1. Yale

“She looks like a goy,” Rachel told me. It was our freshman year at Yale University, and I had just met her father at a popular coffeeshop close to campus during his brief visit from Los Angeles. I had never heard the word “goy” before, but apparently the only thing her father had to say about me was that I looked like one. She explained it was a Jewish word for a non-Jew, and it struck me as funny to be described this way. I shared my father’s French descent and French family name, and all my life I had been told I looked French. Why anyone would expect me to look Jewish was beyond me. Of course, it was also unthinkable that my Catholic father, upon meeting my new college friend, would say only that “she looks like a Jew.”

Rachel and I had both grown up in California where it seemed on the one hand that there was every religion under the sun, and on the other hand that no one really believed in anything in particular, so I had hardly considered the difference in our heritage. Neither of us was particularly religious, after all, so what did it matter? It may not have mattered to me, but I was beginning to learn that there were people to whom it did matter.

Rachel and I adored our fathers, who were both practicing physicians. On meeting Rachel’s father I was shocked by the state of his health. He was in a wheelchair and obviously very weak, appearing decades older than my own father, although both were around the same age. His marriage to Rachel’s mother had ended when Rachel was a child and it came out that he was having homosexual affairs. He was diagnosed as HIV positive over ten years before I met him, and no one had expected him to survive this long.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but meeting Rachel’s father gave me was my first clue that I might be seen as alien in my own country. As it turned out, our brief meeting in the coffeeshop was the only time we ever met. He died the following summer, just after Rachel had made all the arrangements to take a leave of absence from Yale to spend time with him. Although my own family had its share of problems, my parents remained married, something Rachel could only observe with envy. Rachel’s younger sister Abigail’s bat mitzvah took place that summer, not long after her father’s death, and I was staying at their house in Los Angeles where her older sister Deborah had gotten me a summer job as a clinic assistant with Planned Parenthood. During the bat mitzvah, there was a “family dance” and Rachel enthusiastically grabbed my hand to pull me in. Her sister disapproved of this gesture, Rachel told me later, and Deborah herself was not shy about expressing her feelings towards me. “Hitler wouldn’t have a problem with you,” she told me once accusingly, apropos of nothing I remember. I didn’t think Hitler was too fond of Catholics or the French, I tried to explain to Rachel, but she was so beset with grief about her father’s death that there seemed no point in further discussion.

Back on the streets of New Haven, there was another group of people interested in separating the Jews from the goyim. These were the men of what we called Mitzvah Mobile, a van crowned with a giant menorah parked in a prominent spot on the Yale campus during the fall and winter months, so they could intercept students passing by with the question, “Are you Jewish?” Their goal, apparently, was to bring non-practicing Jews back into the fold, and if you answered “yes,” you received a free kit containing a small menorah, candles, and instructions on observing Shabbat, among other things. We were all asked if we were Jewish, many times, and once a Catholic friend told me he answered, “no, but I’d like to convert.” They simply smiled in response and shook their heads, telling him it wasn’t possible.

The Jewish question came up again when I was taking a seminar on Judaism in the Middle Ages. The professor, who was also a rabbi, one day began describing Carcassonne, a Medieval walled city in France, and I nodded in excitement while listening to him because I had been there. Suddenly the rabbi stopped the lecture to ask me a series of questions in front of the class. “You’ve been there?” He asked. “Yes!” I replied. He continued asking questions: “You have a French name – do you speak French? Are your ancestors from France?” I replied yes, and yes again. Finally, he asked, “Are you Jewish?” “No,” I replied, surprised. Then I suddenly realized that I was the only person in the room who wasn’t Jewish, and the question he was asking was of interest to everyone. Now that that was settled, the rabbi went on with his lecture.

