When I was growing up, the whole world was Jewish. The heroes were Jewish and the villains were Jewish. The landlord, the doctor, the grocer, your best friend, the village idiot, and the neighborhood bully: all Jewish. We were working class and immigrants as well, but that just came with territory. Essentially we were Jews on the streets of New York. We learned to be kind, cruel, smart and feeling in a mixture of language and gesture that was part street slang, part grade school English, part kitchen Yiddish.