When selecting a rabbi to co-officiate at their wedding, Chelsea Clinton and Marc Mezvinsky made a wise choice in selecting Rabbi James Ponet. Not many people can tell you this from personal experience, but I can: The guy does great intermarriages. Now, don’t get me wrong. I married a Jewish man. But I would dare…
Anyone who has ever tried to explain to a bewildered Christian friend why you need a ticket to go to shul on the holiest day of the year will appreciate Lisa Miller’s deliberately provocative essay, “The Cost of Being Jewish”. Miller, Newsweek’s religion editor, pointed out in the July 8 article that while there is…
When the Forward published my essay on being in an interfaith relationship last year, I could never have predicted that I would eventually decide to put together an entire anthology of essays by women in Jewish interfaith relationships. Before I wrote my essay, I had carried ideas for it in my head for a long…
Readers sent in some illuminating responses to my pre-Passover Good Fences column about a recent family Bar Mitzvah ceremony where the rabbi included the child’s non-Jewish father in the service in what struck me as an unusually and admirably welcoming fashion. This first reply came from a rabbi in Southern California, who makes an important…
The Montreal Gazette reports in this February 3 article that the Kahnawake Reserve (Canadian for reservation) of the Mohawk nation, just outside Montreal, has issued expulsion orders to about 25 whites living illegally on the reserve. It sounds a lot like a miniature version Israel’s struggles over refugees and foreign workers. About 25 non-natives —…
One of the most spectacularly knuckle-headed advertising campaigns in modern Jewish history was unveiled in Israel September 2 by an international organization devoted to strengthening Diaspora Jews’ attachment to Israel. The organization, Masa (“Journey”), promotes long-term gap-year and junior-year study programs in Israel for Diaspora young adults. Its latest recruitment strategy involves a new Hebrew-language…
Ha’aretz’s U.S. correspondent Shmuel Rosner uses Passover as an opportunity to explain the contentious intercommunal debate over intermarriage to readers of the online magazine Slate. Rosner, the rare Israeli who is genuinely fascinated by American Jewish life (sort of a 21st-century Israeli de Tocqueville), seems to be more sympathetic to the beleaguered pessimists, discussing at…
Writing in Newsweek, Rabbi Marc Gellman argues that “America is loving her Jews to death.” Writing in Radar, “single shiksa” Amber Sutherland offers to help speed the process along.
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