I am Jewish. I claim the heritage of the Jewish people, these unique people who have made an indelible impact on this world, and continue to give their gift. Accomplished, celebrated and decorated; accused, reviled and persecuted. Everywhere and nowhere. My mother is Jewish. She was born in the Lower East Side of New York City, a Jewish neighborhood in a Jewish city, and was raised by a Jewish mother and grandparents. They spoke Yiddish in the home. Her father was from a well-heeled protestant family in Detroit, and his own personal demons and a wanderlust meant that he left the family when my mother was two, never to return. When my mother was a child she didn’t know that Jews were a minority, surrounded as she was by the largest concentration of Jews in the world, a product of the immigration of more than one million Eastern European Jews to New York City between 1880 and 1920, two of which were her grandparents. Her grandfather was an acclaimed Yiddish poet, critic and newsman, and ...