EXCERPTS: Isaac Asimov was born in Russia in 1920, and his family emigrated to the United States when he was three years old. He had Jewish parents who were themselves raised Orthodox, and they raised him in Brooklyn. However, Asimov gravitated to more humanist beliefs from an early age, and as an adult identified vocally with atheism until his death in 1992.

On the one hand, Asimov became one of pop culture’s most prominent atheists; and on the other, he was open and proud of his Jewish heritage.

[...] His memoir also takes issue with an academic critic who, in 1989, accused Asimov of using “more themes in his work that derive from Christianity than Judaism.”

“This is unfair,” Asimov wrote. “I have explained that I have not been brought up in the Jewish tradition. I know very little about the minutiae of Judaism… I am a free American and it is not required that because my grandparents were Orthodox I must write on Jewish themes.” He went on to write that Isaac Bashevis Singer “writes on Jewish themes because he wants to [while] I don’t write on them because I don’t want to.”

“I am tired of being told, periodically, by Jews, that I am not Jewish enough,” he wrote.

Asimov also devoted a chapter in the memoir to antisemitism. He noted that his family never suffered from pogroms or other overt antisemitic terror either back in Russia or in the US, nor did antisemitism ever impede his own personal success. But he did find it “difficult to endure… the feeling of insecurity, and even terror, because of what was happening in the world,” especially at the time of the Holocaust. He also told the story of a public argument he once had with Elie Wiesel, in which Wiesel said he did not trust scientists and engineers, because of their role in the Holocaust.

As for Israel and Zionism, Asimov was something of a skeptic. In his final book “Asimov Laughs Again,” published around the time of his death, Asimov stated that he had never visited Israel and didn’t plan to, although he attributed that in part to his habit of not doing much traveling.

“I remember how it was in 1948 when Israel was being established and all my Jewish friends were ecstatic. I was not,” he wrote. “I said: What are we doing? We are establishing ourselves in a ghetto, in a small corner of a vast Muslim sea. The Muslims will never forget nor forgive, and Israel, as long as it exists, will be embattled. I was laughed at, but I was right.”

Isaac Asimov died in New York City in April 1992, at age 72. His family revealed years later that he had contracted HIV from a blood transfusion following heart surgery nearly a decade prior, which led in part to his death.

Asimov did not have a Jewish funeral or any funeral at all — he was cremated. But at a subsequent memorial service, fellow author Kurt Vonnegut stated that “Isaac is up in Heaven now,” later joking that “that was the funniest thing I could have said to an audience of humanists.”