As I was growing up, you know, I'm a white Jewish American born to Holocaust parents. My father fled Nazi Germany in 1939 and my mother's family had fled the czars of Russia before that.

It was natural to see the struggle for dignity for black people in America as a sister struggle of the Jewish struggle. So growing up, it was always a part of my breakfast cereal to think of myself as someone who was part of a larger struggle.

I mean, like a lot of kids growing up in the early seventies, I was fed Dr. Kissinger with my Fruit Loops. He was the Dr. Ruth of American foreign policy, and the model statesman.


He knows that if his father had been a different man, or his mother another women, he would have been the same.

 He would have lived all his years the same way. They played no part. Any combination would have produced the same result. The same man.


When I was growing up, I installed refrigerators in supermarkets. My father was an electrical engineer.

Growing up, I've enjoyed hunting with my father.