How to Be a Jewish Parent: A Practical Handbook for Family Life

anita diamant karen kushner

How can I make the holidays interesting and meaningful to my child?
Should I send my child to a Jewish day school? A Jewish summer camp?
What kind of synagogue is best for my family?
How do I plan a family trip to Israel or add Jewish heritage sites when traveling around the country or around the world?

If you are, or hope to be, a Jewish parent in more than name, you have a lot of decisions to make. So many choices! But you can have no better guide to this wealth of opportunity than Anita Diamant.

The author of popular books on Jewish weddings and baby rituals, Diamant now joins with family therapist Karen Kushner to help you through the next steps. They give creative, practical answers to these and many other questions, provide guidance on how to foster Jewish decision making for children of all ages, describe how to make your home a "Jewish space," and explain the importance of synagogue membership, holiday celebrations, community service, and other family activities.

Diamant and Kushner draw from many sources to describe the practices, customs, and values that go into creating a Jewish home. They combine insights from Jewish tradition with contemporary developmental thinking about how children learn and grow. They provide addresses (including Web sites) where you can find specific information and other resources. And since experience may be the best of all teachers, they share their own and other parents' stories and observations. For Diamant and Kushner, the number-one goal of How to Be a Jewish Parent is to give parents (and grandparents) guideposts to raising joyful children within the rich tradition of the Jewish faith and culture. No Jewish family should be without it.

Genres parentingjudaismjewishnonfictionjudaicareligionfamily

320 pages, Paperback

First published September 5,2000

This edition

Format: 320 pages, Paperback
Published: September 5, 2000 by Schocken
ISBN: 9780805211160
ASIN: 0805211160
Language: English

About the author

anita diamant

Anita Diamant is the author of thirteen books -- including THE RED TENT. Based on the biblical story of Dinah, THE RED TENT became a word-of-mouth bestseller in the US and around the world, where it has been published in more than 25 countries.

Her new book, a work of nonfiction. PERIOD. END OF SENTENCE. A NEW CHAPTER IN THE FIGHT FOR MENSTRUAL JUSTICE will be published in May 2021., As different as they are, this book returns to some of the themes of THE RED TENT -- including the meaning and experience of menstruation.

Anita has written four other novels: GOOD HARBOR, THE LAST DAYS OF DOGTOWN, DAY AFTER NIGHT, and THE BOSTON GIRL. She is also the author of six non-fiction guides to contemporary Jewish life, which have become classic reference books: THE JEWISH WEDDING NOW, THE JEWISH BABY BOOK, LIVING A JEWISH LIFE, CHOOSING A JEWISH LIFE, HOW TO RAISE A JEWISH CHILD, and SAYING KADDISH..

An award-winning journalist, Diamant's articles have appeared in the Boston Globe, Real Simple, Parenting Magazine, Hadassah, Boston Magazine and Yankee Magazine. PITCHING MY TENT, a collection personal essays, is drawn from twenty years worth of newspaper and magazine columns.