Yes, My Mother's Anti-Semitic — But She's Still Mom

From the Seesaw at The Jewish Daily Forward

My Mother is Anti-Semitic and My Jewish Husband Wants Her Out of My Life

I am a non-Jewish woman who has been married to a Jewish man for 39 years. We have had no problem supporting one another faith-wise — I have gone to temple and he has come to church — but we do have ongoing issues with our parents. My parents are German. My father, who died ten years ago, was raised here and my mother was raised in Nazi Germany.

Growing up she would tell me about how Jews were the cause of all Germany’s troubles, as well as how Jews are cheap, cheaters, liars, and more. Also, she claims that people in her town had no idea what was going on during World War II, something that drives my history buff husband crazy and he says isn’t really possible. I told my husband he no longer had to speak to my mother and in the past nine years they have had no contact.

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Explaining My Jewish Family to My Christian Parents

By Yael Armstrong for Raising Kvell

When I was in middle school, I was lying on the couch one day reading a book when my dad walked through the living room. He asked if I’d done my study guide for a test I had the next day. I told him, “No,” as I continued reading and he asked if that was a smart idea. I said, half paying attention, that I would be fine. I failed the test.

When he asked about it later and I begrudgingly told him that the teacher surely had it out for me, he said, almost to himself, “I wonder if you’d have failed if you studied.”

That was how my parents parented. They let us go too far, offered us help back, and when we refused, were always there to subtly drive the lesson home.

My parents, my sister, and most of my family are Christian in the same way that my husband’s family is Jewish. They are committed, it is a part of their everyday life; in short, they’re Orthodox.

When I converted they didn’t say a word. The first few years of my being Jewish were a weird time in my life and in the life of my family. I was trying to find my footing in a new faith and I think my family was waiting for my Jewish phase to end. I didn’t tell my parents I was dating, knowing that they wouldn’t understand the world that I was now living in (a very Orthodox one at the time) and so, I brought my fiancé home to meet my parents a week before we were going to be married.

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This article has been reprinted with permission from InterfaithFamily 

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As a Mormon, How Can I Comfort My Jewish Mother-in-Law?

By Amanda Hamilton Roos for Raising Kvell

My family always asks me what Jews believe about the afterlife. My family is Mormon but my husband’s family is Jewish—they belong to a Reform synagogue—and my father-in-law is slowly dying. So whenever my family members ask me how my mother-in-law is doing and I give them the update—that she’s coping but still sad—they always shake their heads and say, “How does she do it without a belief in the afterlife?”

This is incredible to them. Mormons spend a lot of time thinking about the afterlife. For example, even though my uncle died tragically, before I was born, he was still very much a presence in my extended family. So much so, that when I was little and I would say my nightly prayer, sometimes I would ask God to put him on the line. Then I would say, “Hello, Uncle Rich. How are you?” and I would tell him things that I thought he might want to know about my grandma, my cousins, etc… (I kept it upbeat, so he wouldn’t feel bad about cutting out early). At my grandparents’ funerals we sang “God Be With You ‘Till We Meet Again,” and I meant it. To Mormons, the idea of an afterlife is the only antidote to the sting of death.

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