It’s estimated that nearly half of all Jewish marriages are ones in which one member of the couple is not Jewish. While this raises all sorts of questions about the future survival of the Jewish people, what interested me most is the questions that were more personal in nature. What does a marriage between people of different backgrounds look like? If the decision is made to raise your children in one faith, or one tradition, who compromises what? Can Judaism expand to include traditions of a different culture? Is is possible to convert to what is certainly a religion, but also a tribe, and an ethnicity? What does that conversion look like, and how does the family that results from it self-identify? Becoming Jewish – How to Raise a Jewish Family When One of You Didn’t Start Out That Way explores those questions and offers some much needed guidance on what happens after the conversion, and what raising a family with someone of a dramatically different culture and tradition is really like.
I started writing this book because when I started on my conversion journey, I couldn’t find answers to the questions that concerned me the most. Not only about my spiritual journey, but also about how that would impact our children, and their identity as Jews but as as members of my own decidedly non-Jewish family. If you are either Jewish, or not, how could they be a part of both traditions? This is my story, and how we figured it out – but I’d love to incorporate stories of how others did it as well.
If you’d like to be a part of the project, please contact me at Melissa.Cohen0214@yahoo.com. I’d love to talk more with you about it.
Recent Comments