for moderate to severe crohn's disease skyrizi is the first il-23 inhibitor that can deliver remission and visibly improve damage of the intestinal lining. serious allergic reactions and an increased risk of infections or a lower ability to fight them may occur. tell your doctor if you have an infection or symptoms, had a vaccine or plan to. liver problems may occur in crohn's disease. control of crohn's means everything to me. ask your gastroenterologist about skyrizi. ♪ control is everything to me ♪ learn how abbvie could help you save. (upbeat rock music) good morning and welcome to 'mosaic'. i am rabbi eric

weiss and honored to be your host this morning. the san francisco bay area is characterized in part by being a place that encourages and nourishes self-discovery. we would like to invite you into a wonderful conversation this morning with mari and jim, who along the way of self-discovery discovered that you are jewish and welcome . >> thank you for inviting us. >> how did you discover you are jewish? >> when i was 30, i had grown up as a wasp and went to an episcopal church in my parents were long dead in my sister was 19 years older and took me aside and said, did you have any idea that our family was jewish? i was absolutely gob smacked. i had no idea and i thought there was a secret but i thought the family was mexican. because my mother was dark and she spoke spanish and came from texas. finding out i

was jewish, it was startling. the revelation. >> i was 54. and had been estranged from my mother and reconnected with her and she said, i have something very important to tell you and i don't want you to find out after i am dead. and she said repeatedly, you are jewish . you are jewish . and finally i said, mom, if i am jewish that means you are jewish. no. i have never had an affinity or affiliation with judaism and i will not start now. and like she said. it was a revelation and in some ways i felt like i had been waiting my whole life to hear this news and the tectonic plates realigning. >> for each of you, you each have a sense that you said you

had a little bit of internal rumbling, a secret waiting for this revelation and i wonder if you could talk more about , what is that , that was at work in terms of , jewishness? >> it made me reflect on the history and when i did i thought of certain episodes that were very startling and anomalous in my background. i remember that there was a farm boy who when he did not get paid adequately by my family said, you must all be jewish. i repeated that and i saw the consternation ripple through the family and i had no idea what that meant. i also had a baby book where everything fell out except there was one baptismal certificate that was glued for eternity , that would never fall out. so i put all of this together and started thinking, there were clues all along . there were strange things. i came home from

boarding school and told and anti-semitic joke and my brother who knew, as my sister had, he got so upset and he never got upset with me. i thought back in my history was revealed in a different light . >> interesting. jim, for you ? >> for me, the timing was interesting . a written an essay for an anthology i co-edited with my friend. called identity and being who we want to be who we are not. it was about identification and i wanted to be jewish. i lit the menorah up. i went to high holiday services . i went to the jewish film festival. my boyfriends were all jewish. what is this about? this piece said been written some years earlier and was published and a month later my mother tells me this news and i am thinking , it is not just envy.

i am. it was like on a cellular level, my body knew something that i did not really know or understand. >> in the jewish community, a lot of people who are born and raised jewish and in the jewish culture have this sense of, it is in our community and in our bodies. we develop a certain kind of embodiments about being jewish. when we hear people say, i knew it inside myself and i did not know what it was. it is a kind of cultural cueing that i am sure you see. part of the natural question is , do you know where the gap happened? do you know where there was a place where jewish identity stopped being

overt and somehow got lost, but still no to the surface? do you know in any of your cases, your past family ? >> that is an interesting question. for my family it goes way back . they were southern jews and assimilated before the civil war. we had a running start on assimilation, in a way. when my mother was born and grew up, she was determined not to be jewish so she changed the family story and was determined . a lot of the anti-semitism in texas around 1905 when she was born, you can imagine. i think what you're saying is interesting in the sense that there were a lot of cues, all kinds of cues as i look back on it, that i did not understand because i was not around jews i knew of as a child . we were in the country with no jews or synagogue or nothing. there were all kinds

of ways of being in the world, values and even some food, even things that , educational kind of value and ethical, sort of standards that i think were basically jewish . >> we will take a quick break and come back to this conversation with marnie and jim right here on 'mosaic' .

