Ellen Ungerman
Sherry Zander was born in Milwaukee in 1952 and raised in the North Shore suburb of Fox Point, the middle of three sisters. Her family were entirely Ashkenazi Jews whose forebears came from Russia, Ukraine, and Poland, arriving in the United States between the 1890s and the early 1900s and settling in Milwaukee. Her paternal grandfather, Harry Levine, for whom she is named, came from a town in what is now Ukraine, and the family name Leuwenauer was changed to Levine. Her parents, Lois Groden Levine and Edward Levine, both born in Milwaukee, married in 1948. Sherry received what she describes as a superb public school education at Bayside School and Nicolet High School.
She earned a bachelor's degree in art education from the University of Wisconsin in Madison in 1974 and pursued graduate study at Iowa State University before returning to Milwaukee. There she taught children's and adult classes at the Milwaukee Art Museum, worked in nonprofit fundraising for organizations such as the MS Society and the Wisconsin Society to Prevent Blindness, and spent about eleven years in the radio business, including a for-profit classical station. Raised in a Reform congregation, Temple Sinai, she attended Sunday school and was confirmed, and participated in BBG and BBYO as a teenager. She moved to Dallas in March 1984 and took a sales position at radio station KRLD.
In Dallas, Sherry found the established Jewish community less welcoming than she had hoped, so she created her own family of friends and hosted her own Passover seders, opening her home to newcomers. She married Ron Zander, a New Orleans native with Wisconsin family ties, when they were in their thirties, and helped bring him into Jewish life. The couple adopted two daughters, Rosie and Heather. Over nearly four decades she pursued an informal but deep Jewish education, including years of Talmud study at Temple Emanu-El. She became a researcher and speaker on small-town American synagogues, held a fellowship at the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati, and remains proud of the life and choices she has made.
Full Transcript
today is tuesday april 19th 2022 and i'm joe reingold and i'm here with sherry zander for an interview today hello sherry i hope you're feeling better i know you've had a series of things going on there operation and we're we're happy you're here with us today um first of all tell us a little bit about your past your family your grandparents your parents where they were from whatever you know about them where they lived what they did for a living etc brought up until the time when you were born oh okay that's a lot whatever you want to tell about that's okay um my parents
my gran my my family are 100 ashkenazi jews and my um two of my grandparents came from russia and one came from what is now ukraine and my uh my maternal excuse me paternal grandfather harry levine for whom i'm named came from a town in what is now ukraine but was part of the austria austria-hungarian empire at the time his family came they all came in the um early to mid 1890s first to new york and then on to milwaukee which is where i am from my other grandmother came from an area of poland which i don't know what it was at the time and
and it was ada levine ada fink levine and um they probably came to the united states about 1905 1906. she was actually she would tell people she was from england because she had lived there from the age of about two until she was 14 and she had a wonderful british accent that served her well the rest of her life but um so they all um they came from the eastern europe and all settled in milwaukee um they were very very very poor uh typical jewish story and uh i had uh what would be a a great great uncle um [Music] a brother of a great great grandmother i have um had who first had a my understanding is a delicatessen in milwaukee era and sold
sundries and um uh so anyway my my family on my father's side are the levins it was actually leuven hour l-e-u-w-e-n-a-u-e-r with an umlaut which they changed to levine l e capital v i n e and my my mother's parents uh they're the ones that both came from russia my grandfather william grodin was the oldest of what was originally 13 children four died and they there was a 25 year age range from start to finish with the kids um but he was the oldest and my grandmother was rose lebarsky who came here at about a year old so that would have been earlier 1890s anyway
they all ended up in milwaukee i do not know how the grodens and lebarsky's wound up there but i had huge huge huge family when i was growing up and now there's everybody has moved this way in that way anyway they all lived there all my life my parents were both born there my parents are lois grodin levine and my father was he's deceased edward levine they again they're a typical i think in many ways first generation story um because they grew up comfortable well off particularly my father's family and they lived in the suburbs along lake michigan in shorewood and whitefish bay and they
had wonderful lives and my parents got married in 1948 um they had met at like a high school fraternity sorority party my father was a couple years older my mother was born lois groden in 1927 and my father was born in edward levine in 1925 again both in milwaukee i was born in 1952 in milwaukee um and grew up again on the east side suburbs in what's called the north shore of milwaukee in fox point um i have two sisters um i always say we're all the same age because there's three years and eight months from start to finish but i have a sister susan
who lives in milwaukee and is married and i have a a sister robin who lives in minneapolis and we are currently i'm in the middle and we are currently 67 69 and 71. and i'm not sure where to go with this but there's so much to say yeah right whatever you want um tell us a little bit about your uh childhood what it was like um elementary school high school and then past high school what you did after that okay um i went to bayside school whenever i tell people about my education they say oh you went to all private schools i went to no private schools ever not even for not for college not for anything but i got what was a superb education it was absolutely prep school education it was but it was the public school
