(JTA) — To an outsider, the battles might seem to be over trifles — in some cases, just a few feet. Where may a non-Jewish parent stand in the synagogue during his child’s bar mitzvah? Can a non-Jew open the holy ark? Should non-Jewish synagogue members have voting rights? Such questions have been pushed to…
The good people at Pew Research have come up with a brief, fascinating addendum to their recent survey of Jewish Americans, aiming to clear up some of the furor the survey touched off over the closely related questions of intermarriage, religious identity and overall Jewish population numbers. Some quick background, in case you just got…
Susan Katz Miller, the author of a new book, “Being Both: Embracing Two Religions in One Interfaith Family,” recently argued in a New York Times op-ed that children being raised as Jewish and something else are not totally lost to Judaism. She said that kids who learn about the faith when they are young may…
(JTA) — When Susan Katz Miller’s Episcopalian mother and Jewish father married in the 1960s, they did exactly what most religious leaders advised intermarried couples to do: They chose one religion and stuck to it. Katz Miller’s mother put her religious tradition aside, learning to make matzah balls and shepherding her four children through bar and…
The Jewishly identified adult children of intermarried parents are less likely to participate in organized Jewish activities than their peers with two Jewish parents, according to a new study obtained by JTA. The Jewish Outreach Institute, a nonprofit that promotes more inclusion of intermarried and unaffiliated Jews into Jewish life, conducted a survey of 204…
A rabbi and a priest walk into an independence day celebration…. That, literally, is how one the most high-profile interfaith friendships in the world today started. More specifically, the bond that Rabbi Abraham Skorka of Argentina cemented with the man who would become Pope Francis began as so many male friendships do: over sports. It…
Well, I promised myself I wouldn’t do it again, but here I am, caught in another round of mud-wrestling over the minutiae of Jewish population statistics. You’re in for a treat. If you’re just joining our broadcast, here’s a quick recap: Pew Research Center published a demographic “Portrait of Jewish Americans” on October 1 that…
Reaction to the Pew Research Center’s survey on American Jews is following its own version of the cycles of grief: first horror, then denial, then a shrugging acceptance. After the gloomy news reports of this first-ever independent survey, a second wave of commentators have focused on what they call the “good news”: the population numbers…
