Pork Rinds vs. Life Partners

The "Orthodox Paradox," Noah Feldman's thoughtful discussion of his intermarriage and the Modern Orthodox community's response to it, has clearly struck a nerve among Jewish bloggers, Orthodox and non-. Joey Kurtzman, the whip-smart senior editor of Jewcy, conducted a Q&A with Feldman, which, unsurprisingly, generated a flood of comments. (There's a broad cultural stereotype that Orthodox Jews are Luddites, but judging from their activity on blogs and discussion boards, that couldn't be further from the truth.)

Kurtzman's Q&A only briefly touches on intermarriage and gets more into the whole debate over Orthodoxy vs. modernity. But there is a nice line from Feldman. Kurtzman asks:

You were surprised when Maimonides—the yeshiva from which you graduated—airbrushed out you and your (non-Jewish) wife from a photo published in the alumni newsletter. Your surprise struck many readers as rather strange, since the community makes no secret of its rejection of intermarriage. It’s a bit like you’d pulled out a bag of pork rinds, devoured them with relish throughout the evening, and then expressed bewilderment when someone asked you if you'd set them aside until later. What are your critics missing here?

To which Feldman replies:

What is troubling about the view you describe—which I never sensed from my classmates—is its implication that somehow modern Orthodox people should be protected from my living my life as I choose. As if choice of life partner were as trivial as a snack... People who are comfortable with their own life choices don't get "offended" when others choose differently.

Feldman's response reminds me of something Rabbi Steven Greenberg, the only openly gay Orthodox rabbi in the world, once said in a speech I saw. Orthodox Jews often liken homosexuality to eating a cheeseburger--it's obviously prohibited by the Torah, so how could gays expect Orthodox Jewry to accept them? But, said Greenberg, nobody ever cried when their cheeseburger left them--or moved across the country to be with their cheeseburger.

Obituary for Sherwin Wine

JTA published a story today on the death of Sherwin Wine, the founder of Humanistic Judaism.

In many ways, Wine injected an honesty into the practice of Judaism that had been missing prior to his arrival. While many Jews don't believe in God (certainly more than believe in the Torah as the word of God), the vast majority of affiliated Jews worship at synagogue services infused with God-language. Wine, a Reform rabbi by training and an atheist by inclination, felt reciting such prayers was intellectually dishonest. So he founded an entire movement of Judaism, one that celebrates Jewish traditions but removes mention of a deity.

Despite its growing popularity in Israel, it has never caught on in the States, one of the few countries in the developed world where not practicing a religion is more of a social stigma than practicing one. The funny thing is, even the most Orthodox of the Orthodox will tell you that believing in God is incidental to being Jewish; either you're born Jewish or convert under the proper auspices, or you're not Jewish. It doesn't matter what you believe in.

On a totally unrelated note, I found this interesting piece in The New York Sun about Ataturk's Jewish roots. Ataturk was the founder of modern Turkey, a fierce secularist and nationalist who banned any public display of the Muslim faith. As interesting as the search for his father's Jewish roots is as a detective story, I feel the entire article is undermined by the author's disdain for the recently elected Islamic Justice and Development Party.

The Islamic Justice and Development Party is the only functioning, democratic moderate Islamic political organization in the Middle East, as far as I know. To say that "The Islamic counterrevolution has won the day in Turkey" is an incredible insult to a party that has been remarkably focused on economic growth, bureaucratic reform and compromise with the old-line secular establishment. If a party anything remotely like the IJDP achieved popularity in any of the Middle East hotspots like Iraq, Iran, Syria or Lebanon, we'd be jumping for joy.

The IJDP's electoral victory isn't a strictly intermarriage-related issue, but I think it's important for non-Jews in relationships with Jews to see that all Jews aren't instinctively hostile to any public expression of Islam.

Rabbi Sherwin Wine, 1928-2007

We just found out that Rabbi Sherwin Wine, founder of the Society for Humanistic Judaism, died on Saturday in a car accident while on vacation in Morocco. Secular Humanistic Judaism has consistently been an extraordinarily friendly place for interfaith families to explore Judaism.

Our sincerest condolences to his family and loved ones.

