Are the Berenstain Bears Jewish?

When my toddler daughter first became infatuated with a certain bear family who live on a sunny dirt road deep in Bear County, I had the vague notion that the Berenstain Bears were Jewish. 

That was merely based on their last name, which Mama, Papa, Sister, Brother and Honey share with their creators, Stan and Jan Berenstain, the married couple who created the classic story series in 1962. (Despite confusion, the name has indeed always been Berenstain with an “a,” not Berenstein with an “e,” one of the more well-known cases of the Mandela effect.)

Dealing with secular (and deeply relatable) themes like watching too much TV and eating too much junk food, I didn’t think too much about the Bear family’s religious identity — until we stumbled upon “The Berenstain Bears and the Big Question,” a book in which Sister Bear starts to ask her parents questions about God and they take her to her grandparents’ church on a mission to answer them. 

So… not so Jewish, then?

Soon, I discovered a whole series of more explicitly Christian-themed Berenstain Bears books. While my daughter went deeper into her Berenstain Bears phase, I went down the rabbit hole to uncover more about the Jewish — and not Jewish — connections to these beloved bears and the humans behind them.

Stan Berenstain was Jewish, Jan Berenstain was Episcopalian

In a 2018 interview, Stan and Jan’s son Mike Berenstain said that his father’s family, the Berenstains, were Jews who immigrated to the United States from Ukraine in the 1880s. Stanley Melvin Berenstain was born in 1923 and grew up in West Philadelphia. 

Janice Marian Grant was also born in 1923 in Philadelphia. Her family was a mix of Scottish, Irish and German, and she was raised Episcopalian. 

Stan and Jan met at Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art, and found that despite their different background, they had a lot in common, including a love of art. In the introduction to “Child’s Play: The Berenstain Baby Boom,” they explained, “We came from different high schools — city and suburban. Our backgrounds were different — Jewish and Protestant. But we thought of ourselves as, simply, American and, primarily, as artists.”

The couple had two sons, Leo, born in 1948, and Mike, born in 1951. They were married for 59 years, until Stan’s death in 2005. Jan died in 2012.

The original “Berenstain Bears” books covered some Christian holidays, but never Jewish ones

Stan and Jan wrote books about many major holidays, including Christian ones. In 1984, they released “The Berenstain Bears Meet Santa Bear”; in 2002 came “The Berenstain Bears and the Real Easter Eggs.” There was even a 1979 television special called “The Berenstain Bears’ Christmas Tree” written by Stan and Jan Berenstain (and produced by someone named Mordicai Gerstein who was, you guessed it, Jewish). 

Yet they told the Forward in 2002 that despite being asked by fans to write a Hanukkah book, they would never do it. “There’s no way to do it without bringing religion into it,” Stan reasoned. They thought of Christmas as mainstream and popular, so not religious (clearly they forgot the reason for the season, and the fact that you can absolutely celebrate Hanukkah from a more cultural perspective). 

It was their son Mike Berenstain who started releasing religious “Berenstain Bears” books in 2008

The Berenstains did not raise their two sons with much religion. As Mike put it, “they taught us ethics from the Judeo-Christian tradition, but they dealt with their mixed marriage by really not teaching us religion.”

It seems Mike turned to Christianity after marrying his wife Andrea and enrolling their three children in a Quaker school in the Philadelphia suburbs.   

After the death of his father, Mike started co-writing some books with Jan, and eventually authored Christian “Bears” books as part of a series called “Living Lights,” published by the Christian book company Zondervan.

These titles include “The Berenstain Bears: God Loves You,” “The Berenstain Bears Say Their Prayers,” “The Berenstain Bears Learn About Heaven,” “The Berenstain Bears Keep the Faith” and even a full “Berenstain Bears Bible” for early readers. 

While these books offer plenty of wonderful, universal lessons (like being honest, standing up to bullying and having patience), they are clearly written from a Christian perspective, with many featuring quotes from the New Testament on the inside cover, and the story of Jesus told in several of the “Living Lights” holiday books.

We may not ever get a Berenstain Bears Hanukkah book, but there is one book that still seems pretty Jewish

Back to “The Berenstain Bears and the Big Question.” After Sister Bear pops the big question (“Mama, what’s God?”), Papa Bear rambles on about the “billions of stars and planets” while Mama Bear takes her daughter out to the garden to look at the birds, flowers and slugs, which she explains are all God’s creations — that God made everything. Then they go to a service at the Chapel in the Wood, where Sister Bear sits mostly bored and uninspired.

It’s on their walk home from church when Sister Bear asks, “Did God make questions?”

Papa Bear answers, “Mostly questions.” The end. 

A conversation about God that ends with more questions? It doesn’t get much more Jewish than that.