"Do you think your grandchildren will be Jewish?” I was speechless when a friend asked me this question many years ago, when my own children were still quite young. How should I respond? After all, my husband and I maintained a kosher home, observed Erev Shabbat with lighting candles and eating dinner in the dining room every Friday evening, and lived our lives as Jews in many other ways. Our three children went to religious school, Hebrew school, to a Jewish camp in the summer and on trips to Israel when they were in high school. Of course our children knew they were Jewish. As for our grandchildren, I certainly expected that they would follow in the traditions their parents had been taught. But they—or rather he, since I have only one grandchild—was not reared in the Jewish tradition because his father is not Jewish and didn’t see the value of living Jewishly
