Sammy Davis Jr's Menorah: The Changing Basis of Belonging in American Jewry

For most of American Jewish history, it has been a given that Jewish identity is a product both of Jewish parentage and Jewish ethnicity. In an era of rising multi-culturalism and greater personal choice in religious affiliation, however, the mode of belonging of the Jewish people now has less to do with a Jewish mother, bagels, and Yiddish jokes and more to do with religious observance and commitment. // Samuel G. Freedman is an award-winning author, columnist, and professor. A columnist for The New York Times and a professor at Columbia University, he is the author of the six acclaimed books, most recently Who She Was: My Search for My Mother's Life (2005) and Letters To A Young Journalist (2006). His previous books are Small Victories: The Real World of a Teacher, Her Students and Their High School (1990); Upon This Rock: The Miracles of a Black Church (1993); and The Inheritance: How Three Families and America Moved from Roosevelt to Reagan and Beyond (1996) and Jew vs. Jew: The Struggle for the Soul of American Jewry (2000). Freedman is currently at work on his seventh book, The Big Game: Football and Freedom in the Civil Rights South. A tenured professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, Freedman was named the nation's outstanding journalism educator in 1997 by the Society of Professional Journalists. His class in book-writing has developed nearly 50 authors, editors, and agents, and it has been featured in Publishers Weekly and the Christian Science Monitor. He is a board member of the Institute for American Values and the Jewish Book Council. He has spoken at the Smithsonian Institution, Yale University, and UCLA, among other venues, and has appeared on National Public Radio, CNN, and the News Hour with Jim Lehrer.