in the area where i lived and um i went there it was we had two years of kindergarten and it went all the way through eighth grade back then so i was at the same school for 10 years which is another reason why people think oh i must have gone to private school but that's just the way the system was and um my sisters did the same and it was just outstanding education um and i'm going to throw in a couple of things here i didn't know how good it was i knew it was good but i i think until i arrived in texas i
didn't realize how superior my education was because i constantly to this day make references to things and people say didn't i say didn't you learn that in school and they go no and i always say oh we learned that we learned that in elementary school of course elementary went through eighth grade or oh gee i learned that in school growing up and as an example something like 95 percent of my graduating class from high school went to college it was absolutely geared to that and they went to great colleges great schools we had a lot of people who went to harvard and yale you know
the ivs and so forth um but things like they wanted us to be completely prepared for life they wanted us to be able to to not only know a lot but be able to do a lot so an example is from fifth grade to eighth grade we all had all of the girls had um and remember this would have been in the in the six early 60s all of the girls had uh what we called home economics twice or three times a week alternating with art or music or whatever these were not choices we had to take it and i loved it i learned how
to embroider i learned how to sew make clothes how to decorate how to sew absolutely everything how to use you know the machine and patterns and how to cook and how to use different kinds of thermometers meat thermometers candy thermometers how to use every kind of cooking thing we learned proper manners which we also learned at home so it was reinforced at school we were taught all of the graces we were taught how to write a business letter how to write a thank you note the correct way to address everybody and everything i mean it just i can't even be i mean it would take
me days to tell you just all the subjects and this is in addition to very high level academics because people were going to college they they just really taught us everything um because and and i don't know if it's it was the german mentality because wisconsin is quite german but i do know that i got a superior education um there are probably very few places here in the state of texas that i don't think there's any place that that gives kids public or private what we got growing up back in the 50s and 60s at my school in my all my schools they were just
fabulous so i went to bayside school through eighth grade and then i went on to nicolet high school for four years uh got an excellent education and and as an example we had and i don't know what they have now but for languages we had german spanish french russian um i think later they added mandarin and hebrew they have a hebrew club there i know that to this i mean right now they do uh it was just everything was just a little more was just it was just better but i didn't know it at the time i just knew that this is what it was
and it was good so um i think i had an excellent excellent educational background after that i knew in high school that i wanted to be um an art teacher i just loved doing art i loved making things creating things designing things putting things together so i went to the university of wisconsin in madison and got a degree in 19 i graduated high school in 1970 and got my my bachelor's degree in art education in 1974 and i did i then went after that to iowa state university for graduate i sort of in later years i have regretted i didn't finish my master's degree there
it was a master's in applied arts and it was in crafts design and it was really an excellent program but i think it was the school was huge but it was um like the texas a m of iowa and it was seemed it was too aggie for me so i left and i went back to milwaukee and i wasn't sure what to do and um i started substitute teaching and i taught in districts all over and one of the art teachers where i was substitute teaching said you know i think you would really enjoy working at the milwaukee art museum and he introduced me to
the person who did the hiring and so and this was part time so it didn't interfere with the day but uh for almost five years i taught uh children's and adult classes at the milwaukee art museum um meanwhile i was still doing all of my art and i was working a lot in textiles um always with color and i had work that was in quite a few juried shows and i would sell work here and there and but i was i was you know i didn't have two nickels to rub together but i was having a lot of fun um and dating different people and
i'll just throw this in i didn't get married until i was 34 and that was here in texas um wait i want to stop you for one second sherry i want to go backwards for just a minute before we go on past that which i want to hear about um tell us a little bit about if there were any activities or any type of things that your parents and you were involved in as far as jewish activities in milwaukee while you're growing up there oh okay it's we my my parents grew up both of them grew up reformed jewish as did i we belonged to
a temple that would had broken off from the big temple emmanuel which would be like the equivalent of the one here in dallas um it was a big old guard kind of place and we belonged to a congregation that was temple sinai it was a lot of young families and it was you know as people like us um you know and then everybody lived kind of on the north shore of milwaukee nobody came from the west side which was somewhat more conservative more orthodox we i went all through sunday school i was confirmed when i was at the end of my sophomore year of high
