Hilberg was not religious, and he considered himself an atheist. In his autobiographical reflections he stated, "The fact is that I have had no God." In a 2001 interview that addressed the issue of Holocaust denial, he said, "I am an atheist. But there is ultimately, if you don't want to surrender to nihilism entirely, the matter of a record." After his second wife's autonomous decision, 12 years into their marriage, to convert from Episcopalianism to Judaism, in 1993, Hilberg began quietly to attend services at Ohavi Zedek, a Conservative synagogue in Burlington. What he most esteemed, and identified with in his own tradition, was the ideal of the Jew as "pariah". As he put it in a 1965 essay, "Jews are iconoclasts. They will not worship idols ... The Jews are the conscience of the world. They are the father figures, stern, critical, and forbidding."