In most of my liberal arts classes at Yale, we worked both with what were considered essential or classical texts along with the primary texts themselves. For example, the main texts I examined for my senior thesis (or senior essay, as it was called at Yale) were in Old French, which I translated into English as part of my work. Whether we were reading the Epic of Gilgamesh from ancient Mesopotamia or the songs of Hildegard of Bingen from Medieval Europe, we consulted direct translations into English of the primary texts in question, along with reputable interpretations, in our examinations and discussions. The only exception, in my experience, was in my Judaism class. When discussing the term paper I would write on Jewish mysticism, I asked the rabbi who was our professor what primary texts I could consult, and he instructed me not to use primary texts but rather interpretations of the Kabbalah by Israeli Kabbalah scholars, such as Moshe Idel or Gershom Scholem.

One of my uncles had done substantial research into our family tree, tracing generations of our ancestors through Church records in Québec and back to France. I had started to learn French in school as a child and up through high school, when I won a scholarship to study in Germany. I became fluent in German during the year there, and when I went back to California, one of my brothers and I checked out an armful of folk music records from the library. One billed itself as “Yiddish Folks Songs,” but when we listened, I was surprised to realize I could understand almost all the words. How was that possible, if I had never heard a word of Yiddish? I concluded that Yiddish was simply a form of German, although I never heard anyone describe it that way, just as Haitian creole was a form of French.

In the same way, at Yale I was surrounded by students with German family names who nevertheless did not identify with anything German. I began to understand that when I met someone with a name I recognized as German – Weintraub, Rosenfeld, or Goldstein, for example – they usually identified as Jewish, or more specifically, Ashkenazi. Ashkenazi was the name of a Biblical tribe of Judea but is also said to mean “German” in Hebrew, suggesting that the German-Jewish relationship was acknowledged and buried at the same time, as if it were a kind of open secret. Secrets, I was to learn later, would be a major theme at Yale, particularly in the form of the secret societies for which the university is famous.

I had never been in the company of so many Jewish people as I was at Yale. Ron Unz, a Jewish alumnus of Harvard, has done research that indicates that Jewish students at Ivy League schools, including both Harvard and Yale, actually outnumber their gentile counterparts, although both universities were founded by Christian clergymen. The default assumption was that you would not notice Jewish overrepresentation, and if you did, you should not ask questions. Jews had a right to question gentiles, but the reverse was not true, and I knew better than to ask them about their surname origins although people felt free to ask me about mine, and I was happy to discuss my own background. If I had gone to Yale and suddenly found myself in the company of a great many French-Canadians, it would be a subject of great interest and discussion, but by contrast I never met another student of French or of French-Canadian descent while I was at Yale.

One of my closest friends was Shauna, who had grown up in a small New Hampshire town and attended a Massachusetts boarding school before coming to Yale. Like Rachel, Shauna was the child of divorce which had shattered her childhood. Rachel’s parents’ marriage had been destroyed by her father’s homosexual affairs, and Shauna’s parents’ marriage was a victim of her father’s adulterous relationship with his secretary. Shauna told me that her mother had already had two children when she learned she was pregnant with a third. She didn’t feel she could raise another child without more support from the father, so she had an abortion, precipitating the end of the marriage. Apparently, Shauna’s father had already been having an affair with his secretary, whom he then married. Both of Shauna’s parents were Jewish, but her father’s new wife was from a Catholic family and bore him five more children. He cut off his ex-wife and their children, including Shauna and her brother, who lived in relative poverty while their father and his new family lived comfortably on a large estate.

Shauna’s grandparents lived relatively close to Yale, on the outskirts of New York City, and we visited them there together several times. They were a striking couple and I was somewhat in awe of them. Her grandmother in particular impressed me as vivacious and elegant; she had been a professional pianist, performing on cruise ships. Shauna’s grandfather was an orthodox rabbi from a highly esteemed family of Talmudic scholars, who had emigrated as a young man from Russia. A child at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution, Rabbi Rosenfeld had grown up supporting the growing Zionist efforts in Palestine, but settled instead in New York. He met the woman who became his wife while visiting the Zionist colonies in Palestine. The story was that her boyfriend for some reason couldn’t make the trip, and entrusted her to the young rabbi-to-be as her chaperone and protector. However, the two young Zionists developed feelings for each other in Palestine and, in the rabbi’s words, “I stole her away.”