Shalom in the Orthodox Home

Noah Feldman, a law professor at Harvard and graduate of a modern Orthodox day school in Massachusetts, wrote a remarkable article for the New York Times magazine about his day school's response to his marriage to a Korean-American woman. It's all the more remarkable for the response it has elicited: Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, the best-known Orthodox rabbi in America via his TLC show "Shalom in the Home," has written a column powerfully and truthfully titled, "Stop Ostracizing Those Who Marry Out."

In Feldman's article, titled "Orthodox Paradox," he relates how he and his then-girlfriend took part in an alumni group photo at his day school's 10-year reunion. But when the alumni newsletter came out, he and his girlfriend were nowhere to be found. He says:

So I called my oldest school friend, who appeared in the photo, and asked for her explanation. “You’re kidding, right?” she said. My fiancée was Korean-American. Her presence implied the prospect of something that from the standpoint of Orthodox Jewish law could not be recognized: marriage to someone who was not Jewish. That hint was reason enough to keep us out.

Since then, Feldman has sent news about his marriage and children to the alumni director for inclusion in the newsletter. "None of my reports made it into print," says Feldman.

The strange thing is that no one from the school publicly shuns him. "As best I know, no one, not even the rabbis at my old school who disapprove of my most important life decisions, would go so far as to refuse to shake my hand," he says. Rather, the modern Orthodox community of which the school is a vital part uses a more subtle, but no less effective technique to remind Feldman of the error in his ways: they pretend his intermarriage doesn't exist. And in a community defined in so many ways by marriage, it is very difficult for him to feel part of the modern Orthodox family.

But, at least in this piece, Feldman doesn't seem angry so much as sad, and curious. He finds his own experience with polite ostracization a telling instance of the way that modern Orthodoxy struggles to respond to the secular world.

Ultra-Orthodox Judaism addresses the boundary problem with methods like exclusionary group living and deciding business disputes through privately constituted Jewish-law tribunals. For modern Orthodox Jews, who embrace citizenship and participate in the larger political community, the relationship to the liberal state is more ambivalent. The solution adopted has been to insist on the coherence of the religious community as a social community, not a political community. It is defined not so much by what people believe or say they believe (it is much safer not to ask) as by what they do.... marriage becomes the sine qua non of social membership in the modern Orthodox community.

For Rabbi Boteach to defend Feldman is both remarkable--and completely in character for Boteach. It is remarkable because it so rare for any public Orthodox person to denounce the community's response to intermarriage; it is in character because Boteach is profoundly interested in selling the values of Judaism to the widest possible audience.

Unfortunately, for all of Boteach's traditional practice, he is not held in high esteem in the Orthodox community. He was raised modern Orthodox but joined Chabad as a young man. However, Chabad's leadership rejected him as his mainstream acceptance grew (and especially when he invited Yitzhak Rabin, the architect of the Oslo accords, to speak in New York). Now he might best be considered a Hasidic man with modern Orthodox inclinations using Chabad techniques to reach a largely non-Jewish audience.

Nonetheless, it is no less powerful when he says about Feldman, who he became friendly with when they were both at Oxford:

Of course I wanted Noah to marry Jewish, and I took pride in the fact that I had helped to sustain his observance in his two years at Oxford. But the choice of whom he would marry was not mine to make. Before he got married I wrote him a note that said, in essence, that we are friends and that my affection for him would never change. I told him that he was a prince of the Jewish nation, that his obligations to his people were eternal and unchanging, that whether or not his wife, or indeed his children were Jewish would never change his own personal status as a Jew and that, as a scholar of world standing, I knew he would do great things with his life and that he would should always put the needs of the Jewish people first.

There is an important distinction here, one that in its way, is even more progressive than the typical Reform response to intermarriage. He is saying that the Jewish community should not only be kind and welcoming to intermarried couples, it should do so whether or not the couple decides to raise their children Jewish. Boteach is saying that one can still live a Jewish life and identify as a Jew even if the rest of one's family is not. Our concern should not only be with their children, but with the intermarried Jews themselves, and their value as people. That's an important point that even those of us immersed in outreach often forget. The Jewish present is just as important as the Jewish future.

