Today’s New York Times has an article by Ethan Bronner on Israel’s 60th anniversary, and how the country is celebrating by inviting a collection of the world’s top political, scientific and business thinkers to discuss major world challenges–with a uniquely Jewish and Israeli spin, of course.

Of course the article can’t avoid mentioning Middle Eastern politics, pointing out how Israel Independence Day is mourned as Naqba (”Catastrophe”) Day in the Arab world. But what’s a tad more unusual for a secular paper is the way the Times positions Israel in relation to the American Jewish community:

One significant development of recent years that will be discussed here is the shift in the relationship between Israel and diaspora Jewry. For decades, Israel was the needy child depending on contributions and support from abroad as it struggled to survive.

Today Israel’s Jewish population of 5.5 million is the world’s largest, just ahead of that of the United States, which is slowly declining through low birth rate and intermarriage. Israel has in fact become the center of Jewish life and is increasingly being asked to act like the older brother to Jewish communities elsewhere.

Continue Reading »

Mildred Loving died this past Friday of pneumonia. An obituary in the Washington Post tells the story of how Loving, an African-American woman, defied Virginia law by marrying her white husband in 1958, and wound up with her name on the 1967 Supreme Court case, Loving vs. Virginia that ended miscegenation laws in the United States.

Bernard S. Cohen, one of the American Civil Liberties Union lawyers who argued the Loving case before the Supreme Court, was with Mildred Loving when she died. Cohen, who is Jewish, called the miscegenation laws “the last on-the-books manifestation of slavery in America.” Last year, on the 40th anniversary of the case in June, Cohen wrote with Freedom to Marry Executive Director Evan Wilson, making an explicit connection between the Loving case and the current legal struggles over same-sex marriage. They wrote:

Continue Reading »

Through this post at Jewschool, I learned about this Israeli High Rabbinical Court ruling that invalidates all conversions done by the State of Israel’s own Conversion Authority under the current head of that government agency, former Knesset member Chaim Drukman. The High Rabbinical Court ruled this because they examined a woman who had converted 15 years ago on the occasion of her divorce, and decided that she was insufficiently observant of Jewish law. They put her, her children, and her ex-husband who was born Jewish, on a list of people who can’t get married in Israel. (What was the logic behind declaring the ex-husband not to be legally Jewish? You got me there.)

In the comments to the Jerusalem Post article, I found a link to this article from a far-right religious web publication, justifying the high court’s decision. The second article gives the impression that some Orthodox rabbis had chosen to invalidate Rabbi Drukman’s conversions because he worked with a Conservative-movement-trained rabbi in Warsaw.
I am flabbergasted that all of these people who converted to Judaism in good faith through the Israeli government’s Orthodox official religious courts are now going to be unable to marry in Israel, attending religious schools, be buried in Jewish cemeteries in Israel–all the things that Israel’s government religious courts control. All of this may stem from political ill-will between these rabbis and Rabbi Drukman.

Continue Reading »

Yesterday, I explored the study It’s Not Just Who Stands Under the Chuppah: Intermarriage and Engagement, co-authored by demographer Leonard Saxe, as well as the response that sociologist Steven Cohen offered at the Reform rabbinical convention in March.

After writing the post, I exchanged emails with Saxe. He responded to my concern that the study appeared to underplay its finding that the adult children of intermarriage are significantly less likely to raise their children Jewish than the adult children of inmarriage–even when you control for “Jewish capital,” like their network of Jewish friends and Jewish educational experiences.

Continue Reading »

At the Reform rabbinical convention in late March, the two leading academics in the debate over intermarriage squared off. In one corner was Leonard Saxe, director of the Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies and the Steinhardt Social Research Institute at Brandeis University. In the other corner was Steven Cohen, research professor of Jewish social policy at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in New York.

