I am one of the people interviewed in the PBS series and hope people will watch what I believe is the most nuanced and sophisticated telling of the Jewish American story to date: a story that has wisdom for any American because it is a story as much about being American as it is about being Jewish. So I will be sweet and allusive.

We do not know what Jewish identity meant in the past because there was no one Jewish identity to be known. There were Jewish identities. There were many different expressions of Jewishness that, as with any religious culture, were products of interactions between people, their times, their inherited tradition, the larger cultures in which they were embedded, and their personal biographies and biologies.

Jewish identity in the first century in Palestine was very different than Jewish identity in Poland in the seventeenth century which was very different than Jewish identity in Spain in the twelfth century which was different than Jewish identity in New Mexico at the end of the nineteenth century which is different than the many kinds of Jewish identities on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in the twenty-first century. In fact, when one studies the Jewish past one discovers that identity is really a verb and not a noun.

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