Interfaith Group

Last edited Wed Apr 10, 2013, 11:19 AM - Edit history (1)

My father converted to Catholicism when I was a small child -- and so I was brought up as a Catholic -- and my mother is a non-practicing Jew. (Which means that, under at least some definitions, I am a Jew.) I cannot reject anyone else's faith, because then I would be rejecting my own family.

You want an anecdote? OK. My Jewish grandfather's mother was the composer Gustav Mahler's niece. Now, the Mahlers were a fairly large Central European family, split into two groups with some enmity between them: The Catholic Mahlers and the Jewish Mahlers. As my great-aunt Pauline Gold (nee Mahler) put it, the Jewish Mahlers despise the Catholic Mahlers because the Catholic Mahlers converted for all the wrong reasons; while the Catholic Mahlers dislike the Jewish Mahlers because they know the Jewish Mahlers are right. (I'm sure that one of the Catholic Mahlers would put it differently.)

Now, despite my being a practicing Catholic, I am one of the Jewish Mahlers. The Nazis had hit the family hard during the Holocaust, and they did not want to lose anyone else. When I was in graduate school at the University of Wisconsin, I worked for a time for a man named Bergstrom, whose mother was one of the Catholic Mahlers. I never told my boss that we were cousins, both because I did not want to look like I was sucking up to him, and also because I knew that his mother took the family feud seriously.