'd have to read from the book. I'm a little shy to do it on my own. But I think that they -- I think they were affectionate towards the language enough to 42:00really be glad that shule was teaching it. But I don't think they had a deep attachment to it enough to kind of do much to keep it alive or to cherish it for themselves or for me. My father's name, Bush -- my name, Bush -- was shortened from "Babushkin," which was -- which his older brothers did when they started a pharmacy. So, when I found that out -- (emphasizes second syllable) "Babushkin," I called it, or (emphasizes first syllable) "Babushkin" -- I kind of revived that name for some of my writing. It was too far along to become "Babushkin," but for some of my writing, it's the name. And --

JP:And is it part of the title of the "Inventions" book?

LB:"Babushkin's Catalogue of Jewish Inventions," right. So, in that way too, I feel a devotion to that world, you know?

JP:And do you feel that not speaking more Yiddish has been an impediment in your work?

LB:Yeah. Not speaking Yiddish and not speaking Hebrew. It's like this: I work 43:00very hard. I don't have a staff. I'm really working four, five jobs for the past few years with "Jewish Currents" to keep it going and to grow it. And amazingly, it's not only steady state; it's growing, it's happening. You know, it's -- so I'm editing a magazine and a website and fundraising and you know -- and if I had the time and -- I probably would want to learn Yiddish. And I probably could do that somewhat easily 'cause of my shule background. I can read the alef-beys. I've done enough typesetting now of Yiddish in that column that I can sound it out, you know? But I also want to learn to play jazz guitar. I've been a guitarist since I'm eight years old, and in terms of apportioning my time, it's more important to me to learn some of those songs from the American Songbook than it is to learn these languages. 'Cause I'm -- I'm not going to become a 44:00scholar of these languages in a way that's going to -- and I find the guitar more entertaining. So, you have -- you make your choices. Life is so busy -- the plaint of our day -- talk to anyone, they just say, Oh, I'm so busy. You know. I'm really so busy! (laughter) And I wish I had more either easy capacity for language or time to immerse in it. It would certainly help me do my job more effectively, not make embarrassing mistakes, and appreciate this language. And make it real what I know abstractly, this stuff about Yiddish as the counterculture. I'd experience it. Wish I could do that.

JP:How did you ever manage to edit the millennial edition of "The Joy of Yiddish"?

LB:Okay. So, I was hired by Leo Rosten's daughters to edit "The Joys of Yiddish," but not to edit the Yiddish. In fact, I was instructed not to mess 45:00with the Yiddish. I hired Yankl Stillman, who is on my board, who was a Yiddishist and a scholar of Mendele, in particular -- a translator of Mendele -- to go over Rosten's Yiddish and give me comment and make corrections where there were glaring issues and raise questions. So, I didn't leave it utterly alone. But we didn't -- I was not told to kind of come up with new Yiddish for, you know, the computer age and so on. My job was to upgrade the sociology -- to update the sociology of the book. Rosten's "Joys of Yiddish" came out when women were not rabbis, and Reform Jews were not wearing kippahs and -- or kippot. (laughs) You know, it was a different Jewish world. And my job was to really just give a commentary that would update Rosten. In the course of doing it, I -- the main thing that I think was I amplified the transliteration, 'cause there's 46:00the YIVO transliteration, Rosten transliteration, and then popular usage trans--

JP:Yeah.

