Yitz Ornstein sighed.

He sighed a deep, heaving sigh. Then, sighing, he sighed again. The year was 2005. Yitz thought of his mother, dead for the past fourteen years. Whenever he sighed as a child in the back seat of her Dodge Dart, she would ask: “Vot’s wronk, Itzikel? Shver tsu zein a Yid? (Is it hard to be a Jew?)” This bittersweet recollection made him feel like sighing, so he sighed some more.

Yes, sighed Yitz. It is hard to be a Jew. Not the same “hard” his mother had endured in Hungary, in Auschwitz, in Israel, in Brooklyn, and on the South Side of Chicago before settling in the Promised Land of Skokie, Illinois. Not the same kind of hard his mother’s grandparents had borne in the Pale of Settlement, with Cossacks raping, pillaging and murdering their way through Jewish shtetls. Not the kind of hard those progenitors’ progenitors had survived in Spain, when Inquisitors tortured them on the rack and forced them to either convert, go into hiding, or emigrate, or when Crusaders ravaged Jewish towns on their way to liberating the Holy Land from infidels.

Not, also, as hard as the hardships those ancestors’ ancestors had overcome in ancient Palestine, with Romans crucifying them for studying Torah. Nor their forefathers, who were persecuted by the Greeks and scattered from the Land of Israel to the four corners of the earth. Nor their antecedents, whom the Persian vizier Haman schemed to exterminate, and whom the Babylonians exiled from their homeland. Also not the same kind of hard their forebears outlasted at the hands of the Canaanites. And certainly not like the hardships of the Israelites, enslaved in Egypt for nearly 400 years before the Exodus.

No, put in that historical context, the troubles of a middle-aged, middle-class, Mid-western Jew hardly merited a sniff, much less the sigh of Jewish sorrow spanning the millennia.

Not a day went by that Yitz didn’t think of the succession of events that had landed him in Skokie, the heir to a level of Jewish freedom not experienced since the fall of the second Temple. But he could hardly be held responsible for the fact that he faced no threat of subjugation, extermination, intimidation, violation, forced migration, or asphyxiation. Even a balding, overweight accountant two months before retirement in Skokie, Illinois, a man who owned a house, a brand new Lexus, and a time-share in Boca, was entitled to his share of heartache. Why should he apologize for it? Could it really be proven that his suffering was any less than that of his great-great grandfather, who had hobbled home from shul one Sabbath to find his hovel ransacked, his wife raped and bleeding, and his children’s throats slit? OK, Yitz had to admit to himself, his suffering was less than that, an admission that led him to sigh guiltily.

But getting back to the main point: the fact was that he had his own troubles, and they were enough to make any reasonable person sigh in vexation. Yitz exerted his rights. He inhaled to capacity and held his breath for a moment before releasing his anguish into the world: “Oyyyyyyy.”

The voice of Yitz’s wife Rachel pierced his reverie: “Yitz! Yitz! Let’s go! Everyone is waiting!”

He opened his eyes and swiveled his head this way and that to clear the fog, finally settling on the shape to his right. “Who?” he asked.

“Your family!” Rachel urged. “Get on with the seder! The brisket is drying out! I have to go back into the kitchen!”

The Passover seder. He scanned the anxious faces around him one by one, barely registering them, and finally settled on the figure at the far end of the table: his youngest son, his mezinik, his Elliott. Elliott, who had graduated at the top of his class in Jewish day school. Elliott, the boy with the angel’s voice, whose flawless chanting of the Torah portion at his bar-mitzvah was capped by a sermon worthy of a graduate student in philosophy. Elliott, who had chaired the social justice league at Niles North High School, who had gotten a full ride at the University of Illinois and had edited the law review at Kent. Elliott, who renounced an offer from a top Chicago firm to work as an immigration attorney for a quarter of the salary.

Elliott, who had brought a non-Jewish woman – a certifiable shiksa – to the seder. It all started coming back to him.

Always the clever one, Elliott had telephoned his mother the previous week to ask if it was OK to invite a friend for Passover, a friend with the misleading, one might even say deceptive name of “Jesse Eck.” When Rachel asked him to tell her more about his friend Jesse, Elliott suddenly got an important call and had to hang up. But when the front door opened minutes before they were to sit down, Elliott, who had never before brought a girl home, strode in holding the hand of a woman. And not just any woman, but the least Jewish-looking woman in the world – five foot ten from sandaled toe to silky blonde hair gathered in a high pony, her smile radiant, her blue eyes sparkling, and her humpless nose gliding into the room as though it hadn’t a care in the world. Her trim figure was sheathed in a knee-length turtleneck sweater dress, a silver cross gleaming on the end of a chain on her chest. Only then had Yitz realized, too late, the awful truth.

