Mixed Blessings: Marriage Between Jews and Christians

Well-done discussion of the issues that may arise when Jews and Christians marry. The Cowans ran interfaith workshops to help couples understand and, ideally, resolve their problems and used what they learned from the participants along with their own personal experiences in writing this book.

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Frequently,what someone thought was their partner's idiosyncrasies turned out to be something common to the latter's heritage. The many examples, while interesting and enlightening, made the book long. On the other hand, I don't know what I would delete.
The book was written in a1987, when about 35 percent of American Jews married non-Jews; today the number is much higher and the intermarriage has become more accepted by families and many religious communities. It is not entirely clear how the Cowans define what it means to be Jewish; certainly many of the Jews in the book identify ethnically, but not religiously.

Paul Cowan is the first-person narrator; his wife, Rachel, was busy in rabbinical school. As explained in the preface, Paul wrote and Rachel edited. Paul is also the author of An Orphan in History.

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