By GARY ROSENBLATT September 4, 2019, 9:18 am
Sarah Hurwitz, who says she was “kind of done with Judaism” after her Reform bat mitzvah at the age of 13, acknowledges that five years ago, if she had seen a book called “Here All Along: Finding Meaning, Spirituality, and a Deeper Connection to Life – in Judaism (After Finally Choosing to Look There)” on the shelf in her neighborhood Washington, D.C., bookstore, she would have doubtless passed it by “if it was written by a rabbi or professor.
“But if I had seen that it was written by a political speechwriter, I probably would have been intrigued, and read it,” she told me the other day. And Hurwitz, who spent eight years in the Obama White House writing speeches for the president and first lady, is hoping that Jews like her, who grew up with limited knowledge of and engagement in Judaism, might do the same. That’s why she spent the last several years writing that very book (title above), available in bookstores this week from Random House.