“Hi! I’m Connie!” the woman announced.

Yitz was dumbstruck. Rachel stood like a statue at the door to the kitchen, a shank bone in her hand. Everyone else stopped bickering and stared. It was as though they were witnessing one of the wonders of the world, like the Great Wall of China or a five-legged mule.

At last Rachel spoke: “Connie? I thought your name was Jesse…”

The younger woman laughed gaily. “Oh…it is! Jessica Constance Eck! Pleased to meet you!”

Shiksas at the seder table, Yitz had mused. Sounds like the title of an off-Broadway show. He blinked rapidly several times and drilled into his ear with his index finger. Maybe this was just a hallucination. He had read about such things. They were often the harbingers of a stroke. When the fair-haired apparition not only failed to dematerialize but knelt in front of the children and engaged them in animated conversation, he experienced an actual hallucination: a tremor passed through the earth and into his body, rattling him to the core. A terrifying transition was underway, and he recognized it for what it was: the three thousand-year-old chain connecting Yitz to Moses was threatening to rupture with his own son, his Elliott.

Yitz had finally willed himself to speak: “Um…uh…say there, Elliott, how about you come into the kitchen to help me with the…uh…the…”

“Charoises!” Rachel chimed in from the kitchen doorway. “Have him come in here to help you finish the charoises!”

“Yes,” Yitz murmured. “That’s right. The charoises. It needs more…pestling…”

As soon as the kitchen door had swung shut behind them, Elliott turned on Yitz. “Don’t look so shocked, Dad.”

“Shocked? I look shocked, do I?” Yitz hissed. “Just because you brought a shiksa to the seder?”

“C’mon Dad, kol dichfin and all that, you know.” Leave it to Elliott to turn the dictum of Passover hospitality on its head and bludgeon his own father with it.

“That commandment addresses poor Jews who have nowhere to go for the holiday, boychik, and you know it. It does not refer to a girl washing down her communion wafer with Manischewitz at my seder table!”

Rachel put her hand on Yitz’ forearm, a gesture guaranteed to restrain him. He took a couple of deep breaths. “Elliott, honey,” Rachel said, “why didn’t you prepare us? Why did you spring her on us like this? And even more importantly, how could you spring us on her? You must have known how your father would react.”

“His father?!” Yitz erupted. “His father? What about his mother? You don’t react to this?”

“Shhh!” Rachel whispered. “Keep your voice down!”

“I didn’t want to deal with your judgment, Dad, just because I am spending some time with a woman who happens to not be Jewish. The doom, the tragedy, the breaking of the three thousand-year-old chain and all the rest of it.”

“Really?” Yitz exclaimed. “Oh, I get it. You didn’t want to feel criticized for dating a non-Jewish woman, so you set her down in the midst of our Passover seder, ground zero of the Jewish experience, so that you could be sure to avoid the criticism.”

“Yitz, please! Keep your voice down!”

“Listen, Dad, this is not a big deal. Don’t worry. I am just spending a little time with Jessie. We have no long term plans.”

“No long term plans! No big deal! I have seen this before, with the neighbors’ son, Aaron Fass. They just went on one date. One date. No big deal, with no long-term plans. From no big deal came a big fucking deal, including a wedding that his father didn’t attend!”

“Really? I thought she was going to convert.”

“She changed her mind a week after the engagement party, right before she informed Aaron that the kids could be raised Jewish so long as they were baptized and celebrated all the Christian holidays with her parents!”

“Yitz, your voice!”

“Dad, listen, I promise you this is nothing, OK? Let’s just get on with the seder. Don’t worry about it.”

Rachel had seized the opportunity to end the conversation. “Good advice, Elliott. Why don’t you go get everyone seated? Your father and I will be right out.”

Elliott leaned in and gave his mother a kiss. He turned toward Yitz, who enveloped Elliott in his arms and squeezed for a long time, as though he were trying to compress something within him. Elliott exited the kitchen, and Rachel and Yitz emerged into the dining room a couple of minutes later. Yitz had walked like a zombie to the head of the table, sat, closed his eyes, reflected upon his place in history, and heaved his great sigh.

