Thousands of name change petitions were submitted to the New York City Civil Court during the 1940s and 1950s. A disproportionate number of them were submitted by Jews. Discussions of Jewish identity at this time tended to equate name changing with “passing:” escaping the Jewish community. Rabbi Milton Steinberg, for example, in 1945, called for stronger Jewish identity among Jewish youth, warning that some “Jews change their names, dissociate themselves from their fellows, calculatingly conceal their origin and try to ‘pass.’” Quietly challenging portraits of name changers as “passers,” however, were Jewish voices like sociologist Erving Goffman, who described name changing as a more complex act of “covering”: hiding the most obtrusive parts of a stigma so that they did not impede daily life. Professor Fermaglich's paper uses name change petitions, published writings, and unpublished letters from name changers during the postwar era to suggest that “covering” indeed more accurately reflected the complicated practice of name changing for the majority of American Jews.