school and they did something very odd they started teaching us hebrew in sunday school when i was in fifth grade and i became very fluent at reading it i could i could just whip right through it and pronounce it correctly and really read well i remember at that passover seder that year reading it my father said wow and then when i was in sixth grade they stopped they did not teach hebrew anymore they didn't teach they didn't keep us going so it's very interesting because most of the prayers and so forth they would be in english and they would say them there are certain things
i know that are are in hebrew and there's a lot that i still don't even know to this day um because we never memorized it if you will when i was growing up in this very reformed congregation um but that's the way it was in the 50s and 60s and i know it was that way here as well the um we never lit candles on friday night we never went to um shabbat services ever we just never ever did but my sisters and i went all the way through until the end of our sophomore years in high school my we always went to temple on
the high and always you know had a wonderful passover seder got together with our family and had hanukkah parties and things like that we did all of those kinds of things but we never ever went to services on shabbat or lit candles or had challah or any of that so you know it's it's it's i guess sort of unusual people are surprised at that but that's just the way it was i didn't know anybody else that did i'm sure there were people who did i just didn't know them um you know at that point did you join any uh jewish organizations as a teenager i
sure did i was in bbg and i was a sweetheart for an aza chapter which thankfully in milwaukee was not like the um the slaughterhouse that it seems to be in dallas it's gotten worse here believe me when i was a sweetheart also it was probably more like what your experiences were so yeah yeah it was just sort of an honorary title and um yes i must say i'm editorializing here both of my daughters were nominated to be sweethearts and we went to walk down and it is it's cruel it's it's it's cruel and i'm glad that this is on recording because it should be
for for time immemorial that the way the sweetheart uh choosing is here is has to be cut out it's it's nasty and the kids who are that age are at a particularly vulnerable in a vulnerable mental state about who am i what am i you know and then it's well it's terrible anyway it was a very nice experience they did it they did it quietly in each chapter each aza chapter chose somebody and then they would just let the person know in my case you know call me up and say would you like to be the sweetheart of our chapter and then we would say
yes and then there would be a sweetheart ball that anybody could go to but that's where they would present us and we we sweethearts would wear a formal gown and the president of the aza chapter would escort us down the aisle as they presented the sweethearts it was very lovely and very nice and we didn't do a whole lot more than that okay okay so now go back to your work history tell us some of the projects and things that have been memorable for you that you worked on while you were still there and then tell us how you got to dallas well people say
how did you happen to come to dallas and i always say a big mistake but i'm going to come back to that so anyway um so i i got to the age of 20 about 24 25 and i knew i had to get a full-time job so um somebody that my parents knew knew that there was an opening at the ms society of southeastern wisconsin which was half the population wisconsin with seven counties for really great interesting job called uh you were the person director of the ms read-a-thon which back then in the 70s a great thing it was a fundraiser to raise money for
ms uh research and i had to go it was really great i had to go to every single school i could possibly sign up in southeastern wisconsin in seven counties didn't matter public private catholic lutheran a lot of lutheran schools there and so forth um to sign up the kids and i'd give an assembly i'd have to you know buddy up to the principals and superintendents to get permission to do it and they'd have an assembly for all the kids and it was really fun we'd show a film and i'd get the teachers to sign up the kids to read books um for pledges and
they could win prizes depending on how many how much money they raised or how many uh yeah how much how many books they read and that was a fun job and i also dealt with the uh all of the radio and tv stations and i um i had to i had to do all of this stuff i had to find a celebrity that would be the honorary chairperson of it because we would use their name in their picture so i did some work with the brewers and a wonderful handsome baseball player named mike keegan i was remembering it was so nice and um i did
um just all kinds of things with the media because i had to do all of the pr the publicity for this and i also had to drive around and give all the um and i had to get people to donate all of the uh all of the the prizes so i go to different companies and get all kinds of prizes donated and and on and on and on and on you know i mean it was it was real what i didn't realize at the time and then subsequently did is it was a sales job i was getting all kinds of people to do stuff before
for ms for the ms society and i was the salesperson i had to ask them to donate all kinds of things or to read the books or to let me do the assemblies or whatever it was and that's where your teaching skills probably came in too it's all a combination yeah well they wanted somebody who would be good at writing and speaking and they wanted somebody with teaching experience they wanted somebody familiar with high schools and so yeah absolutely yeah so how long did you stay with them well i actually only stayed with them for about a year and i was in my mid-20s then
