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The Half-Jewish Book: A Celebration
It's happening The population of half-Jews in America is well on its way to surpassing the population of full Jews. And with this population shift has come a revolutionary transformation of what it means to be half-Jewish. Sure, some people say that you are either Jewish or not, that there's nothing in between--but the authors emphatically disagree. They say half-Jews are a unique subculture of people who draw from both sides of their heritage and synthesize their cultural halves into a remarkable new identity.
The Half-Jewish Book celebrates this unique identity that until now has been ignored, maligned, and misunderstood. There's half-Jewish humor. Half-Jewish/half-Catholic Bill "I come from a mixed religious background--when I went to confession, I brought a lawyer with me." And there's half-Jewish beauty--Gwyneth Paltrow, Joan Collins, and Jane Seymour, just for starters. There are half-Jewish writers (Proust, Salinger), and half-Jewish characters in fiction by authors ranging from Philip Roth to Salman Rushdie. There's even that half-Jewish cartoon phenomenon Tommy Pickles, in Rugrats. There are half-Jewish politicians--Fiorello La Guar-dia, Barry Goldwater, Dianne Feinstein. And there are the extraordinary number of people, like General Wesley Clark, who discovered as adults that they were half-Jewish and then embraced their newfound double heritage.
This book includes an eye-opening essay on half-Jewish identity and looks into the often misunderstood history of half-Jews in the Holocaust. There are original interviews with half-Jews, as well as holiday cards and menus, poetry and song lyrics, and paintings and photographs. Intelligent, exuberant, entertaining, and thought-provoking, The Half-Jewish Book is a fascinating celebration of a cultural mix that is far greater than the sum of its parts.
The premise of The Half-Jewish Book is simple if somewhat Being half-Jewish is a quality unto itself, sui generis. Half-Jewishness is a cultural, intellectual, and aesthetic mix that is, in a variety of ways, greater than the sum of its parts.
To take this position--and to revel in the celebration that follows from it--we stand in clear opposition to those who "You are either Jewish or you are not; there's nothing in between." And we compound this blasphemy by suggesting that there is something unique, remarkable, and downright dazzling about the half-Jewish mind and the half-Jewish face, about the art and wit created by half-Jewish sensibilities, and in the ethical, literary, and political ideas produced from the half-Jewish perspective.
Enough already about the "half-Jewish problem" as the tragic product of intermarriage. It is time to explore the unique and fascinating world of the half-Jew.
--from the Introduction
The Half-Jewish Book celebrates this unique identity that until now has been ignored, maligned, and misunderstood. There's half-Jewish humor. Half-Jewish/half-Catholic Bill "I come from a mixed religious background--when I went to confession, I brought a lawyer with me." And there's half-Jewish beauty--Gwyneth Paltrow, Joan Collins, and Jane Seymour, just for starters. There are half-Jewish writers (Proust, Salinger), and half-Jewish characters in fiction by authors ranging from Philip Roth to Salman Rushdie. There's even that half-Jewish cartoon phenomenon Tommy Pickles, in Rugrats. There are half-Jewish politicians--Fiorello La Guar-dia, Barry Goldwater, Dianne Feinstein. And there are the extraordinary number of people, like General Wesley Clark, who discovered as adults that they were half-Jewish and then embraced their newfound double heritage.
This book includes an eye-opening essay on half-Jewish identity and looks into the often misunderstood history of half-Jews in the Holocaust. There are original interviews with half-Jews, as well as holiday cards and menus, poetry and song lyrics, and paintings and photographs. Intelligent, exuberant, entertaining, and thought-provoking, The Half-Jewish Book is a fascinating celebration of a cultural mix that is far greater than the sum of its parts.
The premise of The Half-Jewish Book is simple if somewhat Being half-Jewish is a quality unto itself, sui generis. Half-Jewishness is a cultural, intellectual, and aesthetic mix that is, in a variety of ways, greater than the sum of its parts.
To take this position--and to revel in the celebration that follows from it--we stand in clear opposition to those who "You are either Jewish or you are not; there's nothing in between." And we compound this blasphemy by suggesting that there is something unique, remarkable, and downright dazzling about the half-Jewish mind and the half-Jewish face, about the art and wit created by half-Jewish sensibilities, and in the ethical, literary, and political ideas produced from the half-Jewish perspective.
