March / April 2006:

Because of leah finkelstein
I'm Jewish. I'm Irish. And I just wrote a book about it.

Essay by Laurel Snyder | Photo by Sonya Naumann


What drives a writer to spend countless hours editing an anthology of other people’s words, proofreading and promoting something that isn’t her own work? Well, the driving force behind Half/Life: Jew-ish Tales from Interfaith Homes is a girl named Leah Finklestein.

See, Leah had a huge effect on me in Hebrew school, where I was the freak in the corner of the room, who looked funny (by which I mean Irish), and waited alone after class — because I had to wait for my mom to be done at church.

What exactly did Leah do to me? Not much, until one day she spun around to face me and spat out, “You aren’t really Jewish, anyway. And everybody knows it!” For no good reason.

So it’s understandable that I felt a little treyf, but when, in grad school, I met another girl with a half-Jewish complex, I had an idea. And after I met a few more I thought, “Maybe there’s a lot of us.” I took some time off from the book I was writing and I put together a proposal, to show Leah Finklestein that a girl with a rosy Irish complexion could be Jewish too.

Of course, somewhere along the way it stopped being about Leah, and started being about the hundreds of people who sent me emails asking to be included in the book. Somewhere along the way I began to think more deeply about what my wacky socialist dad was thinking when he married my pretty gentile mother, to wonder what might be learned from a book like Half/Life. I began to feel a sense of obligation to make something special, and as those thoughts flooded in, I stopped being angry at Leah.

Because mixed in with all manner of submissions from folks like me — born into intermarriages — there were submissions from people more like Leah, people who seemed to me to “fit right in.” Except that they don’t — because they’re gay, or lonely, or anorexic. Because they didn’t get to go to camp or college.

I realized, as I read essays from all over the country, that nobody feels like they fit in. Everybody has something to say about being marginalized, left out, uncool. Everyone feels just a little bit treyf.

So Leah Finklestein, if you’re out there, I hope you do read my book after all. Not because you hurt me when we were nine. Nope, I hope you read this book, and learn from it, and feel better about yourself. Because I sure do.

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