Once you’re a rabbi, you’re good for life — unlike a law or medical license, no central professional body can take the title away. And while you can get the title from a Jewish seminary, such as Hebrew Union College (Reform), Yeshiva University (Orthodox) or the Jewish Theological Seminary (Conservative), there are thousands of rabbis…
A synagogue in Virginia has issued a statement in favor of Conservative clergy presiding at interfaith weddings even though the movement still officially bans the practice. In a Facebook post, the synagogue’s rabbi said that its board had voted to allow its clergy to marry a Jewish person to a non-Jewish person, but only when…
This month, many interfaith families are celebrating Christmas. Unfortunately, there won’t be many expressions of “Happy Holidays” coming from the Jewish world. Recently, Gil Troy described the very existence of intermarriage as “the great unspoken yet perennial source of anguish haunting the Jewish world…American Jewry’s great divider,” and said that “no Jewish community could ever…
(JTA) — A rabbi was among 32 religious leaders arrested in San Diego, California, at the U.S. border fence demonstrating in support of migrants from Central America. About 400 people gathered at the Border Field State Park on Monday to support the migrants as part of a nationwide week of action called “Love Knows No Borders: A…
Around the time my relationship with my now-wife Rachael took a turn for the serious, we went for a hike in the desert and talked about religion. Rachael is Jewish. I am Catholic. Rachael’s Jewishness was mostly cultural. (Holiday recipes, yes! Holiday services or prayers, absolutely no!) By contrast, religion in all forms has always…
The Conservative movement’s central authority on Jewish law has announced that rabbis can attend weddings between Jews and non-Jews. The decision overturns over four decades of assumptions that the movement’s rabbis could be kicked out simply for being a guest at an interfaith wedding. Over the years, rabbis skipped out on countless weddings of close…
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…
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