and i took another job that i stayed at for about three years wisconsin society to prevent blindness and um very similar type of job i had to and again i got to really know all of the media outlets in town and of course when you work for a non-profit the board is always all of the very you know the big big names around town um um so that was really a fun kind of a job for a young woman um and i met i mean i met so many people and so many interesting people i did special events fundraising so when i got to the
ms society in my prior job that was already set up i had to create the events then do everything i already told you about get everything under the sun donate so i did all kinds of things and the two that stand out the most i mean i did a ski event and i something called flip for sight which was a gymnastics event where i had to get i had to get a shopping center to allow me to take over like the main atrium of the shopping center and of course i'd have to get a celebrity person there to be the emcee and i had to
get all of the different gymnastics uh schools and organizations to have their kids come and and compete for pledges for pledges and again do all the publicity and the same things i already told you about but it was always fun and uh but two that really really stand out one was there was there was a racquetball tournament and i created the thing from scratch and then it became a prototype that people did around the country and i actually won an award for it nationally and they brought me to new york for their annual meeting where everybody was there and so that was that was really
terrific that's wonderful it really was it was a neat event and um yeah it's funny i come to texas and i didn't spend a dime on getting prizes or anything and i find here that people are they make a lot of money because because i have to tell you up in wisconsin you know what we'd always see which chapter around the country is doing the best with this or the best with that texas and this is long before i knew i would be moving here texas was always the biggie and i subsequently realized when i moved here it was because they spend a lot of
money to do these events i didn't spend anything i didn't have any money to spend we were a little organization and i got everything donated if there were invitations we printed i found somebody to print those invitations for no money and they would put their name on them you know i got a trip to las vegas donated as the grand prize well i didn't pay a dime for that trip i got somebody to donate it um a travel business so on and on and on um but it was interesting and i got to know i had to get all kinds of psas and and um
free commercials made at the tv stations and at the radio station so i got to know everybody there anyway i did this for about three years so that was a big event and then the last event i did that was so much fun we only had 10 days notice i'd gotten in touch with the milwaukee bucks organization and the guy who would be my counterpart and he said he could he would never give me an answer as to whether they could do this finally ten days before the event i get a call he says you know what we can do the event now the event
was called tip the vip and it was at a restaurant i had to call everybody up all of a sudden 10 days before and it was a smashing success it was the last event i did and the milwaukee bucks the actual players came out and people would come and i called up everybody i knew in town and said tell your friends make reservations blah blah blah and i got all kinds of things donated for an uh an auction there too and of course got a celebrity mc person who was a dj for a radio station a big morning guy it was at a a wonderful
steakhouse and the place was packed and the the waiters were the milwaukee bucks yeah it's like if you went to a restaurant here and all the waiters were the dallas mavericks and it wasn't just a few of them it was the whole team and it was so much fun i mean so much fun and again i had to do all the publicity and get the newspapers out there and the you know but what i had to do was call a lot of people who i knew and of course my family had been living there since the 1890s and this was in the 70s i knew
lots of people i called my parents friends and and everybody i knew and said hey you know this thing just came up and i want to let you know about it really great so that was my last bit but the reason was my last event i was there i worked for a non-profit and i was a non-profit too i mean they don't pay much at all i just thought i'm single i've got to start making some money so at the age of 29 i took a job working for a radio station in milwaukee um it was the at this at that time they still had
commercial um classical radio stations around the country dallas has the only one left um but this was a for-profit classical radio station and i got into the radio business and i was in that business for close to 11 years by that time i had bought myself a little house in shorewood which is one of the north shore suburbs very close to lake michigan and i thought i lived in the smallest house there and i later found out it's on the historic walking tour i did i lived in the smallest house in shore but it was great living there was very well located and everything so
i had a good time i had a good time being single um you know i had my ups and downs of course but uh it was a very it was an interesting time and again until i oh i think my job's overlapped because i still um on saturdays and a couple of nights a week still would teach classes at the milwaukee art museum so that was wonderful exposure too and and a whole just a whole different avenue did you meet your husband there or elsewhere no and it's and it's a funny story so so what happened is i was um i dated different people and
so forth and one day one night i get a call and it's this guy and he says listen i hope you don't think this is creepy or whatever but i'm i i know a lot of people that you know that we know in common and i would like to meet you and he'd seen me he'd you know he'd seen me around town or whatever and ask different friends of isn't and i'm going to tell you right now he knew i was jewish he knew i was jewish from the outset and that that plays a very important role in my story very important role particularly in