My guess is that as eloquent as both of their pieces are, they will have little impact on any part of the Orthodox community. As progressive as the modern Orthodox community is relative to the ultra-Orthodox, they are still highly orthodox (small o) when it comes to defining their boundaries. Feldman is already discredited because of his intermarriage, while Boteach is discounted by virtue of his combination of secular popularity, his desire to universalize Judaism (always a no-no among the Orthodox) and his perceived lack of seriousness--he's a host of a TV show, for goodness sake.

But from the progressive Jewish community, or at least from InterfaithFamily.com, I say "Shalom!" to both Feldman and Boteach. They're welcome in our home anytime.

The Rising Tide on Officiation

Not to toot our own horn, but we appear to have tapped into something with the hiring of Rabbi Lev Baesh as the director of our Rabbinic Circle and rabbinic officiation referral service. Julie Wiener of The Jewish Week has written her most recent "In the Mix" column on the growing interest in officiation at intermarriages. At last year's convention of Reform rabbis, Rabbi Jerome Davidson, of Temple Beth El in Long Island, advocated for the Reform rabbis' association to change its position on officiation; currently its official line says that intermarriage "should be discouraged," but leaves the decision on officiating to the discretion of individual rabbis.

Meanwhile, Rabbi Erica Greenbaum, a recent graduate of Hebrew Union College, the Reform rabbinical seminary, recently completed her senior thesis on rabbinic officiation at intermarriage.

Rabbi Greenbaum, who is director of Jewish life at the Jewish Community Project Downtown in Lower Manhattan, says the research for her thesis was heartening overall.

“There continues to be a perception in some parts of the non-Reform community that any rabbi officiating at intermarriages is a shady character just doing it for the money,” she [says]. “That’s not a fair characterization. Certainly there are those people, but lots of rabbis on both sides are doing what they’re doing with a lot of integrity.”

Further, we're aware of two studies in different stages that look at the impact of rabbinic officiation on Jewish involvement.

To all this, we say "Mazel tov!" We've long been of the opinion that the Jewish community is missing a golden opportunity to attract interfaith couples to Judaism through officiation at intermarriages. Nobody yet knows whether a rabbi's involvement in an interfaith wedding makes it more likely for an interfaith couple to engage with Judaism, but it certainly can't hurt. A rabbi's involvement in an interfaith wedding gives a couple a personal, emotional connection to the Jewish community that they might otherwise not have. We have received numerous thank you notes from couples who we've helped find a Jewish officiant.

In the coming months, I suspect we will hear even more about this issue.

Critical Mass?

A week and a half ago, the Pope issued a decree authorizing Catholic clergy to conduct the old Latin Mass without permission of the Church. This bit of liturgical news wouldn't seem to be of much interest to anyone other than Catholics, but nothing involving the Catholic Church is ever just about Catholics. The Good Friday edition of the old Latin Mass includes a prayer for Jews to convert to Christianity. The potential revival of this prayer was not received very positively in the Jewish world; Abe Foxman, head of the Anti-Defamation League and self-appointed spokesman for the Jewish community, called the news "disturbing."

I have a variety of responses to this news: as a Jew, as a secular observer of the Catholic Church and as someone interested in the cause of inclusiveness for those in interfaith relationships.

As a Jew, I find the news disappointing but not disturbing. It's not clear that the Pope's decree will lead to a widespread revival of the conversion prayer. Even if it does come into more common use, it doesn't turn back the clock on years of reforms in the Church since Vatican II; this is not going to lead to a restoration of the charge of deicide against the Jews. In the U.S., it will have little to no impact on American Catholics. I highly doubt many priests will decide the way to restore their dwindling congregations is by conducting a Mass with their backs turned to their congregation and speaking in a language that none of his congregants understand. It's certainly possible that the Latin Mass may be adopted in those parts of the world where Orthodox Catholicism has a strong hold--specifically South America--but there are latent anti-Semitic attitudes there that the introduction of a prayer once a year will not change for good or bad. And, it's not like calling for the conversion of non-believers is an uncommon practice in Christian churches; one of the most Zionist groups in the world, evangelical churches, make it a point of both calling for the conversion of non-believers and actively missionizing to them. The only difference is that the Southern Baptist Convention never led an Inquisition.

