Intermarried Couples Can Still Build Jewishly Engaged Families

My husband is Episcopalian, but together we have created a committed Jewish family and stayed part of the Jewish community

By Jane Larkin for Tablet Magazine

When I was growing up in New Jersey, my family wasn’t particularly engaged in Jewish life. We weren’t ritually observant, and no one in our house read the Jewish press. But there was one thing I knew for sure: that intermarriage threatened the Jewish community. I don’t recall exactly how I knew this. Maybe I heard the disappointment in the voices of the adults in my family when they spoke about my uncle and cousins who had married outside the faith, or maybe it was the topic of a High Holiday sermon at our Reform synagogue. Whatever the source, the message was clear.

Nonetheless, during my teen years I mostly dated non-Jewish guys. It’s not that I made a conscious decision to defy my parents or my community; I just didn’t have many choices—I lived in a mostly non-Jewish town. When I went away to Syracuse University, which had a student body at the time that was 15 to 20 percent Jewish, my mother assumed I’d find a large pool of Jews to date. I didn’t.

Still, while most of my boyfriends were not Jewish, I never envisioned myself actually marrying a non-Jew. I knew in-marriage was important to my family, observant or not, and I assumed I eventually would marry another Jew. By the time I reached my mid-20s, though, I still had been seriously involved with just a few Jewish guys. So, when one of them proposed, I accepted. Given my dating history, I wasn’t certain I would get another opportunity to achieve what I perceived as the ultimate milestone: a Jewish marriage.

Choosing a partner because of his religion proved to be a poor basis for a sustainable relationship. After two years, our marriage fell apart, thankfully before there were any children. My husband was the right religion, but I wasn’t in love with him.

While my divorce was pending, I found love—this time, with a non-Jew. Falling in love with him forced me to think about my Jewishness and evaluate my feelings about the faith. Only when I was confronted with the possibility of intermarrying and all I thought that entailed—giving up my Jewish identity, and my future children not having a connection to the Jewish people—did I realize just how important Judaism was to me.

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Editing Out Elements of Judaism Doesn’t Work

Instead of masking our ambivalence and discomfort, we should confront it

By Alana Newhouse for Tablet Magazine

Years ago, I attended a Passover seder hosted by a wonderful woman. As we prepared the table, my hostess took a stack of progressive haggadot out of a box and started laying them out at people’s settings. Suddenly, she started, and asked: “Which hagaddah do you use?” At first, I thought she was nervous about her own choice, and told her I had no qualms using whatever haggadah she and her family preferred. But she persisted. “Of course, of course. What I mean is, which one do you like the best? Which would you use if it were your house?”

I told her that, perhaps because I was raised in an Orthodox home, I was—and might always be—most comfortable with a traditional haggadah. She nodded, and explained that, unlike me, she felt moved to use a modernized version for a specific reason. I expected her to say that the traditional text didn’t speak to her in some way, or that she felt it was somehow inaccessible—complaints I had heard before, and which seemed perfectly logical. Instead, she admitted that she actually loved the traditional text, but that she was married to a non-Jewish man and had non-Jewish stepchildren, and couldn’t imagine reading passages about how Jews were the chosen people in front of these people—her family.

Her problem wasn’t religious, per se, or even political. It was emotional.

I thought about it the whole time we were setting the table. As my hostess put on the final touches, I broached the subject again. Those conversations—challenging, sometimes uncomfortable—were the basis of the Seder as I understood it, I explained. At their best, rituals like this one offer us the opportunity to ask ourselves what we believe, to play with the possibilities, and to state our answers—or our ambivalence—in front of the people who fill our lives. In her case, the idea that some Jews believe themselves to be chosen couldn’t possibly be foreign to her husband and stepchildren. The real revelation for them, I ventured, might be hearing those passages read aloud and then hearing their wife and stepmother assert emphatically that she didn’t believe in them—and why. Instead, by using a haggadah that had simply excised those sections, my hostess was leeching the experience of its most challenging—and thus most potentially rewarding—parts.

I thought about this story when I read Batya Ungar-Sargon’s latest post, which reported that some ultra-Orthodox Jews have the same editing impulse as my intermarried, self-identified “secular” hostess. Insecurity, I suppose, is universal.

Easter vs. Passover: In Interfaith Marriages, Mom’s Faith Wins Out

By Naomi Schaefer Riley for Motherlode

I never thought of myself as part of an interfaith marriage — more of a faith/no-faith marriage. I am a Conservative Jew and my husband is a former Jehovah’s Witness, now an “aspiring atheist.” I told him on our first date that our children would be raised Jewish — indeed that they would go to Jewish day school. A little forward, perhaps, but I had friends who spent years arguing over faith until they finally decided their relationship just wasn’t going anywhere. And I had friends who wanted to expose kids to “a little bit of both” and then let them decide. Bringing up children as Unitarians or Jews for Jesus wasn’t in the cards for me.

