Art & Creativity Quote by Arthur Hertzberg

Hertzberg frames writing not as performance but as transmission: a private conversation cracked open just enough for the public to “listen in.” The line has the calm authority of someone who knows that identity doesn’t preserve itself. “Where they come from” is ancestry, yes, but also moral provenance - the accumulated choices, compromises, and arguments that become a family’s (and a people’s) usable past. As a theologian and a prominent Jewish public intellectual, Hertzberg is talking about memory the way religion often does: not nostalgia, but obligation.

The sly power sits in the phrase “what their grandparents were up to.” It’s colloquial, almost mischievous, refusing the marble-statue version of elders. He implies complexity: activism, mistakes, ideological fights, the messy business of living through history rather than being honored after it. That deflates sentimental genealogy and replaces it with narrative accountability.

Then comes the handoff. “I hope they will in their own way continue” is less inheritance than invitation. Continuity isn’t obedience; it’s adaptation. He’s acknowledging a modern reality that grandchildren won’t replicate their elders’ politics or piety, but they can extend the project: carrying forward a tradition of argument, learning, and communal responsibility.

The closing gesture - “I invite anyone else to listen in” - does double duty. It’s hospitable, but it also asserts that particular stories have public stakes. In the postwar American Jewish context Hertzberg inhabited, personal memory and collective history are intertwined; telling the family story becomes a way of resisting erasure, simplifying myth, and letting outsiders overhear how a community narrates itself from the inside.