But Bloom de-emphasized his reactions to his own encounters with the town's Christian residents and the Chasidic Jews. So the Jewish professor of journalism at the University of Iowa, reworked it. It was featured as a Book of the Month Club selection in the United States. But Bloom created something more. By weaving his own personal journey into the book, he created a classic tale of a struggle for an American Jewish identity, updated for the 21st century.
Bloom is the son Jewish parents want their daughter to bring home.
Handsome, with dark curly hair, he's both thoughtful and forceful in conversation. He was an award-winning journalist who worked for several major newspapers before he uprooted his wife and young son to Iowa City, where he took a job at the university there. A complex move for someone who grew up near New York and was accustomed to liberal, cosmopolitan San Francisco, the migration was made all the more difficult by the monolithic Christian culture he discovered in Iowa. Other than being offensive and irrelevant to non-Christians, the headline broke all the rules of news judgment that I preached to my students. The event was neither breaking news nor could it be corroborated by two independent sources.