A Letter to Chelsea For Her Second Pregnancy

This article has been reprinted with permission from InterfaithFamily 

By Rabbi Keara Stein

Dear Chelsea & Marc,

First I want to say B’sha’ah tovah and mazel tov on your pregnancy. Your pregnancy announcement was adorable and I hope Charlotte adjusts to your pregnancy and the new baby once it arrives. I glanced below the article I read including your announcement and saw several comments from people who, for whatever reason, think they know what’s best for your family. If you haven’t read them yet, don’t. If you have read them, or if you’ve heard them elsewhere—I’m sorry people are treating you as the role model for interfaith families. I’m especially sorry your daughter will grow up hearing these comments and constantly having to explain her family to others.

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What Should I Tell My Toddler About Santa?

The Seesaw for The Jewish Daily Forward    

We are heading up to my in-laws for Christmas this year. (My husband is half Jewish; his family isn’t religious and Christmas is Jesus-free for them.) This isn’t my son’s first Christmas with them, but it’s the first time he will really get what is going on. He is three.

I’ve been following the advice to present Christmas as something that Grandma and Grandpa celebrate and that we will be joining them for, like a birthday, and he seems to kind of get it. But I’ve found myself stuck on how to talk about Santa. My son has cousins, 4 and 6, and they believe in Santa. I don’t want him to ruin it for them and therefore don’t plan on telling him that there is no such thing, but I am also not comfortable with him getting all excited about Santa. What should I do?

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My Son Won't Let Me Talk to His Wife About Converting

The Seesaw for The Jewish Daily Forward   

My daughter-in-law is wonderful. We love her. She is not Jewish, though has been a happy and willing participant at our holidays and at our Conservative temple and has told me that she is growing a real affection for our faith.

Now she is pregnant with my grandson and my son says we shouldn’t make too big a deal about matrilineal descent, that it doesn’t matter to him if she converts and they would be welcome at a Reform synagogue in the future. But I feel like I should have the right to at least express my feelings about the benefits of conversion to her, while making it clear that even though I will be disappointed if she doesn’t do it, I will love her and her child no less and our relationship will not change. Is my son being an unfair censor? Or I am inserting myself where I don’t belong?

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How College Can Put the Jewish in Children of Intermarriage

Leonard Saxe, Fern Chertok and Theodore Sasson for The Jewish Daily Forward  
 
The late great baseball player and philosopher Yogi Berra once quipped, “It ain’t over till it’s over.” Our new study, “Millennial Children of Intermarriage: Touchpoints and Trajectories of Jewish Engagement,” attests to Berra’s wisdom. Despite decades of worry that American “children of intermarriage” would be lost to the community, a large-scale study of young adult applicants to Birthright Israel found that the story is more complicated, and more hopeful.

Not surprisingly, young adults raised by intermarried parents grow up with a more limited set of Jewish educational and social experiences. However, if these children of intermarriage become involved in Jewish experiences in college — through Birthright Israel, Jewish campus groups or courses — their Jewish identity and later engagement look in many respects very much like that of children of two Jewish parents.

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8 Reasons My Interfaith Family Celebrates Hanukkah and Christmas

Susan Katz Miller, The Blog, HuffPost   

At this time of year, a blizzard of articles about the so-called December Dilemma swirls up like snowflakes rising from the floor of a snowglobe. Every year, I take calls from journalists looking to, perhaps, shake things up: to dramatize what they are sure must be a conflict between Christmas and Hanukkah, and between interfaith parents. And yet, having chosen to fully educate our children about both family religions, the dilemma essentially disappears and December becomes primarily a delight. We celebrate both Hanukkah and Christmas, with all of the trimmings, and seek to help our children to understand the religious meanings of both holidays.           

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For more great Hanukkah ideas, check out our    page.

For even more great ideas, visit our Hanukkah Holiday Spotlight Kit

Guide to Hanukkah for Interfaith Families

This article has been reprinted with permission from InterfaithFamily

What is Hanukkah?

View a PDF of our Guide to Hanukkah for Interfaith Families

Hanukkah is a holiday that commemorates the Jewish recapture and rededication of the Temple in Jerusalem in 164 BCE. It's celebrated for eight days and usually falls in December. The traditional observances of Hanukkah are lighting a menorah, or ceremonial candelabra, spinning a top called a dreidel and eating fried foods. Though it is religiously minor, Hanukkah is a popular holiday. It's a happy festival in the winter, so it provides what seems to be a universally needed break from the dark and cold. It's a holiday about Jews winning a war, which is not the usual subject for a Jewish holiday. The third reason is obvious: for Jews in Christian culture, Hanukkah is the closest Jewish holiday to Christmas.

