"We kind of went for the high holidays and for the other holidays as well, for Sukkoth and Simchat Torah and Hanukkah and then my parents very often went on Friday nights and I did go through a period when I was maybe 13, 14, 15 years where I actually went every Saturday morning by myself...And then I went less often until -- maybe mostly just for high holidays until I got married at which time nobody from Habonim would marry us because I was marrying a non-Jew and for many, many years that w
Tag: Park Slope
Paul and Yurika Golin
Oral History
"Right before my bar mitzvah, when I was hating the studying, I was 12, and I already knew that I was, at the least, agnostic -- I kind of yelled at her, “I don’t want to do this. I don’t believe in God.” And she said, “Well, I don’t either, and you’re going to do it.” And it was really interesting to me because at that point and for the rest of her career she had already dedicated herself to working as a Jewish communal professional in the Jewish Community Centers movement.
Janise Mitchell
Oral History
"Around the late 60s and 70s all of the sudden you see a lot of “for sale” signs. And this was the period of “white flight.” Families that I knew all of the sudden, oh, you guys are moving? It really shattered a sense of security. I thought that we were all friends, but perhaps that was just from my lens. Maybe that’s what I was hoping but the reality — there was some underlying intention that I did not allow myself to become aware of."
Jonathan Blazon
Oral History
"I’m revealing to myself that it still hurts that Chinese people think of me as being less Chinese -- of not being Chinese, actually. I shouldn’t say 'less.' They just don’t even consider me as being Chinese. And I hate it. I really do."
Bette Yee
Oral History
"...It was 1956, I was in the first grade, and I still hadn’t spoken any English. We really didn’t have a TV until we were -- until I was like seven or eight years old, and we didn’t even know what other kids had. We just knew that we were different, but we also felt that we were special."
Alexander David
Oral History
"I was always the other…To the white kids I was Asian. To the Asian kids I was white. My girlfriend at the time was Asian and she considered me her white boyfriend."
Asha Sundararaman
Oral History
"I dated a white guy and I felt very not-white. And I dated an Indian guy. I felt very not-Indian. So I’m kind of like, eh, it’s in between. Everything is just in between."
Teresa Ish
Oral History
"Most people would not even guess that I was half Chinese. It’s really nice for traveling. If I keep my mouth shut, I can kind of fake it almost anywhere. But, you know, obviously once I speak everyone knows I’m American."