Posted in Parenting/raising children on Jul 9th, 2008
Yesterday I wrote about the fictional story of a successful man whose child inexplicably descends into self-destruction in her teens. Today, my friend Nate Bloom alerted me to a similar story in The New York Times. The big difference is that the story in the Times is true.
In Sunday’s edition, Julie Schumacher, a novelist and […]
Posted in Parenting/raising children, Humor on May 23rd, 2008
My managing editor loves a good barbeque, and wanted to know if we had any good content for Lag B’Omer.
“Lag B’Omer!” I said. “Talk about a difficult to explain Jewish holiday!”
Posted in Purim, Passover, Parenting/raising children on Apr 16th, 2008
My five-year-old son is very subtle. The morning after our Havurah Purim party, my son told me, “You know, not everyone knows what a Purimspiel is.”
“But you do, honey, because we saw one last night. It was the play people were acting out, about Queen Esther.”
He nodded. “But not everyone knows what that is.”
Sometimes my […]
Posted in Parenting/raising children on Apr 15th, 2008
I saw a very interesting one-act on Sunday. Called “Both Sides of the Family,” it tells the parallel stories of an Episcopalian woman raising Jewish children in a Conservadox community and a twice-married Jewish man with Jewish children from his first wife and Christian children from his second. It was created and produced by the Charenton Theater Company of […]
Posted in Interfaith identity, Parenting/raising children, Statistics on Apr 1st, 2008
InterfaithFamily.com has been in the press lately, and I just wanted to share some of the articles and some quotes with you.
Julie Wiener wrote a column this past week on why her interfaith family is committed to lighting Shabbat candles. She found out she’s not unusual:
Interestingly, there are quite a few of us die-hard candle-lighting […]
Posted in Parenting/raising children, Outreach on Feb 15th, 2008
Keeping with Wednesday’s theme, I’d like to write about two very different recently published articles.
In Thursday’s The (New York) Jewish Week, Julie Wiener writes about an organization that commits “the ultimate taboo”: teaching both Judaism and Christianity to the children of interfaith couples. Going to visit the Interfaith Community’s religious school in Long Island, she […]
Posted in Parenting/raising children, Marketing Judaism on Jan 29th, 2008
Overnight summer camp is awesome. I don’t know if I’ve ever met a former camper who disagrees.
But why do parents send their kids to summer camp? More specifically, why do Jewish parents send their kids to Jewish summer camp?
In a terrific essay for the (Vancouver, B.C.) Jewish Independent, Kelley Korbin writes of her shock at hearing that […]
Posted in Parenting/raising children on Jan 24th, 2008
The Boston Globe brought together five Jewish grandmothers and one Jewish grandfather to taste canned chicken soups. Their conclusion? They all stink.
Which I could have told them. I’ve never tasted a canned soup that tasted anything like home-made.
(Credit due Nextbook for turning me onto the link.)
Posted in Parenting/raising children, Statistics, Intermarriage on Dec 26th, 2007
In the sciences all experiments require controls as well as subjects. Controls allow scientists to see if the expected results from an altered environment are any different than what would occur in an unaltered environment.
Typically, research on intermarriage in the Jewish community has looked at the effect of intermarriage on Jewish behavior as a binary […]
Posted in Parenting/raising children, Outreach, Intermarriage on Nov 7th, 2007
Reform Judaism Magazine’s winter 2007 issue looks at the so-called “outreach revolution” through the eyes of children of interfaith households and their parents. The term “outreach revolution” is never precisely defined but I assume it is referring to the gradual change in the atmosphere, programming, outreach and membership of Reform synagogues that has changed the […]
