While I was cooking our seder meal I heard an essayist on NPR by the name of Laurel Snyder talking about being half-Jewish. It was interesting and the name sounded familiar to me. Laurel Snyder, Laurel Snyder. I said the name to myself. Now I know why that name sounds so familiar. She’s JewishyIrishy, a blogger I discovered through 32 Poems. Anyway, I feel like I know her and am glad to see she’s got a book out called HALF LIFE: Jew-ish Tales from Almost, Not Quite, and In-Between. Here’s the synopsis from good old Powells.

"This anthology of 18 essays takes for granted that Jews will intermarry, and that the children of intermarriages will be ‘halfs,’ or half-Jews. Being a half, says Snyder, is not second best; it is not a pale imitation of being really Jewish. Rather, ‘half’ is an interesting, incorrigible, perplexing and profound moniker in its own right, a label that somehow captures the existential angst that all people experience. Read cover to cover, the anthology begins to feel suffocating in its predictability — smart folks reflecting smartly about their struggles with identity. But many of the individual essays are engaging, funny and provocative. Dena Katzen Seidel describes, in a strikingly detached tone, the emotional abuses doled out by her flaky mother, a Christian Scientist. Novelist Thisbe Nissen explains that every New Yorker is a little bit Jewish, while Rene Kaplan observes that the only deal her mismatched parents ever made and kept was the agreement to raise the kids Jewish. ‘My half-Jewishness is a memento of that short-lived moment of concord between the two,’ she muses with a touch of melancholy. Half-Jews will see themselves and their families in this book, and they will laugh, and maybe even cry, while reading. (Apr.)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)