As a secular observer of the Church, the news is a bit more discouraging. The authorization of the old Mass appears to be part of a general conservative retrenchment on the part of the new Pope. Pope John Paul II was no liberal, but he had a particular knack for combining commitment to Orthodoxy with eloquent gestures of inclusiveness. This Pope, who was known as the conservative watchdog of the Church prior to his ascension to the top of the Church, does not show a similar sense of tact. Sort of like the difference between Bill and Hillary Clinton.

As someone interested in the welcoming of interfaith couples, I have a mixed reaction. On the one hand, I feel that Jews should be very careful about criticizing other religions. What appears to us to be innocent and well-meaning criticisms can be taken in a much different way by the sensitive followers of another faith. After all, how tolerant are Jews of outside criticisms of Judaism?

On the other hand, at IFF we're very sensitive to making the Jewish worship service as inclusive as possible, arguing for the increased use of English, explanations of unfamiliar rituals and the inclusion of non-Jewish partners and parents in life cycle ceremonies. If a Christian is made to feel welcome in a synagogue, shouldn't a Jew be made to feel welcome in a Church? Hearing Latin will make things uncomfortable enough for a Jewish partner of a Catholic person; hearing a prayer calling for his conversion will only make things worse.

The reality of course is that most synagogues have a long way to go in making non-Jewish partners feel fully included. The same could be said for Catholic churches.

Making a Half- Whole

A good counterpoint to Sue Fishkoff's article on half-Jews is Deborah Sussman Susser's op-ed in the Jewish News of Greater Phoenix on her Jewish identity. It begins: "I didn't think of myself as half Jewish until I'd been told I wasn't [Jewish] at all."

This is the other side of the coin of those who define themselves as half-Jews while the Jewish community insists on defining them as Jews or non-Jews. Susser considers herself Jewish, while society in general considers her half-Jewish and the traditional parts of the Jewish community consider her not Jewish at all.

I knew I was Jewish enough that the other kids at school made jokes about picking up pennies and told me I was going to hell, Jewish enough that my first "boyfriend" at summer camp had broken up with me when I told him my religion. "I hate Jews," he'd said simply.

This sense of being both on the inside and outside of the Jewish community made affiliation difficult for her. In college, she worried that she would be "outed" at Hillel events. At synagogue, she cried. When she got engaged to a Jewish man, her Reform rabbi told them theirs was a mixed marriage. The amazing thing is, despite her bad experiences, she still identifies strongly as a Jew, lighting Shabbat candles and sending her daughter to Hebrew school.

A Symposium on "Doing Both"

At InterfaithFamily.com, a fundamental point of our mission is arguing that interfaith families should make a religious choice for their children. But it is interesting to hear the perspectives of those who advocate for the opposite view, that it's OK to raise children in a dual-faith household.

Interfaith Community is one of the handful of organizations nationwide that have this opposing view, alongside the Interfaith Families Project in Maryland, the Family School and Jewish-Catholic Couples Dialogue Group in Chicago, Ill., and Dovetail Institute. These organizations exist on the fringes of the established religious community as nearly all religious educators and leaders stress the impossibility of adopting two religions simultaneously.

Interfaith Community was founded in 1987 by a small group of Jewish-Christian families in New York City who felt rejected by churches and synagogues for their choice to practice two religions at home. The group has grown into a small organization with several chapters in New York state and one in Colorado, and offers counseling and support for couples, a formal educational curriculum for children, educational seminars for adults and some religious services and celebrations in both traditions. According to a recent report from a symposium the group held in New York in March, "[Interfaith Community] sees itself as helping to inspire children and adults to take religion seriously."

About 100 people attended the symposium. Attendees included: interfaith families; adult children of the organization's founding families; heads of congregational religious schools; Christian and Jewish clergy; and faculty and students from seminaries and universities. There was one rabbi, Rabbi David Posner of Temple Emanu-El, a major Reform synagogue in New York. Surprisingly, there was both a professor and student from the Jewish Theological Seminary, the Conservative movement's rabbinical school. Said Kate O'Brien, the coordinator of the symposium and a graduate student at JTS, "We've brought ourselves out of the safety of our communities, and we are taking a risk."

The conclusions of the symposium include:

• There is no typical interfaith family.


