Any other Dopers out there with one Jewish parent and one non-Jewish parent?
A couple of questions:
First, what was your religious upbringing like? In my case it wasn’t a problem since neither of my parents are very religious. My Dad (the Jewish half) is a complete atheist and my Mom is pretty close to one. She makes occasional religious statements but she hasn’t prayed or been to church since she was a kid.
Second, how do you deal with questions of ethnicity? I just say “half-Jewish,” but inevitably there’s somebody who points out that I’m not Jewish at all by Jewish law. However I feel wrong denying one half of my ethnic heritage, so I stick with half-Jewish.
You don’t have to answer the questions, I’m just seeing if there are any other half-hebrews on the board. FTR, my Mom is German and Scandanavian from Minnesota.
I am an agnostic who was baptized Roman Catholic. My wife is Jewish and non-practicing.
We are raising our kids devoid of religion, with a healthy does of cynicism towards religion. We do celebrate our capitalist heritage by having both Xmas & Hanukkah. We also have Santa and the Easter Bunny.
Our kids our Half Jewish, with Celtic first names and an Italian last name. I am only ½ Italian, so ours kids are thoroughly mixed up melting pot Americans. My wife is of both Hungarian and Ukrainian Jewish decent.
Added kicker, we figured out that my Dad might be Jewish by Jewish law. His Mom is ½ German Jew {her mother}, but raised RCC. I am reasonably sure this would still qualify him as Jewish under Jewish Law. So my kids are really a 9/16th Jewish or higher or ½ Jewish by how you do the math.
My mother is Jewish and my dad was a Pentecostal Christian but is now just a non-practicing Christian.
My sister and I were raised Jewish in a reform temple, with a little Christian influence. My father is dissatisified with organized religion but he preferred us to be raised Jewish than Christian or without any religion. Both my sister and I had our bat mitzvahs, and I am confirmed with my sister in the confirmation class right now.
As for holidays, we centered in on the family aspect of them, both Jewish and Christian. No Channukah bush, it was a Christmas tree! Easter involved an egg hunt, and a reading of an old book talking about the birth of Christ, and Christmas was mostly presents and family time with my fathers family. For most of the jewish holidays we had my mothers parents over for a big dinner consisting mainly of homemade matzo ball soup and kugel. Oh how I miss having a nice bowl or three of matzo ball soup!
I think of myself as a Jew, even though I am technically non-practicing right now during college. Im a little intimidated to join the local Hillel center, even though I know two people who go.
Also FTR, my mother is an eastern european jew with a little polish somewhere in there, and my father is a german/irish mix.
right here - and you could be me, except for the Minnesota part!
Dad Jewish, Mom not (Methodist; Indiana)
Don’t practice; little religious upbringing
I say “half-Jewish” and get feisty when people point out the matriarchal progression (“do you feel better pointing that out?”) simply for the basic social rudeness of them doing so…
get feisty when people point out the matriarchal progression (“do you feel better pointing that out?”) simply for the basic social rudeness of them doing so…
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Yeah, my mother-in-law could not resist blurting this out to me.
I was raised Episcopal and am non-practicing, my husband is Reform Jewish, and we raised our boys Jewish, much like Tamryne, though we never did Easter.
I embraced much of cultural Jewishness, and our sons grew up going to Temple as a family, also religious school, and each had his bar mitzvah and was confirmed.
No doubt if one of the boys wanted to marry an Orthodox girl, there might be problems, but I certainly do not go to bed at night worrying about this kind of stuff.
Amazing. Two of my SDMB buddies, What Exit? and WordMan, in this interesting little thread. My wife is, as she says, “half-Jew, half hillbilly”. Her Jewish ancestors(her father’s maternal and paternal lines) moved to our small town in the 1890s. There being no other Jews in town, and social pressure being what it was, at some point (no one seems to know when) they joined the local Presbyterian church. They managed to marry fellow ethnic Jews until my father-in-law’s generation, people they met on business trips to Chicago or New York. My wife grew up thinking of herself as being of German descent. She was subjected to some anti-semitic teasing during high school. Her grandmother explained to her that her last name was a Jewish name, and that the family had been, long ago, practising Jews. There are a couple of other families in our town who belong to Christian churches and who have what would generally be considered German-Jewish names.
My father is Jewish and my mother was an Italian Catholic. They dated in the 1950’s, but couldn’t get a dispensation to marry, and so broke up… for 10 years. They ran into each other, got back together ,and married in 1969.
My dad signed away his right to raise us Jewish. We were raised Catholic, my brother and I, but it didn’t take. My dad never did anything overtly to undermine the Catholicism, though having a Jewish father made me question the Catholic dogma at a young age.
There was a specific incident, when I was in 4th grade, where another kid told me that my father couldn’t go to Heaven because he didn’t accept Jesus as his personal savior. When she wouldn’t take it back, I punched her in the face. First and last time I ever punch anyone in the face…
In the post fist-fight conversation, my mother asked why I did it. I told her, and she said that wasn’t true. I pointed out that Catholic dogma didn’t support her denial (I was taking religious instruction at the time, and they made a very big deal about how you can’t be a “cafeteria Catholic”-- you have to accept ALL the dogma, not pick and choose what you want to believe). It was then that I gave up on organized religion entirely.
I consider myself half-Jewish, regardless of whether Judaism accepts me as such. I don’t intend to practice any religion or raise my children with any, so it doesn’t matter that much, I don’t think.
Dad is Jewish (grandfather came from Ukraine) and an atheist, Mom is from a fundamentalist Christian family, but she herself is not really ‘practising’ much (she goes to church maybe twice a year.
