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understand how it relates to other religions—or not—and to be able to put it in perspective.”
    When he wed Maria in 1987 after a year-long courtship, he joined a family whose Roman Catholicism seems as strong as its Democratic ideology. At their wedding, which took place in the presence of four hundred guests at the New York State governor’s mansion in Albany and was covered as a news story by the
New York Times
, both a priest and a rabbi presided. But when it came to raising their children, Cole agreed to defer to Cuomo’s religion. It’s clear now that he didn’t anticipate how difficult that was going to be. “A lot of this journey of mine back to Judaism became more impassioned since,” he says. “But this is what we agreed to do. And I felt that this is what we needed to do for the children.” He pauses. “And it’s hard for me every day.”
    Clearly he’s now navigating his way through conflicting attachments. He celebrates Christmas. He meets privately with a rabbi once a week. (“It’s therapeutic,” he says. “One hour a week, I close my door and turn off my phone, which I don’t do easily. And I try to make sense of who I am, why ‘this’ has all come to be, and if and how our lives make sense in a world that so often doesn’t.”) He holds Passover seders—at which some of Maria’s family are often present. The “father-daughters trip” to Israel was perhaps another equalizer; he says Israel itself dramatizes the coexistence of faiths. “I wanted to show them the coming together of Christian and Muslim and Jewish beliefs pretty much on one hill, in one place. It was important to me to show them not just what Israel has meant to me, but what it means to the world.
    â€œThere’s an extraordinary resonance in the journey that the Jewish people have endured. It is prophesied in the Torah that ‘The Jews over time will be scattered among nations, will always be few in number,’ and our prophets wrote that we will always be ‘a light unto nations.’ . . . The prophecy as to the breadth of the Jewish nation has so far proven to be true, we know that the Jewish nation is the only one to have experienced and survived in exile twice (the second time for almost two thousand years), and few would doubt that the Jewish world (however small it remains, as dispersed as we know it is) has also had an extraordinarily positive impact on the morality of the entire civilized world.
    â€œWe’ve survived this long despite so much adversity and there is an immense depth in the lessons we have learned along the way. My hope individually is that my daughters can get as much as there is to offer from that. And our hope collectively, Maria and I, is that in the end, they will be thoroughly enriched by both faiths.”
    I ask him what he thinks his children will say, down the line, if someone asks if they’re Jewish: “I hope they’ll say . . .” He pauses. “I mean right now they define themselves as being religiously Christian—because the Jews and the Christians all believe that the child is affiliated in the womb from the mother, and so, unless Maria’s going to convert, which isn’t going to happen . . .” He begins again: “My hope is that they’ll make clear that there is a part of them that is Jewish. And there
is
. And to the degree it positively manifests itself in their lives, the more comfortable they will be embracing it.”
    He is also conscious of steering them away from Jewish stereotypes, which he fears can sometimes be self-inflicted. “I hate the term JAP. Hate it. But I think I know how it’s fueled. We tend to want to give our children everything. We want to give everything we had plus everything we didn’t have. And in the end, we probably do indulge them and enable them to have a sense of entitlement.”
    Though