Raising Your Jewish/Christian Child: How Interfaith Parents Can Give Children the Best of Both Their Heritages

This was the first book I read on this subject. After getting my friends' opinions of how they have been raising their children with each parent a different religion, I felt I needed more advice from a neutral party. This book helped me become much more open minded about how I could bring a baby into the world with each parent having completely different beliefs. It helped me to see how we can both raise our child with our own religious beliefs while fully respecting each other.

Now in a completely revised, expanded and updated second edition, Lee Gruzen's Raising Your Jewish/Christian Child: How Interfaith Parents Can Give Children The Best Of Both Their Heritages continues to be an invaluable compendium of keen observation and sound advice for interfaith parenting. All of the problems and challenges confronting a Jewish/Christian family are drawn from hundreds of interviews as well as Gruzen's extensive professional research and personal experience. The issues covered wide range from beginning talking with children about God, and moving on to planning ceremonies, celebrating holidays, relationships with grandparents, developing and sense of self, and more. Raising Your Jewish/Christian Child is enthusiastically recommended and invaluable reading for anyone in an interfaith marriage and seeking to instill values and an appreciation of heritage within the character of their children.

I found this book to be one of the first I discovered that truly examined the option of raising a child to know and respect BOTH religions of the parents. Up until I read this book I was saddened that all advice I'd read said, "Pick one religion and stick with it..." This seemed too simplistic It would necessarily exclude one parent from sharing their own childhood faith with their kids in a meaningful way. We intend to raise our own children as Jews, but I also want them to have a sense of respect and knowledge of my own religion.