• Interfaith couples believe in the importance of cultivating mutual respect.


• Many interfaith couples found that the fact of interfaith difference in their relationship led to them taking their own religious affiliation more seriously. Said one Jewish partner: "I'm more Jewish than I've ever been, because it's all on me."


• Interfaith education can be, but doesn't have to be, confusing for children. Not sure I agree, but if you're going to try to do both, it's better to do it in the structured context of a community than do it on your own.


• Some clergy and religious educators regard the treatment of interfaith families as a matter of "justice."


• Even the most open-minded progressive clergy feel torn between the desire to be open and welcoming and their duty to preserve the distinctiveness and authenticity of their own tradition.


• Adults in interfaith relationships should have more opportunities for religious education. "Their understanding of their own traditions--let alone that of their partners'--tends to be limited," says the report.


• "The long-term impact of educating children in two religious traditions is uncharted and needs to be studied." Good point.


• Seminaries should develop curriculum to prepare future clergy to work with interfaith families.

While I don't agree with the premise of the IFC's work, I do respect their desire to prevent interfaith families from "making it up as they go along." But as they say, we still don't know what the long-term effects or raising children in "both" is. Anecdotally, we've seen that it is detrimental to children's emotional health and often leads to a default adoption of the more mainstream faith.

Half-and-Half

Our current poll question for our Web Magazine issue on Growing Up in an Interfaith Family is "Can a person be half-Jewish?" Appropriately, a day before the issue went online, jacqueline-of-all-trades JTA reporter Sue Fishkoff wrote a story titled "'Half-Jews' fight for acceptance."

For years, people have been saying they were half-Jewish, but the Jewish establishment never gave the moniker any credence. The different denominations are divided on what makes someone Jewish--the Orthodox and Conservative say only a Jewish mother can have a Jewish child, the Reform and Reconstructionist movements say a Jewish father can have a Jewish child provided the child is raised Jewish--but they are united in their opposition to the notion of divided identity. You can't be half-Jewish. You either are Jewish, or you're not.

But a growing number of grass-roots efforts are looking to gain acceptance for those who identify themselves as half-Jewish:

Yet the "half" term is gaining currency, particularly among those with Jewish fathers and non-Jewish mothers. The phenomenon is encouraged by Web sites, books and groups that celebrate or support these self-proclaimed half-Jews, from www.halfjew.com launched to establish "an identity for HalfJews," to the short-lived student group at Brown University called "The Half-Jew Crew."

Many children of intermarriage say they simply cannot turn their backs on the non-Jewish half of their identity. Their rabbis may say they are Jewish, but in their hearts they are also whatever grandma and grandpa are.

This openness to multiple identities is particularly true among college students, according to Daniel Klein and Freke Vuijst, who interviewed hundreds of students for "The Half-Jewish Book" published in 2000.

Klein says those who call themselves half-Jewish "feel they are a combination, they are an amalgam, they are bicultural."

Half-Jews were raised in a variety of different environments: many were raised Jewish, but still celebrated some aspects of their non-Jewish heritage; others were raised in two religions; some were raised in none. They don't want to abandon the non-Jewish aspects of their family and childhood. But, as Robin Margolis, founder of the Half-Jewish Network, notes in Fishkoff's story, "A lot of these people have been greeted by [Jewish] organizations where the first demand is 'make a choice,' and if they don't, they're not welcome."

The traditional Jewish community rejects the notion of half-Jewish because it doesn't jibe with their defense of matrilineal descent and rejection of patrilineal descent. Both positions require a zero-sum approach to Jewish identity.

The progressive Jewish movements define Judaism a little differently. For the Reform and Reconstructionist movements, Jewish identity is more a function of belief and practice than lineage. But for them, the concept of half-Jewish smacks of syncretism. It suggests that those who identify themselves as half-Jewish partially believe in Judaism and partially believe in something else. But that's impossible, they say: you can't believe Jesus was the messiah and believe that the messiah hasn't yet come. Since the Reform and Reconstructionist movements have been fighting rearguard resistance to their positions on patrilineal descent for more than two decades, they're especially sensitive to the suggestion that their positions lead to the dilution of Jewish identity. Whatever your feelings on the notion of half-Jewish, it's hard to argue that it doesn't dilute Jewish identity to some extent.

