In a moving essay for Catapult, Amy Beth Wright describes how her marriage to a non-Jewish man led some of her relatives to cut her out of their lives: “In the past three years, despite being excluded from family weddings, Seders, Rosh Hashanah meals, and Shabbat dinners, I have reached out to my aunt, uncle,…
December used to fill my parents with dread. My parents avoided taking us to malls in December, nervous that the amount of Christmas spirit would create confusion and discomfort for us as Jewish children with a (since converted) Christian mother. In her words, “The Christmas season is hard enough when your family is unambiguously Jewish;…
(JTA) — Conservative Rabbi Seymour Rosenbloom has been expelled from the Rabbinical Assembly, the movement’s rabbis’ association, for performing interfaith weddings. An ordained Conservative rabbi for 44 years, Rosenbloom was expelled by unanimous vote last month after a hearing of the R.A.’s Executive Council. Since 1972, the Conservative movement has prohibited its rabbis from officiating…
Amid the rising fears that minorities harbor about the coming Trump era, Jewish leaders here are fiercely debating: What is to be done? Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s personal appeal to Trump in a December 7 meeting to preserve the Delayed Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program and give up his plans for large-scale deportations of immigrants…
To get to Camp Ramah Darom in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, you drive up Interstate 85, North, out of Atlanta, the nearest big city, for almost an hour. Just a little past Peachtree Corners, you turn onto old U.S. Route 23. From there it’s 35 minutes or so, deep into the mountains,…
(JTA) — A year ago, when several dozen Washington-area Jewish and Muslim religious and lay leaders jostled for spots in a group picture, the mood was convivial. The most novel item on the agenda for that November 2015 confab was bringing in non-Middle Eastern Muslims into the Jewish-Muslim dialogue. The meeting and the venue —…
I am a Jew by choice, I was raised a Muslim, and my mother is an ordained Baptist minister. One might think that I would encounter religious conflict with my family on all fronts. In fact, people are often incredulous at the ease with which I can navigate through these three Abrahamic faiths. Perhaps, because…
The term “intermarriage” is confusing, vague, archaic and, well, creepy. It’s time for Jewish communities to move away from using this language when writing or talking about families. As the child of interfaith parents, and as the parent of grown interfaith children, and as someone who works full-time on interfaith family issues, I can give…
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