my jewish life he asked if i would meet him for a glass of wine or something so i said okay that was fine and he told me the people that he knew and every and all these jewish people and i met him and um and he was it was cute he was cute and he was a jewish mother's dream he was a an md phd he was finishing his actually his md he only had to do three years because he already had a phd in neuroscience or something and and he was a a a brain surgeon you know i'm telling you a jewish mother's dream
and he was about to leave to go to texas because he had gotten a very prestigious residency down here at parkland hospital with dr kenneth clark and he was a very famous neurosurgeon who had when he worked on kennedy and so forth so he had a few more months so we started dating but the thing i haven't mentioned yet is that he was lutheran his two roommates were jewish they were in medical school with them all the people he knew that he asked about you know who do you know who that woman is blah blah blah i'd like to meet her they were jewish so
he knew but he was lutheran so we were dating and everything and um it started to come up he he thought i should be christian and i can tell you i have every single cell in me is so jewish even though i was raised reform i'm jewish i'm a jew and so anyway we continued to date he moved that i met him in about this time of year and then he moved in um at the end of june of that year which 1983. uh to dallas i helped him move down and he got settled and i would see him about once a month we'd go back and forth mostly me coming here and then um it just became more and more difficult because he really but well before i go any further we talked about getting married so we went and visited with his pastor who we'd kind of grown up with and that pastor was living in denver so we drove out there we stayed at his house and we went skiing and stuff we had a fun time the pastor was a great guy but i said i'm not asking
phil to be jewish but i'm never going to be a christian i'm not asking him to change and i'm not changing anyway we did get engaged i did move here we i moved here in march of 1984 and i was in the radio business i was having a lot of success there i'd been selling radio for about two and a half years a couple years and um sorry to find a job and if you're good at it you know you you can get a job so i interviewed at several places and i got an excellent excellent job at krld which at the time was considered
the top job in dallas if you did what i did but he and i struggled more and more with this and he was working all the time we we split up um briefly got back together but then split up in july and it was a very tough time for me because i had no family here i was new to town again i'm going to be honest here i did not find the jewish community here welcome they did not i did have a few people who were nice but that nobody made sure that they invited me on the holidays like a passover or or uh high
holidays um i even had there were people i was very friendly with and i even sort of hinted i said i said i'd sure love to have a place at your passover table and oh i don't know i'd have to ask my grandmother i can tell you when i lived in milwaukee i knew uh two guys who were from other places who were working in milwaukee jewish guys and i didn't have to ask grandma and grandma always threw a very elegant deal with lots of help and beautiful everything but i knew that if you had a jewish person that you wanted to invite to come
for passover invite him and then say hey grandma i've got a friend coming and this guy said oh i'm not sure if i could do that and i just i let it go so it was um an interesting time again i i was doing well in in my business i was meeting people um i was making friends and um i decided and i do this what i'm about to tell you to this day i created my own friend family of friends here and um and i started doing my own passover seder and i would find other people friends who weren't from here and didn't know
anybody or whatever you know or didn't have family and i'd say well come on over you know or other you know there were young marrieds that um i was friends with and they knew that they were going to come to my house they were from all over and this was the funny thing about this doctor that i had been dating i moved here there was a new year's eve party 1983 going into 1984 and phil was on duty at the hospital and he wasn't off until midnight but he had a bunch of young a bunch of friends the guys were all surging in surgery residents
there and they were all young marrieds and they all were jewish but they were having a new year's eve party at somebody's house in the village and phil lived in the village he said i'm going to send one of the guys over there to walk you back to the party because there's no reason for you to wait for me so i didn't know anybody but one of the guys came over and these people were from other places atlanta new york baltimore michigan we had a blast there must have been 15 people there everybody was so terrific and i am still friends to this day with
those people and one of them one couple were very very close friends with um and so that was just a funny another funny thing that happened um and nobody's really friends with him it's not that they don't like him he lives up to new york and he's got a major major job he's the head of uh neurosurgery up at weill cornell medical center in new york um i guess he's internationally known in fact i know he is but i don't really follow him too much but anyway so i made all these nice friends and it was really great he and i split up at july
of 84 and i felt very alone but the other thing is i'm a wisconsin girl and i don't like heat i never did i can't take it i can't take any heat i if it's above starts to get above 80 i start to get uncomfortable and when it's in the 90s i can pass out so that's been kind of difficult all these years big adjustment right well i've worked that one out too i don't spend the summer here anymore and i have a long long long time um but i made my friends and i as i said i created a family of friends who are
