I have a letter that my father wrote to the rabbi at Temple Sinai in New Orleans, where he was a third-generation member, 60 years ago. We were part of the local Jewish establishment; our family had arrived in Louisiana from Germany back in 1836. I was 12, the age when Jewish boys would typically be preparing for a bar mitzvah.
My father was upset about a national publication for Jewish children, called World Over, that I had brought home from the temple’s Sunday school. He had two objections: First, World Over was “pretty strong Zionist or Israeli propaganda,” and second, it contained “open criticism of American policy in Vietnam.”
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