Every story needs a starting point. For years, my mother and I had been talking about how to tell our family’s story, and whether our experiences as a Jewish interfaith family would have value for anyone but us. First we imagined a blog, then a life-coaching business, a book, and even a cookbook. Then she was diagnosed with cancer, and suddenly the whole project seemed more important than ever.

My family has a motto, “We are making memories.” It’s a motto that’s led us through life’s more chaotic moments. The secret to making memories, of course, is how you tell the story. And in my family we strive to tell, and retell, really good stories. And we’re not the only ones.

Every interfaith family has at least two sides to its story. Mine features a poor white boy who was the odd duck in his devout Baptist family, and a Detroit Yankee who was raised in a tight-knit Jewish community until she rebelled and ran away to Kentucky. This episode also introduces the second of three families featured in 72 Miles, one that’s make-believe. Conjured from the imagination of I.J. Schwartz in an epic Yiddish poem titled New Earth, that follows the life of Josh, a Jewish blacksmith, newly immigrated from Lithuania, who settles in rural Kentucky with his wife and young son. 

In this episode, I speak with Dr. Laura Yares of Michigan State about 19th century Jewish life, and what it can teach us today. I also speak with Dr. Matt Boxer of Brandeis University about how and why Jews ended up in small towns to begin with. Along the way, Ben Dubrovsky shares another chapter in the story of Josh, while I share the Jewish history of the Nahm family, four brother who settled in Bowling Green just before the Civil War. The episode finishes with an introduction to a new friend, John Nahm, who grew up in Bowling Green and whose great-grandfather was Sam Nahm, one of the four original brothers and the only one to be buried in Bowling Green.

My parents met at Walnut Street Baptist Church in 1979. My father was there for services, at his mother's request. My mother was there working, as a sign language interpreter. They were married not long after in a different Baptist church, by a group of friends, using an interfaith wedding ceremony they wrote themselves. As a young couple, my parents found their a home at Central Presbyterian Church, in downtown Louisville, where they met my godparents, and made lifelong friends. They even baptized their two children, much to the congregation's delight. We tried to have it both ways, and do all the things as my mother used to say, but that was starting to fall apart the older my brother got, until one day he said to my father, from the backseat of the car, "I'm Jewish. You're not." He was four.

My family moved to Bowling Green in 1989. My brother was turning six, and I was turning three. We rented a house in the country for a few months, then bought the red-brick home on Garrett Drive where we lived for 16 years. We joined the local Presbyterian Church, but didn’t quite fit in. It was too conservative, or maybe we were too liberal. My parents struggled to make friends, and my brother and I hated Sunday School. All of which fueled an identity crisis, and another poignant question posed by my brother from the back seat of the family Oldsmobile.

My mother passed away on September 14, 2021 after a years-long battle with cancer that cost her control of the left side of her face. We had been recording for just over a year, but there was still so much more she wanted to say. After she died, I went through her journals, to learn the perspectives that she was hesitant to share with me even at the end of her life. My father contributed by archiving the family VHS tapes my mother had saved all these years, including a copy of my Bar Mitzvah and my mother's adult Bat Mitzvah. Together, with the stories she shared while still alive, they tell a complicated and often lonely journey of a woman struggling to find her place in life, and a community that she could call her own, which thankfully, and at long last, she finally did...in Judaism.

From Sunday School in Nashville to Sunday dinner at Granny's, my family bushogged our way towards a cohesive religious identity. Even as my mother was returning to the faith of her childhood, my father was moving further away from his, and towards an unlikely home — The American Society of Friends.