Shauna’s and Rachel’s grandparents all had strong ties to New York, and although Rachel’s grandparents had moved to Los Angeles, her grandfather, whom everyone loved, gave the family a tour of his old neighborhood in Brooklyn. I loved learning more about family connections with history, in part because the neighborhoods where we lived in New Haven had clearly also been real residential neighborhoods, rather than the student ghettos they had become by the time we lived there. What had been family apartments, with fireplaces and libraries, were now subdivided to allow students to share smaller amounts of space, and I was fascinated by the faded beauty of the interiors, compared to the simpler, newer architectural styles I had grown up with in California. It was no secret that New Haven had, not so long ago, been a much nicer city to live in. We knew that most of the previous residents of the neighborhoods where we lived had been driven out in the last few decades by crime, gangs, and drugs, but the explanations for New Haven’s demise were varied and confusing. In The Slaughter of Cities, E. Michael Jones describes the social engineering campaigns that started in the ’60s, which took their toll on ethnic neighborhoods. In temporarily replacing the New Haven residents who had fled, we unwittingly offered ourselves as lambs to that slaughter.

New Haven’s Union Station is just about a mile from Yale’s Old Campus, where most freshmen live. One weekend, a friend and I decided to take the train to New York to visit friends at Columbia, and we used a map to find the shortest way to the station. We had only walked a few blocks when a tall, elderly black man appeared next to us and asked where we were headed. We told him, and he said, “let me walk with you.” He was already walking with us, and I suddenly realized that he was acting as our bodyguard to prevent someone from accosting us before we made it to our destination. I was touched by his kindness, and never returned to that street now that we knew it was so dangerous. But the problem with New Haven was that virtually everywhere outside the Yale campus was dangerous. When Shauna’s father visited with her younger sister, he was so disgusted at the state of the city that he told Shauna he wouldn’t want his daughter there. “Aren’t I his daughter, too?” Shauna asked me. Her sister opted for a less prestigious but safer choice, Dartmouth.

I was very fortunate to have an undergraduate mentor assigned to me who took a sincere interest in me and my course of study. One of the few Catholic faculty members I met at Yale, Professor Rayner met with me every semester to help me decide a course plan. I had initially declared my interest in majoring in chemistry, a favorite subject in high school, but after discussions over several semesters, Dr. Rayner noted that what really interested me was religion, and asked me why I didn’t major in that. I was taken aback. You could major in religion? You could, and I did. Looking back now, I see it as the beginning of my journey back to the Catholic faith into which I had been baptized, but still had not fully grasped, as everywhere I turned it seemed to be either ignored, marginalized, or demonized. I still had not noticed that although so much in Christianity seemed fair game for ridicule, almost anything in Judaism did not.

A high proportion of my professors were Jewish, and many classes were taught from a Jewish perspective, whether or not this was stated. I took a class on the Book of Ecclesiastes, whose author wrote, “I applied my heart to seek and to search out by wisdom all that is done under heaven.” The visiting professor who taught the course seemed by contrast devoid of any passion. He told us that the only reason Ecclesiastes was included with the other books of the Old Testament was that its author was traditionally believed to be Solomon, although the messages in the text were incongruent with the rest of the Scriptures. Only decades later, when I looked up the professor, Nahum Sarna, did I learn that he was Jewish and Israeli as well as American, and a Zionist activist. His online biography at “TheTorah.com” states that Sarna “played a major role in training this generation of American Jewish Bible scholars,” but nothing in the course description informed us that we would be receiving a Jewish interpretation of what I was used to thinking of as the Christian Bible. Another course was “The Bible as Literature,” taught by English professor Dorothee Metlizki, whose teaching I found deeply impressive and moving. She described, for example, the exhaustion of the prophet Jonah in God’s pursuit of him. What I didn’t know, according to the online “Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women” is that “not for one minute did she forget that she was Jewish and an ardent Zionist… She liked to say that one could not separate one’s personal life from one’s scholarly work. That was certainly true about her.”

