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Rating: 
Summary: Very Biased and Frustrating to Read!
Review: Before I had even finished the second chapter, I was forced to examine the nature of my Jewishness, what it means to me, what role it plays in my life, and what role I wanted it to play. I didn't want to put the book down! I couldn't wait to see what further revelations were in store for me. Mixed Blessings provides a context in which couples can explore their deeply-ingrained beliefs and attitudes. In this way, it can help people in interfaith relationships to determine their own cultural, spiritual, and religious identities, and to better understand the complex origins of their conflict.
Rating: 
Summary: A must read for those in a Jewish/Christian relationship!!
Review: The book is very informative, as the authors describe their personal experiences with interfaith relationships. They were themselves an interfaith couple and they recount how they dealt with the problems that eventually arose in their relationship and how they came to work with other couples in the same situation. Great interviews with other couples and with children of interfaith relationship describing their own experiences. Definitely a MUST READ!!
Rating:
Summary: Very Biased and Frustrating to Read!
Review: This book was full of biases and faulty assumptions. I am sorry that I wasted my time and money on it. As other reviewers have remarked, the Cowans (the Christian wife of whom converted to her husband's faith) clearly have an agenda- to convince non-Jews that they must convert to their partner's faith and to convince Jews that if their gentile partner won't give in and stop being so goyish, the marriage is doomed. Bull hockey, I say! And I know whereof I speak, being the gentile partner in a long-term interfaith relationship, with a partner whose parents are Jewish and Christian too, successfully married for 30 years!One assumption the Cowans make is that there are two types of people- Jews and Christians. Based on this assumption, they go on for pages about the history of Christians persecuting Jews and completely ignore the fact that there is more than one combination possible for an intermarriage. I am a gentile, but not a Christian, and in my acquaintance there is a Jewish/Buddhist couple, a Jewish/Wiccan couple and many other such pairs. This oversight made the book even less useful than it was to begin with. There were several passages in the book that were so mean and insensitive that they almost made me cry! For instance, the way in one of their seminars they allow the Jewish participants to berate a Christian woman endlessly for wanting a Christmas tree (and she came from a broken home where Christmas was the only happy time!). There is much on how she must be sensitive to her husband's feelings about Christian persecution/being a minority, but what about her? She has feelings too, as do all us other gentiles in intermarriages! Eventually she was pressured into not only giving up the tree but also converting. I mean no disrespect to those who choose to convert- I considered the same at one point. But I do object to books such as this one which is blatantly insensitive and mean to Christian partners. I would be just as mad if it was this cruel to Jewish partners, because marriages should be based on kindness, fairness, and honesty, not coercion, guilt, and cruelty!
Rating:
Summary: Out-dated for our multicultural world
Review: This book was written about a marriage that started in the sixties. It is simply out-of-touch with the realities of our multicultural world. Those of us who were raised to value diversity won't have much use for the lessons imparted by this books' authors. It simply isn't relevant to couples in the twenty-first century. And thank goodness for that. Read Mary-Helene Rosenbaum's "Celebrating our Differences" instead.
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