Enough already about the "half-Jewish problem" as the tragic product of intermarriage. It is time to explore the unique and fascinating world of the half-Jew.
--from the Introduction
- GenresReligion
336 pages, Hardcover
First published September 19, 2000
2 people are currently reading
42 people want to read
About the author
Daniel Klein
87 books238 followersDaniel Klein is the co-author of the international bestseller Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar. He is a Harvard graduate in philosophy and an acclaimed writer of both fiction and nonfiction. When not enjoying the slow life on Greek islands, he lives in Massachusetts with his wife. He is seventy-five years old.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
May 26, 2016
I loved this book! I've recommended this to lots of my half-Jewish friends and relatives. It's a slightly fluffy book of lists about a growing minority (to which I belong), but with some interesting insights into the issues of growing up as simultaneously both an insider and an outsider.
March 31, 2021
A book of minutiae
Reviewed in the United States on October 22, 2020
In several senses, this book is 100% Jewish/Talmudic.
1. A subtle topic that makes a connection between things that we have never thought about. (Who could you imagine that would read the entire corpus of literature written by people that were 50% Jewish that had conflicting emotions because of it.)
2. A relatively trivial topic expanded out to be several hundred pages (305 pages in this case)-- although I have picked up books about the halacha of dentistry that were around 500 pages.
3. Ultimately, there is no conclusion. (And that's probably the single universal agreement that we can have about The Talmud.)
*******
A book like this is senseless in a place like the United States (the country with the largest Jewish population), where "Jewish" is no longer a racial identity but a religious one.
What sane person has ever been heard to speak of a person who is half Protestant? Or half-Catholic?
And yet, it does make sense to speak of a mulatto/blasian/Hapa.
If so, are the authors tacitly acknowledging a racial component to Jewishness? (That's extremely non-PC these days!)
Of course, since there are no references to anything that the authors talk about... It's difficult to know what they are asserting, nor how seriously they believe it since they didn't take the trouble to look it up. (p.12--"just about every American half Jew we encountered celebrates both Hanukkah and Christmas – – which is to say, they light the menorah for eight nights and they have a Christmas tree...")
*******
It's not exactly the first time in history that a large number of Jewish people have gone off and assimilated into a larger population.
Nor that they have mixed into another population of people to create a new type of Jew.
Several points:
1. The birth rates for Orthodox Jews have been very high (5~6 kids per family) as long as anybody has been keeping records. Yet not only do they stay a (roughly constant) percentage of the Jewish population, but the Jewish population itself has been decreasing as a total percentage of the United States.
Where are all of those missing people?
2. The Assyrian conquest happened 27 centuries ago, and those 10 tribes from the Kingdom of Israel (as distinguished from the kingdom of Judah) were forcibly resettled and assimilated into the surrounding populations--pervasive myths of being "lost" notwithstanding.
3. According to Roberto Bachi, the total Jewish population around the time of the Assyrian conquest (~800 BCE) was somewhere between 1 and 1.3 million people. (I find world population estimates of 115 million people at this time.)
But then about 700 years ago, there was some small number of Jewish people in one spot (about 350 somewhere in Central Europe) that experienced a genetic bottleneck and created Ashkenazi Jews such as they are today. (They are over 80% of World Jewry.)
NONE of the current population shift is uncharted territory. (The authors implicitly recognize this around page 50.)
*******
It's not surprising that there is more and more mixed marriage since the stigma associated with being Jewish (in the United States) has been dead for at least half a century.
And so, with tens of millions of people and millions of marriages producing offspring... is it really that hard to believe that some of those marriages would produce interesting people?
There are quite a few marriages between black people and white people, and most of the offspring are non-remarkable. But a few of them are interesting as you would statistically expect with a sample set of millions of people.
*******
A book like this could make more sense in Israel, and they do devote one chapter to the products of mixed marriages there.
With both the facts that:
1. This discursive book is 20 years old this year, and
2. It's not saying very much (although we do get a long list of celebrities that we did not know of that had Jewish ancestry).
