Are Today’s Parents Getting a Raw Deal?

Rhonda Stephens for The Huffington Post   

Summer 1974. I’m 9 years old. By 7:30 a.m., I’m up and out of the house, or if it’s Saturday I’m up and doing exactly what my father, Big Jerry, has told me to do. Might be raking, mowing, digging holes or washing cars.

Summer 2016. I’m tiptoeing out of the house, on my way to work, in an effort not to wake my children who will undoubtedly sleep until 11 a.m. They may complete a couple of the chores I’ve left in a list on the kitchen counter for them, or they may eat stale Cheez-Its that were left in their rooms three days ago, in order to avoid the kitchen at all costs and “not see” the list.

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Don't Censor What Scares You

By Alana Newhouse for Tablet Magazine   

When I was growing up, my parents and I would spend the second Passover Seder every year at the home of close friends. It was an intense ritual: thirty to forty people, somehow always seeming to range in age from birth to near-death, with many from differing backgrounds and with varying degrees of Jewish knowledge and experience, each offering to the collective his or her own particular investment: fluency in Hebrew and Aramaic, mastery of various commentaries on the Hagaddah, insight into current events, comic relief. Crumb1

My parents had become dedicated, beloved members of their modern Orthodox community, but neither had been raised in an observant home, and so neither had much to offer the group by way of formal religious knowledge. Until, that is, the year that my father stumbled upon “the karpas thing.”

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A ‘Little Einsteins,’ For Little Mensches

By Amy Sara Clark for The Jewish Week   

New cartoon on Jewish values focuses on the ‘why' of Judaism rather than the ‘how.’

When Sarah Lefton began developing a video series for Jewish children, her first thought was to focus on Jewish ritual.

“When it first started, we thought it would be a series about demystifying the Shabbat experience — 50, one-minute videos about what happens on Shabbat,” said Lefton, founder and director of the nonprofit G-dcast, which makes videos and apps for those looking to learn more about Judaism.

But after talking to dozens of parents, it became clear that the families she was trying to reach, those with a “lower knowledge” base, were more interested in how to raise mensches than how to say the motzi. 

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Sending My Daughter to Jewish Summer Camp Sparked My Own Jewish Identity

Julie MacDonald for Kveller

I grew up Christian in a small Maine town. I spent my summers reading a stack of library books and hanging out in the backyard with my sister and neighborhood friends. In fact, I didn’t realize sleepaway camp was a “thing” until I went away to college and my Jewish classmates got teary-eyed discussing their camp experiences.

It baffled me. This is how people spent their summers? They left their families to hang out with people they saw for a few weeks every year while doing crazy stuff, like archery? Didn’t their parents love them?

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