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♪ good morning and welcome to "mosaic" rabbi eric weiss and honors to be your host this morning. the san francisco area is a place to encourages and nourishes self-discovery and we would like to invite knew a wonderful conversation with marnie hall and jim van buskirk along the way of self-discovery discovered that you are jewish. welcome, marnie and jim. >> thank you for inviting us. >> let's jump in. marnie, how did you discover that you were jewish? >> when i was 30, i had grown up as a wasp. gone to episcopal church. and my parents were long dead and my sister, who is much older, another generation old remember 19 years older and took me aside and said do you have any idea that our family was jewish? i was absolutely gobsmacked .no

idea. i knew there was a secret, but but i thought the family was mexican because my mother was dark and she spoke spanish and came from texas. finding out that i was a ju was so startling. it was a revelation. >> and jim? >>speaker: i was 54. and had been estranged from my mother. and reconnected with her. and she said, i have something really important to tell you. i don't want you to find out after i'm dead. and she said repeatedly, you are jewish. you are jewish. you are jewish. finally i said, mom, if i'm jewish, that means you are jewish. oh, no, dear. i never had any affinity for affiliation with judaism and i'm not going to start now. and like what marnie said, it was a revelation. and in some ways i felt like i

have been waiting my whole life to hear this news and the tectonic plates were realigning. >> wow, so for each of you, each have a sense of you can say, you had a little internal rumbling, a secret, waiting, you know, for this revelation. and i'm wonder going you can talk a little bit more about what is that -- that was at work in terms of jewishness? >>speaker: well, it made me reflect on my 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 -- there was a farm boy who when he didn't get paid adequately by my family said, you must all be jews. i went back and repeated that and i saw the consternation ripple through the family. and i had no idea that that meant. i also had a baby book where everything fell out except there was one baptismal certificate that was stamped in and glued

for eternity that would never fall out. i put these -- i started connecting dots and said there were clues all along. there were dots. there are strange things. i came home from boarding school and told an antisemitic joke. my brother who knew who my sister had got so upset. and he never got upset with me. i thought back, and my history was revealed in a whole different light. >> interesting. and jim, for you? >>speaker: well, for me and the timing was interesting. i had written an essay called "at the museum of jewish heritage" for this anthology that i co-edited with my friend jim tushinski, identity, wanting to be who we are not. it is about identification. and i wanted to be jewish. i lit the menorah. cried at concerts. i went to high holidays. i went to the jewish film festivals. my boyfriends were all jewish.

i'm like, what is this about? and so this piece had been written some years earlier and was then published. and a month later, my mother tells me this news. and i'm thinking, oh, it is not just envy. i have -- i'm. but it is -- it was like on a cellular level, my body knew something that i didn't really know or understand. >> in the jewish community, a lot of people who are born and raised jewish and then in the jewish culture have this sense of -- of -- of -- it's in our cells. it is in our community. it is in our bodies. so we develop a certain kind of embodiness about being jewish. so when we hear people saying myself. i didn't know what it was. it was a kind of cultural cueing that i -- i'm sure you see. and so part of a natural question ends up being, where --

do you know where the gap happened? do you know where there was sort of a place where jewish eye aye density stopped being overt and kind of somehow got lost, but still known under the surface. do you know in any of your cases your past family framework in that way? >>speaker: that is a really interesting question, because, you know, i think -- from my family it goes way, way back that they were southern jews assimilated before the civil war and a running start on assimilation. when my mother was born and grew up, she determined not to be jewish and changed the family's story and determined -- because a lot of anti-semitism in texas around 1905 when she was born, you can imagine. i think what you are saying is interesting in the sense that there were a lot of cues, all kind of cues as i look back on it that i didn't understand

because i wasn't around jus that i knew of as a child. we were out in the country with no jews armed, no sin goings, nothing. all kinds of being in the world, values. and things that were educational, kind of value and eth ethical sort of standards that i think basically were jewish. >> wonderful. we will take a quick break and come back with this conversation with marnie and gem in just a moment on "mosaic."