LB:-- and they all appear in the new edition, with -- indicating which is what. And I also compressed some of his narrative and messed with the structure in certain ways. But mostly, I was just politically and sociologically updating the book. His daughters kind of had a different vision of what the book should be. One wanted it to basically be a re-release of the book as the Bible; the other one would have rewritten it entirely, and they kind of used me as their compromise solution. Which -- successful. The only problem was -- I thought this was a big mistake -- I said, "I'll do an index for free. I'll do an index for this book. You must have an index!" 'Cause no one reads Rosten's "Joys of Yiddish" from beginning to end. They all say, My grandmother used to say, "a leybn af dayn kop [blessings on your head]." What did that mean? And you have to 47:00be able to find it. Publishing -- all twenty-five-year-olds, they don't know what they're doing, (laughs) no offense to twenty-five-year-olds -- they didn't take -- and so the book doesn't have an index, still. Plus the old edition of it is still out, and you can get that for $8.95 or -- so, I don't know how the book did. It was not my concern. But yes, that answers it. I didn't need Yiddish. I'm embarrassed that I was -- there was something presumptuous. I mean, it was a job. I took the job. I'm glad I did it. But I don't walk around saying, "I edited Leo Rosten," because I don't have Yiddish, and again, I'm sheepish about the fact that I don't have that expertise. You know, it's a testament to the hard times upon which Jews have fallen that I'm a leader. (laughs)

JP:Go figure. (laughs) Well, more about your work.

LB:Um-hm.

JP:So, I think you've written seven books? Let's see. There's the "Rooftop Secrets," and --

LB:Yeah. There are two fictions for kids.

JP:Um-hm.

LB:And "Bessie" and a fiction for adults. And there's "Waiting for God: The Spiritual Exploration of a Reluctant Atheist." There's "Jews, Money and Social Responsibility," which I co-authored with Jeffrey Dekro from the Shefa Fund. There's "Jewdayo," which I can talk about. What else you got there?

JP:I got "American Torah Toons."

LB:Oh yeah! Forgot. There's "American Torah Toons," which is fifty-four illustrated commentaries on the Torah portions.

JP:Right. And then, I think this is the second book for kids: "Emma Ansky-Levine and Her Mitzvah Machine"?

LB:That's right.

JP:Okay. And then, of course, there's the "Babushkin's Catalogue of Jewish Inventions." So, we talked a lot about "Jewish Currents" already.

LB:I also -- I hopefully have a book coming out next year, depending on the 49:00health of the publisher, which is called "The Tree Jumped, the River Ran Backwards." And I'm raising it not for self-promotion but because it's the first book I know of that's Talmudic stories about the rabbis meant to be bedtime reading or reading for young kids not from the Orthodox community. I just decided that it's as good as "Cinderella"; it's as good as "Winnie-the-Pooh." These stories of the rabbis are full of magic and delight and ethics. So, I found using the "Book of Legends" -- the Bialik/Ravnitzky "Book of Legends" -- I managed to find eighteen stories that I thought -- that do not rely upon God, that are about the rabbis, and that don't resort to miracles or false information. And then, I messed -- you know, there are women rabbis, there are -- I really messed with those stories. So, hopefully that'll be out next year.

JP:Wow. And you were -- you mentioned that you were also a speechwriter and consultant for a do-- more than a dozen years -- to the late rabbi Alexander Schindler --

LB:Yeah.

JP:-- who was president of the Reform movement. So, how were you able to internalize and promote the rabbi's thoughts and messages as a religious leader?