While many in the established community may have trouble wrapping their heads around the whole concept, they better get a lot more comfortable soon, because an increasing number of people are defining themselves as half-Jewish. If the Jewish community doesn't find a space for them, you can be rest assured that other faith communities will be happy to have them.

What You Think

Since the Sept. 26 issue of our Web Magazine last year, we've been running polls alongside the table of contents. We typically get around 20 responses. While nothing like a statistically reliable sample, they do provide an interesting barometer of our readers' opinions on interfaith issues.

For example, in our last issue on interfaith weddings, we asked "Do you think interfaith couples are more likely to participate in the Jewish community if a rabbi officiates at their wedding?" Eighteen people responded. 72% said Yes, 28% said No. In our new issue, out today, on growing up in an interfaith family, we asked, "Can a person be half-Jewish?"

We received the most respondents to our December holidays question: "Christmas music: Love it or hate it?" The 69 respondents were evenly split. Half said it was "OK in limited doses," while slightly more than a quarter (28%) said "Love it" and slightly under a quarter (22%) said "Hate it." Count me in the last category.

For most of the questions, there was a clear winner. For the Death and Mourning issue (April 10, 2007), we asked "Is it OK to sit shiva for one's non-Jewish parents?" 78% of the 18 respondents said "Yes, of course," while 22% said "No, mourning is more about the religion of the deceased than the religion of the living."

But in some cases, the questions divided our readers into equal-sized camps. For our Passover/Easter issue, we asked "Is it harder to be non-Jewish at a Passover seder, or Jewish at an Easter dinner?" 47% of the 45 respondents said "Non-Jewish at a Passover seder" and 53% said "Jewish at an Easter dinner." I can see both sides of the coin on this one, but I would bet if we had more non-Jewish readers, the poll results would be quite different.

For the Jan. 30, 2007, issue on Latino-Jewish Relationships and Hispanic Jews, we asked "Which culture has the best food: Spanish, Mexican or Jewish?" 40% of the 15 respondents said Spanish, one-third said Mexican and 27% said Jewish. I demand a recount. You have to be loco to think Jewish food is better than Mexican or Spanish food. Corned beef and matzos ball soup are great and all, but that's about the limit of great Jewish food. Mexican, meanwhile, has tacos, burritos, guacamole, carne asada, carnitas, salsa, chicken mole and a lot of other great foods that end in vowels, while no Jewish dining experience (at least outside the home of your grandmother) can compare to tapas and sangria with friends.

Overall, our readers are a rather tolerant lot. 79% of the 24 respondents to the question "Can you be Jewish if you don't believe in God?" (May 8, 2007) said Yes. When we asked "If interfaith parents adopt a child of non-Jewish or unknown descent, should that child have to convert to be considered Jewish?" (Nov. 7, 2006), 61% of the 18 respondents said No.

But you seem to draw the line at anything that smacks of mixing religions. Half of you (well, 24 of you) said it is not OK for a child to undergo a baptism and a bris (May 22, 2007). And when we asked "Is Messianic Judaism a legitimate religion or evangelical Christianity in disguise?", the overwhelming majority (83% of 29 voters) said it was evangelical Christianity in disguise. Nearly two-thirds of you (14) said Hebrew schools should not accept children being raised in two religions (Jan. 4, 2007). Interestingly, this distaste for syncretism doesn't extend to Buddhism, as only 18% of the 11 respondents said you couldn't be Jewish and Buddhist at the same time (Nov. 21, 2006).

When it comes to your own interfaith relationships, your experiences are all over the map. 63% of the 24 respondents to our June 5, 2007, question said they've never hid their interfaith relationship from their parents, but one-quarter said they didn't tell their parents until they were serious. Of the 25 respondents to the question "Do you attend services at your partner's place of worship?" (Sept. 26, 2006) 12% said "Never," while 24% said "Frequently." 24% said "Only for life cycle events," 24% said "Only for life cycle events and major holidays" and 16% said "More frequently than life cycle events and major holidays, but not regularly."

