She didn’t know the recipe’s Jewish past until adulthood though. “I think it was served ironically on Christmas morning,” adds Lindsay. It’s a recipe Lindsay’s mother had as a child and one she made for Lindsay on special occasions. On the family recipe card, “it says, ‘add the streusel from the Settlement Cookbook,’” Lindsay explains, referring to the iconic Jewish cookbook. There is brisket that was served on Eastern, “noodles Antin,” which Lindsay later discovered is a riff on dairy kugel, and coffee kuchen, a German-style coffee cake. Still, there were Jewish recipes that remained in the family through the generations. “My mom always jokes it was because the cookies were better.” “When they decided, they all chose the Episcopal church,” says Lindsay. They went to church and to synagogue and were given a choice of which religion to adopt. He and Joann decided to raise their children with both traditions. Many of the family friends were Jewish and Lindsay still recalls seeing tattooed numbers on the arms of a couple of their friends who had survived the Holocaust. That journey continued when he returned home from the war with James becoming deeply involved in the church, but, “that didn’t extend to his social life at all,” says Lindsay. He also “befriended an Episcopal priest and started exploring Christianity,” says Lindsay. In the 1930s, as a Jewish student at Amherst College in Massachusetts, James experienced anti-semitism first hand. In their new home, a relative became an abolitionist while another “started the Reformed movement in Chicago and founded Chicago Sinai in 1861,” explains Lindsay.
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Both James and Joann were raised in German Jewish families, whose relatives emigrated from Bavaria and Heidelberg in the mid-nineteenth century. The war and the years leading up to it were a turning point for the family.