Why - and How - We Plan To Raise Our Children Jewishly
Before Jon and I got married, I told him that one of my non-negotiables was the religious education of our hypothetical future children: I wanted them to be raised Jewish.
This might seem like a funny time for semantics but I do think that it's really important to clarify a few things - at least as I understand them - about being Jewish in America.
First and perhaps most importantly as anti-Semitism is on the rise in the United States and across the world, know that one doesn't have to practice Judaism in any traditional way to be considered Jewish by others and targeted by anti-Semites. In Nazi Germany, remember, people counted as Jewish and therefore as deserving of extinction if they had a single Jewish grandparent.
Second, there are so many ways of practicing Judaism and of living a Jewish life that it's counterproductive to quantify or de/legitimize anyone's Judaism. (Unlike in Christianity, very few branches or denominations of Judaism today consider others to b…
This might seem like a funny time for semantics but I do think that it's really important to clarify a few things - at least as I understand them - about being Jewish in America.
First and perhaps most importantly as anti-Semitism is on the rise in the United States and across the world, know that one doesn't have to practice Judaism in any traditional way to be considered Jewish by others and targeted by anti-Semites. In Nazi Germany, remember, people counted as Jewish and therefore as deserving of extinction if they had a single Jewish grandparent.
Second, there are so many ways of practicing Judaism and of living a Jewish life that it's counterproductive to quantify or de/legitimize anyone's Judaism. (Unlike in Christianity, very few branches or denominations of Judaism today consider others to b…