LB:Yeah. I define "religion" in a very broad sense. I think that when people come together to talk about the deep things in life and to hold each other ethically accountable and to talk issues of meaning and to celebrate, that's religion. Now, you know, secularists don't want to call it religion. But that is -- I'd rather submit to the word. If I won't submit to God, I'd like to -- I don't mind submitting to that word. And so, I see what Jews are doing in shul 51:00and what Jews are doing, if only they had these circles they used to have to talk about -- unions or whatever -- as similar activities. And I also know that the Jews in shul don't want to be praying as much as they do. Most of them are sitting through the prayer services 'cause that's what they do. But whenever I come in as a challenger, saying, as Mordecai Kaplan said, that worship is the secondary activity of -- it should be the secondary activity of our communities, that really this is about tapping into Jewish identity as this -- guidance for life, to take it seriously? We don't want to sit there, ambivalent about a liturgy. That doesn't breed passion for Jewish identity as a guidance for life. It breeds ennui. So, in some levels I -- I cut both ways, in terms of -- which 52:00means I'm very marginal. (laughs) But I'm saying to secularists, Please, open up these texts, and educate yourself, and learn about what these rabbis did with the Bible. They -- you know, the Bible wants you to have capital punishment for insulting your parents. And the Talmud says that any beit din, any rabbinical court, that applies the death penalty once in seven years -- another one says once in seventy years -- is merciless. I mean, there is this -- already this humanistic conversation going on about the old, let's transmute it into the new. Continue that. Continue that. It's -- you know, if you're a socialist, the Jewish economic teachings about -- either you take "The earth is the Lord's," Psalm 24, the foundational basis of Jewish teachings on the economy -- either you take it and say, "What Lord? There's no Lord." (makes disgusted noise) Or 53:00you say, "What does this mean, 'The earth is the Lord's'?" Well, it -- at least it means that the sun and the air and the soil and the minerals and the photosynthesis is not -- I didn't make it. You didn't make it. We share it by -- it's a blessing. We live on this planet. Here we are. And, it also means that -- you know, if you think about it, economics are social. There's no way away from it. There's no way around it. Nobody creates wealth without centuries of knowledge and infrastructure and all of this stuff. So, there's a socialist reality to economics that Judaism, with that little phrase -- and it builds upon it. Judaism consistently privileges the community over the personal property rights. If you're a socialist, this is very interesting. It also says, But human beings are hierarchical, and they are driven by the yetzer hara [Hebrew: evil inclination], and without the yetzer hara, we wouldn't do any of this -- you need to know this Talmudic story about the yetzer hara to appreciate that 54:00Judaism's got a socialist sensibility and a sensibility about human nature, and somehow we have to put those together to create the social democracy that we all -- us old socialists -- think we need. And why give up this tradition? So, I'm saying that to the secularists. And then, I'm going into synagogue, saying, You know, three-quarters of your people sitting out there do not really get off on this prayer process, no matter how many times you rewrite the liturgy. They want -- Buber talked about a genuine "we," the need for us to plug in once again to the genuine "we," if we're gonna survive. And I think, if "Waiting for God" has a theology, it's really that it's so hard to cultivate the "we" that Jews resort -- people resort -- to the "you," the praying together to the "you." What would happen, I say to synagogues, if we really tried instead to spend our time 55:00together cultivating the "we"? It's hard. People don't like each other that much. There's always the nudnik factor. Et cetera. But what would it be like? And in that way, as I say, I kind of am a challenge to both sides. And I appreciate that I've got enough of a -- amplifier to be heard a little bit.

JP:So, do you remember any interesting conversations, arguments, with the rabbi Schindler?

LB:Alex was -- was a remarkable Jew of -- and his kind are not that much among us anymore. He was one of these -- I think of them as crossroads Jews. I mean, he was a German Jew, came here -- survived by coming here early enough. His father was a Yiddish poet. His father had had experiences trekking across Russia. So, Alex had an appreciation of Yiddishkayt and a love of Hebrew and a love of Israel, but he was a diasporist himself. He had been on ski patrol in 56:00World War II. He just was one of these Jews that knew the Jewish world and liked it all. And so -- no. I didn't have -- first of all, you know, Alex gave hundreds of speeches a year, and if I participated in eight of them, it was a lot. He used me for certain things. And he was mostly using me for poetry, not for ideology. We saw -- I guess we saw the world pretty much similarly in terms of what's needed, and -- I think the way I affected him the most was on the issue of gay liberation and the embrace of lesbians and gay people, et cetera, in synagogue life. 'Cause when Alex was called upon to deliver a sermon in San Francisco, I think it was, in the midst of the AIDS crisis and so on, he really 57:00did come to me with a certain sense of, Look, this is where I'm at. Where I'm at is these people can't help themselves. I don't think I'm betraying any trust; Alex is gone from the world. This -- these people can't help themselves, so I should have compassion. And I basically said, You know, Alex, I've been there, and no, it's not -- being gay is not something to feel sorry for or superior to, and they don't feel -- except to the extent that they're pushed into the closet or pushed into an oppressed self-image -- it's not like a badge of honor that I'm heterosexual. It just so happens. And therefore, you gotta move into an affirmation. And you have to -- the image I used was that the Jewish star contains in it the triangle. And it's not just the Holocaust that brings Jews into -- not just the oppression of gay people by the Nazis -- it's the whole 58:00experience of being other. And of the riches that emerge from being other. And that an embrace would be good for the Jews and good for the gay community and so on. And Alex delivered a beautiful -- Alex became known as, like, a Jewish rabbinical advocate of gay liberation, and I think that his open-heartedness and the fact that I was a little further along in terms of being an ally to that community was very -- a time that I was able to give him something ideologically.

