I was not comfortable worshipping another Jew.

In speaking of Jesus, I must speak about Christianity because I do not think it possible or profitable to divide the two.

It was admitted by the early rabbis that the sectarians could be as full of good works as eggs were full of meat.

It's more fun to watch without joining in.

Pious XII was too neutral to mention the gas chambers; decent people like my own family were turned into devils by crude Christianity.

Praying privately in churches, I began to discover that heaven was my true home and also that it was here and now, woven into this life.

So many plusses, so many minuses.

Someone gave me a New Testament. I had never before read it systematically. Some parts made sense, some parts shocked me.

The Christian use of religion as a personal love affair both shocked me, and attracted me.

The secular world is more spiritual than it thinks, just as the ecclesiastical world is more materialist than it cares to acknowledge.

This Christian poison hasn't stopped yet.

To change, to convert? Why bother?

At religious instruction classes, I encountered The Pilgrims Progress by John Bunyan, and the sincerity of the traveller in that book was overwhelming.

Because of my Marxism, I was not into myths or miracles, whether it was the virgin birth, the physical resurrection or casting out demons from an epileptic.

I am pleased now that I have lived in a gay as well as a religious ghetto, though it hasn't been very comfortable. Taken together, their limitations cancel each other out and I have seen the world more kindly and more honestly.

I didn't want to be on the losing side. I was fed up with Jewish weakness, timidity and fear. I didn't want any more Jewish sentimentality and Jewish suffering. I was sickened by our sad songs.

I feel that the Christian experience and the Jewish one have much to give each other. If this open society continues and there is no return to political anti-Semitism, then this encounter, deeper than any theology, may happen.

I found that when I did something for the sake of heaven, heaven happened. These things changed my life. I owe them to my encounter with Christianity.

My mother was a modern woman with a limited interest in religion. When the sun set and the fast of the Day of Atonement ended, she shot from the synagogue like a rocket to dance the Charleston.

The real evidence is not practically speaking in scholarship but in how Jesus and the Christianity based on him manifest themselves in the lives of practising Christians. Their lives are the proofs of their beliefs.