good morning and welcome back to 'mosaic'. we are in the middle of a wonderful conversation with marnie paul and jim van buskirk about the way they discovered they are jewish and welcome back , marnie and jim. we were talking about your background and how you came to understand that you are jewish and i am wondering if you could share a little bit about once you discover that you were jewish, how you came into the jewish community and approached the jewish community, resources you use . how did you start? >> my first stop was the jewish community library. jewish genealogical society meeting. i went with the very vague pieces of information that my mother had given me. and try to figure out if any of it was true or if there was documentation. fairly quickly, discovered that they found my

grandfather's world war i draft application, which said, theodore burns and in parentheses, bernstein. and we had always believed that he was of scottish descent . and he had been born in brooklyn. it turns out that he was born in russia. and immigrated in 1906 . my mother had some confused pieces of that and my grandmother, who was parisian , i knew well. her maiden name was simon. and i discovered fairly quickly that her mother's maiden name was , david . and her mother's maiden name was levy. it did not get much more jewish than that. both my grandparents were assimilated and my mother believed that they did not might have even known about

each other's hitting jewish identity. >> fascinating. >> the first step was to go to my lover and tell her i was a jew. my lover was jewish. and she said, i always knew. >> a jewish mind. >> that was my first stop as far as my immediate community. and i went back and i found my relatives in texas and they had some -- i started communicating with them and they had a huge family reunion and brought in all the cousins i had never known and i went back. southern jews are half southern and they all had hospitality bags for everybody from out of town. it was an interesting hybrid of culture. >> what is a hospitality bag ? >> when you go , they pride

themselves, southerners on being hospitable. to have all kinds of goodies and barbecue sauce and treats that were from texas, inside. and inside the bag for all the people and relatives who were from out of town for this reunion . it was such an interesting history and they collected all this archival material so i found out all about the family history. and they are very proud of it . the community for me, my community has to do with my ancestors and i reclaimed my ancestors who i never knew about. but i am very proud of them. they started the first synagogue in austin. they are down to earth . ethical people. they were hard-working and they were smart and -- they prospered in spite of anti-semitism in texas. >> yes. it is interesting you

have come to judaism as an adult and you came to judaism really with your full self . certainly with all your life experience . i'm just wondering if you can talk -- it is a big question but talk a little bit about how you brought your self to that point in time to judaism . and how the jewish community or judaism influences you from that point? >> the first thing that is so important is i had only gone through a self revelation which , i read a book when i was in my 20s about gay identity. i had not thought of myself as a lesbian but i had a dream that night and influenced by that book and i woke up and it was women in bars in new york, had a dream about myself and i woke up, a different person. i had already had this transformational

experience about identity. i knew how mutable identity is in the same thing happened when i found out i was a jew. overnight i found myself liking hugely different person. everything was different about me and i realized before i had been somewhat condescending toward jews who were my friends and lovers. i thought i have been superior in a did not know that until i was jewish. >> interesting. believe it or not we have to take a break. we will come back in a moment and continue this fascinating conversation with marnie and jim.

good morning and welcome back to 'mosaic'. i am rabbi eric weiss and honor to be your host . we are in a wonderful conversation with marnie paul and jim van buskirk. and how

they discover their jewishness. we were talking before the break and marnie was sharing how her own adulthood and when she discovered she was jewish and it influenced her sense of jewishness. i am wondering for you, how that was? >> i came out when i was 20 as a gay man. my identity arranged or rearranged itself . this felt somewhat similar, when my mother revealed this identity. it is like, okay. i completely changed and was completely the same and i took myself to synagogue thinking , maybe now i will find the services much more meaningful. maybe now i will know the songs and i will not be feeling like such an interloper. none of that changed. because i had not grown up as a jew. i liken it that's i use the analogy of

being transgender. a transgender person does not have the childhood of the gender they are now living. i feel like , i am not a pretend jew. my mother's family was jewish. and i have done all the activities. but my and sanity lacks that beginning and parented jewishness. >> self-discovery often times, not always, involves revealing or breaking things that were before that moment, secret. and i can have its own domino effect. both of you have talked about that little bit of an element in your family. i am wondering what effect this had more broadly on your families of origin , in what way

