Book Pitch for I Am My Beloved’s: Jewish-American Couples Talk About Their Marriages
“Gary put mustard on his sandwich and I said, ‘You must be Jewish!’”
“When I had miscarriages, I cried out to God, ‘Why are you still killing the Jewish people?’”
“Our Jewish practices are a choice, but our connection to Judaism is not a choice.”
I Am My Beloved’s: Jewish-American Couples Talk About Their Marriages is a collection of 30 interviews of Jewish North American couples who discuss, intimately and honestly, their relationships, their spirituality, and how the two intersect. Their voices are poignant, sometimes humorous, often profound.
These couples reflect both the diversity and the unity of the American Jewish community, and mirror contemporary American society as a whole: observant and secular, gay and straight, able-bodied and disabled, urban and rural, young and old. Interviewees, who range in age from 24 to 81, include:
• A severely disabled man and his wife, who find unexpected comfort and acceptance in a Chassidic community;
• Two lesbian couples, one of whose rural, blue-collar, Catholic mother participated in their Jewish wedding;
• A descendant of Portuguese Conversos who discovered Judaism as an adult, as did her formerly Roman Catholic husband;
• A couple who were the only practicing Jews in their rural Virginia commune (they have since left the commune and now live in North Carolina).
I Am My Beloved’s, while unique in its subject matter, is similar in feel and content to other successful interview and/or photo books: Listening Is an Act of Love, Sisters, Love Makes a Family, Chinese Lives, and Seen and Heard: American Teenagers Discuss Their Lives.
Currently we are exploring interview opportunities with a number of well known and public figures: actors, writers, playwrights, and politicians.
Most interviews are approximately 2000 words --- eight or nine 8”x8” pages of a nine or ten-page spread --- with the remaining page a black-and-white portrait of each couple. We envision I Am My Beloved’s as a physically beautiful book, to be marketed as a perennial wedding, commitment ceremony, anniversary or holiday gift.