From Great Neck to Swift Hall: Confessions of a Reluctant Historian of Religions

Abstract

Though I have lived a rather bookish life, all that I ever learned I learned for the love of some person, so I must tell the story of my intellectual odyssey in terms of the people who changed my life. I was born in 1940 in New York and raised in Great Neck by Jewish parents who had come to America (my father from Russia/Poland, in 1918, my mother from Vienna/Marienbad, in the 1920s) searching, like modern pilgrims, for freedom from religion. My mother was a devout Communist; it was not until I went to school that I learned that there was such a thing as paper white on both sides; I had done my early drawings on the backs of flyers for Henry Wallace (in high school, I was vice-president of the Great Neck chapter of the World Communist Youth organization). My father was a New Dealer and later a Stevenson man. Both of them regarded themselves as ethnically Jewish; they sent money to Israel and to the local temple, fought for the Rosenbergs and against anti-Semitism, and always managed to get some more pious relatives to invite us to a Passover seder. But neither of them would be caught dead in a synagogue.