Keith and Cindy Hamada: An oral history of a Jewish-American marriage - New York NY
With the new school year about to commence many New York area Jewish parents will have to find a way to fund their children’s day school tuitions. In my June 10, 2010 post I shared my interview with Mindi Wernick and Malkie Grozalsky in which they speak of having made financial sacrifices to send their children to a Jewish school. In my interview with Nassau County residents Keith and Cindy Hamada, Keith speaks of day school tuition as a form of birth control that limits the sizes of Jewish families.
Although Keith and Cindy belong to an Orthodox synagogue and my wife Shoshana and I belong to a Conservative congregation, I was struck by how similar our levels of observance are, which teaches us that labels don’t tell the whole story.
I interviewed the Hamadas at their Nassau County home two years and ten months ago. As in the Wernick/Grozalsky interview and the Simon interview that appeared in this column on July 2, 2010, to make the interview read like a dialogue I have edited out my questions; for clarity the interview subjects sometimes rephrase a question as a statement, and where this occurs it indicates a change of subject. I began the interview by asking how they met.