my friends anyway but on the holidays and we all get together like we just had passover we have a blast none of our families live here and they and they all know if they've got a friend that doesn't have a place to go just call it like with my grandma or my parents we always were very open about that call me up and say hey i'm bringing somebody else or i've got a friend and he's got a girlfriend can they come oh sure of course bring them you know it's just how we are you know and but i never found dallas to be that welcoming
i think had you know if i'd married somebody who was from dallas it would be different but i didn't marry somebody who was from dallas and and it's so i find that attitude to be still somewhat pervasive and i'm sorry to say it because i have i've had some very lovely experiences here but um that's that's been the recurring thread if you will all right well that was that was actually one of our questions is what do you how did you find the dallas jewish community when you got here and how has it changed since you've been here so tell me that part of it
any any changes at all that you've seen or you know any growth anything besides numbers yes we've got the jewish community particularly yeah not really just being honest here and i'm part i mean i'm part of things here i know loads and loads of people i've been here 38 years as if when people say how long have you lived here i go 38 hot sweaty years and i and but but uh again i let that go at a very at a very early time in my my life here because i had to or i would have always been i would have always felt like an
outsider and i don't feel like an outsider i i've created my own inner circle if you will although and my children know this too people are very welcome in my home and i grew up that way if i had a friend they were welcome in our home and it it didn't matter what religion what color what race and anything people are always welcome in our home and i grew up in a beautiful home in a very nice neighborhood we weren't snobby we just weren't snobby but here it's no i don't think it's changed very much i don't a lot of things have changed i think
dallas is a much much much better city than the one i moved to in 1984 i mean it's it's pretty spectacular it's not my kind of city it's not a city i i think maybe had people been more welcoming i would have felt that way felt differently but it's not my kind of city but it is a great city it is a great city i would tell people to come visit here i would say a lot of very very good things about it but i don't think the jewish community it's a it's a bigger version of this is the bigger version of what i you
know and i will say this too i think you know we are comfortable my husband and i are financially comfortable we live in a lovely home that we've been in for 33 years and we like that we travel we have a good had i become i had my husband or i or both of us become fabulously wealthy well i think that that that would have there would have been much greater acceptance um but we're we're comfortable and in in my midwestern way um my sister pointed this out to me a couple weeks ago and she was visiting she said she pointed out all the people
we knew who jewish people we knew who were and not jewish who were very very very wealthy they didn't flash it around they would live in a nice house they might have another house in another place that would be much bigger and fancier but people weren't flashy and so that's always been that's always seemed really uh different to me shall we say yeah how did you meet your husband you said that he wasn't from here either he was not from here but we have a milwaukee connection we found out my husband uh ron is was a couple years ahead of me in he uh is
from new orleans and on his father's side of the family the xanders and the levees which is the maternal grandparent uh his grandmother's side they go back to the mid 1800s in louisiana and they were from all sides lorraine so they spoke french and german and they came from like mets and um strasbourg and right around that area in eastern france and western germany and they moved the levees moved to the cajun country they lived in donaldsonville and thibodeaux and those places and there is a historic little jewish cemetery in donaldsonville and the old synagogue there which i've written an article about is now and
it was built in the 1860s it's an ace hardware store but i have pictures in an article that i wrote um i can't remember was the tjp or the other texas the other jewish newspaper that was here comparing the two but anyway they so they came from that area and they lived there for quite a few years the xanders came to new orleans in oh i think 1880s and uh they came from germany and nobody changed any names that's pretty unusual um anyway so ron's mother's side of the family that's his father's side on his mother's side they had come utica new york originally his
great-grandfather wrote a 50-page memoir single-spaced all about this so a lot of knowledge about it and they lived always up in the north and they um they were very poor of course but his great-grandfather uh became very well off and he he moved all over the place and he was he would go to certain boom towns so one of the places he lived and he lived there almost 50 years probably was up in ashland wisconsin which if you were to look at a map and you look way way way up at the top um you will find bayfield and ashland and ashland was kind of
a moon town it was a major shipping it's right on lake superior and it had a synagogue it had tiny little synagogue and his grandfather was born and raised his grandmother's family moved in the 1860s to waukesha wisconsin i won't go through their whole story but somebody set them up she was um his grandparents i don't know who set them up but his mother's side of the family on both sides are from wisconsin and it turned out so here i was um uh became friends with um janet and jack baum ron became friends with janet and jack baum so i met him a couple of
