“Big Love” is a crappy show about love. But it is a great show about marriage. In the way that “The Simpsons,” unexpectedly taught us a thing or two about family values, the Henricksons have shed some insight on being wed. The polygamous premise aside, the show has some of the most honest portrayals of…
Tara Lyn Gordon, the 26-year-old founder of Artists 4 Israel, says she averages three dates a week from the fundraisers she’s been attending for three years. “Last week [I had] five: two in the same day,” she said. Gordon goes to the fundraisers as a way both to network and to meet potential matches, and…
Move over Jewish day schools. There’s a new intermarriage panacea in town, and its name is Birthright Israel. A just-released study from a research team at Brandeis University led by Leonard Saxe found that 72% of married, non-Orthodox Birthright Israel participants have wedded fellow Jews, compared to just 46% of their peers who did not…
Three months into planning our wedding, my fiancé and I found ourselves playing the unlikely role of matchmaker. As a farmers’ market shopping, eco-minded Jew, I wanted the food at our reception to be fresh, local and organic. Meanwhile, my fiancé’s Orthodox family required anything we served to have the kosher stamp of approval. After…
I was 5 years old when I realized that I was a freak show. In Macon, Ga., good ole boys go huntin’, muddin’ and beer guzzlin’. Peroxide blondes drive pick-up trucks with gun racks. Prayer kicks off sporting events. A Jewish girl is like a werewolf-midget contortionist. My mother always dreamed I’d be married in…
Getting hitched in Israel is hardly a simple proposition, as a new documentary on the subject shows. In the Jewish state, marriage is only possible through Israel’s chief rabbinate — the pre-eminent religious governing body, which predates the founding of the state itself; non-Jewish Israelis must be married by their own religious authorities. In addition,…
When my wedding photo was published in the Forward in 2002, it accompanied an article about creative Jewish rituals found online, including a blessing for children at the time of their parent’s remarriage. I remember thinking, as I looked at the photo, what’s so unusual about this? Oh, right. Most people don’t have their five…
For someone who’s recently written a novel about teenage Orthodox Jewish lesbians — it could even be called the definitive novel, since there isn’t exactly a surplus of teen Orthodox lesbian fiction floating around — Leanne Lieberman isn’t really the ideal spokeswoman for the “Orthodyke” community. As a matter of fact, she’s neither Orthodox nor…
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