January 3, 2003 The following is the text of the InterfaithFamily.com Network’s eletter which was sent to its 5,400-subscriber list on Jan. 3, 2003 and also distributed to the Outreach Fellows listserv and to the listserv of the UAHC’s National Outreach and Synagogue Community Commission. On December 17, 2002, the leadership of the Reform Movement (the Union
Interfaith Families Raising Jewish Children
Remarks presented at “Reaching Out: An Intergenerational Forum” at the United Jewish Communities’ General Assembly on November 20, 2002. I want to begin by telling you a small part of my story. I grew up in a Conservative synagogue. I liked Hebrew school. I enjoyed services. I went to a USY camp. I won an
How Should American Jewry Respond to the National Jewish Population Survey? Reach Out to Intermarrieds
Reprinted with permission of the Forward. According to the recent preliminary release of the 2000-01 National Jewish Population Survey, 1.5 million non-Jews live with Jews. Who are they? How do they relate to the Jewish community? How should the community respond to them? Against the backdrop of a Jewish population that the NJPS describes as
Should Efforts Be Made to Draw Interfaith Couples into the Jewish Community
This article is reprinted with permission of the Jerusalem Report. Edmund Case, publisher of InterfaithFamily.com and co-editor of The Guide to Jewish Interfaith Family Life, debates Jack Wertheimer, provost and professor of American Jewish History at the Jewish Theological Seminary. Dear Jack Wertheimer, Given a community that is declining and graying, the decisions that interfaith
Discouraging Intermarriage is Not the Way to Preserve Jewish Identity
May 2001 A controversy that will define the future of the American Jewish community–how to respond to intermarriage–is again erupting. A new American Jewish Committee survey of interfaith families is being used to support an old, failed strategy–discouraging intermarriage and pressing for conversion of non-Jewish spouses. That is exactly the wrong way to maximize the
Let’s Not Promote In-marriage Without Promoting Outreach to the Intermarried
An Intermarried Perspective on The Jew Within by Steven M. Cohen and Arnold M. Eisen
January 2001 In spite of the evident hostility of Steven M. Cohen and Arnold M. Eisen toward intermarriage, their important new book, The Jew Within: Self, Family and Community in America (Indiana University Press) provides a rationale and a roadmap for encouraging more Jewish involvement in interfaith families. The same factors the authors identify as
Let’s Make the Language of Jewish Prayer Inclusive
November 2000 Something happened at Rosh Hashanah morning services this year that threw me for quite a loss. My least favorite prayer—more accurately, my least favorite translation of a prayer—was read. It was one of the birchot ha’shachar, morning blessings, whose Hebrew ending, “she’asani yisrael,” is translated in our Reform prayerbook so that the prayer,
The High Holy Days Through Interfaith Eyes: A Time the “Strangers in Your Camp” Are Included
My Irish Vacation
July 2000 I’ve been an intermarried Jew for twenty-five years. When my wife Wendy was a junior in college, younger than our daughter is now, she spent the summer traveling in Europe, including a visit with her mother’s first cousin, Rhona Williams, in County Tipperary, Ireland. One of our favorite pictures is of Wendy (in