wedding - Google News

Beginning with a brief history of the Jewish wedding (including wonderful stories of barshert, couples whose love was clearly meant to be), Brownstein guides the bride and groom through the pleasures of the engagement party and Jewish bridal shower to choosing a ketubah (marriage contract), wedding ring, and invitations. She describes traditional Jewish customs and rituals, then suggests ways to personalize the chuppah, or wedding canopy; music; wedding programs; and even the chairs. Brownstein includes the joyous times after the wedding and gives the new couple tips on how to create a Jewish home and original ideas for thank-you notes.

Of course, Brownstein doesn't forget about food, with menu suggestions for an engagement party and a bridal shower tea party, as well as for the wedding reception and Sheva Brachas, the traditional week of festive meals following the wedding. Delicious, mouth-watering recipes for Salmon Roll with Dill Sauce, Green Bean Bundles, Potato and Leek Soup, and Poached Pears will please even the most finicky couple. Brownstein supplies tips on how to keep a kosher kitchen as well.

The book also offers glimpses of seven real-life Jewish weddings. From a jubilant outdoor celebration in San Diego, California; a dazzling New York City affair; a classic Hasidic wedding in Hartford, Connecticut; to an elegant affair in Palm Beach, Florida, these stories will inspire any bride and groom in planning their own wedding, no matter where they live.

Illustrated with more than 200 gorgeous color and black-and-white photographs, Jewish Weddings is an indispensable book for any Jewish couple.

The author tries to combine a pseudo Martha Stewart "look" with some useful information and ideas for Jewish weddings, and the result is mediocrity. The photos are very pretty (much like those found in any of the myriad mainstream bridal magazines at your local newsstand), but I found the text hard to follow and not particularly informative. The author's background as a graphic desginer (not a rabbi or educator or even party planner) clearly dominated her approach to the book. I hoped to find historical context, information distinguishing Jewish wedding traditions from mainstream American traditions, and information further distinguishing Jewish law from custom. Instead I found full page photos of cakes and gowns and ideas about how your creative friends can decorate chairs as a gift to you. While some girly-girls might be into this stuff, as a prospective groom I found it mostly useless and often confusing.

To her credit, the author did manage to include a fair amount of information about Jewish laws and customs, but she failed to present it in a way that eases a bride's (and groom's) decisions about what to incorporate in our wedding, or where to find more information about specific practices. I did not find a single Hebrew word written in Hebrew in the book. Instead the author opted to translate almost everything, with the occasional translitteratation. The "chazen"/"chatan" confusion experienced by another Amazon reviewer stemmed from the author's further failure to distinguish Yiddish from Hebrew ("chozen" or "chossen" is Yiddish and "chatan" is Hebrew for "groom").

To sum up, if you're a girly-girl looking for a secular Jewish take on the Martha Stewart Weddings magazine, and you don't mind shelling out for a hard cover book, you've found your book.

But if you're looking for information about Jewish wedding laws and customs, with historical context and useful information, take a look at Anita Diamant's "The New Jewish Wedding" (revised), which my fiance and I bought after we returned this book. It lacks the pretty photography, but it's got the information we were looking for.


0 credibility   May 17, 2004
I found this book quite unhelpful. I wanted advice on what are the Jewish customs surrounding a wedding. She just described how to DECORATE a Jewish wedding! This book couldn't even get the Hebrew name for groom correct (she calls it 'chazen' when it's 'chatan'), which made it lose all credibility. I stopped reading after that.