How do you tell your parents about the different choices you’ve made? It can be hard to say, we’re raising the kids Jewish. We will/won’t have a Christmas tree. The baby will/won’t be baptized, receive a bris, have a bar mitzvah. What can we tell the non-Jewish grandparents about what is appropriate and how they…
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Religious & Cultural Identity for Your Child & Your Home
Interfaith Couples Raising Children: Identity for Your Child & Your Home Three Workshops, come to one or come to all of them Choosing a religious identity for your child is often feels like the hardest decision an interfaith couple faces. If both of you are attached to your religious/cultural heritage you may have gotten stuck…
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…
Read More »When one child is Jewish and the other is Not
Kveller, an online magazine published the first person story of a woman whose eldest daughter from her first marriage is not Jewish and her second daughter from a Jewish marriage, is Jewish. How this woman got to this place in life is interesting and is the result of being alive in a time when many…
Read More »“A room full of penises”
Today I want to talk about an intimate, yet very common, human body part – the penis — which really means, let’s talk about circumcision. A true story from the mother of a high school age boy When my son was in middle school he decided he wanted to go to a Jewish summer camp…
Read More »Can We Raise ‘spiritual’ children with Dual Identities?
Another question from my Mixed and Matched column in the J-Weekly. My husband is not Jewish; I am. Neither of us is very religious, but we are spiritual. Our kids are 3 and 5, and we can’t figure out what to do about religion. We want them to understand both of us and our…
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