Thus, at Yale I was getting a Jewish education, whether or not I was aware of it. At some point, however, I noticed how many Jewish course offerings there were in the Religious Studies department, and it struck me that they might outnumber the Christian ones. I counted up the courses offered by the department, and found that indeed, Jewish courses outnumbered Christian ones, not including courses like Sarna’s or Metlizki’s, which I had wrongly assumed would be Christian. How odd, I thought, for a school founded by Christian clergymen, in a country where there were reportedly 40 times more Christians than Jews. One of the Christian-themed classes I took in the Religious Studies major was a seminar on Christian monasticism. We took one field trip as part of that class, to the Benedictine Abbey of Regina Laudis in Bethlehem, Connecticut, where we met an elderly nun named Mother Jerome, whom I still remember vividly. She had been born into an aristocratic German family and was living in Munich during World War Two when the city was bombed by British and American planes. Tens of thousands of civilians were killed and wounded, but what she described to us was the aftermath of their bombing the library. Walking out by the river afterwards, she saw thousands of pages of paper flying in the air, caught in tree branches, and falling into the river. I bought a book of her poems, Things That Surround Us.

There was only one required course in the Religious Studies major at that time, which focused on the works of important figures in Western intellectual and religious thought. Required reading included Erik Erikson’s Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History. Part of the thesis of Erikson’s book is that in his rebellion against the Catholic church, Martin Luther was acting on his feelings of rage towards his father. On reading the book, I reflected that even if such motivations explained some of Luther’s behavior, it seemed to fall into the realm of “necessary but not sufficient” when it came to explaining the most significant schism in the past thousand years of Christianity. I had assumed the author was Scandinavian, going from his name. I did not imagine that this was a taken name rather than an inherited one, or that the author was the illegitimate child of Karla Salomonsen, a Jewish woman estranged from her husband, who fled from Denmark to Germany upon realizing she was pregnant. During her son’s childhood, she told him that his stepfather was his real father, but later he learned the truth. His mother either did not know or chose never to reveal the identity of his real father. Wikipedia tells us that “he remained bitter about the deception all his life,” and coined the term “identity crisis,” likely in reference to himself. Understanding this aspect of the background of Erik Erikson suggests that Young Man Luther might in fact have more to do with “Young Man Salomonsen” than the former German monk who became the vessel, in this book, of the author’s bitterness and rage. Erikson taught at Yale, Harvard, and other prestigious universities although he had never earned a university degree himself.

Another book I read for our only required Religious Studies course was Sigmund Freud’s The Future of an Illusion, in which the Jewish author advances his famous atheism. As I recall, we were required to read and write an essay on a Sigmund Freud book of our choice, which was a challenge for me as I had already discovered something resembling an allergic reaction to Freud. I instinctively despised his obsession with deviant sex and lack of spirituality. When we were children, my brother had a book on interpreting dreams, which I consulted with excitement one day after remembering a dream about playing volleyball. According to the book, my dream was actually about sex. I found this preposterous and decided that whoever would declare such a thing not only didn’t know anything, but had a sick mind; further examination of the book revealed that it was based on the theories of Sigmund Freud. Thereafter, I made a point of avoiding reading about such theories and instead chose his book expounding upon his atheism, in part because I found it humorous. Although I was not practicing the faith of my baptism at this time or for many years to come, I found atheism ridiculous because it was so abundantly clear that the human mind was too limited in its capacity to understand the universe to declare that there could be no God. There were just too many things beyond our understanding, even for the smartest among us, for anyone to do so and be taken seriously, as far as I was concerned.

