What I Would Like To Be Thankful For

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It’s Thanksgiving 2010. I have a lot of good fortune in my life and I try to be very grateful. That goes for my work at InterfaithFamily.com, too, but this year I’m not sure how thankful I feel. It has to do with Jewish attitudes towards intermarriage and whether they are changing and will change for the better. It’s related to my presentation at the General Assembly of the United Jewish Federations of North America, and to media reports since.

One of the most important books I’ve read is Ron Heifitz’s Leadership Without Easy Answers. I read it in one of my best classes at the Hornstein Program, organizational behavior taught by Susan Shevitz. His thesis is that the job of leadership is to move people to adapt their attitudes in significant ways.

What I tried to convey in my presentation is that every Jewish community could and should extend explicit welcoming messages to interfaith families, and could and should offer relatively low cost programs and services that will attract and engage interfaith families in Jewish life and community. But the real question was, why don’t Jewish communities do that? Why do Jewish funders allocate less than 1/10 of 1% of their total spending to engaging interfaith families?

I believe it’s because Jews and Jewish leaders view intermarriage as bad, as something negative, or at best, with ambivalence. Whether it’s because of tribalism, or because of flawed research that suggests that intermarried couples because of the fact of the intermarriage are and will be less Jewishly engaged, or because of misguided views that intermarriage can be prevented or reduced – whatever the source, too many Jews and Jewish leaders, in the words of one of IFF’s users, can’t resist saying that intermarriage is “bad bad bad.” One of the primary goals of InterfaithFamily.com’s work is to move Jews to adapt from that attitude, towards seeing the potential for positive Jewish engagement by interfaith families.

The GA presentation was structured as initial remarks by me and then by Steven M. Cohen, followed by responses from three top federations executives. Now Steven M. Cohen is the sociologist most associated with the survey reports that conclude that intermarriage leads to much less Jewish attitudes and behaviors. Even though I think he has made a lot of progress over the years, and now says that he supports more funding for engaging interfaith families, and that he doesn’t want to alienate interfaith families – still, when he made his remarks, it was like he couldn’t control himself from his default position that intermarriage is “bad bad bad.”

Cohen repeated his severe critique of the Boston federation’s report that showed that the 60% of interfaith families raising their children as Jews were much like in-married Reform Jews in their attitudes and behaviors. He recited a litany of comparisons where they fall short of their in-married counterparts – all while studiously avoiding any comparisons where they “score” ahead. You would never ever know, listening to Steven Cohen, that interfaith families raising Jewish children in Boston actually light Shabbat candles more than in-married Reform of Conservative families do.

There was a little moment of drama at the end of the session. I think Steven could sense that the last question had been asked. He took the mic and recited another litany, of things like Jewish summer camps, day schools, Israel trips, social networks that get young Jews together – and said that these steps could or would prevent or reduce intermarriage. I kind of grabbed the mic and said, we don’t have to promote those things as preventing intermarriage, we can promote them as building strong Jewish identity and desire to have Jewish families and children. There was a smattering of applause at that point, and the program ended.

That was really my point: Jews and Jewish leaders should stop talking about intermarriage as bad; they should promote Jewish experiences not as preventing intermarriage but as building identity and desire to have Jewish families; they should encourage young adults to choose partners who will support their Jewish engagement – whether or not the partner is a Jew.

The room was packed. I estimate there were over 200 people there — at 8:15 am! Several people came up and said very positive things to me afterwards, but it’s hard to gauge overall reaction. I heard indirectly that one of the federation executives on the panel told one of his donors that he had been sensitized that it is a problem to say that in-marriage, rather than strong Jewish identity, is the goal. To that extent, the program was a great success, and I’m thankful for that. If others felt that way, I’d be even more thankful.

I didn’t make good notes of the three federation executives’ remarks. Barry Shrage, the head of the Boston federation, basically said that saying don’t intermarry and fearing intermarriage won’t work, that we need to address interfaith couples with positive messages. Steve Rakitt, the head of the Atlanta federation, said the message should be to promote positive Jewish identity, and talked about the Pathways program to engage interfaith families that the Atlanta federation funds. The Boston and Atlanta federations are the only two that allocate any significant funding to programs to engage interfaith families. I’m thankful for that, but if more federations would follow suit, I’d be even more thankful.