times i was dating somebody else people were setting me up with this one and that one and um he had been seeing somebody for a number of years um so when we met i just always he's a fun guy i just thought he was fun i met him a few times and then i was working at krld which was with the dallas cowboys flagship station at the time and i said you know i'm taking my very best clients and their wives for lunch at the stadium club and then do a cowboys game and i was talking to janet i said i can ask one of
these guys they're all very nice but i'd rather either go on my own because i know the wives and these guys the three guys or take somebody who's just a friend who i don't have to worry about and she said well why don't you call ron xander i said oh that's a good idea i'll call good old ron xander i called good old ron xander and he said oh sure that would be really great well we had a really nice time everything went out great went great and then um he started calling me and again i was dating different people and i had activities with
the radio station with all of the stuff going on and he called me on friday and he said ask what if i wanted to go to a movie that night and i said oh i'm sorry i can't and then he said well how about tomorrow night saturday i said oh i'm sorry i already have plans i'd love to do it but you know i've got plans already so then he called me i would see him but then he called me that wednesday and asked me to go out saturday i said oh i've already got plans but i would i would date him and during the
week you'll meet him for lunch or this or so then the next week he asked me a week in advance and he said he wanted me to go to the oh i forgot what it was called one of those fundraising balls that were a lot of fun that a lot of young people went to and it was formal every dallas was very very formal back then and it was you know floor length and black tie and uh he said did i want to go to the oh the bellini ball and i said well actually i i can't because um i actually already have a date
to the bulimia ball and i'm telling you that because if you do go you will see me there so we did he started asking me more in advance for the weekends and after a very short time i was just dating him and we ended up getting married oh but but so the oddball thing is his mother's side of the family in milwaukee knew my family knew my dad's family and they they knew each other because they lived there for decades and decades and decades um so people in our families already knew each other it turns out when ron was a senior in high school he
really wanted he he had had so much fun when he'd come up to dallas i mean to milwaukee in the summers and visit his grandparents especially as a teenager and they said oh you should come up here and go to school at whitefish bay high school that's the the suburb that they lived in and my dad graduated from whitefish bay high school too and uh so his senior year he went and lived with in milwaukee on the north shore and so when we met we started talking and it turns out we know all these people in common he dated a bunch of girls i knew
from bbyo and a bunch of guys he was friends with i knew from bbyo but we never met but we figured out that we were in the same place once at the same time the year he lived with his grandparents 1967-68 we would have been in high holiday services together at temple sinai because his grandparents belonged to the same temple so so we figured we were in the same place but we never met until right right but ryan was doing nothing jewish at all and um but i brought him around i brought him around over the years anyway about a year later we got married
and he was even having a problem with he wasn't going to he was not going to wear yamaka at his wedding he was not doing that so i just quietly went and bought a beautiful bridal yamaha you know that's meant for a man but it's white and it's embroidered and it's gorgeous and everything and he wore it um and over the years i've i've brought him along but but i want to go back to the jewish thing because the fellow i was seeing who was lutheran said well i don't understand why being jewish is so important to you he said i never see you going
to temple i don't see you you know you don't go every week or do this or do that and i said to him you know you're right but i feel 100 jewish all the time and that is not a function of my showing up in temple i just feel it and of course as we all know there is a genetic component to being jewish so it's not a religion i hate when people call it a faith because it's not blind faith it's a way of living it's a behavior it's a thought process i mean that's what i think so what that did was very interesting
it sent me sent me into and i was 31 when i moved here and i'm 69 years old now so it sent me into a 38-year informal i would say exploration of why do you feel so jewish what does it mean to be jewish and it's been a wonderful personal education and i i went to talmud class at temple emanuel we're members i went there for 20 years until i went back to work full time so i couldn't be there in them at 7 30 on wednesday morning but i learned a lot and i've done some reading and it's it's really been a terrific thing
you know had i not moved to dallas i don't think i ever would have had that personal jewish education and i've really worked at imparting that to my own children you know the things i have learned are they here do they still live in no um and this is also very interesting i my husband had never been married either and we were 34 and 36 when we got married we um i always kind of knew that i probably wouldn't be able to get pregnant and um so i did fertility work and all of that my mother had taken des when she was pregnant with my
older sister and me um so neither of us ever was able to get pregnant because of that but we adopted two girls one through jewish family service in 1996 and one through a local agency here hope international from russia and um we went over there in 2000 she was already a year and four months old so my older daughter rosie who is named after my grandmother's lives in austin now she attended ut and my younger daughter heather is 23 and she is finishing up at unt um and she's majoring in elementary education so um they both went to temple emmanuel they were both in bbyo
