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Half/Life: Jew-ish Tales from Interfaith Homes
Written by authors born into the so-called “dilemma of intermarriage,” the stories in Half/Life explore the experience of being raised in a half-Jewish home. Though each essay is distinct, and the experiences are vastly different, each describes growing up without a streamlined identity, unsure of community or religious direction. From Jenny Traig, whose experiences led her to extreme devotion in the form of religious-obsessive compulsion (scrupulosity) to Thisbe Nissen, who finally felt Jewish after discovering a rosary in her boyfriend’s sock drawer, these authors examine the complicated relationships they felt with the Jewish community and the world at large. By turns tragic and funny, religious and heartbreaking, angry and surprisingly familiar, Half/Life represents the altogether diverse memories and reflections of a handful of men and women who have spent a lifetime grappling with how to define themselves, or not. Resulting from that struggle is a complex exploration, and some truly brilliant prose.
200 pages, Paperback
Published March 23, 2006
3 people are currently reading
133 people want to read
About the author
Laurel Snyder
39 books807 followersLaurel Snyder is the author of six children's novels, "Orphan Island," "Seven Stories Up," "Bigger than a Bread Box," "Penny Dreadful," "Up and Down the Scratchy Mountains OR The Search for a Suitable Princess" and "Any Which Wall" (Random House) as well as many picture books, including "Charlie & Mouse," "The Forever Garden," "Swan, the life and dance of Anna Pavlova," and "Baxter, the Pig Who Wanted to Be Kosher."
A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and a former Michener Fellow, she also writes books for grownups, and is the author of a book of poems, "The Myth of the Simple Machines" (No Tell Books) and a chapbook, "Daphne & Jim: a choose-your-own-adventure biography in verse (Burnside Review Press) and the editor of an anthology, "Half/Life: Jew-ish Tales from Interfaith Homes" (Soft Skull Press).
Though Baltimore will always be her home, she now lives happily in Atlanta.
A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and a former Michener Fellow, she also writes books for grownups, and is the author of a book of poems, "The Myth of the Simple Machines" (No Tell Books) and a chapbook, "Daphne & Jim: a choose-your-own-adventure biography in verse (Burnside Review Press) and the editor of an anthology, "Half/Life: Jew-ish Tales from Interfaith Homes" (Soft Skull Press).
Though Baltimore will always be her home, she now lives happily in Atlanta.
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
October 24, 2012
"We're bound to stories that don't so much resolve as unravel," writes a contributor to this anthology of essays on growing up Jew-ish in an interfaith home.
The authors of Half/Life strain to locate and describe their particular mixtures of Jewishness and nonJewishness by relating childhood memories, college memories, adult memories; how their parents met, married, divorced; how they themselves met, married, divorced. Trips to Israel, trips back home. What they were named, what they weren't named. What they ate, what they didn't eat, who their friends were, who their friends weren't. Where they spent their Sundays, their Saturdays, their Christmases and Passovers. What they knew or didn't know or thought they knew: "I grew up under the impression, for much of my youth, that Canada was a Jewish country." "I was eighteen before I realized that whaddycomb isn't Yiddish, but shorthand for 'Whaddya call 'em.'" "'If your mother's not Jewish, then you are not a Jew ... hadn't anybody ever told you that?'"
At times, the essays almost break down under the weight of hastily sketched family trees with too many uncles and aunts to keep track of in just four to ten short pages. And after a while, the stories blend together--in a week I will have trouble distinguishing the writer with the Jewish father and Irish Catholic mother in Boston from the writer with the Jewish father and Irish Catholic mother in Ohio (for a hypothetical example).
But somehow it works, and the end result is beautiful and touching. Together, the essays in Half/Life compose one of the most eloquent expressions of the complexity of living out a mixed identity that I've come across.
Recommended for anyone who is a little bit of one thing, a little bit of another thing, or a little bit of each.
The authors of Half/Life strain to locate and describe their particular mixtures of Jewishness and nonJewishness by relating childhood memories, college memories, adult memories; how their parents met, married, divorced; how they themselves met, married, divorced. Trips to Israel, trips back home. What they were named, what they weren't named. What they ate, what they didn't eat, who their friends were, who their friends weren't. Where they spent their Sundays, their Saturdays, their Christmases and Passovers. What they knew or didn't know or thought they knew: "I grew up under the impression, for much of my youth, that Canada was a Jewish country." "I was eighteen before I realized that whaddycomb isn't Yiddish, but shorthand for 'Whaddya call 'em.'" "'If your mother's not Jewish, then you are not a Jew ... hadn't anybody ever told you that?'"