I went to Hebrew school (Reconstructionist) and have never considered myself to be anything but Jewish - I almost ‘converted’ but decided I did not want to at this time before the ‘final roundup’ as it were, since I did not feel like I could ‘convert’ to something I had been, in my mind, all my life. I may decide to ‘convert’ in the future, but not right now.
I, too, find it really rude when people cheerfully inform me that I’m not ‘really Jewish’ - how offensive can you be? Nobody would ever tell someone they weren’t ‘really Christian’ if they asserted they were (or, if they did, they would be considered really rude!).
Since I am now agnostic, I tell people I have a Jewish/Quaker background, but I am not religious. Kind of covers all the bases.
Oh, and I love that split scene in Annie Hall where Alvy is having dinner with his family on one side and with Annie’s on the other. It’s exactly the way I remember Easter dinner at my Grandmother’s house as compared to Passover at my Nanna’s.
We rarely went to our reform temple, but I did become Bar Mitzvah. That may be the last time I ever set foot in a temple.
I still tell people I’m Jewish, but I’m rather agnostic.
Oddly enough, my father’s side was originally Jewish, so I have a “jewish” sounding last name, even though it was changed - my great-great grandmother had her new husband change his family name to something “less jewish sounding”. At that point, that side of the family changed their religion, too. Only one letter was changed, and the resulting name has become common and still retains it’s “jewishness”
Dad was raised Jewish, Mom Irish-Catholic, but converted so Grandma wouldn’t have a heart attack because Dad couldn’t get married in a temple.
Neither of my parents have ever been religious, and never pushed religion on any of us. My brother and I didn’t go to Hebrew school, nor were we mitzvahed in any way. Everything I know about the Bible (new or old), I learned from Alex Trebek and Andrew Lloyd Webber.
We had Christmas trees and Passover baskets, and usually celebrate holidays with Dad’s family, without the background that makes them “special.” Rosh Hashanah=free day off school. Yom Kippur=eat before we leave the house, Grandma won’t feed you till sundown.
I grew up to be a pagan, but I appreciate religion more than most people I know because I had to find it myself.
Since I started this thread I guess I should thank everyone who replied. So, Thanks!
Good to see a few other demi-Hebrews on the board.
I’m also glad to see other people are annoyed by people telling them they’re not at all Jewish. I can understand the religious reasoning, but I don’t see anything any more wrong identifying as half-Jewish than identifying as half-Irish or half-Italian, if that’s what you happen to be.
My dad is a non-practicing Jew (Ukranian/Polish) and my mom is a semi-practicing Lutheran. I tell people I’m a Jewtheran when I’m feeling jovial and corny. For a serious answer, I say that I’m ethnically part Jewish and hope that doesn’t offend anyone. I was raised Lutheran, FWIW, and religiously I suppose I identify as vaguely, privately Protestant.
I know more half-Jews than I do full Jews. Actually, I read a statistic in one of the reviews for The Half-Jewish Book: A Celebration that said there are more half-Jewish children under the age of 11 than full Jewish children. Anyone ever read that book, by the way? It’s on my list of things to read.
Thanks for sharing that book, Aw-Snappity. This, even though “[half-Jews] are lamented as the first generational step toward the extinction of all Jews in America” and denied various sorts of recognition as Jews by various factions within Judaism. “As if all that were not enough, they can never figure out how to decorate their living rooms come mid-December.”
Heh, I can relate to the above.
As an Episcopal kid in both New York and Colorado, I had a lot of half-Jewish and Jewish friends. The halfsies sometimes seemed unsure of what they were, or whether they should ‘choose’ something.
Back then, being a ‘hybrid’ was a bigger deal, and this influenced our decision to raise our kids Jewish. But yeah, December was sometimes difficult for me.
What if Dad converted before the wedding? Does that count? Apparently the nuns at RBC did such a good job, they beat the Catholocism right out of him.
My Mom, on the other hand, had never wanted us to be deprived of some of the aspects the other kids in the neighborhood had - we got out Hanukkah presents on Christmas (no tree, but stockings were still hung by the chimney with care) and did Easter Eggs. I was still raised as Reform Jewish, though, and went through hebrew school and a Bar Mitzvah, but have only been back a handful of times, and even then only for weddings or a bris.
My mom was Jewish–she converted to Christianity when I was about 12. My dad’s Christian, although he isn’t religious at all. My grandparents stopped talking to my mom when she married my dad, but after my grandfather died, my grandma got over it when mom started having kids. Grandma was from the old country so we were pretty familiar with Yiddish early on. She kept kosher.
We were raised Presbyterian. When I was in college I gave up on that, having discovered that they didn’t have the lock on the true meaning of life after all. I went to a Quaker college and flirted with joining the Society of Friends, then decided I really wasn’t a Christian after all. I married a nice Jewish boy (well, a nice Atheist Jewish boy) and we decided to raise our kids Jewish, and let them sort it out when they got older (they’re 4 and 2 now, so they have a ways to go). We are not religious at all, but the kids will get a religious education when they got older.
I rejoined the fold–as a person with a Jewish mother, it didn’t take much. I picked out a Hebrew name (named myself after my grandmother), had a naming ceremony at the local Temple and that was it. Both boys have been circumcised. We celebrate Chanukah at home, Christmas with my family, Passover and Sukkoth at my husband’s cousin’s (the only place we keep Shabbot). When the kids’ get older, we’ll have to be more active I think. Which is weird, because my husband, raised Jewish, doesn’t believe, and the one who believes has no real background in the religion. As my 4-year-old is learning to say, “Oy.”