I was born in Manhattan and grew up in Scarsdale. Scarsdale didn't work for me as a place at all.
Jewish Christmas' - that's what my gentile friends called Chanukah when I was growing up in Michigan in the thirties and forties. Anachronistic, yes, but they had a point. Observing the dietary laws of separating milk and meat dishes was far easier for the handful of Jewish families in our little town than getting through December without mixing the two holidays.
There are billions of men in the world, probably millions near my age. Maybe hundreds who are compatible with me. Maybe at least a dozen who would want to date me. There's got to be at least five on the continent whom I could probably marry. So why am I so hung up on this one guy?
For any child growing up, anything is possible. We were poor growing up and you had to work hard and make it happen for yourself.
The mediocre mind has no capacity for understanding. It is stuck somewhere near thirteen years in its mental age, or even below it. The person may be forty, fifty, seventy years old - that does not matter, that is the physical age. He has been growing old, but he has not been growing up. You should note the distinction. Growing old, every animal does. Growing up, only a few human beings manage.
We are all born with an open heart, but at some point as we are growing up, things happen in our lives where we start to shut down, like rejection, not fitting in, wanting approval, judgments, comparisons, and criticism of others.
When I was growing up, I didn't know who Jewish people were, what it was to be Jewish.
My grandpa was a cowboy. He roped cattle out in Texas and Arizona. Growing up, I'd see him maybe once a year and he'd always get me on a horse at some point. But each time I'd have to learn again.
I'm Jewish, and my family is Jewish. I was very interested in Woody Allen when I was growing up, but I don't think of myself as a Jewish writer. I'm more from suburbia, American suburbia. I'm more from the '70s than I am from Judaism.
Jewish history has been in my cultural DNA since I was a child growing up in post-war London. In the midst of that dark, gray, lamenting monochromatic world of the '50s, I had a sense that both Jewish and English history were full of color and light and animation.
In 19 years growing up in Israel I had no Jewish friends. Zero.
I can play a Jewish guy, another Jewish guy, and then another Jewish guy, and then maybe a Cuban guy. Or at least a Middle Eastern guy. But for me, they're all Jews.
Growing up in the San Fernando Valley, I grew up around a lot of Jews. I grew up culturally Jewish, ethnically Jewish, but without real belief and without a strong faith.
This will sound like I grew up on another planet, except for those people who are past 55, 60 maybe. When I was growing up, my mother and her generation basically felt that you should only work as a way of passing time until you got married and had at least two children. And the only careers that were open for women at the time was teacher or nurse - which are fantastic careers, I mean fantastic and I actually am a former math teacher.
I went to the University of Vermont because I had a kind of unrequited love for this high school girlfriend. She wasn't even at the University but at another school nearby. But I thought if went to a school near her, just maybe... I was really remedial about girls in so many ways.
Sometimes I'm under the impression some of the fights happen that they shouldn't happen because a guy's cheating. Also, I think when something like this happen they should have not only a suspension but also monetary wise enforce a penalty. Maybe take the purse of the fighter to the other fighter.