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For more great Hanukkah ideas, check out our    page.

For even more great ideas, visit our Hanukkah Holiday Spotlight Kit

My Mission to Welcome

by Rabbi Sarah Tasman for Rituallwell.org

One of my favorite parts of being a rabbi and the director of InterfaithFamily/DC is working with couples to prepare for their wedding. I meet with a lot of couples that come from diverse backgrounds and no two couples are the same. Each is a unique set of individuals bringing together their life experience, their families, and their hopes for the future.

Whatever kind of wedding they have in mind, I tell them that my goal is to create a ceremony together, a ritual which we can personalize so that their wedding reflects who they are as individuals and as a couple and their intentions for their life together. On the simplest level, a ritual helps us mark sacred time and helps us to be present in the moment. And no matter what the individuals’ backgrounds, I want their wedding to be one of many beautiful, meaningful, and accessible Jewish rituals in their lives.

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Peaceworks: Cooperation Never Tasted So Good!™

Since its beginnings in 1994, PeaceWorks Holdings LLC has been a business that pursues both profit and peace. We pursue profit through our sales of healthful food products that are produced by

neighbors on opposing sides of political or armed conflicts, whose cooperative business ventures we facilitate. PeaceWorks imports creative healthy foods that use only the freshest ingredients. The result is delicious, all-natural products

A minimum of five percent of our profits are used to support the PeaceWorks Foundation and the One Voice Movement, which aims to amplify the voice of moderate Israelis and Palestinians, and to help them build a human infrastructure and the political environment necessary to propel political representatives towards a two-state solution.

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Children of Intermarriage are Reshaping the Contours of American Jewish Life

on eJewishPhilanthropy

Yesterday in New York City, the Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies released their latest study “Millennial Children of Intermarriage: Touchpoints and Trajectories of Jewish Engagement.”

The bottom line: Children of intermarriage in the millennial generation are far more likely to identify as Jewish compared to the children of intermarriages in previous generations. As a result, the proportion of American Jews who are the children of intermarriage has increased in the millennial generation to roughly half, and it is likely to increase further in the generation that follows. The result is intermarriage and the tendency of the children of intermarriage to identify as Jewish in such large numbers are reshaping the contours of American Jewish life.

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November is Interfaith Family Month

This article has been reprinted with permission from InterfaithFamily 

Interfaith Family Month is an opportunity for your synagogue or organization to join with other welcoming communities in a bold statement that we will continue to build an inclusive Jewish community in our local areas and across the country.

In 2014, over 150 synagogues and organizations in Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Philadelphia, and the San Francisco Bay Area participated in this exciting program. This year, InterfaithFamily is expanding this program to Atlanta, Los Angeles, and the District of Columbia. You can see who is participating this year here.

Interfaith Family Month is your opportunity to show that you welcome interfaith families and to thank them for their contributions to the Jewish community. In the month of November, take some time during an existing service or program to offer a blessing or words of thanks to your interfaith participants, or you may choose to offer a special program, dinner or event.

Visit our resource page and FAQ  for sample blessings, readings, or other program ideas.

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Book Review: David Gregory’s How’s Your Faith?

From On Being Both

David Gregory and I are both children of Jewish fathers and Christian mothers, both of us raised Jewish. We both married mainline Protestants. We both have children with one Jewish grandparent, yet we are both passing on Judaism to our children. And we both tell our interfaith family stories in recent books. I am grateful for each interfaith family story that gets published, and especially for each adult interfaith child who speaks up about the complexities of interfaith life.

David Gregory, of course, is the former host of NBC’s Meet the Press. The arc of his memoir How’s Your Faith: An Unlikely Spiritual Journey traces his rise to television prominence, and his humbling fall when Meet the Press ratings sink and he loses his job at NBC. To be fair, his search for greater spiritual meaning started years before his career crisis, and this book is a disarmingly frank and raw accounting of how he has wrestled–with his difficult childhood, his own anger management, his career ambitions, and with how to raise Jewish children with a wife who is a church-going Methodist.

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Help! I Think My Mom Lied About Being Jewish

The Seesaw for The Jewish Daily Forward   

I am a Jewish woman who raised her family Jewish, or so I thought. I bar mitzvahed my son and recently sent him on Birthright, after which he became interested in our ancestry and began to do some digging around. He discovered that none of my mom’s ancestors seem to be Jewish. She says we should ignore this and that she, and therefore we, are Jewish, but I nevertheless have started to feel insecure about it. If my mom is lying, and neither my father nor husband are Jewish, are we still Jewish?

Conversion Might Be in Your Future

A friend once contemplated what he’d do if he woke up one morning and discovered he wasn’t Jewish. Because Judaism is central to his life, he believes he would do whatever it takes to become and remain unambiguously Jewish. In his case, that would mean an Orthodox conversion. But a cousin of mine, upon learning of my wife’s own Orthodox conversion, remarked that she’d have to think long and hard about converting if she suddenly learned she wasn’t Jewish.

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He Says He Wants To Be Christian and Bar Mitzvahed

The Seesaw for The Jewish Daily Forward

We are a Christian dad and a Jewish mom and have been raising our son with exposure to both religions. This summer my son went to a popular Christian camp because all his friends were going and we didn’t want him to feel like he is missing out. He is 11 and heading into middle school next year.

He just came back from camp and is expressing interest in becoming more Christian. However, he still says he wants to have his Bar Mitzvah. Now I am wondering, can he really be both Christian and Jewish? Also, how can I help him navigate this?

You Need to Figure Out Your Priorities First

You can’t begin to help him navigate this until you and your spouse know exactly what you are trying to accomplish. As an observant Jew, I have a clear goal to raise my Jewish children as Jews, with all the richness, beauty and meaning that Judaism can offer them.

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Sukkot Blessings

This article has been reprinted with permission from InterfaithFamily

For those looking for a quick, easy reference to guide them through the home (and in the sukkah) ritual blessings for Sukkot, this resource is for you!

Our handy Sukkot Blessings, in an easy-to-print PDF format, includes the customary prayers said in the sukkah and when we shake the lulav, all in Hebrew and transliteration, with traditional and alternative translations as well.

Not sure how to pronounce the Hebrew? Read along, in transliteration or in Hebrew, and listen to each blessing:


You can also watch this video on how to shake to lulav:

SORRY: The Hardest, And Perhaps Most Powerful, Word

by Rabbi Robyn Frisch. This article has been reprinted with permission from InterfaithFamily

One of my favorite children’s books for Yom Kippur is Jacqueline Jules’ The Hardest Word: A Yom Kippur Story. It’s about the Ziz, an enormous bird with dark red wings and a purple forehead. The Ziz’s giant wings are always knocking things over. One day, after the Ziz mistakenly knocks over a big tree with his wings and the tree then knocks over another tree, which smashes a children’s vegetable garden, the Ziz goes to God and asks God how he can make things better.

God instructs the Ziz to search the earth and bring back “the hardest word.” The Ziz stretches out his big red wings and goes off to search, coming back to God over one hundred times with a variety of words. Each time God sends the Ziz back out, insisting that there is still a harder word.

Finally, the Ziz, discouraged, flies back for one last discussion with God:

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Help! Will My Grandchildren Be Catholic?

The Seesaw for The Jewish Daily Forward

My daughter just got engaged to a Catholic man. He is a fine gentleman, extremely respectful, and we get along well. She recently let us know that after a long discussion she accepted his request that their future children be raised Catholic. She herself will remain a Jew and they will join our family for the important Jewish holidays, along with the occasional Shabbat dinner.

She indicated that if she didn’t accept the children being raised Catholic the engagement would more than likely not happen. It was a deal breaker for him and his religious family. My daughter had hoped that the children, as my wife and I hoped, would be raised interfaith. We are not very observant, but have a strong Jewish identity that means a lot to us.

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High Holy Days: the Basics

This article has been reprinted with permission from InterfaithFamily

Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish New Year) and Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement), together, are known as the High Holy Days (or High Holidays).

For many, this is the only time of the year we go to synagogue. For others, it's a chance to reflect, take stock of the past year and make amends. It's a holiday season that is rich in symbols, like the shofar or apples dipped in honey.

This booklet, High Holy Days: the Basics, explains the Days of Awe, starting with Rosh Hashanah and running through Yom Kippur, including what to expect at synagogue services, what the home celebrations may look like and concluding with a glossary of useful terms.

