Nostalgia Interviews With Chris Deacy

This week I have interviewed Dan and Lavinia Cohn-Sherbok who were based in Kent from 1975 until 1997 when they moved to Lampeter after Dan was appointed Professor of Judaism. Dan is originally from Denver, and is of Hungarian descent, while Lavinia descends from an established middle class English family whose father was the lawyer of the Church of England. Dan talks about how he found out when he was in his twenties that he was the product of artificial insemination and how he didn’t have a good relationship with the man that he had hitherto thought was his father. Lavinia relays her unhappy experience of going to a girls’ boarding school and how university was a completely different, liberating experience for her. We learn that from 1980-87 Lavinia taught Religious Studies at King’s School, Canterbury, where she was the only full time female member of staff. She later became a headmistress. Dan talks about his experience of going to an ‘American Graffiti’-type high school and from there went to a