My Mishegoss

Team Ned Singer Sporting Goods, Bernard Horwich Jewish Community Center Little League, 1969 (from the collection of the author).

I don’t look Jewish. And we all know that everyone knows what I mean! I was lucky enough to have been adopted by a lovely and adoring Jewish couple and converted under rabbinic supervision within the first ten days of my life. I do not set off anyone’s Jewdar on sight. I do not have the look of one who was born to a woman named Horwitz from Chicago but rather one born to a woman named Reynolds from Campobello, South Carolina, and I can pass so easily that I can pass whether I want to or not. Many a gentile has brought to me their unsolicited opinion about The Jews for as long as I could sit at a bar, legally or otherwise, and I quit drinking 30 years ago. So, thus and therefore, I have gained some legitimate insight into how Jews still do not fit easily into American culture.

Of course, beyond stereotypes, Jews don’t necessarily have one particular “look” and my identity has never significantly been called into question at Hebrew school or in a synagogue minyan. I am quite comfortable in my Jewish identity, secular as it may be. And while I can still hold my own in a traditional synagogue service, I personally get more out of the culture, history and ethical traditions the way that the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism Rabbi Mordechai Kaplan explained as an evolving religious civilization. There is an old saying that goes, “Schwartz goes to shul to talk to God. I go to shul to talk to Schwartz.” That is my mishegoss.