My Jewish friends didn’t really practice Judaism, of course, or they wouldn’t have been friends with a goy like me. That’s how I thought of my Catholicism at this point: an ethnic identity, but not a spiritual one. Instead, I loved “sitting zen” on Wednesday nights at the New Haven Zen Center, run by local residents, many of whom had ties to Yale. The head teacher, Aaron, was considered to have received “transmission” from the Korean Zen Master who had founded the school, which meant he was highly qualified as a teacher. Aaron was Jewish, middle-aged, and divorced, and the father of two boys who were something like eight and twelve. He struck me as very intelligent and sensitive but somewhat haunted and lonely, which I suspected had to do with his divorce. The zen group was a social one, and once Aaron, who I viewed as a father figure, and I had milkshakes and a long talk at a local diner. Soon after that, he visited the apartment I shared with two other students, bringing homemade rosehip jelly, but on this occasion, he made it clear he was interested in more than just a friendship, although he was more than twice my age. Shocked and saddened, I quit being a regular at the zen center in New Haven.

There were other zen centers, however. Over one Thanksgiving break, a Jewish friend from Yale, Dan, and I visited the Cambridge Zen Center, where students could stay overnight for free. There I picked up a copy of Ram Dass’ famous book, Be Here Now. Born to a wealthy Jewish American family, Richard Alpert took the name Ram Dass from his Indian “guru,” to whom he had been introduced by another American during a trip to India in 1967 after he had been fired from Harvard for giving psychedelic drugs to undergraduates. He was gay, but apparently celibate after finding his guru, who soon sent him back to America, and shortly thereafter passed away, according to Dass. Be Here Now was immensely appealing to me at the time due to what I saw as a sincere search for truth, many deep insights, and Dass’ wonderful, often self-depreciating humor. I was so ignorant of Christianity at that time that it did not occur to me that Dass’ stories of his guru, and particularly the “miracles” he experienced and witnessed, pale in comparison to the parables and miracles of Jesus. For example, Dass describes his “conversion” as occurring when the guru appeared to read his mind, telling him things about his own life that no stranger could possibly know, just as Jesus did with the Samaritan woman at the well, telling her that she had five husbands. The Samaritan woman knew that it would be impossible for Jesus to know such personal information about her if He were not the Messiah, and ran to tell everyone that the Messiah has come. Jesus left his Apostles, a Church with an enormous body of teachings, and Ram Dass left a multimillion-dollar foundation that disseminates “teachings of spiritual masters from various world religions,” including through expensive retreats.

“Love everyone and tell the truth,” Ram Dass tells us his guru told him. Jesus said as much, and much more, and as this is easier said than done, also provided us the means to do so through his Apostles and Church. With their appeal to seekers such as I considered myself then, the “various world religions” promoted by Jewish teachers such as Ram Dass, Sharon Salzberg and Pema Chodron pull their followers away from Christian teachings. All too often, they also take their students through pyramid schemes of endless paid retreats in the name of an elusive “enlightenment.” I remember being at one when another student asked a question, beginning, “Not to be a smart-ass, but…” The teacher interrupted him, joking, “What other kind of ass is there?” At which I immediately blurted out, “A dumb ass!” Everyone in the room burst out laughing, and I felt my cheeks turn bright red… the words just came out of my mouth. During my years at Yale and for many years afterward, however, zen practice held great interest for me. Alienated from my native faith, I remained ignorant of how lacking such teachings were in substance and depth compared to those of the Catholic Church, and that the focus was typically solipsism rather than charity.

Meanwhile, almost without exception, all my Yale student friends sooner or later became the victims of crimes – usually street muggings and robberies. Being a victim of crime in those days in New Haven was the rule rather than the exception. It was clear there was a problem here, and I felt called to address it in some way, both by trying to help people who were suffering and by trying to understand why it was this way. I started volunteering in a Friday night soup kitchen that was run by Jewish students at Yale’s “Kosher Kitchen.” I became such a regular that they invited me to join the leadership that alternated taking charge of serving meals to the needy on Friday nights. Around this time, however, I had a long conversation with a homeless man who told me that Saturdays were the hardest days because that was the only day of the week there was nowhere to get a free meal in New Haven. By the end of that conversation, I decided to find a way to make a Saturday soup kitchen. Starting and running this was one of my main occupations as an undergraduate, and through this work I got to know many of the regulars at the soup kitchen and their stories. I asked various churches to help through the use of their facilities, and Yale’s Saint Thomas More Center let us use their kitchen. To my surprise and delight, many of the poor and homeless people we served volunteered to help in various ways, from carrying food supplies to the kitchen to serving. They helped us create a fun and friendly atmosphere and we always had music, including live bands.