My final verdict would be to give it a miss. It's not even worth it as donated, because you can't recover the time that you could have spent on a more useful book.
Verdict: Not recommended. Too outdated at this point and too trivial. Also, for somebody (like the present reviewer) who has halachic Jewish status, but no Jewish blood..... this book is very low value added.
Reviewed in the United States on October 22, 2020
In several senses, this book is 100% Jewish/Talmudic.
1. A subtle topic that makes a connection between things that we have never thought about. (Who could you imagine that would read the entire corpus of literature written by people that were 50% Jewish that had conflicting emotions because of it.)
2. A relatively trivial topic expanded out to be several hundred pages (305 pages in this case)-- although I have picked up books about the halacha of dentistry that were around 500 pages.
3. Ultimately, there is no conclusion. (And that's probably the single universal agreement that we can have about The Talmud.)
*******
A book like this is senseless in a place like the United States (the country with the largest Jewish population), where "Jewish" is no longer a racial identity but a religious one.
What sane person has ever been heard to speak of a person who is half Protestant? Or half-Catholic?
And yet, it does make sense to speak of a mulatto/blasian/Hapa.
If so, are the authors tacitly acknowledging a racial component to Jewishness? (That's extremely non-PC these days!)
Of course, since there are no references to anything that the authors talk about... It's difficult to know what they are asserting, nor how seriously they believe it since they didn't take the trouble to look it up. (p.12--"just about every American half Jew we encountered celebrates both Hanukkah and Christmas – – which is to say, they light the menorah for eight nights and they have a Christmas tree...")
*******
It's not exactly the first time in history that a large number of Jewish people have gone off and assimilated into a larger population.
Nor that they have mixed into another population of people to create a new type of Jew.
Several points:
1. The birth rates for Orthodox Jews have been very high (5~6 kids per family) as long as anybody has been keeping records. Yet not only do they stay a (roughly constant) percentage of the Jewish population, but the Jewish population itself has been decreasing as a total percentage of the United States.
Where are all of those missing people?
2. The Assyrian conquest happened 27 centuries ago, and those 10 tribes from the Kingdom of Israel (as distinguished from the kingdom of Judah) were forcibly resettled and assimilated into the surrounding populations--pervasive myths of being "lost" notwithstanding.
3. According to Roberto Bachi, the total Jewish population around the time of the Assyrian conquest (~800 BCE) was somewhere between 1 and 1.3 million people. (I find world population estimates of 115 million people at this time.)
But then about 700 years ago, there was some small number of Jewish people in one spot (about 350 somewhere in Central Europe) that experienced a genetic bottleneck and created Ashkenazi Jews such as they are today. (They are over 80% of World Jewry.)
NONE of the current population shift is uncharted territory. (The authors implicitly recognize this around page 50.)
*******
It's not surprising that there is more and more mixed marriage since the stigma associated with being Jewish (in the United States) has been dead for at least half a century.
And so, with tens of millions of people and millions of marriages producing offspring... is it really that hard to believe that some of those marriages would produce interesting people?
There are quite a few marriages between black people and white people, and most of the offspring are non-remarkable. But a few of them are interesting as you would statistically expect with a sample set of millions of people.
*******
A book like this could make more sense in Israel, and they do devote one chapter to the products of mixed marriages there.
With both the facts that:
1. This discursive book is 20 years old this year, and
2. It's not saying very much (although we do get a long list of celebrities that we did not know of that had Jewish ancestry).
My final verdict would be to give it a miss. It's not even worth it as donated, because you can't recover the time that you could have spent on a more useful book.
Verdict: Not recommended. Too outdated at this point and too trivial. Also, for somebody (like the present reviewer) who has halachic Jewish status, but no Jewish blood..... this book is very low value added.
December 22, 2020
It started out stronger than it finished. Quick read
June 29, 2021
I love the concept but the execution reads like an elementary school paper. Didn't finish it, really doubt I'll try.
January 10, 2011
This was a terrible book. Wow. Just SO BAD. Thesis: Being half-Jewish is awesome and sexy. Proof: Here are photos are sexy half-Jewish people and bad copy.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews