Interfaith Families

Jane Kaplan

Description

As the number of Jewish-Christian marriages in America continue to rise, couples find themselves searching for ways to reconcile love and religion. Even when each partner has no particular religious life, they are confronted with related conflicts.

• Should children be raised in one faith and not the other?
• Who decides which holidays to celebrate and how?
• How can couples deal with extended family members who may not understand or accept their interfaith marriage?

Readers will find and array of reactions and approaches as the couples profiled in this book describe how they tacked these topics. Each personal narrative offers fresh insight into interfaith families by giving examples of the successes and failures, struggles and triumphs of everyday situations and major life decisions.

Sujets

• Comparative Religion
• Philosophie et théologie
• Religion

Informations

• Publié par: Church Publishing Incorporated
• Date de parution: 01 mars 2005
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781596271524
• Langue: English

Extrait

Interfaith Families
Interfaith Families
Personal Stories of Jewish-Christian Intermarriage

Jane Kaplan
Foreword by Phil Donahue, talk show host
Seabury Books An imprint of Church Publishing, New York
Copyright 2004, 2005 by Jane Kaplan All rights reserved.
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 1-59627-011-X
Church Publishing Incorporated 445 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10016 www.churchpublishing.org
5 4 3 2 1
Contents
F OREWORD BY P HIL D ONAHUE
A CKNOWLEDGMENTS
I NTRODUCTION
1 C HOOSING A J EWISH F AMILY L IFE
2 C HOOSING A C HRISTIAN F AMILY L IFE
3 F INDING A W AY TO H AVE B OTH
4 L OOKING FOR A LTERNATIVES
5 D ECIDING TO C ONVERT
I NDEX
Foreword
This book is more than a collection of stories of Jewish-Christian intermarriages. It is an astonishingly honest look inside the hearts and minds of married people of different faiths. Ms. Kaplan brings the best gifts to this very personal inquiry: an unusually insightful and well-focused interviewing skill and compassion for the very personal nature of the issues. This book is an act of love and respect for the people who have endured what for some was a terrifying discovery: being in love with someone of another religion, another culture, another set of rituals and values. It is a genuine page-turner with Jane Kaplan as the guide on journeys that begin with, What will my parents say? and proceed into the most sublime questions of life itself: Who am I? Who is my spouse? And who shall our children be?
-Phil Donahue
Acknowledgments
Thanks first and foremost to my husband Harry and our children Jacob and Elise for their consistent enthusiasm and support during this entire project. Many thanks also to my agent Ron Laitsch, and to Suzanne Staszak-Silva at Praeger for her clear and insightful guidance in shaping this book. I greatly appreciate Phil Donahue s extreme generosity and encouragement. And I want to thank John Ware for his early help with the original manuscript.
Introduction
* * *
When we decided to get married, I remember my mother trying to talk some sense into me. She would say, Just keep in mind that religion becomes a very, very sensitive issue, and marriage is difficult to begin with. You have so many issues that differences in religion make everything harder. I just completely ignored her. Then we started planning the ceremony and had a real tough time trying to find someone to marry us. And that s when I really started getting very discouraged, very disillusioned.
* * *
Stephen and I didn t know what we were going to do about children. He wanted them brought up with some religious background, and it made the most sense for them to be Catholic because that s what he is. On the one hand, I had never been very active in Judaism. I didn t go to Hebrew school. I never had a bat mitzvah. And yet I identified so strongly as a Jew that the idea of raising my son as a Christian was making me impossibly uncomfortable. I just couldn t do it.
* * *
We belong to both a church and a synagogue. We each attend the other s house of worship. Whether we are going to the church or the synagogue, we go together, because we re a family. I don t want to send a message to Ellen s church community that I would send her alone. And she feels the same way when I want to go to synagogue.
* * *
This book is intended as an unbiased and nonjudgmental forum for the issue of Jewish-Christian intermarriage. It is made up of fifty-one stories that I compiled by interviewing men and women from around the country and editing their material. There is no single religious point of view that prevails in the book. There are no right or wrong answers to the questions that are raised. Instead, both Christians and Jews are given a chance to talk freely about how they have been handling the many aspects of intermarriage and how they feel about the choices they have made.
I am not part of an intermarriage myself. I became interested in the topic over the years because a number of my close friends and relatives are in intermarriages and have confided in me about the various issues they were confronting. Many of them have read one book or another on this subject, as I have. The books tend to either be surveys of the issue or represent only the Jewish or Christian point of view. They never seem to include very much in the way of personal stories. People I spoke with were very interested in a book that would have a more personal format and would enable them to learn firsthand about the variety of situations intermarried couples have encountered. They told me they had a great desire to compare other people s stories with their own in order to gain insight into their own lives.
