A Beginner’s Guide to Race Relations In America

From about the time I taught myself to crap in the pot until I was almost twelve years old my family lived in a tract home in a raw housing development that had been planted haphazardly in what my father told me had once been farms and meadows near the Hog River in Hartford, Connecticut. The houses were all nearly identical: mean, newly-built three bedroom “ranch type” rat traps set on bald, quarter acre lots on treeless streets. The development was populated almost entirely by Jews. Some were like my family, second or third generation American Jews, the fathers a few years…