Last year, at a car rental company, a Muslim man from Iraq who was bringing us our car, noticed my younger son, who looks the most like me of all of our children, replete with olive skin. It was the end of January, and even so, both my son and I looked brown. The Iraqi […]

“I recently learned that my mother’s mother’s mother was Jewish,” she wrote in her email. Apparently Cynthia’s grandmother had converted to Catholicism before World War II as anti-Semitism was rising. (Her great-grandmother had perished in the Holocaust.) Cynthia understood that although she was raised Catholic, according to Jewish law, she was considered a Jew. Despite […]

Dear Jew in the City, My great-grandparents were Jews from Kiev who emigrated to Romania before second World War. Both my grandmother and mother were secular people. I always knew about my heritage because my mother was very attached to her grand- mother and often speaks about her. Apparently, she was somewhat observant. I grew up […]