Ron Klain, Rahm Emanuel, and the Christmas Madness

A story in IsraelNationalNews.com commenting on the appointment of Rahm Emanuel as President-Elect Obama’s chief of staff, and of Ron Klain as Vice President-Elect Biden’s chief of staff, leads with: “Both appointees are Jewish, but while Emanuel is an observant Jew, Klain intermarried more than 20 years ago and his family observes Christmas.” This is the

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Hope, Not Fear

I started InterfaithFamily.com as an independent non-profit in January 2002. There was a time three or four years into it that I gave serious thought to closing down. I started to write an essay that I thought I would submit to Moment magazine complaining bitterly about the lack of funding support for outreach to interfaith

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The Associated Press and Officiation

Associated Press religion writer Rachel Zoll recently wrote an article about the difficulties interfaith couples can face trying to find a rabbi to officiate at their wedding. She gives examples of rabbis whose status as rabbis is questionable, who do not respect Jewish tradition in the weddings they conduct, and who charge unreasonable fees for

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An Unnoticed Outreach Hero

Rabbi Abraham J. Klausner died on June 28. The obituaries in the Jewish press, including JTA and the Jerusalem Post, described how Rabbi Klausner, the leader of a Reform synagogue in Yonkers, N.Y., for 25 years, was the first Jewish chaplain in the US Army to enter Dachau and had been a leading advocate for

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Enough Is Enough

April 2007 (with Micah Sachs) One of the most uplifting parts of the Passover seder is when we sing “Dayenu.” Each verse speaks to a different gift that God gave the Jewish people, followed by the celebratory chorus “Dayenu”–“it would have been enough.” If God had only allowed us to leave Egypt, goes the first

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Don’t Write Off the Intermarried: A Case for Community Outreach

February 12, 2007 (with Micah Sachs) With a response from Steven M. Cohen Charles Dickens’ classic A Tale of Two Cities begins with the famous opening line: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” Sociologist Steven Cohen’s new study on intermarriage has a similar title, but a different spirit. Ignoring

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“Keeping the Faith”

Yesterday’s Boston Sunday Globe magazine “Coupling” column by Alison Lobron provides an illuminating perspective on how young adult Jews think about interdating and intermarriage. Alison describes herself as a “not-very-active Jew” who had no Bat Mitzvah, no Hebrew lessons, and no family tradition of Jewish holidays. After a two-year relationship with a “not-very-active Protestant” on

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Two Friends

We had a pretty big week at InterfaithFamily.com last week. As we’ve already mentioned, it’s our fifth anniversary as an independent organization, and the 200th issue of our Web Magazine, and we had great coverage in the New York Jewish Week and the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles. We launched our new User Survey

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“Jewish parent + Christian parent = Jewish kids”

Amy Klein has a terrific article in the current edition of the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles that features InterfaithFamily.com and some of our writers. The title, “Jewish parent + Christian parent = Jewish kids,” expresses our organization’s mission better than we’ve been able to do ourselves! Along with Julie Wiener’s (New York) Jewish

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The Critics Respond to the Boston Survey

Steven M. Cohen, one of the leading critics of outreach, has an op-ed on the results of the recent demographic study of Boston’s Jewish community in the current issue of the Forward, co-signed by demographers Jack Ukeles and Ron Miller. Cohen et al first question whether the 60% figure for interfaith families raising their children

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