My approach was typical. Most of the interfaith couples I interviewed over the past few years for my book on interfaith marriage decided to raise their children in one faith or another. Over and over, these mothers and fathers used the word “impractical” to describe the idea of raising children in two faiths. And the older the child, the less likely they were to try it. It’s hard enough for many families to squeeze in time for one set of religious practices. Committing to two is probably going to cut into soccer or homework or just a little family downtime. One mother who raised her three children as Catholics and Jews told me “it was a good thing they weren’t athletic.”

At an event for interfaith families outside of Washington that I attended two years ago, the presiding rabbi told a group of newlyweds and engaged couples that the “December Dilemma” — the conflicts that arise over the celebration of Christmas and Hanukkah — shouldn’t be a great source of tension for them. “Easter and Passover are more of a dilemma,” he pointed out half-jokingly. You have to decide: “Was Jesus the Messiah? And who crucified him?”

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The persecution and slaughter of Christians. Why?

By Raymond Ibrahim for The Commentator

Time to get to the core issue: Why are Christians the most persecuted group in the entire world, and why is that persecution quintessentially Islamist? Raymond Ibrahim is better placed than most to explain

Why are Christians, as a new Pew report documents, the most persecuted religious group in the world? And why is their persecution occurring primarily throughout the Islamic world?

(In the category on “Countries with Very High Government Restrictions on Religion,” Pew lists 24 countries -- 20 of which are Islamic and precisely where the overwhelming majority of “the world’s” Christians are actually being persecuted.)

The reason for this ubiquitous phenomenon of Muslim persecution of Christians is threefold:

Christianity is the largest religion in the world. There are Christians practically everywhere around the globe, including in much of the Muslim world.

Moreover, because much of the land that Islam seized was originally Christian -- including the Middle East and North Africa, the region that is today known as the “Arab world” -- Muslims everywhere are still confronted with vestiges of Christianity, for example, in Syria, where many ancient churches and monasteries are currently being destroyed by al-Qaeda linked, U.S. supported “freedom fighters.”

Similarly, in Egypt, where Alexandria was a major center of ancient Christianity before the 7th century Islamic invasions, there still remain at least 10 million Coptic Christians (though some put the number at much higher). Due to sheer numbers alone, then, indigenous Christians are much more visible and exposed to attack by Muslims than other religious groups throughout the Arab world.

Yet as CNS News puts it, “President Obama expressed hope that the ‘Arab Spring’ would give rise to greater religious freedom in North Africa and the Middle East, which has had the world’s highest level of hostility towards religion in every year since 2007, when Pew first began measuring it. However, the study finds that these regions actually experienced the largest increase in religious hostilities in 2012.”

Christianity is a proselytizing faith that seeks to win over converts. No other major religion -- including Buddhism, Hinduism, and Judaism -- except Islam itself, has this missionary aspect (these faiths tend to be coterminous with their respective ethnicities: Buddhists, Asians; Judaism, Jews; Hinduism, Hindus).

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'When something good happened, I always called Dad': Why Simon Cowell named his son after the father who gave him his entree into showbusiness

By Alison Boshoff for DailyMail.co.uk

He was an older dad: a fun-loving, larger-than-life character who would leave for work in his E-type Jag, a Havana cigar clamped between his teeth.

He had staff — a gardener, a cook and a nanny — and loved to hobnob with celebrities.

He went racing at Ascot every year, and he would give Simon and his younger brother Nicholas the day off school so they could join him in his debenture box.

And Eric Cowell, after whom The X Factor creator has named his own newborn boy, had an eye for the ladies at least the equal of his son’s.

Indeed, everywhere you look in Simon’s life, you can see the influence of Eric Selig Phillip Cowell, the East End boy with Jewish roots who became a property mogul.

And, interestingly for the mother of Simon’s son, Lauren Silverman, who is still waiting for a proposal from her beau, Eric was the marrying kind — but he tied the knot only after the children had been born.

Indeed, Eric married three times and fathered five children, all born out of wedlock — including Simon. Cowell’s redoubtable mother Julie kept much about Eric’s racy past from the children.

It seems no one in the family told Simon about Eric’s first marriage until a couple of years ago.

And Eric’s two children from his second marriage were not allowed to meet Simon or Nicholas for years.

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