ABSTRACT
It was finally the Austrian school system that turned me into a Jewish mother. Before I gave birth to two girls in Austria, I was probably like many other well-traveled, progressively minded Americans living with a European. But what challenged my previous identity as an assimilated, nonreligious Californian of Jewish origin, here in the southern Austrian town of Graz, were not fears of anti-Semitism or neofascism, but the fact that religious education is an integral part of the Austrian public school system. My daughters are faced with the choice of attending courses in Catholicism along with most of the other kids in their class, or being branded a “nonCatholic” and sitting the classes out with the “outsiders.”