 

* * *

 

“Yitz!” Rachel whispered again. “The brisket!”

He looked down upon his plate, noting his “Leader’s Copy” of the haggadah, the text of the seder ceremony. Yitz sighed and picked it up, examining it like a shell he had found on the beach. He knew it well, even recognized the splotch of chicken soup on the cover from 1995, but now somehow the book seemed completely novel to him. He began leafing past the introductory material, a swimmer weakening against the current. Seizing the first piece of liturgical flotsam that floated before his eyes, he began to read:

“Blessed are You, Lord, our God, King of the universe, who creates the fruit of the vine.” Having concluded this passage, Yitz paused for a breather. He closed his eyes.

A new sound emerged: “Uh…Dad?”

From his position at the head of the table, Yitz turned to his left to find his 32-year-old eldest, David. David had been a backup right-fielder for the Peoria, Illinois minor league team until his release in the middle of spring training a week earlier. Yitz sighed. He recalled the precise moment when the train of David’s future had run off the tracks.

“Baseball?! Baseball?!” Yitz had fumed when David came home from the University of Illinois with an offer from the Peoria team. “Baseball? Is that why I taught you to throw and catch, schlepped you to all your practices, and drove to Champaign-Urbana to watch all your games? So you could squander it all on baseball?”

David had seemed bewildered by this line of reasoning. “What are you talking about, Dad? Why did you do all those things if not to encourage me to play ball?”

“To be an accountant, you schmendrik! Who plays baseball for a living?”

“But your heroes, Dad! Williams, Mantle, Banks…”

“Yes. Williams, Mantle, Banks, not Weinberg, Mandelbaum, and Bernstein!”

“What about Sandy Koufax? He was a Jewish ballplayer.”

“Sandy Koufax? Sandy Koufax was an anomaly, the exception that proves the rule. For every Sandy Koufax there are fifty Albert Einsteins, Sigmund Freuds, Ira Gershwins and Mel Brookses.” 

Yitz’s protestations had gotten him nowhere. David signed with the team, and in all the years since, had never lived his dream of having an at-bat in the Majors. He married his high school sweetheart, Maddie Goldstein, as pretty but empty-headed a girl as Yitz had ever encountered, who sat to David’s left. Over twelve years of marriage they had produced four children, seated in a fidgeting row on the opposite side of the table, to Rachel’s right.

Oh well. Here goes. Yitz issued a little sigh and asked David to read:

“Blessed are You, Lord, our God, King of the universe, who has granted us life, sustained us, and enabled us to reach this occasion.” When David finished, Yitz handed Maddie, David’s wife, a piece of matzo to hold while she recited:

“This is the bread of affliction that our forefathers ate in the land of Egypt…”

Next came the children. Yitz assigned them the recitation of the Four Questions, which he knew they had been practicing for weeks, and which they delivered in a droning chant full of errors in Hebrew pronunciation. These children were the thread upon which the fate of the Jewish people in America now hung. Yitz, praying it would be enough, sighed.

An empty chair sat to Maddie’s left. The empty chair was designated for the prophet Elijah, who, according to tradition, would in good time herald the coming of the Messiah. But Yitz considered the chair’s rightful occupant-in-absentia to be his daughter, Beth. Nine years earlier, Beth had visited Israel during spring break of her Junior year. Yitz had dreaded that trip for the possibility of her meeting up with an Israeli who would break her heart or, worse, his.

What transpired exceeded his fears. Beth, arms and legs bare in a tank-top and short-shorts, was intercepted at the Western Wall by skirt-wearing, long-sleeved Orthodox yeshiva girls, who invited her to a Passover seder. In a sense, she had never returned from that excursion. Beth had forsaken her final year at Oberlin, changed her name to “Beruria Rivkie,” hired a matchmaker to pair her with another “born-again Jew,” and in the space of six years had four children. Were it not for motor vehicles, indoor toilets, alternating current and hyperlinked digital editions of the Talmud, one could be forgiven for believing that her ultra-Orthodox neighborhood in Jerusalem was an eighteenth-century Jewish shtetl. Beth (Yitz couldn’t bring himself to utter the name “Beruria Rivkie” or the even more loathsome “Velvel Yisroyel,” the appellation her husband had adopted) would not have attended Yitz’s seder even had she lived in the States. Her parents’ home was no longer Kosher enough for her.

