To Life: Jews Explor­ing Nature offers a unique treat­ment of Jew­ish engage­ment with nature through eight chap­ter-long biogra­phies of nat­u­ral­ists who man­i­fest­ed dif­fer­ent aspects of their Jew­ish iden­ti­ties and made sig­nif­i­cant con­tri­bu­tions to their fields. As such, it spans two major realms that are rarely dealt with in the same book, Judaica and nat­ur­al his­to­ry. But this pair­ing of sub­jects also reflects my own life-long iden­ti­ty — Jew­ish by birth and a pas­sion for ani­mals and nat­ur­al his­to­ry acquired a few years lat­er. Nei­ther of my par­ents went to col­lege, but hav­ing lived through the Great Depres­sion, and expe­ri­enc­ing depri­va­tion, they were total­ly com­mit­ted to ensur­ing that nei­ther my sis­ter nor I were ever want­i­ng, and that includ­ed total sup­port of our interests.

For the first twelve years of my life we lived in Skok­ie (an area that had a large Jew­ish pop­u­la­tion at the time) and then we moved to Mount Prospect, Illi­nois (where Jews were quite rare). The Chica­go area is rich in venues that nur­ture a love of ani­mals and nature. One cold Sun­day morn­ing in Jan­u­ary when I was in fourth grade, I read an account of wolver­ines, the largest of the weasels which can sup­pos­ed­ly dri­ve griz­zly bears from their vict­uals. This left me very much want­i­ng to see one. My father oblig­ed and we drove to a near­ly emp­ty Brook­field Zoo where my wish was ful­filled. A peri­od of but­ter­fly col­lect­ing led my dad to con­tact the direc­tor of the Chica­go Acad­e­my of Sci­ences (now the Peg­gy Note­baert Muse­um) who met with us and gift­ed me a but­ter­fly net which I still have. And my moth­er took me on numer­ous bird­ing trips through­out the region and beyond.

Our fam­i­ly was not par­tic­u­lar­ly reli­gious­ly obser­vant, although my father attend­ed High Hol­i­day ser­vices at var­i­ous tem­ples, with me usu­al­ly accom­pa­ny­ing him. His eldest sis­ter reg­u­lar­ly host­ed a seder at which we were fre­quent par­tic­i­pants. My spouse and I belong to one of the two tem­ples in our home coun­ty of DuPage. Judaica from the begin­ning formed a cen­ter piece of this book and I had con­sid­ered myself knowl­edge­able about sec­u­lar mod­ern Jew­ish his­to­ry, but through my research for this new book I have learned a lot about the the­o­log­i­cal and philo­soph­i­cal writ­ings that pro­vide the foun­da­tions for Jew­ish thought and practices.

All of my books take a long time from con­cep­tion to pub­li­ca­tion. The prepa­ra­tion of this one com­menced in 2016. Dur­ing that peri­od events and encoun­ters occurred that added even more per­son­al con­nec­tions to the project. One slow day at the Fort Sheri­dan Hawk Watch, I had a sub­stan­tial con­ver­sa­tion with a fel­low bird­er. We forged a friend­ship and sub­se­quent­ly I often joined his bird­ing crew, which con­sist­ed of obser­vant Jews. One enthu­si­as­tic par­tic­i­pant was high school stu­dent Yonatan Simkovich with whom I bird­ed on occa­sion, out­ings where he saw a num­ber of species that were new to him. His moth­er, Mal­ka, is an esteemed schol­ar of Jew­ish thought and his­to­ry who aid­ed my book project on sev­er­al fronts for she believes that any­one help­ing any of her chil­dren in their pur­suits is wor­thy of her time and effort.

In Jan­u­ary 2019, I was one of the keynote speak­ers at the Wings Over Win­ter bird­ing fes­ti­val in Paris, Ten­nessee locat­ed in the far north­west­ern cor­ner of the state. While rid­ing in the van dur­ing one of the field trips, I chat­ted with some fel­low bird­ers. Through our con­ver­sa­tion, I learned that one was Pamela Bar­mash, an ordained Con­ser­v­a­tive rab­bi and a pro­fes­sor of Jew­ish stud­ies. She and I have become friends, col­lab­o­rat­ing on field trips while she has shared her exper­tise when I had ques­tions relat­ed to my research.

And then there were the road trips east in search of infor­ma­tion. The late David Burg and his wife Jean gen­er­ous­ly put me up for five nights in their home over­look­ing the Hud­son Riv­er, which was an easy walk to the bus that took me to the Amer­i­can Muse­um of Nat­ur­al His­to­ry where Lib­bie Hyman (an Amer­i­can Zool­o­gist) did much of her work. When I called Harvard’s Muse­um of Com­par­a­tive Zool­o­gy, where the arach­nol­o­gist Herb Levi spent most of his career, I was told to reach out to his daugh­ter Fran­cis. She and her spouse host­ed me at the fam­i­ly home where she grew up in Pep­perell, Mass­a­chu­setts on sev­er­al occa­sions. As I spent three days going through Andrew Spielman’s papers housed at the Cen­ter for the His­to­ry of Med­i­cine at the Count­way Library in Boston, I received an email telling me that a long­time bird­ing friend and men­tor had passed. I sat there motion­less with a look that prompt­ed con­cern by one of the librar­i­ans who asked if I was all right. This ges­ture of kind­ness meant a great deal to me in this dif­fi­cult moment and made it eas­i­er to get back to the task at hand.

One of the most unusu­al of my sub­jects is Philip Her­shkovitz, who left grad­u­ate school in 1933 to live in Ecuador where it was cheap­er and where he could pur­sue his life­long fas­ci­na­tion with Neotrop­i­cal mam­mals. He was dis­cour­aged from going as he could not speak or read Span­ish, knew no one, and had very lit­tle mon­ey. He stayed for almost four years, wan­der­ing the jun­gle bare­foot and shirt­less col­lect­ing spec­i­mens with a blow­gun. This sin­gle-mind­ed­ness and inde­pen­dence marked much of his career. His youngest son Mark explains it this way: “[I]t under­scores the sin­gu­lar­i­ty of my father’s per­sona and tra­jec­to­ry. There are some tra­jec­to­ries that for Jews have been well paved. Nat­ur­al his­to­ry is not one of them. It takes great for­ti­tude and deter­mi­na­tion to clear a new path in a dense wilder­ness.” The ranks of Jew­ish nat­u­ral­ist have grown sub­stan­tial­ly over the inter­ven­ing decades, so in some respects this book takes a his­tor­i­cal per­spec­tive. But oth­er groups remain strong­ly under­rep­re­sent­ed, empha­siz­ing the need to make an appre­ci­a­tion of nat­ur­al his­to­ry open to everyone.