“Is He Jewish?”
AS MY GRANDMOTHER’S
ALZHEIMER’S progressed, she became fixated on two questions. When my sisters and I visited her at the memory-care facility, she always asked if we had boyfriends. If the answer was yes, she had a follow up: “Is he Jewish?”
Up until just a few months before her death, my grandmother attended Friday night services at our Reform synagogue almost every week with the help of an aide. By the time I was old enough to wonder what kept her coming back belief? The music? The social scene? it was too late to ask. But long after she’d lost the ability to remember much about our lives where we lived, who was doing what at work or in school she continued to ask about our romantic partners. My family joked, darkly, about the extent to which the communal imperative of Jewish reproduction had become ingrained in her psyche, a stalwart train of thought that hung on even as other memories fell victim to disease. Our answers to “Is he Jewish?” w
Read a response to this letter from Brandeis University Press here.
We are a group of scholars whose research is connected to American Jewish history and experience. All of us have read the preface that Professor Marc Dollinger submitted to Brandeis University Press this fall. We hold a variety of perspectives about its claims and approaches, but we are in agreement that it addresses compelling and timely issues.
Having reviewed available documentation, it seems to us that Dollinger was invited and then denied the opportunity to present a new preface to the forthcoming printing of his book. We recognize that editors have every right to ask for changes from their authors and to engage in the process of peer review. By the same token, we believe authors should be given fair opportunity to respond to and make changes suggested by editors or reviewers.