Jay Sanderson, head of the Los Angeles federation, seemed to say that welcoming interfaith families wasn’t the right issue to be talking about – he said that we need to be welcoming everyone. My response was that yes, it’s important to be welcoming to everyone, but we need to have some services and programs that specifically address the unique needs of interfaith couples and families. Even after this session, my feeling is still that federation executives would just as soon not talk expressly and explicitly about engaging interfaith families.

I hope you will be able to evaluate the session for yourself. It was filmed by Shalom TV and their founder told me afterwards that it would be on their site, but it hasn’t appeared yet and I’m starting to wonder if it ever will. You can read my complete remarks on our site, and a shortened version on the Huffington Post and on eJewish Philanthropy.

So I got back from the GA and there was a spate of news stories coming out of Israel. On November 16 the Jerusalem Post reported that the Knesset held a special session on assimilation in the Diaspora and a new study showed high rates of intermarriage in the Diaspora. As usual, the Israeli view was to equate intermarriage with assimilation, the loss of Jewish identity and engagement. I’ve tried in the past to explain What Israelis Should Know About Intermarriage in North America – but it doesn’t feel like many are getting the message there. I’d be more thankful if they did.

On November 17, Alan Dershowitz was interviewed about his new novel that includes a romance between an Arab man and a Jewish woman. The interviewer from The Jewish Press, which is by its own admission mostly for Orthodox readers, says, “Intermarriage is generally thought of as one of the worst sins a Jew can commit” and asks why he protrayed the interfaith romance. Dershowitz gave what I consider a bad answer:

I don’t think I portray it in a positive light. I think I portray it realistically. I portray it the way I see it among my students. I’m trying to be descriptive, not prescriptive. I’m not suggesting it’s a good thing. I don’t support it. But I see it all around me. The other night I spoke at a Chabad Shabbat dinner at Harvard, and a lot of the students came with non-Jewish girlfriends and spouses. Many of them will eventually convert to Judaism but we’re going through a very challenging period now with intermarriage. I can’t ignore that in my writing.

I would have been thankful if he instead had said, “I don’t accept your question – most young Jews today do not consider intermarraige to be a sin. The other night I spoke at a Chabad Shabbat dinner at Harvard, and a lot of the students came with non-Jewish girlfriends and spouses. That just goes to show that young Jews feel that they can live Jewishly with non-Jewish partners – isn’t that great! That’s what we should hope will happen.”

I don’t want to overlook the more positive news and views. On November 18, there was a wonderful short piece in the Jewish Exponent by our friend Gari Weilbacher, the managing director of Interfaithways in Philadelphia, with yet another story of Jewish engagement in an intermarriage. On November 21, Sue Fishkoff reported that the Conservative movement is tipping towards openness to the children of intermarried couples. And on November 23, the Connecticut Jewish Ledger interviewed sociologist Arnold Dashefsky, who said:

On one hand, intermarriage could be a boon to the Jewish population. If the non-Jewish spouse decides to become Jewish or if the couple raises its children as Jews, they might actually increase the Jewish population. … [T]here is a portion of the Jewish population that is intermarried that is also committed to living a Jewish life, even if the spouse hasn’t converted. In our interviews – and I stress that they do not constitute a representative sample of all intermarried couples – in many dimensions, some couples had Jewish behaviors similar to or exceeding the larger Jewish population. In [some] areas – synagogue membership, lighting Shabbat and Chanukah candles, participating in a Passover seder – intermarried couples actually exceeded the American Jewish population as a whole… Fasting on Yom Kippur was identical among the two samples…. We believe that the Jewish community should offer encouragement to those members of intermarried couples who wish to affirm their Jewish identity and give the non-Jewish spouses support and recognition that this is something they want to share in.

I would be thankful if more sociologists talked about intermarriage like Dashefsky did.

How thankful do you think I should feel? Am I right to feel that there hasn’t been enough progress fast enough towards a positive attitude that sees intermarriage as an opportunity for Jewish engagement? Or is there progress that I’m not seeing and is it happening as fast as reasonably could be expected?

Either way, I hope you have a good and thankful Thanksgiving.

This post originally appeared on www.interfaithfamily.com and is reprinted with permission.