Saxe was there to talk about a study he co-authored, It’s Not Just Who Stands Under the Chuppah: Intermarriage and Engagement. Cohen was there to refute it. (Sort of.) I didn’t witness the debate, but I have read Saxe’s study and Cohen’s remarks that followed.

Continue Reading »

Earlier this year, JDate began offering bulk-rate discounts on JDate subscriptions for rabbis interested in promoting Jewish dating among younger, unmarried members of their congregations. Nothing wrong with that, although the measure is more symbolic than practical, given the small number of young, unmarried people in most synagogues. And the kind of young, unmarried Jews who join synagogues are the type of people who are already dedicated to marrying another Jew. But kudos to anyone who wants to help someone find their beshert–whether he or she is Jewish or not.

Less encouraging have been the explanations that rabbis have given for offering the JDate memberships. From the aforeblogged Newsweek article:

The rabbis say they felt compelled to act because of the gradual dilution of the faith through marriage. Almost half of American Jews marry non-Jews, a rate of exodus that has more than tripled since 1970.

Continue Reading »

Consider this a belated cleaning of online hametz:

• Julie Wiener recently wrote about the growth of local Mothers’ Circle chapters for the Wall Street Journal. The Mothers Circle, a program for non-Jewish women raising Jewish children, now has chapters in 26 communities.
• Wiener also wrote a great pre-Passover piece for AP on Passover food and how strange it is to non-Jewish guests. Among other highlights, Wiener quotes me. It makes a nice companion piece to today’s featured articles, Strangers at a Strange Meal.
• A few weeks ago, Rabbi Lev Baesh, the director of our Resource Center for Jewish Clergy, spoke with Rabbi Jim Egolf, rabbi of Beth David Reform Congregation in Gladwyne, Penn. In Rabbi Egolf’s podcast, Rabbi Baesh introduces InterfaithFamily.com and talks about how his approach to Jewish engagement differs a little from the organization. Continue Reading »

The prolific Shmuel Rosner gives Slate an overview of the latest exchanges of fire in the Jewish intermarriage wars. It’s nothing earth-shattering, covering studies that have been reported on elsewhere, but the opening anecdote nearly made my head explode. Rosner relays the story of a 30-something Jewish woman married to a Catholic man who walks into a Maryland synagogue:

Maybe, she asked the executive director of this temple, you have a Seder to which I can come with the kids, so that they’ll have a first positive exposure to Judaism?

But the executive director gave her advice she didn’t expect: If this is your children’s first encounter with Judaism, don’t start by bringing them to a Seder. It is long, can be boring at times, and requires a lot of reading. Better start their schooling in Judaism with a lighter practice.

Continue Reading »

My five-year-old son is very subtle. The morning after our Havurah Purim party, my son told me, “You know, not everyone knows what a Purimspiel is.”

“But you do, honey, because we saw one last night. It was the play people were acting out, about Queen Esther.”

He nodded. “But not everyone knows what that is.”

Sometimes my son will start using words correctly and then ask me later what they mean. I’m always sliding new words by him and finding out that he’s picked them up when he hands his dad a board book of the Noah’s Ark story with the request, “Read me the abridged version.” My big challenge is to introduce the words in such a way that he gobbles them up like a little Pac-Man and doesn’t shut off his attention.

This is also my challenge at my job. The difference is that I am writing here for adults who are, generally speaking, highly educated. Continue Reading »

I always thought that Tom Hanks’ wife, Rita Wilson, was a charming woman and a good actress. She met Tom when she played an idealistic Jewish Peace Corps member in the 1985 film, Volunteers. Hanks starred as a WASP playboy who joined the Peace Corps to get out of the country just ahead of some gangsters who wanted to kill him because he could not pay some gambling debts. Of course, the playboy and the Jewish idealist fall in love.

Wilson, who is the daughter of Greek Orthodox immigrants, recently wrote a piece on the joys of Greek Orthodox Easter for the Huffington Post. This year the Greek Orthodox celebrate Easter on April 27.

Continue Reading »