When Sherman began 8th grade in Los Angeles in the fall of 1936, his mother Rose had recently been married — for the fourth and last time — to a Jewish conman and gangster. I have his FBI file. It’s big. (Mostly he liked to burn down businesses, usually his own. But the file suggests that in later years he was connected to Mob infiltration of the Teamsters Union and, perhaps, the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa.)
Not surprisingly, the often married Rose Sherman and her criminal husband were not concerned about Jewish tradition. They were married by a Christian minister.
But some Jewish traditions die harder than others. Sherman went to school at John Burroughs Junior High School, which had a large Jewish student body. On September 24, 1936, at the time of the Rosh Hashana new year holiday, the student newspaper reported that 650 students, or 30 percent of the school, were absent the first day of the two-day religious holiday. Most returned to school on the second day. Unfortunately, it is impossible to know if Sherman was absent either day. Probably not.
Sherman’s family may not have lived as Jews, but they still lived among Jews. And it was this ethnic ingredient in Jewish identity that Sherman became famous for celebrating at precisely the moment in the early 1960s that Americans of various backgrounds began reclaiming their linguistic/national/culinary/folk traditions.
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