The Mixed Marriage of the Century

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I didn’t think the wedding of Chelsea Clinton and Marc Mezvinsky would be eclipsed so soon, but here comes the engagement of Prince William and Kate Middleton. People everywhere are just fascinated by the British royal family. Through our lens here at InterfaithFamily.com, we can’t help but focus on the “intermarriage” aspect of the relationship. No, Kate Middleton isn’t Jewish – now wouldn’t that be an interesting situation! – but she is a “commoner” and, well, you can’t be much more “royal” than William, the future King of England.

The Jewish community’s response to interfaith marriages might take a lesson or two from the British aristrocracy’s response to its own kind of mixed marriage. Their attitudes have certainly adapted over the years towards a welcoming approach. It isn’t all that long ago that King Edward VIII was forced to abdicate in order to marry Wallis Simpson, a commoner (and divorcee to boot). But Queen Elizabeth and Prince Charles have publicly expressed their complete delight with Prince William’s choice.

The British don’t have any qualms about the status of the children of a royal-commoner marriage: any child of William and Kate will be not merely royal, but, well, the heir to the throne. That goes further than the Reform movement’s approach, where a child of an interfaith marriage is at least presumptively potentially Jewish if raised Jewish.

The British also make it easy for someone marrying in to acquire royal status. I’m no expert on this. I’m not sure if by reason of the marriage, Kate becomes a Duchess or a Princess, or that happens by the Queen just conferring that status on her. Either way, she becomes part of the royal family. It would be nice if the Jewish community considered our partners who aren’t Jewish part of the family in the same easy way.

The press has focused on how solicitous William has been of Kate. After all, he’s lived his entire life with what I’m sure are peculiar or at least particular “rituals” of the royal family, and she’ll have to get used to all of that. William reportedly promised her father that he would help her to adjust. Wouldn’t it be great if the Jewish partners in interfaith couples took the same kind of approach with respect to sharing Jewish traditions with their partners?

Here at InterfaithFamily.com we’re positive about the potential for couples from different backgrounds to build fulfilling lives together and to decide to affiliate their family with the tradition of one partner while honoring and respecting the tradition of the other. We’re happy to see that at least at the outset, it looks like Prince William and Kate Middleton have a good chance of doing just that. So we’ll send them an early mazel tov!

This post originally appeared on www.interfaithfamily.com and is reprinted with permission.

Chelsea and Marc in the Jewish News Again

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Each year the Forward, the only national Jewish newspaper, publishes a list called the “Forward 50” which they describe this year as a list of “men and women who have made a significant impact on the Jewish story in a Jewish way.”

Way back in 2001, I made the list, to my mother’s everlasting pride – she thought it was a list of the fifty most important Jews. I had criticized one of the leading critics of intermarriage as subjectively biased, and I think the Forward staff liked the controversy.

As usual, the list this year is entertaining reading – in particular this year because they added a 51st space, for two people: “Chelsea Clinton and Marc Mezvinsky, high-profile intermarriage.”

If you read this blog you know that we’ve had a lot of comment on the Clinton-Mezvinsky wedding, starting back when their engagement was announced, continuing with speculation about what kind of officiant they would have, and most recently with comment on the not very enthusiastic reaction of Jewish leaders to their wedding because a rabbi co-officiated with a Methodist minister before Shabbat had ended.

According to the Forward, the wedding “reinvigorated the intermarriage conversation for a new generation of American Jews.” Chelsea’s wedding to “an involved Jew… was a validating first in many ways” referring to the photos of a chuppah, a ketubah, and the groom in a tallis and yarmulke – “The Clintons and Mezvinskys telegraphed to the world that Judaism has nothing to hide.”

In explaining why they went beyond 50, clearly the controversy was again important: Chelsea and Marc are included “For the hot debate this couple caused about who is a Jew and what role nuptials play in religion, for how they captivated the American imagination and energized the conversation around Jewish identity.”

Next week I will be speaking at a session at the Jewish Federation of North America’s annual convention on the question, “Can we encourage in-marriage and welcome interfaith families?” We had a planning call for the session today and the other panelists did not seem thrilled to hear that I plan to bring up the Clinton-Mezvinsky wedding in my presentation. But I still feel strongly that the tepid reaction of Jewish leaders missed an opportunity to extend an enthusiastic welcome to a prominent couple that could have helped to inspire many other young couples to consider Jewish traditions for their own weddings and lives together. I’m glad that the Forward has kept the Clinton-Mezvinsky wedding in the spotlight.

