Customer Reviews

Raising Interfaith Children: Spiritual Orphans or Spiritual Heirs?

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the actual result of the rare upbringing of the 3 children of the Schaper and Goldstein marriage of a Protestant woman minister and her non -practicing Jewish husband, who helped their children learn via Protestant Sunday School and church attendance and preparation for Communion, plus full preparation for Bat and Bar Mitzvahs, was that all 3 chose to practice Judaism as their primary faith as adults. Their dad became a practicing Jew in the process, and ended up as biographer of a well known minister, Wm. Sloane Coffin, in a book published this year by Yale U. Press.
The US statistics on children of Jewish- Christian families seem to support this result, since more of them produce Jewish children, and an equal number to those in fully Jewish families.

this book offers a romanticized veiw of raising interfaith children: it goes into depth extolling the benefits, but offers scant pragmatic advice on how to deal with the challenges and potential costs. i did not find the book at all helpful.