Yitz looked at the empty chair and sighed. He was a Jewish Goldilocks, as far as his offspring were concerned. One child not living up to his potential. One taking things too far. The third was just right: a genius, an idealist, an activist. And the end of the line.

 

The presence of Jessica Constance Eck at his seder table was no less than the real-world manifestation of Yitz’s worst nightmare: that the extermination of the Jews, a task undertaken but never completed by the Egyptians or the Amalekites or the Hittites or the Philistines or the Babylonians or the Assyrians or the Persians or the Greeks or the Romans or the Muslims or the Crusaders or the Inquisitors or the Cossacks, or by Hitler, would be accomplished by Yitz himself. Yitz himself, by nourishing his children on the fruits of Jewish success in America: American tolerance, American egalitarianism, American meritocracy, American opportunity, American education, American freedom of religion. In other words, all those secular principles that Yitz considered more sacred than religious ones. The conclusion was obvious: the rights enjoyed for the first time in the history of the Diaspora by American Jews had produced an existential crisis as ominous as any prior persecution.

He had feared all along that his devotion to liberal causes, combined with his disdain for religiosity, would lead his children to conclude that Jewish continuity was not important to him. Yitz, steadfastly Jewish, ardently atheist, experienced no cognitive dissonance during his regular attendance at synagogue services, where he recited prayers to a God in Whom he didn’t believe. He loved poring over tractates of Talmud every Sunday in his study group, unpacking layers of meaning from the sages’ obsessive-compulsive analysis of minutiae that couldn’t have mattered even in ancient times. He never expected non-Jews to appreciate the logic and historical authenticity of this attitude, but all his hopes for the future rested on the expectation that his children would.

His thoughts turned to his annual recitation of the “I Have a Dream” speech at the family dinner table on Martin Luther King’s birthday, delivered complete with the cadence and inflections of its author. He had attended the March on Washington as a youngster, and not a year went by without Yitz reminding his children that The Speech’s timeless messages of justice, equality and human dignity were both literally and philosophically grounded in the Old Testament and Jewish values. 

He would rail against the stacking of the deck against the poor in America. He would charge his children with the duty of righting historical wrongs. He would recount the debates in which he participated as a Skokie Village Trustee for eight years, where he championed public education and construction of the new library building. Every time he brought one of these issues home with him to the dinner table, he could see Elliott soaking them up and making them his own. And when Elliott was fifteen years old and asked to recite The Speech himself for the first time, Yitz dared hope that his grand experiment in American Jewish liberalism had succeeded. 

But maybe Beruria Rivkie was right after all: maybe one could not be both progressive and Jewish in America and hope to survive beyond a couple of generations. At least she had made a choice that assured Yitz of Jewish grandchildren. With Elliott it would all be over. Jewishness is transmitted through the mother, and Yitz could see on Jessica Constance Eck’s porcelain features, as clearly as he had seen it on Aaron Fass’ girlfriend’s, that there would be no conversion in her future.

It was therefore with the fate of an entire people in the balance that Yitz proceeded with the seder. In afterthought, he recognized the error of waging his battle for Jewish survival using haggadic texts. He assigned the readings like they were laser-guided missiles, each armed with a customized textual warhead.

For Elliott: We were slaves under Pharaoh in Egypt…Had not God the Holy One delivered our forefathers from Egypt, then we and our children and our children’s children would still be slaves to Pharaoh.

For Jessica: The wicked son says: What is this ceremony to you?…By thus excluding himself from the community, he forsakes the central concept.

For Elliott: And I took your father Abraham from beyond the river, and I led him throughout the land of Canaan. I increased his seed and gave him Isaac…

For Jessica: Why was Laban the Aramean worse than Pharaoh? Because Pharaoh wished to destroy only the males but Laban wished to uproot everything…

When it came time for the passage about the ten plagues, Elliott refused to read in Hebrew and pulled out a Spanish translation, “in solidarity with the plight of Mexican immigrants.”

“What, we don’t have enough of our own troubles?” David protested, casting his gaze about the table for signs of approval. “We have to worry about Mexicans now?”

Yitz and Elliott turned on him simultaneously. “Of course we have to worry about Mexicans!”