This post originally appeared on www.interfaithfamily.com and is reprinted with permission.

Slingshot, Hero, Online Group, Quite a Week at InterfaithFamily.com

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It has been quite a week here at InterfaithFamily.com.

As we reported yesterday, scooped by Julie Wiener in a very nice post, InterfaithFamily.com has once again been included in the Slingshot guide to the fifty most innovative Jewish organizations. We are one of only nine organizations that have been in Slingshot in each of the past six years (see list below).

Even better than being included in the guide, InterfaithFamily.com was one of nine organizations (see list below) to receive $40,000 grants from the Slingshot Fund, which pools contributions from young funders and then makes grants to organizations included in the guide.

InterfaithFamily.com has received a Slingshot Fund grant in three out of the four years that grants have been made. This generous funding is very helpful to our ongoing efforts to expand the reach of our helpful information and welcoming message – and it makes a statement that the cause of engaging interfaith families in Jewish life is important to the next generation of Jewish funders.

We are very grateful to Melissa Brown Eisenberg for her words in announcing the grant to IFF. It means a great deal to all of the staff at IFF to hear this kind of praise for our efforts and to be described as “crucial to the future strength and vitality of the Jewish community:”

Since 2001 InterfaithFamily.com has been the destination for individuals, couples, families and their children seeking information on how to make Jewish choices in their everyday lives.  The website itself is a resource for information-seekers on how to live Jewishly, be married Jewishly, celebrate Jewish holidays and raise Jewish children.  The site also connects interfaith families to each other for support, to local organizations that are inclusionary, and advocates for inclusive attitudes, policies and practices in the wider Jewish community.

With the intermarriage rate hovering at around 50%, the sheer number of non-Jewish partners, spouses and interfaith offspring is too large to ignore.  Our generation, the Slingshot generation, salutes the effort by interfaith families to see themselves as part of the Jewish community.  We believe in the significance of the work InterfaithFamily.com does to keep Judaism in the lives of those who could easily not identify as Jewish.  Between its website, referral services and ability to connect people, we see InterfaithFamily.com’s existence as crucial to the future strength and vitality of the Jewish community.

Congratulations to Ed Case and the entire InterfaithFamily.com team on receiving a 2010 Slingshot Fund grant.  Ed, you are certainly one of Slingshot’s Jewish Community Heroes.

Melissa’s last comment was a reference to the second big news of the week – I made it into the top twenty vote getters in the Jewish Federations of North America’s Jewish Community Heroes contest. In fact I ended up at number 18, what I hope will turn out to be an auspicious number. Now a panel of judges picks one winner and four honorees, each of whom gets a grant for his or her non-profit.

We made a concerted effort to get out the vote, and I’m very grateful to the people who responded to the many email and Facebook voting reminders and the big orange pop-up on our home page. I hope it wasn’t too annoying – thank you to all for putting up with it. I didn’t seek the nomination and I’m not interested in personal glory – but it surely would be great if the federation world, at its important annual meeting, got a message from first the voters and then the judges that the cause of engaging interfaith families in Jewish life deserves recognition and priority. That’s what I hope the result of the contest is.

We were invited to submit a one-minute video explaining what an award would mean, and if the JFNA makes that publicly available, we’ll provide a link to it.

The last and perhaps most important development of the week isn’t a grant or an award – it’s the debut on Wednesday night of Love and Religion – Online, our first online group for couples to discuss how they can have religion in their lives. Four pioneering couples have signed up for an online version of a workshop Dr. Marion Usher has offered for 16 years at the Washington DC JCC. We had some technical difficulties to work out, but it was a great session.

It was reassuring and reaffirming to me to see bright, articulate, serious, dating or newly-married young couples thinking about important questions in their lives: whether they will be able to find a Jewish religious community where they will feel comfortable and welcomed, how they will incorporate celebrations of holidays, how the partner who is not Jewish will feel about raising Jewish children, how the Jewish partner will feel at his or her partner’s holiday times and religious services.

I have been involved in interfaith family issues for over forty years now, first personally, then as a lay leader in the Reform movement, then professionally for the past thirteen years. I call the issues that the couples in our online group raised this week “eternal” in the sense that every pair of interfaith partners who are interested in having religion in their lives need to address and resolve these questions. They’re not “eternal” in the sense that they never get resolved, but the issues that came up forty years ago are still coming up today. Every community should offer discussion groups for couples to address these issues, and we are really pleased to make the option available on an online basis.

