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.           

Continue reading.

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.

Continue reading.

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.

Continue reading.

Follow us on   

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.

Continue reading.

Follow us on   

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.

Continue reading.

Follow us on   

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.

Continue reading.

Follow us on   

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.

Continue reading.

Follow us on