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I will even say ""blessing""—of my Yeshiva education: To question everything and everyone. It was merely an unintended consequence of the Yeshiva method

the school decided to administer IQ tests to all the students. The school called my mother and said that I had gotten one of the highest scores. At first the rabbi thought I had cheated

they hated me even more. I loved conflict

that wasn't good enough. I recall vividly our efforts to find--or contrive--common ground. For some

school-named “Torahs Emes” (the Truthful Bible)

there were two competing Yeshivas: One taught Yiddish

“He’s never even heard of Florida.” She was told to come to the hospital immediately. She saw me sitting in front of my tray of food refusing to eat and screaming

my father was holding my hand on a busy street

while the other half seems to be creating ways around them. Much like the Internal Revenue Code. No wonder so many Jews become lawyers and accountants. It’s not in our DNA; it’s in our religious training.

she would intone the M word. If she saw you putting a handkerchief in your pocket on Shabas

the offending (or offended) item had to be buried in the earth for exactly seven days. That restored its kosher quality by “kashering” it. After eating meat

there was a required “brucha”—a formulistic blessing appropriate to the activity. “Baruch ata Adonoy”—“blessed be you our God”—followed by a reference to His creation: “who brings forth bread from the earth” or “wine from the grapes” or “fr...

I have no idea what my parents believed about the nature of God

who we called Itchie. It had nothing to do with any skin condition. One day my Uncle Itchie took me to a Brooklyn Dodger baseball game that got rained out half way through. We ran to the train station only to find no one tending the token b...

whose parents were better educated and more cultured than mine. I must have picked up some appreciation of music and art from them. When I went to sleep away camp

and we loved to ask because it was free and it showed them that we had ""culture"" (pronounced ""culchah"").

especially opera and choral music. As an adolescent I had sung alto in the local synagogue choir and had a fairly good voice. I was ""fairly"" good--but not very good-- at lots of things in addition to singing: athletics

all we had was a small plastic radio that lived in the kitchen

The Red Badge of Courage; Moby Dick; and a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.

I was amazed at how faithful the comic was to the tone