Am I a Jew?: My Journey Among the Believers and Pretenders, the Lapsed and the Lost, in Search of Faith (Not Necessarily My Own), My Roots, and Who Knows, Even Myself

“I was nine years old when my mother forced me to convert to Christianity….”

When Theodore Ross moved from New York City to small-town Mississippi, his mother insisted that the family pretend to not be Jewish. He was sent to an Episcopal school, where he studied the Bible, sang in the choir, and even took communion. As an adult, he abandoned the religious charade, but wondered: Am I a Jew? In search of an answer, Ross immersed himself within communities on the fringes of Jewish identity—“Cr...