Elliott continued: “Dave, have you paid no attention all these years? Every Passover we remove ten drops of wine from our cups, one for each of the ten plagues. Every year we declare that a Jew’s cup can’t be full as long as people are suffering. Are those just words to you?”

“That message was about Egyptians drowning in the Red Sea, not Mexicans soaking their moccasins crossing the Rio Grande!”

“Moccasins? Mexicans don’t wear moccasins, David! Jesus Christ!”

The desecration of the Lord’s name caused Jessica Constance Eck to wince and place a hand on Elliott’s arm, an act Yitz was glad to note produced no restraining effect whatsoever. It wasn’t too late!

“Well, I don’t think what Mexicans wear or don’t wear is our concern,” David complained.

Elliott raged. “It is in fact exactly our concern! Your freedom means nothing unless you use it to free others!”

True enough, Yitz mused, but does it mean the freedom to fill Jewish homes with the pitter-patter of goyishe feet looking for Easter eggs?

“Yitz!” Rachel exclaimed.

He clapped a hand over his mouth. Had he spoken aloud, or was this yet another example of Rachel’s capacity to read his mind?

Jessica Eck, giving no sign that she had heard Yitz, tried to enter the conversation. “Didn’t God command us to feed the poor, clothe the naked, care for the widow – ?”

“God?!” Yitz erupted, an old reflex triggered. “What does God have to do with any of this? We’re talking about religion, not God!”

“Oh, come on, Dad!” shouted Elliott. “Give us a break! Most normal people in America can’t relate to this religious atheism of ours. Only the Jews have that. But one thing the Jews don’t have is a monopoly on morals. Judaism is no more moral and no better than other religions!”

“What are you talking about? I don’t think Judaism is better than other religions! If you were Korean or Pakistani or any other kind of person, this woman would be just as much of a shiksa in one of those families as she is here!”

“What’s a shiksa?” interjected Jessica Constance Eck.

“It’s what you are, dear,” Rachel replied sweetly.

Yitz barreled on. “You don’t have to be a Gentile to be a shiksa. And when you show your yiddeshe punim over at the Eck family Easter dinner – ” he pointed an accusing finger at Jessica Constance Eck, the representative of that future gathering, “ – you sure as hell will be their Jewish shiksa and very probably their non-Republican shiksa!”

David, who had exhibited a great deal of unease ever since the announcement that the brisket was in danger of drying out, now interjected: “How about we get on with the seder and continue this conversation over dinner?” Having proposed this motion, he looked around the table for someone to second it, but in vain. Maddie rolled her eyes. The children, aligned in their chairs, sat in slack-jawed amazement.

“Let me get this straight,” said Elliott. “Jews should only interact with Jews. Koreans should only associate with Koreans, Pakistanis with Pakistanis, and Republicans with Republicans, right? What good does that do anybody? All this tribalism is meaningless when we can all benefit from each other’s strengths.”

“Yes,” agreed Jessica Constance Eck. “Diversity is our greatest – ”

“What a load of crap!” Yitz exclaimed. “You know perfectly well I don’t believe we should live in isolation. But what happens to your precious diversity if everyone becomes the same as everyone else? Does being a member of the Jewish people mean nothing to you?”

“No, Dad, being Jewish means a lot to me, as you know. But it doesn’t mean everything to me, and I don’t want being Jewish to lead to the exclusion of other things that are important to me.”

“What important things is it excluding? You’re helping the needy, a Jewish value. You’re a scholar, a Jewish value. You care for the environment, a Jewish value. You are tolerant of other people’s beliefs, a Jewish value. What is your being Jewish preventing you from doing?”

“Well, dating Jessie, for one thing…”

“What are you saying? That there is only one woman in the world for you, and what if that one woman isn’t Jewish? That’s silly romanticism. There are dozens of Jewish women out there with whom you could make an absolutely wonderful life. Why do you think arranged marriages work? The best, most lasting kind of love is one that develops after the wedding, not before. The strongest relationships are based upon shared values. What values do you share with this woman?”

Elliott was silent.

“Almost everything except religion,” Jessica Constance Eck answered.

There was a pause.