I feel very honored this week because of the Slingshot listing and grant and making it into the Jewish Community Heroes semi-finals, but what was most gratifying about this week was offering another resource that will help interfaith couples learn about and connect with Jewish life and community. That is what I really love about this work.

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Organizations included in Slingshot for six straight years in addition to IFF: Advancing Women Professionals, Hazon, Ikar, JDub, Jewish Funds for Justice, Jewish Milestones, Reboot, and Sharsheret.

Organizations that received Slingshot fund grants this year in addition to IFF: JDub, Jewish Funds for Justice, Reboot, Encounter, Gateways: Access to Jewish Education, Institute for Curriculum Services, Moishe House, Project Chessed, and Six Points Fellowship for Emerging Jewish Artists.

This post originally appeared on www.interfaithfamily.com and is reprinted with permission.

Julie Wiener, Mayyim Hayyim, Joseph Reyes

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I’ve been preoccupied lately with the Jewish Community Heroes voting contest, which ended today. (I think I made it into the top 20 vote getters and am eligible for an award, but more about that another day, after the official results are announced.)

I’m catching up on what’s been published lately and it occurred to me: if there were to be a voting contest on who is the best writer about interfaith family issues today, Julie Wiener should clearly be at or near the top of the list.

Julie has two great blog posts this week. In Harboring Boston Envy, she writes about many of the features that make Boston a great Jewish community (full disclosure – I’m a Boston loyalist), and especially about our wonderfully welcoming community mikveh, Mayyim Hayyim. A great example of Julie’s perceptive sensitivity is this:

More important than the aesthetic is the facility’s warm, welcoming and nonjudgmental approach, with volunteer mikveh guides trained to be sensitive not just to the needs of men and women, liberal and Orthodox Jews, first-timers, converts, grieving Jews, joyous Jews and those about-to-be married (including lesbian and gay couples), but also to interfaith families.

In one of the four preparation rooms hung a beautiful framed photo and certificate of sorts that not only commemorated a family’s conversion of their baby but that explicitly acknowledged that while the baby’s non-Jewish mom is not herself converting, she plans to be supportive of and involved in the child’s Jewish upbringing.

I’ve seen that photo and certificate, it is stunning, and Julie is exactly right about Mayyim Hayyim’s warm, welcoming and nonjudgmental approach.

A Message from Joseph Reyes is about the divorced father who at one point was ordered not to take his daughter to church, raising all kinds of publicity that we covered months ago. Julie writes about a message she received from Mr. Reyes. To me he sounds more than a little paranoid, but her take on the complexities of interfaith divorces is well worth reading.

This post originally appeared on www.interfaithfamily.com and is reprinted with permission.

Do Not Stand Idly By

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For the past several years I have tried to keep my family out of my professional work in order to respect their privacy. Today I’m going to deviate a little from that rule.

Two weeks ago one of the happiest occasions in my life took place in my home: the bris of my first grandchild. A grandchild is a wondrous creature — I keep saying that he is like an entire universe of possibilities, and we have no idea how they will play out.

While I was making a few remarks at the bris, I noticed a young adult guest starting to cry. She came up to me afterwards and said that as a lesbian she had been overcome by my choice of pronouns in my remarks. All I had said was the following to my son-in-law and daughter: “We just said a prayer that we hoped that Jonah had huppah, a loving partner, in his life. I hope that 25 or 30 years from now the two of you are talking to each other about who Jonah is going out with, do you like the person, is the person good for him, is the person ‘the one.’”

It would have been easy for me to have said “is she the one,” and I did chose my words carefully, but I was quite taken aback that what I said had such an impact. It left me wondering how many times the young woman had experienced expressed assumptions of sexual preference that left her feeling different and disfavored.

I tell you this because I wonder whether casual expressions of assumed heterosexuality lead directly to the homophobia playing out in the news. You may have heard that a Jewish newspaper, the Jewish Standard, printed an announcement of a same sex wedding, then apologized after members of the Orthodox community objected, then kind of retracted the apology when others objected to it. Our friend David Levy has been blogging about that at Jewschool, which also has a follow up story.

