I was born in Washington, D.C., where my mother called from her hospital bed to put me on the waiting list for a good nursery school. My own kids were born at home in Idaho (one in the bedroom, one in the living room), where getting them into a good preschool was a little less fraught.
I’m sure my mother wasn’t thinking about Judaism when she signed her first child up, and neither was I. But as the parent of Jewish kids in Idaho, I am always considering how to navigate some issue (Santa in the schools, offhand slurs and conflicts with the High Holidays, to name a few). My husband and I moved here in the summer of 2001, a few months before our daughter was born, which means that virtually all my impressions of being Jewish in Idaho have been filtered through the lens of being a parent.
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