A Quote by Elayne Boosler
My family was totally non-religious. There was no question we were Jewish, but we were not observant.
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I grew up pretty secular. I went to public school, and all the Jews that I knew, none of them were religious. While probably half of my friends were Jewish, they were all secular Jews. We went to Hebrew school, we knew we were Jewish, but it wasn't a major part of our existence.
When Superman was originally created, by Siegel and Shuster, they were two Jewish immigrants that were desperately trying to assimilate into America. They were having a hard time because they were Jewish. They wanted to get in to mainstream publishing but they couldn't. That's why they, and a lot of Jewish guys, went into comic books.
The Tambors were conservative Jews, and we attended Temple Beth Shalom at 14th Avenue and Clement Street in San Francisco. We were the only Jewish family for miles. To me, being Jewish meant 'otherness.'
Our mother was a very religious and observant Jew, our father less so. She was kind of driving the religious education, so for us it was more a burden and an obligation when we were kids at that age.
No one in my family has been observant for generations, but we all identify with being Jewish.
My father was from a secular Jewish family and my mother from a nominally Christian (Episcopalian) one. They were not religious as adults. They did, however, believe in educating their children about the Bible. They viewed this as an essential part of any education.
Most of the Jewish refugees, stripped of their considerable possessions, came to Israel. They were welcomed by the Jewish state. They were given shelter and support, and they were integrated into Israeli society together with half a million survivors of the European Holocaust.
My dad left when I was a little boy and I grew up with my mother's family. There were foundations in the U.S. where Jewish people got together and sent money to Cuba, so we got some of that. We were a poor family, but I was always a happy kid.
Although both sides of my family were religious, I was never forced to practice the Jewish faith. I did not really rebel against it, but then, as today, I disliked organized religion. I have a strange inhibition about praying with others.
I have enormous pride in the survival of the Jewish people, the cultural heritage of the Jewish people, but I'm not observant, and I don't belong to a synagogue. I don't go to temple on high holy days, but I'm proud to be Jewish.
We were all such odd characters, even though we were a really functional family, in a way, as eccentric and crazy as we were. And it was such a wonderful feeling amongst us of being a family almost. We were 'The Addams Family!'
There were many times when I kept silent about being Jewish as I got older, when Jewish jokes were told.
First I went to a Jewish school, when I was very little. But when I was 12, they put me in a school with a lot of traditions, and they were educated people and they were talking about Greece and the Parthenon and I don't know what. All the kids, all the girls they had already seen that and knew that from their family, and I would say, "What are you talking about, what's that?" It's not my world. My grandparents were very well-educated people, but in the Jewish tradition. They knew everything about the Bible.
No true Christian can carry within his heart hatred for any of God's children . . . I am as aware as any other Christian that our Savior was Jewish, His mother was Jewish. The Apostles were Jewish. The first martyrs were Jewish...So no true Christian, in my judgment, can be an anti-Semite.
I took to religion at about age 12; it was very hard for me to be Sabbath observant as a kid in a home which was not Sabbath observant. I think my parents thought the whole Jewish thing was a phase.
One reason which I find particularly fascinating about Israel is this. There is no such thing as a Jewish civilization. There is a Jewish culture, a Jewish religion, but there is no such thing as a Jewish civilization. The Jews were a component basically of two civilizations. In the Western world, we talk about the Judeo-Christian tradition and you talk about the Judeo-Islamic tradition because there were large and important Jewish communities living in the lands of Islam.
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