they both um uh you know they were confirmed there and we have done all of these things but one of the things that was interesting again this is important about my learning that and i tell everybody this and non-jews are particularly fascinated when i tell them this i said one of the things that i have learned is that as jews we are not about blind faith at all but we are a religion of behavior and i explain a little bit about the talmud 613 laws that tell us how we are to live how we are to behave how we are to be jewish you know
if we're jewish we this is how we are supposed to be or these are these are our how to handle things how to handle life people say that sounds lost your sound sherry oh there we go oh it was for some reason the sound went away go ahead that's fine anyway so so yeah i i people say oh that sounds really great i go yeah it's really great that's why i like being exactly what i am that's why i'm never changing to a different you know religion because it's it's it's uh it's it's really how we behave it makes us what we are not just
in our genetics of course and and of course we have wonderful people who convert and take on those those laws and so forth and the behaviors um so it's been great it's really been terrific uh oh but what i was going to say is one of our teachers we've had a variety of teachers over the years one of our teachers in our talmud class went into me in the library one day and he said in a temple and he said you should read this book this will change your life i said really and he said yeah and it was um i don't pronounce it correctly
so i won't even say it i'm not good with hebrew or yiddish or whatever but um it's guard your tongue about lotion right okay very important principle yes yes and i get the daily uh the daily little email um blurbs and i tell people about some of them and you know when they ask me about you know being jewish i say yeah these things tell us how to conduct ourselves in different situations and and so forth and so i love that i love that because it makes sense to me along that line my final question to you is this think about this what do you
think you are the most proud of it's not a trick question whatever whatever you think what are you the most proud of throughout your your lifetime and what's what you've achieved and etc that's a mammoth question you could give a few answers if you lie i'm not sure i would say proud as much as glad glad that i have the life that i do i am happy with my choices um nobody makes great choices all the time but i'm very very happy with my choices i'm happy to be me certainly happy to be jewish yeah i'm i'm really glad to lead the life that i
do i i can tell you a few things that i've done and one of the things that i did going back 20 years a little longer and i've never put it into a book and i still need to one of my explorations was going to small towns i didn't realize how many people had lived in really tiny towns that were jewish and made jewish lives so i started studying really studying these and i've given many many many many talks around the country and in in dallas i do a whole talk on just small town texas synagogues but i focus particularly on towns that have had
synagogues they're small they're not almost never more than 50 000 people would be a big town the smaller the better like schulenburg texas but i do i took many photos and wrote articles and gave talks gave talks to and i had a fellowship at the um american jewish archives in cincinnati gave talks to the the wrath i gave one talk that was required to the rabbis and professors they are the students um but really exploring the jewish life of the people in small towns across america what what made them who they were and what kept them going and um because a synagogue is that's a
major commitment and if you're a little tiny town like um way up on the uh up of michigan uh and you've got you know 15 members and they're keeping this beautiful little old synagogue going and having passover seders and high holidays and bringing in rabbis you know that that's a statement and it's and the histories are all funny and fun and great and heartwarming so that's something i'm proud of that i've done that and still can put it in a book and probably will i hope you do and we'd love you to make a presentation to us to the dallas jewish historical society that's what
we're all about talking about jewish history all around here so yes absolutely yeah and i'm so glad that the organization has has grown and flourished but and i want to throw something one i know we don't have a lot of time i want to throw something into that i think is so great a hundred years ago about 30 years ago i was asked to be on the board of the dallas jewish historical society and i literally would fall asleep in the meetings and it was kind of people who lived there for you know lots of generations and they didn't really want to take in anything
new kind of like inviting new people to your home for holidays but i have seen your organization just burst open with fascinating programs just great great offerings to the community i think it's wonderful and i want to compliment you on that i think it's really really great and they and and this interview is an example of opening up to who's here and who's jewish and what our histories are well i want to thank you for doing this with me and this will live on we're so happy we that you decided to stay in dallas and grow here with us and be here so it's been
a good life it has been a good life that's good my parents have a similar story which i'll tell you about another time but anyway i want to thank you very much sherry and continue to grow and come see us and do do a few presentations that would be wonderful with us we'd love it all right thank you thank you very much for doing this too thank you thank you and have a wonderful rest of your peso passover okay you too thank you so much bye bye