We were both a long way from New York.
Donna was getting her Master’s in Library Science at Catholic University. I was at American University’s Washington College of Law. Native New Yorkers adrift in the late 1990s in a city that felt, at first, like someone else’s. We found each other anyway—the same sense of humor, the same appetite for adventure, the same reflexive loyalty to the Yankees. In a town full of transplants, we recognized something in each other.
I put up a wall when things started getting serious. My intention had been to marry Jewish. But Donna has a habit of being right about things I’ve convinced myself are fixed, and she broke that wall down. When we fell in love—and you cannot always control who you fall in love with—the conversation about how we’d raise our future children came quickly and naturally. She never had a wall. She was making a leap of faith too—a Catholic woman agreeing to raise her children in both traditions, trusting that her own religion would have a place in our home. I have never fully forgotten that.
I knew what I was stepping into. As a Jewish father, I wondered whether our children would hold onto Jewish identity growing up in a home that also celebrated Christmas and Easter. That question lived quietly inside me. But love is love.
We got engaged, and the Catholic Church required a Pre-Cana retreat—a premarital workshop held over a weekend. I agreed to go under one condition: If anyone started singing “Kumbaya,” I was out the door.
The weekend turned out to be nothing like I’d imagined. I’d pictured something intensely evangelical, not entirely comfortable territory for a Jewish man who didn’t share the theology. Instead, it was warm, grounded and surprisingly universal. On the final morning, one of the priests asked if he could join us for breakfast. When Donna and I told him we were an interfaith couple—she Catholic, I Jewish—he set down his coffee and said, simply, “As long as you believe in God, it doesn’t matter. Love is love.”
I felt a weight lift off my chest that I hadn’t fully realized I’d been carrying.
I should mention that in the last 20 minutes of that Sunday afternoon, they had us all hold hands and sing “Kumbaya.” I gave Donna the stink eye. She laughed. We have been doing some version of that routine ever since—me with my walls and my conditions, her laughing them down.
When people ask what religion we’re raising our daughters, Jocelyn and Claire, Donna and I say the same thing: both.
We know how that sounds. We joke that it may result in some serious therapy bills when they’re older. But both is the honest answer. Both is what we are.
Donna runs our house, and that includes the holidays—all of them. We decorate for Hanukkah and Christmas. She makes raisin kugel and matzoh ball soup from scratch. She helps ensure the girls study their Hebrew and Torah portions. I have tried to show up for her faith the way she shows up for mine.
Every year, I string the outdoor Christmas lights. These days, it’s from a ladder on the ground, though in my younger years I was the Jew on the Roof, draping icicle lights from our second-floor eaves. I drove the girls to and from CCD at the church around the corner. Early in our relationship, I gave Donna a diamond cross necklace that she still wears today.
Our daughters have surprised us. Jocelyn loved CCD. Claire didn’t much care for it. We assumed we knew which way each daughter would lean, and we were wrong about both of them.
Jocelyn had her bat mitzvah in February 2024. Afterward, she stepped further into Jewish life, starting a Jewish student cohort at H-B Woodlawn, an Arlington secondary school comprising students in grades 6-12. The group she founded drew students across all grade levels, including seniors. She sometimes wears a cross and a Star of David together. When people ask, she tells them she’s interfaith, as if it’s the most natural thing in the world. For her, it is. She’s found a place for both.
Claire is a different person, which is its own kind of gift. She is a social butterfly who makes friends easily, but she has never quite bonded with more than one or two kids at religious school. She doesn’t love Sunday mornings. She has been honest with me—sometimes bracingly so—about the questions she carries. God is one of them.
When Claire tells me these things, I try to listen rather than argue. There is no gain in pushing back; she will simply dig in and become more certain of her own position. She comes by that honestly.
I thought I saw a crack last spring when her religious school organized a field trip to Ellis Island and she spent the day tracing the immigrant threads that brought her family to this country, Jewish and Italian alike.
Claire is the kind of traveler whose mantra is “touring is boring.” She would rather be in a pool in Aruba with a smoothie in one hand than in any museum you could name. But something caught her at Ellis Island. She moved through the exhibits slowly, reading things I would have expected her to breeze past, turning to me with insights she’d just learned. The history was getting through—her history, from both sides.
When we finally left, she said, “Dad, don’t hold this against me. But I think this time, touring isn’t so boring.”
It didn’t change her mind about religious school. She is clear that she is finishing her bat mitzvah and that will be that, at least as far as the temple is concerned. After her bat mitzvah, she’ll continue toward her Catholic Confirmation. You can plant seeds, but you cannot decide where they take root.
On October 3, Claire will stand on the bimah at Temple Rodef Shalom in Falls Church. She will chant in a language she has spent years learning, in a tradition her Catholic mother helped keep alive in our home, in front of a family that contains multitudes. She will do this not because she believes everything it represents, but because she made a commitment and she is going to honor it. That, I have come to understand, is its own kind of faith.
There is no escape, of course, from having to be Yankees fans. Some things are non-negotiable.
Jason Schlosberg is an attorney, writer and photographer who lives in Arlington with his wife, Donna, and their two daughters. He is currently writing a novel about faith, fatherhood and survival, set in Israel after October 7.
