(Sometimes I have to park things on this blog because they aren’t anywhere else online in a concise way.) Arthur Szyk was a remarkable artist who illustrated many of the children’s books we’ve all read. His Passover Haggadah was on display at the Legion of Honor a few years ago. I saw this special event…
Read More »Books
Culturally Jewish
Cultural Jews “I’m culturally Jewish.” How many times have I heard this? Too many to count. What does it mean? It means different things to different people. The common thread is, “I don’t believe in God.” Let’s not even go into what “God” means; let’s jump right to what does “cultural” mean? For the non-Jewish…
Read More »Get Your Culture on this Summer!
I’m reading a wonderful book, The Mathematician’s Shiva. Of course, it’s about Jews – but also other Russians, Poles, Americans, scientists and more. I love the underlining Jewishness of the characters and I really love that it is not about the Holocaust. There is so much more to Judaism than misery and murder. Which leads…
Read More »I Went to My Cousin’s Crispening
In the 1990’s, glory days of Interfaith Outreach, the American Jewish community was intently focused on successful approaches to teaching Judaism to children from interfaith homes. In their 1996 book, I Went to My Cousin’s Crispening, Margie Zeskind and Sheilia Silverberg were among the first Jewish educators to help Hebrew school teachers deal with the…
Read More »Books for adolescents on interfaith families
Then… Are You There God, It’s Me, Margaret feels solidly set in 1970, the year of its publication. The interfaith issues are, by now, stereotypical – the Christian family that disowns their daughter for marrying a Jew and the distracted Jewish father who has no interest in religion and is usually at work. If you…
Read More »Children and Bedtime Prayers
A prayer before bedtime A Christian mom on this list told me that she was raised saying a prayer before bedtime. In thinking over the prayer she realized that there was nothing about Jesus, nothing anti-Jewish in it and began saying it with her own children. She loves having something from her own childhood that…
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