Of the dozens of people you interviewed, only a literal handful are observant or Orthodox, and most of those are rather idiosyncratic in their Orthodoxy. Why didn’t you include individuals whose Orthodoxy is more normative – people like Sen. Joseph Lieberman, Washington attorney Nathan Lewin, Hollywood screenwriter Robert Avrech, novelist Herman Wouk, film critic/radio host Michael Medved, etc?
I honestly didn’t approach people because of their observance or lack of it. I interviewed people who interested me, and for the most part I had no idea where they were going to land in terms of observance. (Many of these people had in fact been raised religiously, and I didn’t know if they’d maintained that level of observance or not before I spoke to them.) Obviously a different approach would be to deliberately seek out an equal number of pious and so-called “cultural” Jews, but I didn’t use observance as a yardstick to figure out whom to talk to. I suppose you can fault me for not seeking out observant Jews but the fact is that I did not seek out non-observant Jews either – or any particular kind of Jew for that matter. I approached public figures who happened to be Jewish and asked how Jewish they felt, which childhood traditions they upheld and which they’d let go and why.
As for Sen. Lieberman, I did write to him and he never responded.
A few of your interviewees are of mixed parentage and their identity as Jews, as well as their ties to Judaism and/or the Jewish community, can fairly be characterized as tenuous at best. Why include them in a book about “prominent Jews”?
I was interested in Jewish identity in whatever form it took. Gloria Steinem and Sarah Jessica Parker, it’s true, have Jewish fathers, as does Dr. Laura Schlessinger, who converted. I was interested in their stories, too….I didn’t have a checklist for each person before I approached him or her in terms of their level of observance or their ties to the Jewish community. It was the opposite: I wanted to get a snapshot of Jewish identity from some of the most prominent American Jews wherever they were Jewishly. I thought there was value in that, and I never pretended to be selecting a perfectly balanced representation of Jewish thought or identity. That said, I do think that it’s worth noting and discussing that this random sample of Jewish public figures proved to be so lacking in observance, with such a high rate of intermarriage. That’s worth talking about.
Your mother [author and editor Letty Cottin Pogrebin] has written extensively on Jewish subjects, so one wonders why you chose not to include her in the book.
I did want to interview my mother, but in the tradition of boosting Jewish mothers, she thought it would be better for my first book not to include my mom.
You interviewees cover so many fields of endeavor, with one noticeable exception: popular music. It’s a surprising absence, given the influence of popular music in our culture and the number of interesting potential interviewees – Bob Dylan, Neil Diamond, Carol King, Neil Sedaka, Billy Joel, David Lee Roth, etc.
You are absolutely right that I failed miserably in the music industry. I did ask Simon and Garfunkel, Billy Joel, Barry Manilow, Itzhak Perlman, Bette Midler, and Barbra Streisand. All turned me down. Gene Simmons and Randy Newman both said yes, but we couldn’t schedule their interviews in time.
Is there anyone else you wanted to include in the book but who turned you down?
I wanted to interview others, including Rob Reiner, Frank Gehry, Jerry Seinfeld, Senators Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, Paul Wolfowitz, and Jon Stewart. Seinfeld said no, and I never got an answer from the others.