American Jewry’s large centrist and liberal groups are seeking to radically reform the community’s main umbrella organization, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. This new effort is the biggest fallout yet from the Presidents Conference’s controversial decision to reject the membership bid of J Street, the dovish Israel lobby. In a May…
Reform leader Rabbi Rick Jacobs says the Union of Reform Judaism will consider dropping out of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations after it voted to reject membership to the dovish group J Street. “This much is certain: We will no longer acquiesce to simply maintaining the facade that the Conference of Presidents…
If you want to know why ordinary American Jews, especially younger ones, are turning away from the communal establishment — not out of anger but out of disinterest or, perhaps, disgust — then look no further than the convoluted argument over whether J Street should be a member of the Conference of Presidents. J Street:…
On April 30, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations will vote on J Street’s application for admission. It will be a significant moment not just for the left-leaning lobby, but also for the Jewish establishment as a whole, which will have to provide a verdict on whether the communal tent should include…
The leader of Reform Jewry has backed J Street’s effort to join the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. Rabbi Rick Jacobs, the president of the Union for Reform Judaism, says the mission of the Presidents Conference, the communal foreign policy umbrella body, would be compromised if it rejected the application of the…
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…
(JTA) — In the months since the Pew Research Center’s survey of American Jews renewed communal concern about assimilation, the intermarriage debate is flaring up again. Jewish religious and communal institutions had been shifting away from seeing intermarriage as a problem to be combated and toward focusing on engaging the intermarried. But in recent weeks, there…
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