An Orphan in History: Retrieving a Jewish Legacy

In the spring of 1961, I flunked an exam that would have enabled me to write an honors thesis. In reality, it was a minor failure—I was spending most of my time at the Crimson building, where I was the editor of a weekly magazine—but I felt as if I’d been excommunicated from Harvard, my secular church. But I also had the strangely exhilarated…