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July 1, 2021

How an English Jew Grew Up to Consider Himself an American at Heart

A boy, his grandfather, and the Statue of Liberty.

When Roger Bennett’s great-grandfather left the Ukrainian mega-shtetl of Berdichev, he had planned to make his way to Chicago, where he hoped to ply his trade as a kosher butcher in a thriving city with a sizeable Jewish community. But as fate would have it, he instead settled in Liverpool, a city long past its Industrial Revolution-era boom years—a story not unlike those told by many Liverpudlian Jewish families. Bennett describes how that family history shaped his conviction that he was “born an American trapped in an Englishman’s body” in 1970, after his family had reached the middle class:

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