My conversation with Eleanor suggests that people who are Americans assimilated from other immigrant backgrounds, whether religious or ethnic, might identify with some of the issues raised by my book, and that I should emphasize that, rather than Jewishness in particular. I’ve retitled a few poems (“Ritual Bath” instead of “Mikveh” is one such) and I will add notes at the back. But the over-all packaging is a different question. I suppose I could start my elevator pitch with this idea:
People one or two generations from an immigrant past often feel a connection to the old religion or the old culture without being quite sure what claim it has on them and what they value in it. In the case of poet Judith Kerman, this connection is to Eastern European Judaism. But the issues raised by her collection of poems, Aleph, broken, may be of interest to North Americans from many other backgrounds who feel similar perplexities.
Many Jewish books offer relatively little to the large percentage of American Jews who are secular and whose relationship to Judaism is ambiguous or conflicted. The poems in Aleph, broken explore an unconventional but not atypical Jewish identity, one that is scientific and secular but yearning for connections usually found in Jewish observance, history and belief.
These poems, which explore the ways in which life and Jewishness are not what Kerman was taught to expect, reflect both real and imagined personal experience. Beginning with her family origins, the book grapples with such contemporary issues as sexism, antiSemitism, the Holocaust, aging and death, ecology and social justice. Kerman’s explorations of other cultures, especially Latin America, bring her back to questions of her personal identity.
Kerman was raised in an atheist home with a sense of history and progressive politics as part of Jewish identity. She acquired a broad knowledge of both the Hebrew Bible and Jewish culture through reading. In her late forties, she became active in Jewish religious and community life. However, the conventional understanding of Jewishness remains problematic for her, while the tradition of argument, exploration and dispute remains compelling. Many readers from a variety of cultures are likely to identify with her meditation on these challenges, which are faced by all those who still feel rooted in their culture of origin while finding a deeper meaning in the great scope of human experience.
This feels a little awkward, but maybe closer. Thoughts?
Judith Kerman 
My dear friend, Donna, used to say …you can’t have your t….chas in two places and I wonder if you can compare any second generation to Jewish second generation. If your whole unique experience for the last twenty years or so has been spiritually Jewish should you be concerned about marketing to more….when I think of the work of your hands, not just your brain, I think of something essentially Jewish, having nothing to do with faith or religion, but an almost genetic grace in the face of fear, an awareness of having perhaps only a half of a family tree/ those who were too frum either stayed or went back to the pale. Some of this is uniquely jewish in craft with not being able to own land and just as my son is forever changed by 1492 I ask you if you want to dilute your investigation. Happy Passover or a sissan pesach if you like.
If you feel like answering, what made your parents atheists.
I think many young identified and even affiliated jews are actually
atheists which worries me.
Interesting questions. I’m not at all sure my experience in the last 20 years has been “spiritually Jewish.” I’ve learned a lot of behavior and text, but it has not made a dent in my atheism, and it does not fill the spiritual needs I actually do feel. I’ve lately been thinking about going back to Quaker meeting, which was the best fit I ever encountered (apart from not being Jewish-flavored).
Since I have always felt Jewish but been turned off by my exposure to the religion, my tuches has been in two places throughout my adult life, and maybe longer. Twenty years in synagogue life hasn’t made much of a difference.
My parents were atheists because they did not believe in the metaphysics promulgated by Jewish texts and practices. In fact, my father thought the whole question foolish – he was a radical materialist (and I mean physics, not money). My mother’s family were Yiddish Socialists, devoted to the people and to the history but indifferent to the religious aspects as far as I can tell.