At times, the essays almost break down under the weight of hastily sketched family trees with too many uncles and aunts to keep track of in just four to ten short pages. And after a while, the stories blend together--in a week I will have trouble distinguishing the writer with the Jewish father and Irish Catholic mother in Boston from the writer with the Jewish father and Irish Catholic mother in Ohio (for a hypothetical example).
But somehow it works, and the end result is beautiful and touching. Together, the essays in Half/Life compose one of the most eloquent expressions of the complexity of living out a mixed identity that I've come across.
Recommended for anyone who is a little bit of one thing, a little bit of another thing, or a little bit of each.
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June 25, 2007Half/Life creates and brands a community that has, until now, not even recognized itself as such. This book takes a disconnected group of people, a Diaspora of artists, and turns the group into a community with a common bond.
Half/Life is an anthology of personal stories, written by authors who have all shared the experience of being raised in a half-Jewish home. Though each essay is distinct, and the experiences are vastly different, the half-Jewish narrative in each describes the experience of growing up without a streamlined identity, unsure of community or religious direction.
From Jenny Traig, whose experiences led her to extreme devotion in the form of religious obsessive compulsion (Scrupulosity) to Thisbe Nissen, who only finally felt Jewish when she first discovered a rosary in her boyfriend's sock drawer, these authors explore the complicated relationships they felt with the Jewish community and the world at large. In the end, these experiences made each contributor, most of all, a writer.
For twenty years, the Jewish community has discussed the problem of "Jewish Continuity," by which it is meant, "Jews marrying Jews." Two years ago, for the first time, more Jews intermarried than inmarried, and the Jewish community realized it could not stem the tide. Now the Jewish community is turning over on itself, scrambling for ways to include and address the needs of an ever-growing half-Jewish population, after twenty years of alienating language and exclusion. Conferences are being called. Religious law is being re-examined. Half/Life seeks to be the book that will show the Jewish world, and the world at large, what it feels like on the inside of a Half/Life.
How will the Jewish community turn its ship around, and welcome these half-Jews, when for generations half-Jews have been silently tolerated or excluded outright?
Half/Life is an anthology of personal stories, written by authors who have all shared the experience of being raised in a half-Jewish home. Though each essay is distinct, and the experiences are vastly different, the half-Jewish narrative in each describes the experience of growing up without a streamlined identity, unsure of community or religious direction.
From Jenny Traig, whose experiences led her to extreme devotion in the form of religious obsessive compulsion (Scrupulosity) to Thisbe Nissen, who only finally felt Jewish when she first discovered a rosary in her boyfriend's sock drawer, these authors explore the complicated relationships they felt with the Jewish community and the world at large. In the end, these experiences made each contributor, most of all, a writer.
For twenty years, the Jewish community has discussed the problem of "Jewish Continuity," by which it is meant, "Jews marrying Jews." Two years ago, for the first time, more Jews intermarried than inmarried, and the Jewish community realized it could not stem the tide. Now the Jewish community is turning over on itself, scrambling for ways to include and address the needs of an ever-growing half-Jewish population, after twenty years of alienating language and exclusion. Conferences are being called. Religious law is being re-examined. Half/Life seeks to be the book that will show the Jewish world, and the world at large, what it feels like on the inside of a Half/Life.
How will the Jewish community turn its ship around, and welcome these half-Jews, when for generations half-Jews have been silently tolerated or excluded outright?
March 12, 2009
This book purported itself to be a collection of essays by thoughtful people addressing their complicated, fractured identities on the page. And yay, it succeeded in doing that; but I didn't come away with anything.
The contributors were overwhelmingly bent on the deconstruction of their respective identities, and seemed to ignore the gleaming potential in the act of identity-salvage or construction or re-appropriation. Most seemed to revel in their out-religion status. To top it off, in a book ostensibly about two religions, very few contributors expressed an interest in actually being Jewish (or Christian), or knew how to practice as a Jew (or a Christian). Instead, to Snyder's contributors, Judaism + Christianity seemed to be mostly about culture, or rather a "clash of cultures" between the Christian Other and the Jewish other Other (along with often-implied-to-be-related broken-family issues). Ugh...
