Perhaps that’s an inappropriate headline. It seems that Mr. Hitchens, an avowed atheist perhaps best known for his book “God is Not Great,” is already on our side. It seems that he discovered he was Jewish when he was 38 years old, as The Guardian explains:
It happened when his brother Peter took his new bride to meet their maternal grandmother, Dodo, who was then in her nineties, and Dodo said, ‘She’s Jewish, isn’t she?’ and then announced: ‘Well, I’ve got something to tell you. So are you.’ She said that her real surname was Levin, not Lynn, and that her ancestors were Blumenthals from Poland.
Christopher was thrilled when Peter told him. By then he was living in Washington and most of his friends were Jewish. Moreover, he felt that he had somehow known all along. He remembers an odd dream in which he was on the deck of a ship and a group of men approached him and said they needed a 10th man to make up a minyan (Jewish prayer group) and he calmly strolled across the deck and joined them. them. He insists that he is Jewish…
We can’t help but wonder what Freud (also Jewish) would make of Mr. Hitchen’s dream. And we fervently hope that Hitchens will one day come to praise G-d not just in dreams, but also during his waking hours.