Document 1B: Photographs of Elayne Delott, 1952-1971.

   This is my favorite photo of myself. It's still how I feel inside.

   This photograph is probably from the ninth or tenth grade. An avid reader, I came across a book on Eastern religion in my family library that made a strong impression on me. For this photo, I dressed up in an old kimono and put two chopsticks in my hair, adopting what I believed was an eastern prayer mode. In college, I was enamored with the crossover of eastern and western thought. Herman Hesse's books and Somerset Maugham's The Razor's Edge, with their elevation of the search for meaning and the rejection of materialism, were very much part of college culture then. Post-Mississippi, I encountered Buddhism. The recognition of basic goodness as the essential quality of human nature, the struggle to see beyond ego and the message of compassion as the path of the Bodhisattva (the awakened mind) made more sense to me as a life path than traditional political activism.

   New England Young Judea was a Zionist youth group for Jewish high schoolers, basically an after-school social club to connect Jewish teenagers with each other and with Judaism and Zionism. Fifteen years after the end of the Second World War was a time when Zionism's message to American Jewish teenagers took pride in the survival of people who were still in shock over how the Holocaust could have happened. My close friend Gail Freedman was elected president and I Vice President, and (as I remember), Irene Schulman was our secretary. We spent the year between high school and college in Israel.

   Elayne DeLott and Peter Cohen in my home the night of senior prom.