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Check out Jvillage’s High Holiday+    page.

Will Other Movements Follow?

By Lisa Hostein for The Jewish Week

When Rabbi Aaron Panken took over as president of the Reform movement’s Hebrew Union College — Jewish Institute of Religion in June 2014, one of the first issues he inherited from his predecessor was the very question the Reconstructionist movement is grappling with now. A group of students at HUC was pushing the administration to re-examine its ban on admitting and graduating students in interfaith relationships.

Rabbi Panken, whose movement is the largest in the country, launched an extensive process to solicit the views of the seminary’s faculty and students along with congregations, rabbis and other stakeholders, to determine if such a change was warranted.

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My Daughter Doesn’t Want to Be Jewish

Deborah Ager for Kveller

I’ve been Jewish for 522 days. When I converted, my child was nearly 8 years old, which is too old to take into the mikveh (ritual bath) with me without her agreement. If she’d been 5 or younger, I’d have taken her in the mikveh and she’d be Jewish now. That didn’t happen, so I began my Jewish life with a non-Jewish child. (My husband isn’t Jewish either.) Overnight, my conversion turned us into an interfaith family. I wasn’t sure what that would mean, yet I know I wasn’t expecting my daughter’s declaration that she doesn’t want to be Jewish.

At the conversion, I took a vow to raise my child within Judaism. It never occurred to me that the challenge in doing so would be my own child, because she adored religious school and attended Shabbat services with me. (Yes, she was allowed to attend religious school before I converted.) But now, my child is rebelling—politely, but still. She’s told me she doesn’t want to be Jewish or Christian. She wants to be “nothing,” she says. By rejecting it all, I think she wants to let me know it’s not personal.

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Jason Segel Opens Up About Growing Jewish (and Christian)

The comedian sits down with Marc Maron to discuss his childhood

By: Maria Cruz for ShalomLife

In an interview with Marc Maron on his podcast “WTF with Marc Maron”, actor Jason Segel shares his experiences growing up from a family with a Jewish father and a Christian mother.

Segal, who is set to work on the new Lego movie, is a published author, actor, songwriter, and musician admits, despite all his accomplishments today, that he was the “awkward kid” growing up.

“I grew up going to a school called Saint Matthew’s during the day and I would walk to Jewish school at night,” he says. “Your father wanted some Jew in ya,” Maron jokes back but Segel says his parents let him decide. Admitting that it was a stupid decision because, as a child, he didn’t care which religion he would belong to, Segel decided to try and merge the two together.

He also acknowledges the strange spot he was put in being of both Jewish and Christian religions. “At Christian school you’re the Jewish kid and at Hebrew school you’re the Christian kid. I think that’s the nature of groups,” he explains. “And so everyone wants to compartmentalize people and I think I decided at that point, like okay, it’s me versus the world kind of.”

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Romance Bloomed for a Jew and an Asian American, Until Tribalism Trumped Love

I said I’d convert to placate my boyfriend. But his family would never disregard the fact that I was Korean.

By E. Tammy Kim

New York City’s least remarkable interracial couple is the Asian American woman/Jewish man. In middle-class, over-educated enclaves of Manhattan and Brooklyn, it’s an inescapable pair.

Yet it took me a while—a decade in the city—to join these ubiquitous ranks. For years I had dated mostly Korean and Asian-American men, opting for bodily familiarity and trying to fulfill my parents’ vision of an appropriate mate. As I hacked my own path through the brush of my early 30s, however, I grew open to new possibilities of attraction and desire.

It’s an experience we’re quickly losing to the glance-and-swipe froideur of Internet dating: the man who’s not your type but sends you reeling in person; the unwelcome Eros that barges its way in. That’s how it was with P., my first Jewish boyfriend, whom I loved and who loved me in equal, unwitting measure. In our universe of two, we might have had many more years ahead of us, but in the real world, we succumbed to the fatal, familial tribalism that dating profiles articulate as “preference.”

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Hollywood Now: Amy Schumer, Paul Rudd & More Stars Heat Up Summer Screens

By Gerri Miller for InterfaithFamily.com;
This article has been reprinted with permission from InterfaithFamily

Amy Schumer: Trainwreck?