Much more tragic is the recent spate of teen suicides due to homophobic bullying. I am very proud that InterfaithFamily.com is a co-sponsor of Do Not Stand Idly By: A Jewish Community Pledge to Save Lives originated by our friends at Keshet. The pledge states a commitment to end homophobic bullying or harassment, to speak out when anyone is being demeaned due to sexual orientation or gender identity, and to treat every person with dignity and respect. You can sign the pledge on Keshet’s website. I hope that you will. if the commitment becomes more of a reality, my little grandson’s world will be that much of a repaired place.

This post originally appeared on www.interfaithfamily.com and is reprinted with permission.

Mark Zuckerberg Is Not In Love With A Stereotype

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I’m afraid that the Jewish world is about to blow it again with interfaith couples and families, as happened just two months ago with negative reactions to the wedding of Chelsea Clinton and Marc Mezvinsky. This time, it’s about Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of Facebook.

Apparently the soon-to-be-released movie, The Social Network, written by Aaron Sorkin, suggests that Zuckerberg created Facebook so he could meet non-Jewish girls. This according to a piece by Danielle Berrin in the Huffington Post yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg Created Facebook To Get Non-Jewish Girls, that is disturbing on many levels.

Berrin writes that the movie assumes that “for some Jewish men, and perhaps Mark Zuckerberg, being a Jewish woman is a turn-off.” Apparently there is a scene in the movie where Zuckerberg and his friends are looking at a group of Asian women dancing and one comments that Jewish guys connect with Asian girls because they are not Jewish.

I don’t deny that there are stereotypes in culture of Jewish women. As Berrin says, young Jewish women are depicted as Jewish American Princesses and adult Jewish women are depicted as the Overbearing Jewish Mother. To her credit, Berrin says that these stereotypes “obviously, are egregiously unfair.”

But Berrin offends when she suggests that it is not “pure fiction” when Sorkin suggests that in Zuckerberg’s eyes “one of the best things about being an Asian woman is that she isn’t a Jewish woman” on the basis of the fact that Zuckerberg is in a serious relationship with Priscilla Chan, a Chinese-American medical student, whom he started dating in college. She also ends her piece by saying that Jewish women aren’t the problem, the problem is that Jewish men like Zuckerberg are hanging out with the wrong ones.

The notion that Mark Zuckerberg is in love with Priscilla Chan because she is not Jewish, and that he wouldn’t be with her if he had hung out with the “right” Jewish women, is, with all respect, ridiculous. And offensive.

Do you know anyone who is in love with a stereotype as opposed to a real person? Do you know anyone who fell in love with a person because he or she was a stereotype – or was not a person who fit some negative stereotype?

There’s no explaining why Mark Zuckerberg or anyone else is in love with who they are in love with. But I’m pretty confident that people don’t fall in love based on whether a person they are attracted to fits one stereotype or doesn’t fit another.

Berrin offends for another reason: She says a profile of Zuckerberg in the New Yorker gave “the Jewish world yet another reason to fret over the its future by suggesting Zuckerberg is on the road to intermarriage.” Can I ask why that is a reason for the Jewish world to fret? This is the same kind of backward thinking that recently led Jewish leaders to declare the wedding of Chelsea Clinton and Marc Mezvinsky  “not a Jewish event.”

It’s too bad that this movie, judging from Berrin’s comments, is probably going to generate many more comments complaining that Jewish men aren’t interested in Jewish women and are on the road to intermarriage. It would be a lot smarter if the Jewish reaction to Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan would be a great big “mazel tov, welcome to our community.”

This post originally appeared on www.interfaithfamily.com and is reprinted with permission.

 

Conversion for Children at Mayyim Hayyim

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Our friends at Mayyim Hayyim have produced a wonderful video of the conversion of an infant. The film was made by a terrific film maker, Jennifer Kaplan. We’ve added it to our Conversion Resource Page; you can watch the video on our site.

Please check out my comments on the video on Mayyim Hayyim’s new blog.

While you’re at it, consider attending Mayyim Hayyim’s international conference October 10-12.

The project was supported by funding from two of InterfaithFamily.com’s supporters CJP, the Boston federation, and the Natan Fund.

This post originally appeared on www.interfaithfamily.com and is reprinted with permission.