living as jews has really made it transparent and brought it forward? >> the first thing that was important for me is as a counselor , i work with people's narratives all the time. some narratives are just not helping certain people. but this did when i found myself to be such a chameleon and how it changed me, it empowered me in my work to take a more hegemonic view of narratives and say i can help people change . lookout i changed from these revelations. i can also help people change their narrative. it was instructed in my work and very influential. with my family members, all him think they are a wasp, i am the last jew. it is up to me to pass on the heritage and i have been doing my part. >> it was interesting, my

mother was doling out cousins and i will call them and i got a family genealogy that indicated that my grandfather's parents were not john and jenny burns of scotland but jacob and velda bernstein. i called my brother and said isn't it interesting that our great-grandfather was jacob and you named your son jacob? and he was not interested at all and he said jacob was named for someone in my wife's family. i said yes, and it is common. don't you think that is an interesting lineage. he was not engaging and i remember at a family dinner my nephew who was a teenager at the time said, jim, i don't understand , how is it that you are jewish but dad is not jewish and grandma is not jewish? and i am looking at my brother thinking , how do i answer that? and that is how

things have remained. >> in the family. >> we will take another quick break and come back on 'mosaic'. please join us in just a moment .

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good morning a welcome back to 'mosaic'. i am rabbi eric weiss and we are in the middle of a wonderful conversation about discovering they are jewish with marnie paul and jim van buskirk. welcome back. there is so much to talk about and i am wondering how the two of you met and if you can talk about , is there a community of like folks in our jewish community? >> one of the ways that marnie and i had met, but we reconnected when i remembered a wonderful novel by richard hall called, family fictions . and it was about a family , which had hidden is jewish identity . i opened it up and it was dedicated to marnie. and i sent her an email and i said, guess what? i think i am part of the tribe. we sat down over

lunch and started comparing notes and it was just this great connection and it really gave me solace and a sense of community and i remember her telling me about a bar mitzvah that she held for herself and i said, no. i said bat mitzvah and she said no, bar mitzvah. >> anyway. richard was my brother. it is a book about -- it is in true novel about a fiction, family fiction. >> it is interesting. >> have you discovered folks like yourselves who later in adulthood discovered that they are jewish? >> many. it turns out it is a very common narrative and there have been lots of books about it and memoirs written. madeleine albright . we have

been on panels called, new jews, many people who discovered as adults they had jewish heritage . >> i am wondering , as part of your narrative, how do you begin to integrate and make choices about jewishness in jewish life to the life you already have? how do you understand jewish holidays? how do you understand jewish approaches to biblical narrative. to jewish ethical values about being in the world and that sort of thing. it is a big question but can you talk about what that is for you? >> it has been an evolving process where a pull on one legging of our time of jewishness and put something over my head . it has been years to the point where i'm so proud and happy to be a jew and very open . it has been very gradual and it is taken a

lot of processing, investigation and historical searching on my part. >> i wonder, i'm sure it is true for both of you but , jim comedy you move through places where you relinquish christianity or things you did that were not particularly jewish? is that part of the process? >> i don't think i had any christianity to relinquish. one of my rabbi friends asked me, what religion will you growing up? and i said tongue-in-cheek , we were devoutly unitarian and he rolled his eyes. i had a wonderful opportunity because, coincidentally the universe had provided , i was working at the jewish community library and i have resources to the staff in the collections, two people. any question i had in my job was to

read books for the book club in a buck program. all day every day i was sitting and reading about the jewish experience in every form and variation in every geographical place. it was a crash course in judaism. everything i had not been taught as a young person, i was filling up the reservoir and understanding and having a particular perspective. i did not have it to begin with. but i was growing it, somewhat similar to marnie. >> believe it or not we have just one minute left in our conversation. i am wondering , for anyone who may be listening or know somebody in their world in your particular state of discovery, what is one thing you might suggest to somebody who finds themselves discovering that they are jewish and they had not previously known . >> i would say, to celebrate that heritage. what a marvelous heritage and how

lucky we are. >> wonderful. >> i would echo that and to say that we are not alone. there are lots of us, all over the world who for one reason or another have had to hide their heritage and to embrace it and to celebrate it and find like-minded people. >> thank you so much for sharing your story. thank you for joining us here on 'mosaic' and we encourage you to self discovery. have a wonderful day.

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