Shauna’s boyfriend was a student at Yale’s School of Art and among many people displaying their talents at one of the openings held at least once a semester, which I often attended with friends. Another who frequented these events was Harold, a local homeless man I knew from my soup kitchen work. A tall, distinguished-looking black man with glasses, Harold was said to have attended Brown before a descent into mental illness. I once happened to cross paths with him on the street where he was begging for food, having just exited the student dining hall with a fresh bagel wrapped in a napkin. I immediately offered it to him, and he took it, but then flew into a rage, pushing it back in my face as if he were wielding a gun. “What am I supposed to do with this?” He thundered. I avoided any engagement with him from then on, but at the art openings, he behaved like anyone else, milling around and gazing at the work on display, no doubt encouraged by the food and drink offered with them.

Another acquaintance I ran into at art openings was Josh, whom I knew as a resident at the New Haven Zen Center, which was a ten-minute walk away. At some point, however, Josh transferred his residence from the zen center to his art studio to save money. Josh’s thesis project featured a pile of crumpled clothes thrown into a bathtub with feet he had placed in his studio. That was it. Perhaps the clothes served as his mattress, I wondered, but what was the point of going to art school if this was all he had to say? This gaining admittance to an elite school only to make a grand gesture of contempt in many ways exemplified the atmosphere in general. Shauna’s boyfriend, Alex, fit into this mold too, although his efforts were more interesting. For his thesis project, Alex had made a full-body suit that looked like chain mail out of wood rather than metal. It was technically impressive, but there was a twist. Alex wore the suit at the opening, which covered one full side of his body, while the other side of his body was completely naked. He then walked around his studio slowly, like a robot, not making eye contact or engaging with anyone. My first reaction on seeing him was shock, and then laughter. What was he doing? He had technical talents to create a suit that were beyond most people, and used them to expose himself to both strangers and friends who had come to admire and support artists. But if this were a statement about the emperor’s new clothes, no one said so.

This particular opening also included work by my close friend Ann, a daughter of immigrants from Ireland who, like Alex, also had great technical skills and produced luminous photographs of the Irish countryside and villages where her relatives lived. Ann had filled her studio with a labyrinth or maze, such as that which a rat would have to go through in order to find a treat. Perhaps in solidarity with the hypothetical rat, I went through with a sense of anticipation… what would I find at the end? But the maze simply led in a convoluted circle, bringing those who entered back to the beginning with a sense of disappointment. I expressed my reaction to Ann, who burst into delighted laughter; apparently the point was to disappoint, like the bathtub full of old clothes, or a half-naked man wearing a wooden suit, much of the “art” on display was an aggressive display of nihilism and contempt for the audience. Ultimately, the art openings at Yale were consistent with the art around us.

Yale’s beautiful campus, designed in homage to famous British universities like Oxford and Cambridge, was quite literally littered with giant, ugly, inexplicable sculptures, as if a gang of childish giants above had cast their toys out of their sandbox to clatter to earth, damaged and dented, to lie among the elegant buildings erected centuries before. Sterling Library in particular had been built to resemble a cathedral. The counter where one checked out books stood in place of an altar. Here we could show our student cards to be admitted to the wonders of 14 floors of “the stacks” that rose above the main floor. I always felt awed to enter this building and spent countless hours, exploring one of the largest collections of books in the U.S., reading in the generous leather chairs. Those were some of the last years before the world of knowledge and books began to be transformed through electronic databases, although of course we didn’t know it yet. What I did know is that it was always worth the trip into the stacks to find the book that interested me, where I inevitably found it surrounded by others of interest as well. I never tired of the thrill of walking into the library and spending time there.

