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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