A couple of weeks ago, waiting to board our plane at LAX, my husband is approached by two bearded Orthodox Jewish men, a father and son. “Are you Jewish?” asks the son. In the traditional black coats and hats, full-bearded and smiling, they believe they’ve stumbled on a landsman (loosely defined as a fellow Jew).

My husband, gracious and good-spirited, tells them, yes, he is indeed a Jew. At which point they try to coax him into a midday prayer ritual. He shakes his head, thanks but no thanks. They’re persistent but also know when it’s time to let it go. The Chabad sect of Judaism works hard at bringing less observant Jews back into the fold.

Years back, a single woman living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, a Jewish man, also of the Orthodox persuasion, approaches me on the street, asks for directions. A simple request, a helpful answer, and I’m handed a $20 bill by this stranger.

I can’t take this, I tell him. You helped me, he insists. This is just a way of saying thank you. And there is no way I can get him to change his mind. Not a huge amount of money but enough to make me think about how I would spend it. A few days later, I would find myself at a street fair. An etching caught my eye. It cost $20.

Memory compresses time. That brief encounter would evolve into a correspondence that spanned 1978–1984. He is a rabbi, I learn, living in Belgium. His letters, intermittent, fill me in on his activities aiding Jewish families in need. He loves visiting Israel, runs a school there. He sends presents, promises to give me the information I want about Beruria, a female Talmudic sage.

A friend thinks he wants to marry me. No way. On a scale of observance compared to his, I’m practically a shiksa (i.e., a gentile). Nothing in his letters suggest he wants to pull me into a more observant life as a Jew. I take his use of the word ‘love’ in his sign-off in a spiritual, not personal, context.

Within that same time frame I would come across an article about a Jewish man named Leo Frank, convicted for the rape and murder of a white teenager, Mary Phagan, who worked at the pencil factory he managed in Atlanta. This was 1913, and the perception of Leo Frank — a Northerner, an industrialist, and Jew — made him something of an alien in a Southern milieu resistant to change. Unfamiliarity only managed to breed contempt for a man of the Jewish faith. . . .

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