72 Miles til Kentucky

Every interfaith family has at least two sides to its story. Mine features a poor white boy who was the odd duck in his devout Baptist family, and a Detroit Yankee who was raised in a tight-knit Jewish community until she rebelled and ran away to Kentucky.


This episode also introduces the second of three families featured in 72 Miles, one that’s make-believe. Conjured from the imagination of I.J. Schwartz in an epic ...

My family has a motto, “We are making memories.” It’s a motto that’s led us through life’s more chaotic moments. The secret to making memories, of course, is how you tell the story. And in my family we strive to tell, and retell, really good stories.  And we’re not the only ones. Storytelling is a southern folk tradition, and I come from a long line of master storytellers, a tradition I’m proud to carry on, because some stories jus...

My family moved to Bowling Green in 1987, but we weren’t the first Jews to live there, far from it. Jews had been settling in Bowling Green for over 150 years, drawn by economic prosperity. Jewish merchants helped open up the American frontier, wherever they could a  stream or railroad to follow. They learned to adapt their faith and traditions to a new place, one where there wasn’t a Jewish community to rely on. And when their chi...

My parents met at Walnut Street Baptist Church in 1979. My father was there for services, at his mother's request. My mother was there working, as a sign language interpreter. They were married not long after in a different Baptist church, by a group of friends, using an interfaith wedding ceremony they wrote themselves. 

As a young couple, my parents found their a home at Central Presbyterian Church, in downtown Loui...

My family moved to Bowling Green in 1989. My brother was turning six, and I was turning three. We rented a house in the country for a few months, then bought the red-brick home on Garrett Drive where we lived for 16 years. We joined the local Presbyterian Church, but didn’t quite fit in. It was too conservative, or maybe we were too liberal. My parents struggled to make friends, and my brother and I hated Sunday School. All of whic...

My mother passed away on September 14, 2021 after a years-long battle with cancer that cost her control of the left side of her face. We had been recording for just over a year, but there was still so much more she wanted to say. After she died, I went through her journals, to learn the perspectives that she was hesitant to share with me even at the end of her life. My father contributed by archiving the family VHS tapes my mother ...

From Sunday School in Nashville to Sunday dinner at Granny's, my family bushogged our way towards a cohesive religious identity. Even as my mother was returning to the faith of her childhood, my father was moving further away from his, and towards an unlikely home — The American Society of Friends.

Introducing a third faith in our household seemed to solidify our identity, rather than shatter it, and my brother and I...

When you’re Jewish, it seems like the holidays are always around the corner, and there always seems to be some sort of competition. Whether it’s the High Holidays just as school gets into full swing, or how Chanukah and Passover often, but confusingly not always, overlap with Christmas and Easter. There’s a lot of explaining to do, and partnerships to be built. 

That’s what led my mother into my elementary school classroom...