Late one night after I was walking home from the library, I had just walked into our apartment building entryway when I heard a banging behind me, just as I was putting my key in the lock to open the inner entrance doors. I turned, thinking someone was knocking on the door behind me to get my attention, but saw no one. I continued upstairs and found my roommates in the living room, looking out the windows onto the street from which I’d just stepped in. Someone had just driven to the pizza parlor a few doors down the street from us, stuck a gun out of the car window, fired multiple shots into the pizza parlor, and drove away. Presumably there was someone inside they wanted to “get.” Unfortunately, this sort of thing was very common. It mainly seemed to be gang-related, and since none of us were involved with these gangs, we were usually not targets unless we were in the wrong place at the wrong time, but this could potentially be anywhere, anytime, or anyone. I remember one news article about a woman bludgeoned to death in a nearby cemetery with a piece of a tombstone. Once a week, I volunteered with a Yale environmental education group at one of the inner-city elementary schools, and that week, one of my students was missing. I asked the teacher where he was and learned he was the son of the woman who was murdered. He had no relationship with his father and had been sent to another town to live with a relative. I never saw him again.

What I remember most about this group of school children was their intense adoration during the hour I spent with them each week, which was so extreme it was somewhat bewildering. If the day’s lesson involved drawing something and I showed them an example, they clamored over each other to imitate me. When I was their age, I remembered my own admiration of the local high school girls who sometimes rode on the school bus with us, longing to emulate them and wanting to grow up to be like them. The unconcealed adulation of the children of New Haven, however, formed almost a perfect mirror of the hatred we seemed to receive from the men on the streets in the neighborhoods surrounding Yale, many of whom who were perhaps just a decade older. It was almost as if there was some alchemy in the streets which transformed innocent adoration into terrifying rage. Thus, I wondered as I walked, ran, and cycled through the streets of New Haven whether there was any purpose – any redemption – to be found in being a sort of human sacrifice to the rage we encountered on a regular basis.

I gained a lot of experience being on the receiving end of this rage, as I ran 10-20 miles on a typical day. I had run every day of my life since I was 14, for the joy of running itself, for the exercise, and because my mind needed the time to reflect. In the process, I got to know the streets and neighborhoods of New Haven like the back of my hand, and also got to experience repeated episodes of men on the street trying to grab me, throwing rocks and padlocks at me, and screaming such things at me as, “you’re in the wrong neighborhood, b****!” when I was just a few blocks from campus. When a German friend visited and joined me in a long-distance run through the city, he remarked that he was surprised that the U.S. was still so segregated. Segregation was a word I associated with the Old South, but I realized he was right. Except for the students, who tried to live as close as possible to the university that had brought us here, the neighborhoods for miles around Yale in almost every direction were mainly or entirely black – like the streets between campus and the train station – and anyone who wasn’t immediately attracted attention. At the end of a 20-mile run, I was once chased along a footpath Yale students called the Ho Chi Minh trail by two black teenagers, one of whom wielded a torch and the other what looked like a broomstick. In the far corner of the lot, where they had apparently been burning a mattress, stood an enormous black man. I was exhausted but the adrenaline kicked in, as I knew if they caught me, I might not make it out alive. I took off as fast as my legs could carry me, and fortunately I was close enough to the safety of the street on the other side that I left both young men behind me.

We were told the crime rates in New Haven were worse before, but it was hard to imagine what “worse” was. As it turned out, we didn’t have to imagine. A few days after Valentine’s Day in 1991, a 19-year-old student named Christian Prince was walking home at night through the Yale campus, on what I considered one of the safest streets in the area, when he was shot dead on the steps of St. Mary’s Catholic Church. A tall, handsome Lacrosse player, Prince had been accosted by two black teenagers from a neighborhood close to campus who a few hours earlier had decided to rob “a cracker.” Threatened with a gun, Prince handed over his wallet, at which point the gunman reportedly announced to his accomplice, “I oughta kill this cracker,” and shot him in the heart. The two then fled, the gunman dropping his own wallet at the scene so that the murder was soon traced to him. I had never met Christian Prince and only can imagine the terrible shock and pain their son’s senseless, unprovoked murder must have caused his family. Prince’s father, grandfather, and great-grandfather had all attended Yale, but the Yale of our day had changed radically from the past, just as the city whose name meant “sanctuary” had been transformed into a death trap.