An Unnoticed Outreach Hero

Rabbi Abraham J. Klausner died on June 28. The obituaries in the Jewish press, including JTA and the Jerusalem Post, described how Rabbi Klausner, the leader of a Reform synagogue in Yonkers, N.Y., for 25 years, was the first Jewish chaplain in the US Army to enter Dachau and had been a leading advocate for Holocaust survivors. The New York Times obituary tells that story too, with quotes from Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, that Rabbi Klausner was "the father figure" for more than 30,000 survivors found at Dachau, and was instrumental in improving conditions in the displaced persons camps after the war. But the Times tells one more story about Rabbi Klausner that the Jewish press didn't mention.

In 1986, Rabbi Klausner wrote a book titled Weddings: A Complete Guide to All Religious and Interfaith Marriage Services. The book, though out of print, is still available from online sources. it contains texts for wedding services from many religious traditions with suggestions for combining texts of different faiths.

The Times notes:

For Rabbi Klausner, refusing to marry interfaith couples was a mistake. "It's a very traumatic experience to have a clergyman reject your judgment," he told The New York Times in 1989. "I don't think this is the role of religion, which should be to heal and help."

I don't know why the JTA and Jerusalem Post didn't mention Rabbi Klausner's stance on rabbinic officiation at intermarriages in their obituaries. I think it was a lost opportunity to show that such an obviously wonderful Jewish hero was willing to take a stance on what remains, over 20 years later, a divisive issue.

Coincidentally, Rabbi Lev Baesh starts work today as InterfaithFamily.com's first Rabbinic Circle Director. Part of his work will be to create resources for intermarrying couples and the rabbis who work with them. We'll explore whether we can incorporate some of Rabbi Klausner's work, or possibly reprint it, as part of that effort--an idea for which we thank our friend Rabbi David Kudan.

The Appeal of the Other

Everyone who's dated--that is to say, everyone--knows that figuring out why you are attracted to someone is often the greatest mystery in your life. Are you interested because the other person is interested? Is it physical attraction? Does the person laugh at your jokes? Is there a chemistry that can't be explained?

One factor that is particularly difficult to untangle is the cultural factor. Are you attracted to someone because they come from a similar background--or because they come from a different one? In Elizabeth Rosner's "Everything I Know About Being Bad I Learned in Hebrew School," an excerpt from Bad Girls: 26 Writers Behave published in The Forward, a girl who grew up with a stringent Orthodox upbringing rebels against Judaism and dates every non-Jewish boy she can find:

When boys began showing up with increasing frequency on my radar screen, I realized keeping secrets could become a new form of resistance. My father forbade me from dating non-Jews, and naturally they were all I wanted. I sneaked out of the house to meet boys named Charlie and Matthew and Chris, kissed their Catholic lips and tried my first tastes of beer. I wanted to taste everything. I wanted to be free.

Her motivations for dating non-Jewish come from a complex mix of adolescent rebellion, proto-feminism in the face of non-egalitarian religious schooling and the conflicted way her parents practiced Judaism: while her father was observant in every way, her mother ate shrimp cocktails at restaurants and didn't go to synagogue. The irony is, once Rosner moved to the Phillipines to escape her parents, she found herself holding onto her Jewish identity tightly.

In an article in Tango magazine, Sarika Dani, an Indian-American woman, discusses her attraction to non-Indian men:

Growing up, I always assumed that I was missing the gene that made Indians of the opposite sex appealing to me. They seemed immature, unexciting and too close to home to be attractive. It was hard to understand how I could be connected to my culture, but disconnected from the guys who populated it. I now know that when it comes to dating, the desire for the novel and exotic -- for me, anyone who wasn't Indian -- can compete with the need for familiarity. But in the end, which impulse should win out?

But, like Rosner, as Dani got older, the appeal of the exotic wore off. She is now dating an Indian-American man:

But this time, instead of my usual aversion to familiarity, I found something sexy about our sameness. Right away we had an unspoken trust and respect -- he didn't feel like a stranger for very long. Our common ground extended to our family values, our views on education and money and our professional goals. And so many of my family's habits no longer required explanation -- like my mom's practice of carrying Taco Bell sauce in her purse to spice up soups on the go, or my dad's lack of interest in football.