good morning and welcome back to "mosaic." in the middle covering of marnie hall and jim van buskirk the ways they both discovered they were jewish. welcome back, marnie and jim. >> hi. >> we were talking a little bit about your background and how you came to understand that you are jewish. and i am wonder going you can share a little bit about -- once you discovered you were jewish, how, then, you came into the jewish community. how you approached the jewish comment. resources that you used. how did you start off, jim? >> well, my first start was the jewish community library's jewish genealogical sarasota meeting and i went with the very

vague pieces of information that my mother had given me and tried to figure out if any of it was true or documentation of anything. and fairly quickly discovered that one of the research ers found my grand father's world war i draft application that said theodore person withes, and in parentheses bernstein. and we always meed he was of scottish descent and born in brook len. turns out he was born in russia and immigrated in 1906. my mother had some confused pieces of that. and my grandmother who was parry san i knew well. and her made name was simone, simon. and her mother's name was david, david. and her maiden name was levy.

it didn't get much more jewish than that. both my grandparents, both my parents were closeted/assimilated and my mother may believed that they may not have known go each other's jewish hidden identity. >> fascinating. marnie, for yourself? >> the first step was to go home to my lover and tell her i was a jew. my lover was jewish. my lover, freda, she said i always knew you had a user cup. >>speaker: jewish mind. >> yeah, cup. yeah. so that was my first stop as far as my immediate community found my relatives in texas and i started communicating with them and a huge family reunion and brought in all the cousins i never known and funny because

southern jews are half southern and hospitality bags from those outside of town. a hybrid culture. >> what is a hospitality bag? see, you don't know. this is so interesting. they pride themselves southerners as being hospitable and all goodies and barbecue sauce and treats that were from texas inside. inside the bag for all the relatives for out of town for this reunion. i mean, it was such an interesting history and they had 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 a lot to do with my ancestors that i reclaimed my ancestors that i never knew about and very proud of them. they started the first synagogue in austin. and they are down-to-earth

ethical people and hard working and smart and utterly -- i mean they were -- they prospered in spite of anti-semitism in texas. >> yes. and it is interesting that you come to judaism as an adult, so you came to judaism really with your full self. certainly with all of your life experience. >> yes. >> i am just wondering if you can talk -- i knows a big question, but talk a little bit about how you brought yourself to that point in time to judaism. and how, then, the jewish community of judaism influenced you from that point. >> go ahead. >> well, the first thing that is so important is i had already gone through a self-revelation, which is i read a book when i was in my 20s about gay identity. and i had been with women before, but i haven't thought of myself as a lesbian. i had a dream that night, influenced by that book.

and i woke up. it was women in bars in new york. i had a dream about my self being -- and i woke up a different person. i had already had this transformational experience about identity so i already knew how mutable identity is. and the same thing happened when i found out i was a jew, i overnight found myself like a hugely different person. everything was different about me. and i realized before i had been somewhat condensating toward jew who were friends and lovers. i thought i was superior. i is it not know know that until i was jewish. >> interesting. believe it or not -- we have to take a break and we will continue this fascinating conversation with marnie and jim.

. >> good morning and welcome back to mosaic. rabbi eric we circuiss, honored your host. we are in a conversation how they discovered their jewishness. jim, we were talk ing before the break and marnie was talking her own adulthood when she discovered she was jewish influenced her sense of jewishness and back and forth and i am wondering for yourself, how it was for you. >> somewhat similarly. i came out when i was 20 as a gay man. and so my identity kind of arranged or rearranged itself and felt similar when my mother revealed this identity. i was like, oh, okay. so i completely changed and was completely the same. and i took myself to synagogue thinking, oh, well maybe now i will find the services much more meaningful. maybe now i will know the songs

and i won't be -- feel like such an interloper and, of course, none of that changed because i haven't grown up as a jew. so i sort of liken it to -- i use the analogy of being transgender -- a transgender person didn't have the childhood of the gender they are now living. and i feel like i -- not a pretend jew. my mother's family was jewish, and i have done all the -- all the activities, but my identity lack that beginning nurturing, parented jewishness. >>speaker: interesting. so you know self-discovery oftentimes -- not always -- but oftentimes involves either revealing or breaking things that were before that moment secret. and that can have its own domino effect. and so both of you have talked about that little bit of an

element in your families and i am just wondering, what effect this had more broadly on your -- on your families of origin. and what ways then really living as jews have really made it transfor rent and brought it to the floor. >> well, the first thing that was important to me as a counselor, you know, i work with people's narratives all the time. some narratives are just not helping certain people. what this did when i found these -- when i found myself to be such a chameleon and how it changed me, it empowered me in my work to take a hejimonic view and i can change. look how i changed from my revelations and helped people change their narrative and very instructive in my work and very influential. and then with my family members all who think -- now that

