Rabbi Continues
Teaching Passion
Into His 80s
R JESSE BERNSTEIN | JE STAFF
abbi Howard Bogot, 81, has spent a lifetime teaching Jewish texts to
Jewish students in Jewish settings, from youth groups to summer camps
to synagogues.

In 2019, at Penn State University, Abington, most of his students
are not Jewish. Not that that’s deterred him. His students, he said,
are conducting interviews with their own parents and grandparents
about Jewish texts in their native tongues, everything from Mandarin
to Spanish.

“Match that,” he said, and laughed. “I sound overly excited, because I get
overly excited about it.”
Bogot’s is a life animated by that excitement. Raised in Oak Park, Illinois, by
parents who left Europe seeking a better life in the United States, Bogot’s story
is one of a man passionately pursuing a deeper of understanding of Judaism
and the world, often at the same time.

Oak Park, a town just west of Chicago, was not only home to the Bogots (and,
he remembers, a few Frank Lloyd Wright houses), but to his father’s drugstore.

His father met his mother through a classmate at the pharmacology school in
Chicago, and running the drugstore was a family affair. Bogot remembers those
days fondly, especially the prodigious number of Black Cow root beer floats that
he enjoyed (back then, his intake earned him the nickname “Butterball”).

12 MAY 9, 2019
THE GOOD LIFE
JEWISHEXPONENT.COM