The Forward is launching The Seesaw, a new advice column which will focus on the real life issues faced by interfaith couples and families. While the Jewish establishment wrestles with the communal implications of interfaith relationships, a growing number of American Jews are simply living in one. For them, intermarriage isn’t a problem or a…
A still from the Woody Allen film “Annie Hall” represents a fading paradigm of intermarriage. These days, more American Jewish women than men are marrying out, as the Forward’s Josh Nathan-Kazis recently reported. The story’s headline, “Jewish Woman Is New Face of Intermarriage, Pew Study Data Reveals,” led me to wonder: If Jewish women have…
In 1926, a distraught father wrote to the Forverts’s advice column, A Bintel Brief, with a problem: Where are all the Jewish men? With four daughters to marry off, and no Jewish husbands in sight, the man was considering moving to another city. “We live in a country town where we are the only Jewish…
Intermarriage, for many American Jews, means dark-haired Brooklyn Jewish men wedding corn-fed blond Protestant women. Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe, for instance. Alvy Singer and Annie Hall. That stereotype may have once reflected a demographic reality, according to a new analysis of data from the Pew Research Center’s 2013 study of American Jews. But not…
Are conservatives ever right? They were wrong about slavery, wrong about women’s suffrage, wrong about segregation, wrong about gay rights. They were wrong about trickle down economics – it’s never worked and never will, as the ballooning wealth gap proves once again. They were wrong about Iraq (where are those WMD’s, anyway?) and wrong about…
(JTA) — All in favor of a strong Jewish future say “aye.” On that core question, there is resounding unanimity, but there have been some unnecessarily polarizing articles in the Jewish press suggesting that we have to select either endogamy or outreach. Nonsense! Such binary thinking reduces a multi-dimensional and complex reality to a false…
When Rabbi Daniel Zemel started his career, back in the past century, the last thing he thought he’d ever do was perform intermarriages. But as the years passed, Zemel, who leads Temple Micah, a Reform congregation in Washington, found that maintaining his strict rule on this issue became ever more difficult. “It got harder and…
(JTA) — For an article I wrote on a recent flare-up in the intermarriage debate, I did two interviews with Rabbi Rick Jacobs, the president of the Union for Reform Judaism. Twice I asked him whether there was any value in articulating a communal preference for in-marriage over intermarriage, and the second time I followed…
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