I recently finished reading Philip Roth’s American Pastoral, which won the Pulitzer for fiction in 1997. Roth of course has written extensively about Jewish men who fall in love with non-Jewish women–and the parents who disapprove–and American Pastoral is no different. Except when it is.

Unlike most of his other protagonists, the central character in American Pastoral is not a Roth-surrogate. The hero of American Pastoral (and to be sure, a hero is what he is), is a tall, athletic, endlessly optimistic blonde businessman and former high school sports star nicknamed “the Swede.” In short, he is the anti-Roth. But like Roth’s typical parade of Zuckermans and Portnoys, he is Jewish, and he is from New Jersey.

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Julie Wiener at The Jewish Week has a nice column about non-Jewish women who convert many years after their intermarriage.

This phenomenon marks a change from the typical pattern 20 or more years ago, when women would often convert before marriage under pressure–either overt or subtle–from their partner’s families. Continue Reading »

Young unmarried Jews are just as interested in Judaism as their married peers, a surprising new study shows. What’s different, say co-authors Steven M. Cohen and Ari Y. Kelman, is that they avoid affiliating with synagogues, federations and JCCs in part because those institutions are so focused on the traditional family unit.

Uncoupled: How Our Singles Are Reshaping Jewish Engagement, conducted as part of the Jewish Identity Project of Reboot, with the support of Andrea and Charles Bronfman Philanthropies, looked at more than 1,700 non-Orthodox Jews between the ages of 25 and 39 from the 2007 National Survey of American Jews. The authors compared their behaviors and attitudes to the behaviors and attitudes of inmarried non-Orthodox couples. Say Cohen and Kelman:

As many as 67% of these non-Orthodox singles agree, “I am proud to be a Jew,” slightly surpassing the 66% of in-married Jews who agree. More broadly, single Jews express Jewish pride in many different ways, they are widely and deeply connected to Jewish friends, and they express keen interest in self-directed ways of expressing and exploring their Jewish identities.

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The list of Jewish players who have ever played in the NBA is short (and the list of notable ones is even shorter). The best ever is Hall-of-Famer Dolph Schayes, who was named one of the 50 greatest players in NBA history in 1996.

The newest Jewish talent in the NBA–and first since Dolph’s son Danny last played in 1999–is Jordan Farmar, the backup point guard for the L.A. Lakers. Even more relevant for our audience, he’s from an interfaith family. His father was a non-Jewish African-American and his mother is Jewish (he was subsequently raised by his mother and his stepdad, an Israeli). Despite being a second-year player and making more than $1 million a year, he continues to live with his parents. (I’m sure his fellow players never give him guff about that.)

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In yesterday’s Huffington Post, one of the original plantiffs in the California Supreme Court case that legalized same-sex marriage, Robin Tyler, wrote about the one thing more shocking than her pending marriage to a woman: her pending marriage to a non-Jew.

Tyler (original last name: Chernick) and her partner Diane Olson plan on being married by Rabbi Denise Eger of Kol Ami, an LGBT-friendly Reform synagogue in West Hollywood, Calif. However, the wedding itself will be held on the steps of the Beverly Hills Courthouse, where Tyler fully expects a mix of drag queens and protesters.

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In this Middle Eastern country, a woman of the majority religion married a man from another religion. Her family had no problems with it, but the couple lives in fear of being exposed to the religious authorities as an interfaith couple. Meanwhile, the majority of this state’s young people support a couple’s right to civil marriage.

Israel, right? Try its neighbor to the north, Syria.

While Israel (justly) gets flak for its antiquated, inconsistent and prejudicial approach to interfaith marriage, the Arab countries that surround it are no better–and in many cases worse. Take Syria.

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(In which someone finally answers the question, “What about…Naomi?”)

Shavuot begins Sunday evening. Though it’s not a minor holiday in Jewish terms, it doesn’t have as much of a presence in the United States as other, better-known Jewish holidays. To me, that’s a shame, as it celebrates aspects of Jewish belief that I think are under-recognized in the Jewish community. Shavuot was one of the three pilgrimage festivals to the temple in Jerusalem when it was standing, and it is the modern form of an ancient Near Eastern agricultural festival for the barley harvest, but most importantly, it’s the time when Jews celebrate the giving of the Torah at Mt. Sinai.

Now that I work at InterfaithFamily.com, I’m thinking more about what the Jewish holidays have to say to interfaith families. Like Purim, Shavuot features the reading of a book of the bible that centers on a woman who enters an interfaith marriage. At Purim, we read about Esther, a Jewish girl who married a non-Jewish king and saved the Jewish people. At Shavuot, we read The Book of Ruth, a Moabite, who married into an Israelite family and became part of the Israelite people.

Typically, we interpret the Book of Ruth as a story about the acceptance of converts, and really, the world’s Jewish community needs that message right now, but I think we could also read this as the story of a successful interfaith marriage.  Continue Reading »

My managing editor loves a good barbeque, and wanted to know if we had any good content for Lag B’Omer.

“Lag B’Omer!” I said. “Talk about a difficult to explain Jewish holiday!” Continue Reading »

We’re still not over it.

We Jews are still not over our fears of being forced to convert.

Jews’ negative feelings about proselytizing are so strong that even in Israel, a country where Jews are the majority, we continue to feel threatened by the idea that someone might force us to convert. To me, this explains a lot about the ways that the Jewish community has reacted to interfaith marriage. A recent story about Jews in Israel burning books brought this into sharp relief. The deputy mayor of the small Israeli town of Ohr Yehuda, acting as a private citizen, organized a collection of missionary literature, which some of the townspeople then burnt in a bonfire.

In response to the burning of copies of the New Testament in Ohr Yehuda, Rabbi Eric Yoffie, President of the Union for Reform Judaism, Rabbi Peter Knobel, President of the Central Conference of Reform Rabbis, and Rabbi David Saperstein, Director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, issued the following statement: Continue Reading »

In his (presumably) last trip to the Middle East as president, Pres. Bush joined in the celebrations of the 60th anniversary of Israel. But he also, as Sheryl Gay Stolberg writes in the New York Times, “received something else: a little lesson in cultural awareness.”

In a museum garden, where Pres. Bush and his wife Laura were speaking with a group of a dozen young people selected by the American Embassy, he asked if Jews and Arabs dated one another, or went to dances:

“No dances?” he asked, sounding surprised.

There was a slight pause in the discussion, until the American ambassador, Richard H. Jones, stepped in, politely telling the president that society was more conservative here.

As to the dating question, Manar Saraia, a 22-year-old Israeli Arab from Haifa, had an answer. She has Jewish roommates, which is unusual enough. A Jewish boyfriend, she told Mr. Bush, would be too much. “The parents and the children themselves,” she said, “think if we are of different religions, that it’s hard to live as a couple together.”