everybody is dead, i have -- i mean, all the predecessors, i'm the last jew. so it is up to me to pass on the heritage. and i have been doing my part. >> interesting. and jim? >>speaker: well, it was interesting. i -- my mother was dealing out cousins and i would call them and i would get a family genealogy of that indicated ma my grand parents were not john and jenny but jacob and cell? da bernstein. i called my brother and said my great grandfather was jacob and you named your son jacob. and he was not interested at all. he said jacob was named for somebody in my wife's family. up said yeah, it is a common name and don't you think it is an interesting lineage. he was not engaging. i remember at dinner -- a family dinner, my never knew who was a teenager at the time said, well, 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 over at my brother thinking, how do i answer that? >>speaker: interesting. >> so that is sort of how things have remained. >> in the family. we will take another quick break and come back here on "mosaic." please join us in just a moment.

♪ ♪ ♪ >> good morning and welcome back to "mosaic."

rabbi eric weiss, and in the middle of a wonderful conversation of discovering they are jewish with marnie hall and jim van buskirk. welcome back jim and marnie. so much to talk about. i am wondering how the of two you met, and you can talk a little bit about, is there a community of like folks out there in our jewish community? >> well, one of the ways that marnie and i -- we had met, but we -- we reconnected when i remembered a wonderful novel by richard hall called "family fictions." and it was about a family who had -- which had hidden its jewish identity. and i opened it up, and it was dedicated to marnie. and i sent her an e-mail, and i said guess what, i think i am part of the tribe. so we sat town over lunch. and started comparing notes.

and it was just in great connection and and really gave me solace and sense of community and i remember her telling me about away bar mitzvah she held for herself. i said a bah mitsvah. so talk about that. >> anyway, richard was my brother and he broke a book -- a true book about a fiction. i mean true naval about a fiction which is my family fiction. i mean it is a very interesting complicated -- >> interesting, interesting. have you discovered folks like yourself who -- who later in adulthood discovered that they are, in fact, jewish? >> many. it turns out it is a very, very common narrative. there have been a lot of books about it. memoirs written. madeline albright. we have been on panels called

new jews of many people who discovered as adults that they have jewish heritage. >> so i am wondering as part of your the arc of your narrative so far. how do you integrate and make choices of jewishness and jewish life to the life you already have? how do you understand jewish holidays and approaches to biblical narratives or jewish ethical values of being in the world. that sort of a thing. big question, but can you talk a little bit about what that is for you. >>speaker: for me very much on a evolving process where i pulled at one legging of a time of jewishness and put something every my head. and it has been years to the point where now i am so proud and happy to be a jew.

and very open and it is taking a lot of processing and investigation of and historical searching on my part. >>. >> i wanter if is this the same for are you, jim. relink win christianity things that you did that were not particularly jewish. is that part of the process? >> i don't think i have any christianity to relinquish. one of my rabbi friends said what relin ledge i don't know were you growing up. i said tongue and hockey creek, devoutly uni tar ian and just rolled his eyes. coincidentally the universe had provided. i was working at the jewish community library. so i had resources to the staff, to the collections to people any question that i had with as to read books for books in a box program. all day, every day, i was

sitting and reading of the jewish experience and every form and every geographical place. a crash course? judaism. anything i haven't been taught as a young person, i was filling up the reservoir and understanding and having a particular perspective because, as i say, i didn't have it to begin with. but i was growing it. somewhat similar to what marin had said. >> fascinating. believe it or not, we have just one minute left in our conversation. and i am wondering for anybody who meet be listening or know somebody in their world in your particular state of discovery, what is one thing that you might suggest to somebody who finds themselves discovering that, that fact, they are jewish and they haven't previously known. marnie, what is thing you would suggest? >> i would say to celebrate that heritage. what a marvelous heritage. how lucky we are.

>> jim, how about you? >> i week co-- i would echo tha and say we are not alone. there are people around the world who had to hide their heritage and embrace it and find like-minded people. >> jim, marnie, thank you so much for joining our story and for joining us on "mosaic" and encourage you to self-discovery. have a wonderful day. ♪ ♪

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