“I know you,” Yitz said, his gaze streaming toward Elliott. “Your mother and I sent you to Jewish day school. We kept a Jewish home. We did what we could to let you know what is important to us. And now you have to decide what your own values are. Yours and not ours. Don’t marry someone Jewish for us. Don’t raise your children as Jews for us. But keep one thing in mind: if there is anything you treasure about being Jewish, and if that thing depends upon Jewish continuity, it will all be lost if you don’t raise a Jewish family.”

Elliott’s face turned crimson. His hands shaking, he seized his haggadah and leafed a few pages ahead, stabbing the booklet with his finger when he found the text he was looking for, the verse linking him through three thousand years of Jewish history to the Exodus. He shouted the words: “In each and every generation, every person is obliged to regard himself as if he personally was liberated from Egypt. These are the words! This is the line you used all those years to deceive us. You said it means that we cannot be truly free until we learn not to take our freedoms for granted!”

“But that is what it means…”

“You’re wrong! In each and every generation means that we can never be free. In each and every generation, we need to isolate ourselves. In each and every generation, even if no one is persecuting us, we need to remember that they might persecute us. The Jews are the only people in history who fear not suffering, because if they’re not suffering they might be going extinct!”

“So what, Elliott? So what if that’s true? Shver tsu zein a Yid, my mother used to say: it’s hard to be a Jew. Maybe being Jewish needs to be challenging. What’s wrong with that?”

“What’s right with that? Why can’t we be happy unless we’re also miserable and insulated? We live in a post-ethnic civilization, or at least we ought to be living in one.”

“That’s what your grandmother thought before they loaded her into a cattle car bound for Auschwitz!”

“That was then, Dad. This is now.”

“The difference between then and now is only a matter of time, Elliott! Do you really think that Jews in America have escaped any possibility of persecution? Anti-Semitism is boiling just beneath the surface of this society you feel so secure in. All it will take is the right provocation, and it will be the Third Reich all over again!”

“That’s nonsense, Dad. Look at the world around you. In the civilization you and I live in, all this ethnic and religious divisiveness is causing too much hatred!”

“But what about all the good the Jews have brought to the world?” Yitz could barely breathe. Monotheism…the Bible…the foundations of legal thought…music…art…literature… philosophy…psychology…entertainment…science…the list of achievements stretched out over almost every human endeavor and without interruption from the Exodus to the present day. How could Elliott deny it? “How…how…how can you – ”

“I know what comes next, Dad. Spare me the Jewish accomplishments over the centuries disproportionate to our numbers. I don’t know why the Jews have achieved so much. Maybe it has to do with education, maybe with culture, maybe genetics, but whatever it is, we live in a different time, and none of those things will matter in the future!” Elliott flung his haggadah onto the table, toppling his wine glass, a purple stain spreading over the white tablecloth. “We’re leaving,” Elliott declared and, grabbing Jessica Constance Eck by the hand, dragged her out the door.

They sat in stunned silence, Yitz heaving and gasping like a fish out of water.

“Wow,” David observed, “a reverse Elijah.”

“We’re finishing the seder,” Yitz croaked. But it was no good. The text seemed devoid of meaning. And when it came time for the meal, even Rachel’s gefilte fish turned to ashes in his mouth. Yitz dropped his fork, staggered through the kitchen, passed by the brisket and headed for the bedroom, where he shed his clothes and climbed into bed.

 

* * *

 

Rachel had once dragged Yitz to a “mindfulness” course, in which the participants were instructed to meditate on all their body parts, starting with one big toe and working their way around to the other in what to Yitz was a circle of agony. In a life that now seemed to be spiraling out of control, a toehold seemed to Yitz just what he needed, so he resolved to try meditation again. But once he had grasped his big toe with his mind, what was he to do with it? Relax it? Flex it? Wiggle it? Apparently, he was simply supposed to contemplate it. What a goyishe concept. He lay flat on his back in bed, staring at the ceiling.

Rachel entered the room. “Yitz, what’s wrong with you? First Elliott leaves, then you! David and Maddie and the kids and I had to finish everything up by ourselves! Is this what you call a seder?”

“No,” Yitz said, “this is what I call a disaster.”

No sighs left. He covered his face with his hands and wept.

 

Emmet Hirsch was born in Chicago and raised in Israel in a Reform Jewish family. He now resides in Evanston, Illinois and is an obstetrician-gynecologist, a husband, a father to five wonderful, liberal Jewish children and a grandfather to one wonderful, liberal Jewish fetus. He is the author of the novel The Education of Doctor Montefiore.