JP:And what did he give you ideologically?

LB:He gave me Bialik's "Book of Legends," which was my access to Talmud. He gave me a deep appreciation of the fact that religious people aren't boobies, that religious people are just as smart -- and that, in fact, it's only with 59:00religious language that it's easier to talk about certain things. It's just easier. Without that language, it's hard to talk about life and death and da da-- you know. And he gave me a livelihood. No small thing.

JP:No small thing.

LB:He gave me the right to be a writer and to be -- to lead this kind of thoughtful, contemplative life, encountering Judaism and taking it seriously. Just such a gift.

JP:You've written in "Waiting for God" that you distrust the sense of instant intimacy and community that can be generated through the gestalt of communal prayer, song, or confession, yet nevertheless, the lack of transformative rituals in humanistic movements seems to me one of their major weaknesses. So, the whole book seems to be a dance around trying to find that balance, trying to feed that craving for spiritual identity in a way you can live in your life --

LB:Yeah. Yeah.

JP:-- without what you need to reject. It was those no, no, no, nos and the yeses at the end of that book. I'm wondering -- since you've written that book, if you've gone any further in that dance.

LB:That's an interesting question. What I'm -- what I'm trying to do now -- and again, I wish I had more time. You know, it's now that I'm sixty that, My God, I wish I were tenured somewhere and had a sabbatical, you know? Being an editor is sort of like poor man's professorship. I would like to figure out what my 61:00challenge to synagogue life would translate to. I mean, "Waiting for God" offers a certain challenge. Quietly. I'm not in their face. But it's offering the challenge of cultivating the genuine "we." We spend our time together, our precious time together. Most Jews don't see each other outside the synagogue life that much, and this is their time together. What would it look like if we didn't do what synagogues usually do? It -- might we take something else out of the Ark, like a globe of the planet, or pass a baby around instead of the Torah each week? I mean -- I'm not a rabbi. I don't want to be a ritual leader. I am sometimes a ritual creator, but I don't want to be a leader of a ritual community. So, I don't want to go too far with this. But that's a question for me. And also, the intersection of, like, could the creative arts and ritual life 62:00-- how do we use the arts to address -- one thing I'm thinking of and I'm maybe gonna try to find funding for is the idea of collecting small communities -- small groups of artists in different communities and playing a catalytic role, sending out prompts to them about, you know, This holiday's coming. Here's a text about this. Here's what I'm thinking about teshuvah [Hebrew: repentance] or about -- you know. What is teshuvah? What is -- and asking them to kind of create artworks around these themes. And then, at the end of a year of that, you'd have an art show, and just to develop more Jewish artists who are using a Jewish sensibility to infuse their art, video, whatever. I'd like to help catalyze that if I could find the time and the funding for it. And so, in that way, I'm trying to move beyond the simple critique of expressing my ambivalence into making a proposal for what -- the Judaism that would satisfy me and all 63:00those people who stay outside of synagogue saying, Ah, they pray there. What might satisfy us? That's one way I'm thinking about it. Apart from that, I feel like the "Waiting for God" expresses where I'm at. I remember hearing Arthur Green lecture -- in Massachusetts somewhere, in Boston somewhere. And Arthur Green's a great scholar of mysticism and so on -- and is a very compelling speaker. And I asked a question to him, which I thought was really true of my generation. We are drawn to spirituality, which -- I should give you a definition of how I define that word. We're drawn to it with a sense of ecstasy, 64:00thankfulness -- because our lives are good. We've achieved a level of comfort and ease in life that our parents and grandparents and poor people who need God for comfort and for hope -- we don't need that. We need to express our thankfulness and so on. So, there tends to be an easy ecstasy about spirituality. "Isn't this grand?" And for me, I asked Arthur Green, "Where is the fear of God? Where is the fear of an accountable universe? Where is the fear of --" You know, to me being an atheist is comforting, not discomforting. I don't mind dying and rotting in the grave. I don't need there to be an afterlife. I've -- you know. But the idea that I'm account-- that the universe has a moral code, that I'm accountable to some universe -- the God I don't believe in is a scary God. It's a God more of the Old Testament, Torah God. And 65:00I feel like that sense is lost to my generation, and therefore, their God's a cheerleader. It really is. God -- their God -- the Reconstructionist God, for that matter -- is kind of the embodiment of goodness. I don't need to spend any time worshiping a God of goodness. I need to find the goodness and cultivate it. So, they're -- I feel like they've -- that the God is so diminished in power that we could just walk away from it and find other ways to be happy and thankful and in community. And that's a sense that I put out in "Waiting for God" that I still feel. I'm still not easily swept up in joy. You want to get joyful with me? Give me a little of your time. (laughs) Give me a little intimacy. Give me -- and I remain a stranger in that way.

