WASHINGTON (DC)
Washingtonian
By Harry Jaffe | January 3, 2016
Bethany Murphy grew up in a trailer park outside Rochester, New York.
Her father was Jewish, her mother Catholic. When they divorced, they gave her a choice between the two faiths.
“The Jesus statues creeped me out,” Murphy says. “And the story about Jesus being reborn didn’t seem plausible.”
Her mother—the gentile—explained that Jews were “people of the book.” Bethany, then seven, loved books. “I was sold,” she says. She later read My Name Is Asher Lev and The Chosen. “From then on, I was a Jew.”
Often, she was the only Jew. She recalls kids throwing quarters at her on the school bus. One day, a girl said, “Hitler didn’t finish his job.” Bethany spat in her face.
Her mother did the job of teaching her about Judaism. It took. At Rutgers, Bethany minored in Jewish studies. Many of her friends were Orthodox, the most observant Jews.
But Jewish pedigree is matrilineal. Membership in the “tribe” is passed down through the mother. Because Bethany’s last name was Murphy, everyone figured she had taken her father’s name and her mother was Jewish. In fact, it was the other way around.
It wasn’t until Bethany traveled to Israel that it hit home. Sure, she tried to follow kosher dietary laws and observe the Sabbath, and she could speak some Hebrew. But to be considered a Jew, she’d have to convert.
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