It wasn’t just the growth of intermarriage, you know. Or the dramatically shrinking Conservative movement. Or the fact that non-Orthodox Jews were having fewer and fewer children. The real dismaying headline of the Pew Research Center’s Portrait of Jewish Americans,, which this October will have been released five years ago, was the finding that young…
Rabbi Lev Baesh has co-officiated a wedding with a Native American chief on the shores of Lake Michigan. He conducted Paris’ first Catholic-Jewish ceremony. One time, he stood under the chuppah with a Hindu pandit; another, with a Shiite cleric. Things finally got tricky with an evangelical preacher — who’d been asked by the Jewish…
After mulling over the controversial question for three decades, Rabbi Joe Black has changed his mind. The leader of the largest Reform congregation in the Denver is now conducting interfaith wedding ceremonies. In a letter and sermon to his synagogue, Temple Emanuel, in May, Black said that he could not in good conscience turn away…
You never know when it’ll get you. I mean tradition. You walk through life managing to make difficult and unconventional but seemingly-right-for-you choices — you say no to Harvard, you quit The New Yorker, you say no to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop — and then one bright day you’re ready to propose and you find…
Is Jewish continuity inherently sexist? In some people’s minds, like the author of a recent op-ed in these pages, Jewish continuity is toxically identified with Jewish sociologist Steven M. Cohen. I’m neither judge nor jury, but if the #MeToo allegations against Cohen are true, and they may well be, the prominent sociologist should be held…
Steven M. Cohen is perhaps the most important Jewish sociologist in America. A prolific writer and popular speaker on the Jewish circuit, Cohen is best known as the architect of the intermarriage “crisis” discourse; he has for decades used sociological surveys to insist that intermarriage is “the greatest single threat to Jewish continuity today.” But…
On Sunday, Isaac Herzog — outgoing leader of Israel’s opposition party, son of the sixth president of Israel, grandson of a chief rabbi — was unanimously elected chairman of the Jewish Agency for Israel, the largest Jewish nonprofit in the world. It took only a few days for him to run into the buzz saw…
Last week, I sat with my students and colleagues at an exceptional student-led Iftar, the festive evening meal that breaks the Ramadan fast. Looking around at the mixed tables and watching everyone genuinely enjoy themselves over food (which was glatt mehadrin kosher food to accommodate Orthodox students and teachers), music and conversation, despite the longstanding…
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