JP:Can you tell us about some of your mentors?

LB:It's hard to do. I've thought about that, because -- I only have a bachelor's degree, so I did not have --

JP:In --

LB:-- graduate studies -- English.

JP:Yeah.

LB:Writing. I got to study creative writing with Joseph Heller for a year. That was a great year. Was he a mentor? No. He was just a good teacher and fun to be around. City College, when I went there, even though I was very unhappy to be there -- I didn't want to be there -- had a great writing program. Joel Oppenheimer, Anthony Burgess, John Hawkes, Gwendolyn Brooks, all teaching at the same time at City College. It was quite amazing. A great influence upon me as a fiction writer -- to my detriment, probably -- was Philip Roth. I wanted to be Philip Roth. I wrote four novels. I got one of them published, the only one being the historical novel, not the Philip Roth confessional novel. And I 67:00couldn't be -- and so I'm not a fiction writer anymore. It was too much heartache. I'm an essayist much more. But I definitely -- is that a mentor? Yeah. Having the Beatles in my life as a central aesthetic experience, and in particular, having John Lennon, the most famous person in the world, expressing his humanity and saying there's nothing that -- there's nothing you can do that can't be done, nothing you can sing that can't be sung, you know, so put my ambitions in their place and allowed me to embrace my life as what it was. So, that's -- certain artists have been great teachers to me in their creativity. Allen Ginsberg, though I'm not -- I haven't deeply read Allen Ginsberg -- his chutzpah, his in-your-face quality -- when I did the book "American Torah 68:00Toons," it was a great creative experience. It was the only time I think that I had a contract for a book before I wrote the book. So, I wrote it knowing there would be no anxiety. It was gonna come out. And it was also me playing for the first time with Photoshop and images, which was a great liberation for me. And at a certain point, the publisher said, You know, if you take out this semi-nude, or if you'd play down -- not use that four-letter word, we could probably market this for family use. And I thought of Allen Ginsberg, and I said, "Nuh-uh. Nuh-uh. This book is what it is. Go --" you know. And it's had pitiful sales. It's a great book; it's had pitiful sales. But in that way, you know -- I have not had -- ah. I work very closely with Jeffrey Dekro of the Shefa Fund. And we did a book, "Jews, Money and Social Responsibility," 69:00together. And I -- just last weekend was the scholar-in-residence at a synagogue in Philadelphia, and Jeffrey, who's now on the board of "Jewish Currents," came to hear it. And he was knocked out. And I was knocked out because I realized, as I was reading it in Jeffrey's presence, how much of my thought about Jewish economic philosophy was influenced by Jeffrey. Arthur Waskow, also, as a very hardcore political religious figure has been such an inspiration and a challenge to me, because I'm not religi-- you know, he gives me the dread of -- he gives me the heebie-jeebies, but he's my teacher. So, I've had teachers; I really haven't had mentors. I've had inspiring artists and some political teachers. And I have my wife as my -- and my children -- as my great life teachers. Very much so.

