And then there is the poignancy of Jewish legacy described in David Kuney’s evocative new memoir, On Rockingham Street: Our Journey from Vilna to the Suburban South.

Kuney, a DC lawyer who files amicus briefs for law professors and retired Judges with the Supreme Court, skillfully paints the circuitous path of his family’s meanderings from their we’re-Orthodox-because-everyone-is Orthodox roots in Vilna, to their somewhat deliberate shedding of the religious traditions by the time they get to Chicago, and finally to their partial return to Jewish communal life in Arlington, Virginia.

Read full review here

— The Jerusalem Times

“David Kuney’s memoir of his family’s journey offers a rich social history of the evolution of Jewish identity in America. The immigrant generation both runs away from its Jewish roots in its desire to acculturate, and yet still serves as the anchor for that very identity for their children and grandchildren. The memoir is deeply personal, but it also reflects a more universal theme: how American has made it possible for a myriad of cultural identities to emerge and flourish with a unique American twist”

— Rabbi Sid Schwarz, author of Jewish Megatrends: Charting the Course of the American Jewish Future

“What begins as an engaging memoir of Jewish immigrants arriving from Eastern Europe in the twentieth century, then becomes a probing account of the question of what it means to be Jewish in the America of the twenty-first century.”

— William Kristol, editor at large, The Bulwark

“This book is a very moving memoir of one family’s physical and spiritual hundred-year journey from Vilna to Chicago to Arlington, Virginia. But it is much more than that. On Rockingham Street tells the story of millions of American Jews who left their Judaism behind in Eastern Europe, their children who had a tenuous relationship with Judaism, and their grandchildren who have made a tremendous effort to reclaim their Jewish heritage.”

— Rabbi David Golinkin, President, The Schecter Institutes, Jerusalem

“Pirkei Avot teaches, ‘Turn [the Torah] and turn it, for everything is in it.’ A serious student of both Judaism and language, David Kuney applies this dictum to his family’s history, exploring the tensions between religion and secularism, particularism and assimilation, and being Jewish in a majority-Christian America. His family is at once representative and distinct, and his questions age old.”

— Rabbi Deborah Waxman, President, Reconstructing Judaism