The Mother Of All Confusion

When solutions are decided on the basis of their being pragmatic, not because they are right:

But Will the Chicken Soup Taste as Good?: Gentile Mothers Raise Jewish Kids

A couple of months ago, Christina Aguilera snagged tabloid headlines when she hosted a bris for her 8-day-old son, Max Liron Bratman. The Catholic pop star apparently plans to raise her child in the faith of her Jewish husband, whom she married in a Jewish ceremony in 2006.

While Ms. Aguilera may be the most famous example these days, she is hardly the only gentile woman who has, in effect, become a "Jewish mother." Every Friday night, Abi Auer -- an Atlanta mom of two small children -- makes a special dinner for the Jewish Sabbath, often with homemade challah. Kim Stiglitz, who lives in San Francisco, recently began marking the Sabbath by avoiding computer use on Friday nights and reserving Saturdays for family time with her husband, Marc, and 2-year-old daughter, Poppy.

For thousands of years, only children born to a Jewish mother (or who underwent a conversion) were considered members of the tribe. But while Orthodox and Conservative Jews continue to adhere to the law of "matrilineal descent," for the past quarter-century the more liberal Reform movement has fully accepted the children of Jewish fathers and gentile mothers provided that the parents give their offspring a Jewish upbringing.

Today, with intermarriage increasingly pervasive in the American Jewish community, it is no longer unusual to see gentile moms coordinating the Hebrew school carpool and hosting Passover seders. In fact, the Jewish Outreach Institute (JOI) -- a New York-based group seeking to make the Jewish community more welcoming and inclusive -- estimates that there are over 200,000 households in the U.S. in which gentile mothers and Jewish fathers are raising Jewish children.

The Mothers Circle, a national program sponsored by the institute, aims to give these women the know-how and confidence to pull this off...While many participants ultimately decide to become Jewish, organizers insist that this is not the goal of the Mothers Circle. [emphasis added]

Perhaps the problem is best--if inadvertently--described by Sylvia Barack Fishman, professor of contemporary Jewish life at Brandeis University and author of "Double or Nothing: Jewish Families and Mixed Marriage":

The main problem the Jewish community faces, according to Ms. Fishman, is not that there are so many Christian mothers but that Jewish fathers tend to be so disengaged from Judaism. "Men in general are much more skeptical about the necessity for religion in raising children," says Ms. Fishman. "Women, both Jewish and non-Jewish, are much more likely to say that religion is a useful tool in raising moral and ethical people and that it's better to raise children with religion than not with religion." [emphasis added]

The thing about tools is that you are generally not too particular about how--or how often--you use it.

Technorati Tag: Intermarriage and Judaism and Jews.