JP:I'm gonna ask you a little bit about them in a moment. I want to talk about your daily blog, the "Jewdayo," which provides snippets about Jewish people in history and culture on the anniversary of their birth or their death or some major occurrence.

LB:That's the book.

JP:Yeah, there it is! So, what inspired that blog and what do you hope it to achieve?

LB:Good. It's fun to talk about. About twenty or twenty-five years ago, Sherwin Wine's movement, the Society for Humanistic Judaism, gave me a gig. They hired me to come up with a date, a humanistic date of interest for every day of the year. This was pre-internet. This was the library. And I produced a manuscript -- which never was published. I don't know what happened on their end. They got other interests -- I don't know what happened. I got paid, and I had the manuscript, which then disappeared into the mess of my office. And about three 71:00years ago, I found the manuscript. Just cleaning up I came upon it, and I said, "Wow, with Google, with the internet now, I could really do this." And I just jumped in and launched it, sending it at random to my email list as an email -- only to realize that I had only found two months' or three months' worth of that manuscript, and I was really in for the long haul. So, now it's been two years and three, four months. Every day, I send out one paragraph and an inspiring quote about something having to do with Jews. Now, some of them are about Righteous Gentiles or about -- Saint Paddy's Day, I was looking for something to do for Saint Paddy's Day, and I found out that according to a variety of food experts, corned beef was not an Irish invention. Rather, the Irish had salt bacon and cabbage, but when Irish people came to America, their intersection 72:00with Jews and with brisket and with the Jewish deli, et cetera, gave rise to corned beef. So, I wrote about that on Saint -- but mostly it's about the Jewish innovators, mostly -- while I do some rabbis and some religious dates, mostly it's not that. Mostly it's not religious history. Partly 'cause -- you know, I mean, Chabad's website will tell you what day of the year Noah's Ark landed on Mount Ararat, but I don't usually go to the mythical in "Jewdayo." For me it's -- first of all, it's an exercise in pretending that I have control over my life and that every day I'm gonna be able to send out an email. Even when the electricity goes out for three or four days and the flood hits the valley. I mean, I've been managing -- I haven't missed a day. And that's fun. There's a nice illusion there. It's also -- honestly, it's a way of having contact with a certain community of people. I send it out now to about twelve hundred to 73:00thirteen hundred people; about five hundred of them open it. And it's a way to bring them to "Jewish Currents" website, to read this blog, to read this article, to buy this thing at the marketplace. So, it's a marketing game. But people just love "Jewdayo." I began it as "Jewday." And people liked it, but they recoiled from the name. And I took a little poll of -- I think there were only about a hundred readers at that point, and said, "How many of you want me to change the name?" And the over-- three-quarters of them said, Change it. And I just added the "o," which evokes Harry Belafonte. And I said, "It's daylight come, and me want go Chelm." And it worked. "Jewdayo" made the difference, that one accent. And people just write, saying that this is their practice. They read -- you know, email's very oppressive. I throw out so much of it. And I dread going to email, 'cause it's going to bring me work and unsoli-- blah-blah-blah. 74:00But people seem to really stick with "Jewdayo." And I do it because they like it, and so do I. It's my self-education.

JP:The twins.

LB:Um-hm.

JP:(laughter) They're twenty-five now?

LB:They're twenty-five now.

JP:What are they doing?

LB:My son is --

JP:And his name?