After I decided to do a book about Jewish-Christian intermarriage, I spent many months researching the topic thoroughly. I read everything I could find on the subject in order to determine the issues that should be included and the points I wanted to bring out. Based on my research, I developed a lengthy set of interview questions and topics to explore. This interview guideline included all of the important issues and aspects of Jewish-Christian intermarriage. My goal was to find people who could articulate each of the varied points of this issue in personal and compelling ways.
It took a long time to find the individuals to include in this book. I started out by asking everyone I knew to recommend possible couples and then went on to ask those couples whom they knew, and again whom the next set of couples knew. I preinterviewed by phone everybody who seemed as if they might have something valuable and unique to say. I then chose the individuals I wanted to interview more fully. I did the actual interviews in person if possible, or I recorded the material over the phone if someone lived too far away. In this way, I was able to reach people all around the country and obtain their stories.
As I researched this issue, I learned that each year the number of Jewish-Christian marriages in this country has continued to rise. And indeed I was able to find many individuals who wanted to participate in this book; I initially talked to more than three times as many people as I was ultimately able to use. I interviewed men and women at all stages in their marriages about a wide variety of both practical and emotional issues. My voice was not added to their stories, and there were no experts who stepped in to comment on the material or to offer their interpretations. The ideas and feelings expressed were unfiltered, and the stories seem to me thoughtful and honest and passionate. They were told with the kind of details only someone experiencing a situation firsthand could know.
People willingly shared very personal parts of their lives with me. But in most cases they didn t want to do it publicly; often, there were things they told me that they preferred not to reveal to friends or family members, or even to their own spouses. I have protected their privacy by changing their names and, in some cases, other details that might identify them. At times, if their perspectives differed sufficiently, I have included the stories of both the husband and the wife. But because of the highly personal nature of the feelings expressed, I interviewed each member of the couple privately.
Although there are many common denominators, I think each story has its own unique perspective. In one, both the husband and wife wanted a chance to pass their own heritage on, so they decided to raise their daughter as a Christian and their sons as Jews. In another, a Jewish woman agreed to raise her children as Catholics, but when her son was born she couldn t go through with it, so the couple compromised by becoming Unitarian. There is a Catholic man whose Jewish wife did not want their children baptized, but after twenty years of Catholic education he felt he had to do something, so he secretly baptized his children himself one day when his wife was out. And there is a Christian woman who converted to Judaism and seems to be happily leading the perfect Jewish life but is really feeling she wimped out by converting, in trying to make herself acceptable to people who didn t like her the way she was.
There are a number of stories in the book from people who have converted. Although the husband and wife were both part of the same religion after the conversion took place, I have included them as intermarried couples for two reasons. First, in some cases the conversion did not actually occur until after the marriage was already underway, or even until after the children had been born. Second, the two individuals came into the marriage with very different family and cultural backgrounds, which continued to affect them even after the husband or wife had converted.
As I put together this book, some clear patterns emerged about Jewish-Christian intermarriage. These findings are the result of my own observations after researching and interviewing so many people about this issue. They are based not only on the individuals who have been included in the book, but also on all of the others I spoke to along the way. The patterns I found are strongly reflected in the book in terms of the number of couples who are in particular situations.
A large number of intermarriages have taken place between Jews and Catholics, rather than between Jews and Protestants.
There have been many Christians who converted to Judaism but very few Jews who converted to Christianity.
Far more of the intermarried couples I spoke to have chosen a Jewish orientation for their family rather than a Christian one. Even if the Jewish person was fairly nonreligious, he or she often still wanted to have Jewish