"I am not religious. I am a socialist atheist just as my mother and her parents were. I come out of that radical Jewish socialist tradition that started in roughly 1900. These secular Jews took the messianic, utopian promise of religious Judaism and transferred it to this world. I'm very much part of that tradition, and I didn't even realize it until recently. I've been reading books about the Pale in Russia [where the czars allowed Jews to live] and the ghetto life there; I recognize a lot of things that I didn't even know came from there which deal with me."