LB:-- trying -- his name is Jonah. He is working in New York for a radio station, and he's trying to become a DJ, which basically means finding a job in a small market now, and he's working on that. So, he was working hard at trying to fulfill that hope, getting on the air. He's like me; he's in an industry that is shrinking. I mean, we're gonna be the last living magazine, 'cause of our niche -- we might be. Print magazine; he's trying to break into radio, but he's working hard at it. And my daughter Zoe is -- she's a social worker working with 75:00sex crime victims. She lives in South Carolina. She's getting her master's degree. She's married and has promised me she will not raise children in South Carolina, and I hope that's true, when the time comes.

JP:How did you decide with your wife Susan how to raise them in terms of their Jewish identity and Yiddishkayt and --

LB:Yeah. That's a -- well. Susan's family had a strong -- very strong -- connection to Pesach. We were always creative around Hanukkah. We turned it into a tsedakah holiday -- as well as a fabulous, fun holiday. But we'd accumulate all of those solicitations from organizations, and the kids would sort through them, and then we'd assign a theme -- you know, Hanukkah has so many themes, and it's such a home holiday. So, lighting oil can be about energy, and you could -- therefore, this group of organizations are involved with ecology, oil, et cet-- 76:00you know. And we'd give tsedakah very deliberately and in a disciplined way during Hanukkah. The most innovative thing my family did was for Rosh Hashanah, where the girls go to synagogue and the boys do something else. So, my son knows it's the one day of the year he's gonna hang out with dad, and dad's allowed to ask him questions, intimate questions. But we also did a family tashlich [Hebrew: ceremony performed near water on Rosh Hashanah, lit. "to cast"]. And I never had been to a tashlich. I still don't know what a traditional tashlich looks like. I imagine it's boring, 'cause it's murmured prayers, and -- but I know that the holiday is about repairing relationships and reckoning with yourself. So, my family goes to a river -- we're surrounded by water -- and each member of the family praises each member of the family while everyone listens. And then, each member of the family says, "You know, dad, I wish you'd get -- be 77:00less angry," or whatever their criticism, their hope for one another is. And then, we throw breadcrumbs on the water with -- making our vows or -- not making, not vows; what's the word? Resolutions. Based on what we just heard. It's very powerful experience to have your children hear you praise your loving partner and be praised and have your children say what they love about you and also what they -- what their grievances are. It was incre-- it's -- we still do it each year. This was an innovation. So, we tried, as a family, to be -- to pay attention to the Jewish calendar and be innovative. At tashlich, when my kids were eleven, we said to them, Look. We don't really belong to a synagogue. It's getting time for you guys to prepare for your bar or bat mitzvah. So, here's what -- and we proposed a homeschooling to them. And my daughter said, "No, I 78:00want to learn to read Hebrew. I don't want to be clueless." These were her words. "I want to go have a normal bat mitzvah." And for her, "normal" meant the Woodstock Congregation, which is a wonderful synagogue, Reconstructionist rabbi, et cetera. So, Zoe became the most wanting to do this bat mitzvah in history, and Jonah was homeschooled. And that's how we did it. And they both had their event on the same day, different style. Zoe got very involved with Young Judea through the synagogue, spent her -- a year between high school and college in Israel, has been to Israel five times, has learned Hebrew, and thinks of herself as, I think, breaking with the family. And I look at -- and I think she's a chip off the old block. (laughter) I really think that Zoe's doing this because of what we did for her, and she's taking it her own way. And so, that's their 79:00story, essentially.

JP:I have a bunch of other questions, but we have maybe twenty minutes or a little less than that.

LB:Um-hm.

JP:So, I'm wondering before we wind down if there are any other topics that you want to bring to this discussion?