 

I Want To Be Your Jewish Community Hero — But It Is Not Personal

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If you come to this website, by now you must know that I have been nominated to be the Jewish Community Hero. It would be hard to miss, since when you come to the site a big pop us box asks you to VOTE in large orange letters. I hope that isn’t too annoying.

If you’re one of my 550 closest friends, you’ve been getting regular emails reminding you that you can vote for me every 12 hours. I hope that isn’t too annoying, either.

I’d like to explain why we’re taking the risk of being annoying. The Jewish Federations of North America sponsors this contest. The top twenty vote getters are evaluated by a panel of judges that picks one winner and four honorees. All five are recognized at the JFNA’s annual meeting, called the “General Assembly,” and all five receive grants for their organizations from the JFNA.

The General Assembly is the place where representatives of all of the local federations get together, along with most of the major Jewish family foundations. It is probably the most important Jewish communal gathering of the year. Especially if you are a non-profit looking for recognition and needing funding.

The cause of engaging interfaith families in Jewish life is terribly under-funded. A few years ago I calculated that the Jewish community gave less than one tenth of one percent of all of its communal spending to outreach to interfaith families – the total was less than $3 million for interfaith outreach against total spending of over $3 billion.

The federations at the time were responsible for spending close to $1 billion of that $3 billion. But very few local federations were spending anything for interfaith outreach – Boston and Atlanta being the notable exceptions.

If I can stay among the top 20 vote getters – I’m currently number 14 – and if the panel of judges takes an enlightened approach to what causes are important (in my opinion) and makes me one of the five honorees – then the cause of engaging interfaith families in Jewish life will be highlighted in front of the entire federation world. That kind of recognition could lead to funding from local federations – after all, InterfaithFamily.com serves people in every Jewish community – and help with the family foundations, too.

The grant from the JFNA would just be gravy – I don’t know how big the grants are, but frankly any amount would help.

I’m not looking for personal honor. I didn’t even seek to be nominated, a wonderful colleague at the Boston federation did that on her own. But being an honoree would be an important boost for our cause – so I want that very badly.

The first step is to be in the top 20 – and I figure that the higher I am in the list, the better my chances with the judges. I’d like to be in the top 10.

Right now at number 14 I have 2,120 votes. The person who is number 10 has 3,391 – so I have a long way to go to get into the top 10.

So please vote early – and vote often!

This post originally appeared on www.interfaithfamily.com and is reprinted with permission.

Love and Religion: An Online Discussion Group for Couples

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It’s no secret that, on top of all of the usual issues that come up in relationships, interfaith couples have the extra joy/challenge of navigating additional conversations about identity, heritage, culture, religion, and more. We have many sections of articles dealing with these very topics.

These discussions can feel, at times, overwhelming; some couples choose to ignore the topics all together. In the spirit of increasing dialogue, we would like to invite couples to participate in an online discussion group. If you are dating, engaged or newly married, and interested in exploring the issue of religion in your relationship, and:

  • want to have a religious life and are unclear how to discuss this issue in your relationship;
  • want to be with other couples who are struggling with the same issues;
  • and want answers to your questions about religious life together, including:
    • Where can we find Jewish clergy to marry us?
    • Can our children be Jewish if my wife does not convert?
    • Can our children be Jewish if my wife does not convert?
    • What does a conversion require?
    • How can we respect both our religions if we decide to have Judaism as the “lead religion”?
    • How can we approach our parents to help us with these dilemmas?
    • Can our children go to Hebrew school if they are not converted at birth?

then our discussion group is for you. You do not need to find the answers to the challenges of being part of an interfaith couple alone.

For 16 years, Dr. Marion Usher has offered a four-session workshop at the Washington DC Jewish Community Center that has been a model to guide couples in openly discussing issues they face as partners from two different backgrounds. The workshop offers you a safe environment to work on creating your religious lives together. You can make Jewish choices while still respecting your partner’s religion.

InterfaithFamily.com is now pleased to pilot the Love and Religion workshop, facilitated by Dr. Usher herself, using an online video conferencing system. Love and Religion – Online meets each Wednesday for four weeks, October 20 and 27 and November 3 and 10, from 7:30 to 9:00pm eastern time. The cost is $36 per couple.

To register for the workshop and for more details, click here. I hope you will want to participate in this pioneering, pilot effort. If it is successful, we’ll offer the online discussion group many more times.

This post originally appeared on www.interfaithfamily.com and is reprinted with permission.