I was raised Methodist in Houston, Texas, with, as far as I know, not a trace of Jewish ancestry. That was confirmed by a DNA test, which revealed that my feistiness comes from Scotch-Irish background, not Irish ancestry, as my father had claimed.

My early intersection with Judaism was accidental, but, as I’ll recount, it eventually became a matter of choice. How much those accidental intersections led to my later involvement and how much I’m reinterpreting them in light of later developments is hard to say. In our relation to the past, there’s always a fine line between fabrication and interpretation. As Frost’s speaker puts it, “I shall be telling this with a sigh / Somewhere ages and ages hence . . .”

I’ll be honest. I recently started thinking about all of my early accidental encounters with Jews because of the way in which current anti-Israel sentiment and antisemitism have profoundly disturbed me. I am indeed revisiting them in terms of my later history with Jews—and my current identification with the plight of Israel and the Jews in 2026. Even though I can never know what the other roads would have been, I do know the road I took, and I’m recounting my early history to situate the perspective I have now. Because I didn’t grow up where non-Jews would frequently be exposed to Jews—New York City or, for that matter, Meyerland or Bellaire in Houston—my numerous youthful experiences with Jews seem, at least in my 74-year-old memory, to be more meaningful.

On Idaho Street in the Third Ward in Houston, our next-door neighbors were the Oshmans. (No, they didn’t own Oshman’s Sporting Goods.) Ricky Oshman was one of my childhood friends; his sister, Terri, was one of my sister’s friends. At Bonham Elementary School I was picked to play the role of a Jewish father for a school celebration of the holidays. Other students asked me if I was Jewish because of that.  I said no, but I don’t think they meant it in a derogatory way, and I didn’t take it that way. At Cullen Junior High, Paul Zalinksy (at least that’s how I remember his name) sat right behind me. I was a good student, but I remember how we all thought of him as exceptionally smart. We didn’t associate his smartness with his Jewishness.  He was Jewish, and he happened to be smart. As it turned out—another accident I came to imbue with meaning—the person whose influence on my music turned me from being a rock-and-roll drummer and flat-picking guitarist into a finger-picking folksinger, David Rodriguez, himself moved from rock and roll to folk music because of the Jewish girls he hung out with on the southeast side of Houston, one of them later to become my wife.

Even through my parents’ relations, my history with Judaism was taking shape. The first funeral I was taken to as a child was Jewish. Toby Flato was my father’s boss at Humble Oil and one of his closest friends. My dad admired Toby Flato because he was smart as a whip and, like my dad, about as direct as you could be. They went to University of Houston basketball games together. They hung out at the gym where Cleveland Williams, the boxer, worked out. We often went to their house, decorated in the same mid-century modern style that I discovered in my wife’s childhood home years later. Mr. Flato’s daughter studied in Israel. She was state archery champion, and Mr. Flato gave me a recurve bow with some arrows and a few lessons in how to shoot it. Decades later, my wife’s French relative, Charles Bartels, whose dad had survived a concentration camp, taught me Olympic-style archery for two months, and I won the state championship in my early forties.

In high school my French teacher was Madame Rosenthal from France. My guess, looking back, is that she left France to escape the Nazis. She largely taught in French, what we now call the immersion approach, which was a bit scary. After I was married, I went to an event with my wife at a Jewish synagogue in Houston and we ran into Madame Rosenthal, who of course spoke to me in French. I think my wife, whose French was and is about as good as it can be for a non-native speaker, answered for me.

When my wife met my best childhood friend, Bill Cohn, she asked me if he knew he was Jewish. He didn’t, but he asked his father who confirmed that a generation or two back the Cohns were indeed Jewish. As you drive through Texas, you often see Jewish names on buildings and businesses. Some of the people who built them identified as Jewish, and some, like my childhood friend, did not. And of course many of the well known businesses in Texas were started and run by Jews who openly claimed their Jewish identity—like Neiman Marcus, Weingarten’s, and Sakowitz.

When I met my wife, Mallory Young, she explained that her paternal grandfather’s name had been Yankowitz or Jankowici (depending on whether you went with the Yiddish or Romanian version). He had come to America from Romania as a young child and claimed that an official changed his name at Ellis Island, but, it turned out, he had changed it as a grown man to Julius Octavius Young, clearly wishing to assimilate. Mallory’s mother and her mother’s mother escaped from the Nazis in 1938. Her mother was thirteen, and she told the story of Mallory’s grandmother pinching her so hard it made her cry to get the ticket master’s sympathy so he would let them on the train. They ended up in South America, and eventually made it to New York. Then, finally, to Houston, Texas, where Mallory grew up. Mallory’s father fought in Patton’s Third Army in Europe and his unit liberated a concentration camp.

Because of Mallory, I began a more conscious and deliberate engagement with Jewish history, the Holocaust, and the creation of the modern Jewish state. I read Golda Meir’s autobiography; many books about the Holocaust, including Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem; a book about the Israeli raid on Entebbe airport in Uganda; and books about the Zionist movement of the 19th and 20th century and the creation of modern Israel. As a child growing up in La Salette Place in Houston, the Jewishness of my neighbors and classmates didn’t have any special significance; the more I learned the more it mattered to me.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)