LB:(pause) Not anything in particular. I -- to me -- if I have a pur-- a mission as a Jewish writer and editor and activist, it has to do with a kind of old-fashioned -- I think I've said it before here -- reminding Jews of the integrity of their American Jewish identity, of their Diaspora-ist identity, their hereness, doikayt, whatever you want to call it. And not -- and I feel like I am in rebellion against the tendency in the mainstream community to use 80:00Israel as the defining -- almost proxy -- for Jewish identity. And -- and also, to remind Jews that, to the extent that we can, to be a light unto the nations, a nation of priests, whatever you want to call it, that we have this history and this tradition that is countercultural, that is testifying against idolatry. We live in a very idolatrous country. If you think about the language -- "American Idol." More people vote for "American Idol" than vote for the president. If you think of the bumper stickers. If you think of "Drill, baby, drill" and the term "supermodels" and just -- there's so much -- the language itself bespeaks a certain idolatry, a certain cult of the individual that's really out of control in our country, that -- and Judaism proposes a different communitarian 81:00sensibility. And just as when I watch Pat Robertson speak, I don't get what's Christian about him -- I don't understand the link between what I read in the New Testament and what Pat Robertson's putting out ideologically -- a lot of times I don't see the link between what I see within Jewish values and the religion as practiced. And so, I -- that's my work. With that point reiterated, no, I don't have any (Pearl laughs) particular questions that --

JP:What do you see as the future of the Jewish religion and culture and politics and -- particular Yiddish?

LB:Wow. I think -- I think that to the extent that Jewish identity continues to 82:00be a -- identity about transforming the world, that young people will embrace it, will reinterpret it, will find their blend that works for them. I think that to the extent that it's an identity of remembering injury and focusing on Holocaust memorialization, though that -- you know, I -- I'll say as an aside, I'm forever newly stunned by the reality of what happened to our people a generation ago. I'm stunned by it. And whenever I feel jaded about it, all I have to do it is contemplate it more intimately, and it happens all over again. But I think if an identity is built around remembrance and around another land, the land of Israel, and around a not, for many Jews, very satisfying 83:00spirituality embodied in the trappings of Judaism, that it won't click. I think that Orthodoxy will continue for a while to flourish, because it is a counterculture! It really is a counterculture. It's just that it's a counterculture that's inward-looking rather than universalist-looking. But it's a counterculture. And I think people are looking for nurture from the mainstream. I see that the Jewish community seems to be hugely endowed with resources and underendowed with people wanting those resources. It's dwindling. I mean, there's, like -- if you want to be a Jew, especially if you want to be a young Jew, there's funding; there's books; there's a glory of resources. But more and more, there seem to be dwindling numbers. And I have nothing more 84:00cogent to say about that than anybody else, about what to do about that. Except I really -- creativity is the key. I think that breaking out, unpacking Judaism, and not worrying about being faithful to what was, but unpacking it in a creative way, has -- whether it's music, visual art, whatever -- can be very compelling. Look at the klezmer revival. I mean, people have flocked to it because it's uncomplicated. You don't have to have ambivalence. It's got rhythm. And you know it's Jewish, and it's got roots. And it's great music. I think that artists really need to be embraced and cultivated by the community as important 85:00for continuity.

JP:And my last question was gonna be what advice you have for future generations. I think you just answered that, but in case you didn't, if you have more to say --

LB:Advice.

JP:-- about that.

LB:(pause) I'll say that -- there are periodic periods of time -- (laughs) there are periods of time that are liberatory, when people rediscover their connectedness to one another and cultivate that rather than cultivate the competitive quality, to which we're all subjected. It's part of life too. And I just -- in Philadelphia, I just saw "Cyrano de Bergerac," and I saw Van Gogh's 86:00art exhibit. And they're both from 1880s, 1890s, which was a period of -- it was a liberatory period. The 1930s was this politically liberatory period. The 1960s and '70s. It'll come again. And that -- those periods will always fade away, because the conservative nature of life will also -- but they're needed to refresh us and keep us going. And so, if I'm really advising someone, it's, Don't be afraid, and if you really feel an urge to take a chance in life, to follow your heart, do that. Do that when you're young, at least. You can always go back to school and do what you've got to do to make a living. (laughs)

JP:Great advice. Thank you so much for participating in this.

LB:(laughs) It was a lot of fun.

JP:Me too. Thank you.

LB:Good.

[END OF INTERVIEW]