Prince had done nothing wrong, but if you read the news stories, they almost seemed to blame him for being murdered and those who loved him for the shock and grief of their reactions. The media used the incident to suggest that the “privilege” inherent in going to Yale in general, and Prince’s lineage in particular, had somehow forced his killer’s hand, when the reality was that an innocent young man had been randomly targeted by criminals for the thrill of committing a murder. It was as if the media was in favor of human sacrifice, but God hates human sacrifice. When both my father and that of Christian Prince had attended Yale decades earlier, the city was still beautiful and safe. The undergraduate students were all men. My father attended St. Thomas More, the Catholic church at Yale, and went to mixers with the local Catholic women’s college, Albertus Magnus, named after the mentor of Thomas Aquinas. I wondered how and why since then people had made such a hell of a place so many people wanted to be.

Being at Yale let me spend a significant amount of time with my grandparents, who lived outside Boston, for the first time in my life, as until now we had always lived 3,000 miles apart. Their being a few hours’ train ride from New Haven made them easy to visit when they invited me to come for weekends or holidays. By this time, I was so alienated from the faith of my baptism, however, that on one of my early visits, I had asked my grandfather if he was Catholic. He winced at the question, and immediately replied, “Of course! It’s the only real religion.” I was polite but secretly laughed at his declaration. How could that be true when all my life I’d been told otherwise by almost everyone around me? Unlike my parents, however, my grandparents attended Mass regularly, and when I visited, I went with them. On one such occasion, during the Lord’s prayer, my grandfather grabbed my hand with an intensity that startled me. I looked up at the priest at the altar, dressed in green, signifying ordinary time… but something extraordinary was starting in me. Witnessing the faith of someone so close to me was like a seed being planted. I was a Catholic at heart, although it would take decades for me to finally come back to the faith.

Yale was famous for its School of Drama and students put enormous energy into theatrical productions, often with impressive results. Although it didn’t occur to me in my student days, the hidden grammar of putting on a successful play or musical at Yale appeared to be that it either had to denigrate Christianity, glorify Judaism, or both. For example, Agnes of God by the Catholic playwright John Pielmeier, took its title from a play on words with Latin Agnus Dei, or Lamb of God, the title given to Jesus Christ in honor of his offering of himself in sacrifice to save mankind. The play was a fictionalized version of a real event that had taken place in Rochester, New York, in 1976, when a Catholic nun was found to have secretly given birth to a baby boy who was found suffocated to death in a trash can in her room. Following this discovery, the nun was put on trial and found not guilty, by reason of insanity, of all charges, including homicide, by a Jewish judge. In the play, Agnes’ pregnancy is compared to that of the Virgin Mary and Agnes’ conception to the Immaculate Conception. Such horrifying subversion of Catholic teachings was exactly the kind of thing that was celebrated in my time at Yale.

Rachel excitedly told me about another production, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, a satire by Tom Stoppard whose title is taken in reference to two minor characters in Shakespeare’s famous drama, Hamlet. In an online forum discussing the play, a reddit user asked “Does anyone else find the idea of two characters named ‘Rosencrantz’ and ‘Guildenstern’ being shifty, untrustworthy backstabbers a little bit antisemitic?” It didn’t occur to me at the time, but both Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are often considered Jewish names, with the German variants meaning “rosary” and “gold star” respectively. Stoppard was Jewish, but his name was taken from his British stepfather to replace his birth name, Sträussler. In an article for the online Jewish Journal entitled, “Out of the Jewish Closet,” Gershon Hepner wrote that the playwright “identified with Rosencrantz whose identity as Jew was cleverly concealed by him as by the Bard…”

[…] This is just an excerpt from the Feb 2024 Issue of Culture Wars magazine. To read the full article, please purchase a digital download of the magazine, or become a subscriber!