The contributors were overwhelmingly bent on the deconstruction of their respective identities, and seemed to ignore the gleaming potential in the act of identity-salvage or construction or re-appropriation. Most seemed to revel in their out-religion status. To top it off, in a book ostensibly about two religions, very few contributors expressed an interest in actually being Jewish (or Christian), or knew how to practice as a Jew (or a Christian). Instead, to Snyder's contributors, Judaism + Christianity seemed to be mostly about culture, or rather a "clash of cultures" between the Christian Other and the Jewish other Other (along with often-implied-to-be-related broken-family issues). Ugh...
November 12, 2009
A collection of personal narratives about growing up in interfaith homes. Deeply moving, lushly written....I learned my experiences are not uncommon. Many others know what it means to navigate between two cultures, to be both insider & outsider, to grapple with identity issues while combating two different packages of prejudices. It is a must-read for any half-Jewish person, and highly recommended for anyone who works in interfaith settings.
April 8, 2008
A fine collection of personal essays with interesting insights into interfaith marriages of a certain type. An easy and engaging read with no tragic endings. Minor editing glitches and some approaches that fall flat, but overall it's a nice book that offers perspective into religion as culture and those who fall outside of it.
May 4, 2008
Edited by my friend Laurel Snyder, with an essay I wrote about my friend Ann -- who isn't half-Jewish at all, with reference to Bob Hunt, a childhood bully I've always wanted to name in print. Here's to you, Bob!
January 26, 2015
Essays by children of interfaith marriages.
April 7, 2010
I have an essay in here called "Another Quaquaversalist Puppycat."
December 23, 2017
A few of these were good, but mostly they weren't. As a collection, they were very samey, and while I don't doubt each essay was personal for the writer, I came away with almost nothing as a reader.
January 27, 2009
really motivates me to put together and edit a similar book.
this is a lovely series of essays, some of them really quite beautiful in the writing, that nonetheless goes nowhere to further my understanding of the experience of half-jewish or multi-ethnically-jewish people. (as one of these people i am annoyed to see myself so poorly represented.)
the many essayists seem more interested, indeed, in lovely writing than in any insights. there are funny vignettes and woeful tales of easter-ham-eating and family dysfunction, lots of frustration at poor religious educations and narrow-minded relatives, and a lot of highfalutin literary navel-gazing about "what am i?" cycles of sure/unsureness.
i suppose i was looking for something different. a more pointed set of analyses about particular factors and ideas in peoples' backgrounds, a more engaging, loving sense of jewishness (and other-half-ness!), less of a personal/individual focus. these essays are charming and many of the writers are insightful and clever, but the overall effect is of a writer's workshop and not something audience- or community-oriented.
this is a lovely series of essays, some of them really quite beautiful in the writing, that nonetheless goes nowhere to further my understanding of the experience of half-jewish or multi-ethnically-jewish people. (as one of these people i am annoyed to see myself so poorly represented.)
the many essayists seem more interested, indeed, in lovely writing than in any insights. there are funny vignettes and woeful tales of easter-ham-eating and family dysfunction, lots of frustration at poor religious educations and narrow-minded relatives, and a lot of highfalutin literary navel-gazing about "what am i?" cycles of sure/unsureness.
i suppose i was looking for something different. a more pointed set of analyses about particular factors and ideas in peoples' backgrounds, a more engaging, loving sense of jewishness (and other-half-ness!), less of a personal/individual focus. these essays are charming and many of the writers are insightful and clever, but the overall effect is of a writer's workshop and not something audience- or community-oriented.
December 20, 2007
I actually submitted an essay for this anthology and worked very closely with Laurel Snyder (a very compassionate and hard working editor) on trying to make my piece fit. In the end, and after reading this collection of essays, I see why Snyder had to pass on my entry. This collection seeks to unravel the essence of what it means to grow up in a mixed religion household. What binds the essays together is the authors' connection to their Judiasm (which my piece lacked). Many of the essays are very well written, engaging and thought provoking. An interesting and fresh collection.
November 5, 2011
About the grown children of interfaith families, but it mostly seems to dwell on the unintended consequences of vain, narcissistic, neglectful 1970s parenting techniques. Some good stuff, some tedium.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews