“No, I didn’t convert for my husband.”

It is a sentence that had spilled from my lips countless times. That my motivation for converting was for marriage would be a seemingly safe assumption, given that I had married a Jewish man. But my conversion was the result of a nearly decade long spiritual quest. So complex was it, that it finally took a book, The New Jew , to answer the oft-asked question, “Why did you convert?”

If the journey writing about my conversion was rich and enlightening, speaking with readers is absolutely illuminating. It’s not only because it offers me the opportunity to hear other peoples’ stories. It’s because of the new ideas that those conversations spurn. This blog is one of those ideas.

While The New Jew, An Unexpected Conversion is the story of my conversion from Midwest lapsed Catholic to New York Jew, it sort of stops where another story begins. It’s like the romantic film that has a torrid, sometimes frustrating romance that happily culminates in a wedding. As gratifying as those movies are, they rarely tell you the “then what?” story. Does a relationship story really end at marriage? In my experience, that’s where it begins. The same could be said of conversion.

I’m finding that people want to know the “then what?” story. Part of their questions are curiosity-driven, wondering what it is like to be Jewish, particularly after a lifetime of another faith. Many of the inquiries come from a relatedness. As one reader, who is also a convert to Judaism, noted at a recent book signing, “Being a convert is a whole different thing. Are you finding that, too?”

So began The New Jew blog. My hope that this blog is a site to find out how life continues after the initial journey – in honest, humorous and sometimes poignant stories, and where people can leave their ideas and experiences. Most of all, as in any good read, I hope it is a place where people can find themselves in the story.