Talking to Children About Jewish Identity in an Interfaith Family

ReformJudaism.org

Children begin to ask identity questions at an early age. Who am I? Who is my family? Where do I belong? Why does my family celebrate some holidays and not others? These are all standard questions children ask to determine how they fit into their world

The same is true about religious identity. Children want to know the different ways they connect to their parents, and members of their extended family. For children in interfaith families, clarifying the role of religion in the family dynamic and the child’s personal identity from an early age  is important. The following guidelines will assist you when talking about Jewish Identity.

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Our Jewish Catholic Mexican American Newborn

by Anna Keller. This article has been reprinted with permission from InterfaithFamily.com

I grew up in an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn, NY. My parents were liberals who met in the theatre where they had been professional actors. My father was a Brooklyn boy, born and raised in Crown Heights. My mother, a Baltimore native who said she always wanted to marry a Brooklyn boy, and so she did. They moved to Midwood, a Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn. They wanted to be close to my Grandmother and to buy a house and to teach their children my brother and I the importance of our Jewish heritage. My father wanted us to always remember where we came from.

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Interfaith Baby Namings

Planning a ceremony when your family is multi-faith or multi-cultural.

By Debra Nussbaum Cohen
Today there is a good chance that someone special in your life who isn’t Jewish will be at your bris, simchat bat, or other welcoming ceremony for your new baby. It may be an aunt or uncle, grandparents, or even yourself or your partner: a non-Jewish parent who has pledged to raise this child in a Jewish home.

Both parents will obviously be involved in the planning of your ceremony, and to a certain extent can tailor it to their personal comfort level. For example, how much is said in English versus Hebrew, how much is focused on the idea of the covenant between God and the Jewish people, and how much focuses on more universalistic Jewish ideas and traditions. Welcoming ceremonies for girls, which are a relatively new phenomenon, are not “fixed” as the ancient rite of brit milah, and so there is often far more room for flexibility.

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Muslim and Jewish Feminists Gather to Seek Common Ground

by Betsy Teutsch for The Jewish Daily Forward    

Heba Macksound, a founding member of the first Sisterhood of Salaam Shalom Jewish-Muslim women’s interfaith dialog chapter, tells her story. “I was in the detergent aisle at ShopRite, thinking about what most Muslim women think about in the detergent aisle — which brand, and how many ounces to buy — when a man started cursing my hijab.” Macksound had the presence of mind to seek out the manager. “I am afraid to shop in your store,” she told Mark Egan. Egan responded by personally escorting her on her shopping trip.

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