Amy Schumer’s name may not be household famous yet, but with the July 17 release of the buzzed-about comedy Trainwreck, which she wrote and in which she stars, that’s about to change. The standup comic and writer (Inside Amy Schumer) turned movie star grew up in an interfaith family in New York, the daughter of a Jewish father and a Protestant mother, and was raised in her father’s Jewish faith. Voted Class Clown and Teacher’s Worst Nightmare in high school, she was able to find comedy in a life that wasn’t always funny: Her father’s furniture business went bankrupt, he was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis and her parents divorced. “I love to laugh. I seek laughter all the time,” Schumer said on CBS Sunday Morning. “I think that’s something that also comes with having a sick parent. You don’t know what’s going to happen. I want to experience all I can and make as many memories as I can.”

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We Just Don't Want a Bris

Seesaw in the Jewish Daily Forward

I was raised Conservative but in a kind of just going through the motions way. I never really clicked with Judaism, and it surprised nobody when I married a non-Jew. We had a rabbi officiate our wedding, but not for spiritual reasons. We just liked some of the fun Jewish traditions, and also couldn’t come up with a better alternative, and knew the rabbi would make my family happy.

Now I am pregnant with a boy and my family is putting pressure on me to have a bris. I will circumcise him in the hospital, but I just feel no need to have a whole ceremony and party a week after I give birth. The reality is, it means nothing to me and I don’t feel like I should have to do this just for my parents. We aren’t going to raise him Jewish, so there is no point in pretending we are at the beginning. Seesaw, how can I get my parents to understand that I just don’t care about being Jewish?

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You say ‘intermarriage’ like it’s always a bad thing

By Sarah Tuttle-Singer, The Times of Israel New Media Editor

My dad wasn’t born Jewish.

My dad celebrated Christmas. He went to Church every Sunday.

Hell, he sang in the Episcopalian choir at his church — “If you can’t sing well, sing LOUD” his father told him, and loudly my father sang, his voice booming through the rafters clear to the high heavens until the choir master said “son, why don’t you try basketball instead.”

And then one Spring evening in March 1968, he met a woman with dark hair and darker eyes, a woman whose skin was still bronzed by the Israeli sun where she had spent the year picking sweet oranges in the fields, a woman who wore her Jewishness like a coat of many colors.

My mom’s people fled from Poland and Russia, although their name and the stories they tell trace all the way back to Baghdad, when by the waters of Babylon they lay down and wept for thee, Zion, their real homeland.

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My Dad’s One Big Question

by Liz Polay-Wettengel;

This article has been reprinted with permission from InterfaithFamily

It started as most modern romances do these days. Girl logs on to a website. Spies a boy. Sends notes back and forth. But it was 2000 when I met Dave, long before dating websites—a time when chat rooms and websites catering to different hobbies and interests were just starting to bring people together.

We corresponded via Internet and phone calls before we ever met in person. I was living in Brooklyn and needed to be in Boston for a work event in May 2001. We thought we should have dinner. Dinner turned into a weekend, which turned into weekend trips between New York City and Boston for quite some time.

Aside from the travel, it all seemed so simple.

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Dear Gefilte: I Want to Convert, but My Husband Won’t Approve

From: deargefilte@kveller.com

Dear Gefilte,

My husband was brought up basically without any religion. I grew up very Catholic. My mother-in-law converted to Judaism several years before we met. Hubby doesn’t take her conversion or any religion seriously.

Here’s the deal, I desire very much to convert to Judaism myself. I’ve finally found a religion that really speaks to me. Problem is I know my husband will not only be shocked…he won’t support me in this. What do I do? How do I approach this?

Yours truly,

Jewess-in-training
—
Dear Jewess-in-Training,

Here are a few things that often require “support”:

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Michael Douglas Credits Son and Dad at Genesis Ceremony

The Jewish Daily Forward

Actor Michael Douglas credited his son and celebrity father for helping him reconnect to Judaism as he accepted the Genesis Prize, “the Jewish Nobel,” in Jerusalem.

Douglas, an Academy Award winner, accepted the $1 million award on Thursday night for his commitment to Jewish values and the Jewish people. His wife, the actress Catherine Zeta-Jones, and children, Dylan and Carys, were on hand for the ceremony.

In his address, Douglas noted his new ties to Judaism at age 70.

He said his son’s decision to have a bar mitzvah “made me think and it made me strong. And for that I will always be grateful.” His voice broke as he thanked Dylan, who had his bar mitzvah last June, and later his whole family for their support.

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