A new episode of Michael D. Nolan’s Brooklyn Memoir, The actual name of his memoir is Proximity: What can happen when we live, work and love close together.

Back in my Brooklyn boyhood, there were two readily acceptable answers to the question, "What are you?" You were either Jewish or Catholic. We didn’t know what Protestants were. Over time, I would learn to respond to the question with "Ethical Culture," to the perplexed looks of my punchball buddies in the PS 99 schoolyard. They already knew there was something a bit different about me, since I went to school on both the Jewish and Catholic holidays.

Ethical Culture was founded in New York City in the late 19th century by a renegade rabbi named Felix Adler. It was non-theological in nature and emphasized the Golden Rule and common ethical teachings of all great religions. The founders were active in the establishment of various settlement houses on the Lower East Side which helped waves of immigrants who flooded New York.

My brother, sister, and I religiously attended the Sunday School of the Brooklyn Society for Ethical Culture at the corner of Prospect Park West and 1st Street. After we were dropped off, Mom and Dad attended the weekly service or "Meeting" right next door which featured a lecture by a "Leader" as the Ethical Culture ministers were called.

My radical politics were born of this experience. The Sunday School classes consisted of songs and stories which emphasized world brotherhood and interracialism. [Ask me to sing – "If there were no poor and the rich were content, if each of us knew what true brotherhood meant, it would be a wonderful, wonderful world."] We frequently went on field trips to visit the services of other religions. In high school, I became active in NEYO, the National Ethical Youth Organization, which included hotbeds of bohemianism, discussion groups, and folk dancing at the Brooklyn Society or the larger group at the New York Society at 2 West 64th Street in Manhattan. I was elected president of NEYO in the late 50s.

My mentor during these days was Eddie Gottlieb, the Sunday School principal. Eddie was a socialist and a pacifist, active in the Socialist Party USA (the Norman Thomas wing) and the War Resisters League. I began a life of demonstrating before I was in high school. I paraded for peace down Broadway alongside Pete Seeger on banjo. I marched with CORE, the Congress for Racial Equality, in Harlem. I stood in City Hall Park in defiance of Civil Defense air raid requirements. While at Midwood High School, I organized two busloads of students to attend the Youth March for Integrated Schools in Washington in 1957-58 in the wake of the Supreme Court desegregation decision of 5.5.54. In 1963, I worked with Bayard Rustin (a Socialist and pacifist comrade of Eddie’s) in bringing demonstrators to the historic March for Jobs and Freedom where ML King gave his memorable "Dream" speech. Twice, I brought Norman Thomas to my high school. The second time, they shut down classes and beckoned all students to an assembly to hear him speak.

In all of this I was probably fulfilling more of my Mom’s liberal Jewish heritage than my Dad’s moderate, apolitical Irish Catholic values. It was my Mom I went to to ask permission to break the law in the Civil Defense demonstration. She gave it. She was an activist, frequently subject to righteous indignation about one topic or another. On more than one occasion, I’d hear my Dad tell my Mom, "Lena, don’t get involved."

But I knew I didn’t completely belong in that world of New York liberalism and found balance in baseball, touch football, and hanging out with my Italian buddies. I played centerfield for the Avenue J Spartans in the Parade Ground League. We were invariably in next-to-last place in league standings. The Cadets dominated first place and featured a husky catcher named Joe Torre.