In the San Diego Jewish Journal, Tinamarie Bernard rages against "ShiksAppeal," that is, when Jewish men, or women, purposefully only date non-Jewish partners. Although in Bernard's case, the stereotypes that she attributes to Jewish men who won't date non-Jewish women are more than matched by the stereotypes she uses to argue that Jewish men should date Jewish women.

Sometimes the attraction to the other can be more than curiosity and excitement over the power of mystery, it can manifest in a desire to actually become what the other person is. In the case of a previous boyfriend of Paula Tavrow, he wanted to become Jewish, like her. What she couldn't figure out was whether he was interested in her "as a woman, or as a Jew?"

Finally, Beliefnet has an amusing story about how Jewish moms are pushing JDate on their children, and sometimes getting the hoped-for result: a Jewish marriage.

Speaking of San Francisco...

Keeping with yesterday's return-from-San-Francisco theme, j., the Jewish news weekly of northern California, and The Forward recently wrote about a clever new outreach strategy from Rabbi Moshe Langer of the Chabad of San Francisco: free trolley tours of the diverse and beautiful city. But unlike other Chabad marketing--free iPods in exchange for enrolling in Hebrew classes, "spa day for the soul"--the trolley rides are not about getting people to become traditionally observant or join Chabad. All that the bearded Rabbi Langer asks is that all his passengers, Jewish or not, perform one mitzvah (good deed) that day.

It's what the Jewish Outreach Institute calls "Public Space Judaism," whereby the Jewish community engages the global community wherever they are: grocery stores, coffeeshops, even trolleys on Powell Street. I particularly admire the Chabad Cable Car because it doesn't sound like Rabbi Langer is pushing his religious agenda. By "soft-selling" Judaism and showing people of all creeds how welcoming and friendly a strongly Jewishly identified person can be, he's making Judaism appealing to unaffiliated Jew and non-Jew alike. That can send a powerful message to interfaith couples.

Turns out, though, that Rabbi Langer is only following in his dad's footsteps. His father, Rabbi Yosef Langer, has been dubbed "Rally Rabbi" after blowing the shofar during the San Francisco Giants' Jewish Heritage Night. At this year's Jewish Heritage Night in August, the Giants will be giving out Rally Rabbi bobbleheads.

The State of Jewish Journalism

I returned from San Francisco today, where I attended the 2007 conference of the American Jewish Press Association, the professional association of Jewish publications and websites. This was the fourth conference I attended and the sessions tend to be similar from year to year. There's always one or two on how to make your print publication work on the Internet, there's always one where everybody bemoans their inability to reach young readers and there's always one on media coverage of Israel. The irony in the perpetual inclusion of the first two sessions is that few significant Jewish websites are members of the AJPA and almost none of the few Jewish media outlets that have had some success reaching young Jews--Heeb, American Jewish Life, Jewcy or Jewschool, for starters--are members either. So the conversations about web presence and youthful audience occur in a vacuum, led by old media print editors.

There was a complete lack of official discussion of intermarriage, at least in the sessions I attended. This isn't a flaw, but a reflection of the fact that Jewish journalists are quite comfortable with intermarriage being a fact of life in the communities they cover. Our recent survey of 21 non-Orthodox Jewish papers revealed only four publications that would not publish interfaith wedding announcements--although two of those four are the two largest Jewish papers in the country. With the newspaper industry in such miserable shape, editors and publishers of Jewish papers don't have time to worry about defining the borders of the Jewish community--they're more interested in reaching the widest possible audience, which most certainly includes intermarried couples and their children.

I had an interesting conversation with the Orthodox publisher of a Jewish paper. He said when he started the paper that he had no interest in giving press to intermarriage. But after reading a letter to the editor in The (New York) Jewish Week where an Orthodox writer argued that the Jewish community needs to be welcoming to the intermarried, he changed his tune. He says he's still not sure exactly how he wants to cover intermarriage, but he knows he wants to give it more press than he has in the past.

We also unveiled a new syndication option to Jewish papers, where we will distribute a new article every two weeks to subscribing Jewish papers. We hope that means more exposure for our articles in the printed Jewish press.

Unlike their counterparts in many other Jewish institutions, Jewish journalists, for the most part, are quite open to welcoming interfaith couples and families into the Jewish community with open arms.