That’s a big, very personal question. I found myself oddly moved by the fact that "American Girl" has added a Jewish immigrant girl to their line of dolls.

She’s called Rebecca Rubin and lived in a tenement on the Lower East Side in 1914 with her Russian immigrant parents. I wondered why this resonated and remembered that as a child in France, I had no one to identify with in terms of heritage. The few times my father alluded to being Jewish I was flummoxed — what could that mean? Everyone at school was French with lots of French brothers and sisters. My dolls were mainly hairy German hand puppets, and in the books I read, everyone was French or a pirate. The character I bonded with was the little Peruvian boy in the Tintin book The Temple of the Sun — he wore a red cap which gave me some room to hope that he was actually a girl in disguise.

I’m afraid I can identify with most heritages, cultures and religions I come across, which makes me either a cultural and religious whore, or a new-age patsy. I like most religions and traditions, apart from cannibalism, Meso-American human sacrifice, Dragon lore, witchcraft, female circumcision, Sundance rituals and Morris Dancing. One day at Sarah Lawrence,  the entire  anthropology class assured the professor that we had no prejudice against any culture whatsoever. We asserted loudly that we could understand all of them, and valued the differences between peoples of this earth. The professor opened her next nine AM class by handing out tins of fried ants, dried grasshoppers and canned maggots. The ants and grasshoppers were, I believe, African, and the maggots — grubs — were Australian. "So none of you feel any revulsion toward any aspect of any human cultures?" she asked. We shook our heads, eight privileged girls logy from last night’s pot and Haagen-Dazs, standing firm in our beliefs. We thought the intriguing, rather cute insects and worms were some kind of Show and Tell. I looked down at the tinned maggots in front of me. Of course, I remember thinking, in the desert, you have to eat whatever protein you can find, even if it’s living on a dead tree. She handed me a can opener. "OK Joan, open your tin and put whatever is in there in your mouth," she said.

I think that’s what called making you eat your words.