I grew up in a small town in Northern Wisconsin in the 1970s. The measure of diversity was the occasional Minnesota Vikings enthusiast who bucked the tide of the Green Bay Packers’ Cheesehead fanatics.
But in that bastion of homogeneity, my parents managed to raise me with wide citizenships. My parents met in the Teacher Corps in Kentucky in 1968, my father hailing from affluent, Jewish Long Island and my mother from a working-class town of 200 in Protestant Northern Minnesota.
Embracing difference was hard-wired into their relationship, something they modeled again and again: My father cast a Black girl in the role of Don Quixote in the school’s production of “Man of La Mancha”—not a popular move in Bowling Green, Kentucky, in 1970.
I spent many weekends in Superior, Wisconsin, cleaning, painting, and doing repairs at the homes of people living with severe physical and mental disabilities, the preservation of whose dignity and the beauty of whose living spaces were of paramount concern to both my parents.
And when, now in St. Paul in the mid-1980s, our rabbi was fired by our synagogue after coming out, my parents banded together with a handful of other families to launch a new congregation with her as its rabbi, the first mainstream synagogue in America with an out lesbian rabbi.
Throughout my childhood, my parents instilled in me a commitment to valuing and respecting difference, but it was the showing—far more than the telling—that’s been their enduring gift.
Aaron Dorfman is the President of the Lippman Kanfer Foundation and doing his best to raise three fierce loving daughters and run 15 miles a week. www.lkflt.org
