Born in America

The Jewish Writing Project

by Bruce Black (Sarasota, FL)

As a boy I learned Hebrew while sitting in
a cramped, stifling second-floor classroom
on Wednesday afternoons and on Sunday
mornings, chalk dust in the air and cigarette
smoke mixed with sweat and the stale smell
of ink and old paper, reading Bible stories
from ancient books with dusty yellow pages
and the smell of an exotic, sun-drenched land
rising from between the lines.

The land was called Israel—Eretz Yisrael
in Hebrew—and I was told to call it home,
even though home for me was a split-level
house in northern New Jersey within sight
of the tall spires of Manhattan where my
father worked, and all I knew about Israel
was that it was hot and dusty, a dry land
covered in sand, a place where refugees with
numbers tattooed on their arms came from
Europe’s death camps to build new lives.

I remember how…

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We Count. We Just Weren’t Counted.

Susan Katz Miller is the author of The Interfaith Family Journal and Being Both: Embracing Two Religions in One Interfaith Family. Her original surveys of multiple religious practitioners in US interfaith families are often cited in the academic literature. A former correspondent for Newsweek and New Scientist, she has spoken on interfaith families at The Parliament of the World’s Religions, the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly, The Wild Goose Festival, and many other venues. Find her at susankatzmiller.com or on twitter @susankatzmiller.

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In Judaism and Jeshuaism there have always been two opposite views on interfaith relationships. All groups know having a partnership with someone of another religious system or with a non-religious person makes life more difficult.
Those who are not so against intermarriage and would allow such contacts with people of other religious groups, do believe it can enrich both partners and families.

The way people feel about Israel have so much to do with interfaith. Also groups that are keen to be not mixed can take an adverse opinion of Zionists. Look for example to some Haredim.

That the non-Orthodox Jewish world in America now have extended interfaith families, and that they are taking the demographic lead, does not mean that would be to according to the mitzvot. What the opinion might be we always should remember that it is the Elohim Who touches and knows the heart and Who shall be the most righteous Judge.

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Preceding

Intermarriage and Protecting the state of the Jewish and/or Jeshuaist family

Welcoming Interfaith Families, Maintaining Tradition – Eqev 5781

Being Both

More on Pew’s Jewish Americans in 2020

For generations, interfaith families who felt excluded, misunderstood, or disrespected by Jewish clergy or institutions, have found other homes. Some gravitated to Unitarian-Universalism, which draws on many religions. Some added Buddhism, or Sufism, or Paganism, to their spiritual practice. And for more than a quarter of a century now, interfaith families have been building their own dual-practice communities in which to honor both Judaism and Christianity.

But very few of these people with complex religious practices (and I have studied hundreds of them) stopped practicing Judaism altogether, or stopped calling themselves Jews.

The irony is that Jews who did stop practicing Judaism altogether are considered Jewish in the new Pew study of Jewish Americans in 2020, as long as they don’t claim a second religion. But if you claim two religions, you forfeit your right to have Pew consider you part of the…

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Welcoming Interfaith Families, Maintaining Tradition – Eqev 5781

Throughout the ages, interfaith has always been a matter of discussion and for sure did not make matters of life easier.

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Preceding

Intermarriage and Protecting the state of the Jewish and/or Jeshuaist family

The Modern Rabbi

I recently completed my fourteenth year as a rabbi, since I was ordained at the Conservative movement’s Jewish Theological Seminary in New York in 2007. As many of you know, I have been affiliated with the Conservative movement for my entire life.

The Jewish Theological Seminary of America

But you may not know that in 1994, when I was finishing my Master’s degree in chemical engineering at Texas A&M University, I applied to the rabbinical school at the Reform movement’s Hebrew Union College, at the urging of the Reform rabbi at the Texas A&M Hillel. When HUC rejected me, Rabbi Tarlow was incensed, and he called the chair of the admissions committee to find out why. He was told that the committee felt that I had difficulty seeing multiple sides to an issue.

Now, it may be that what they saw about me during the interview was engineering clarity: trying…

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Intermarriage and Protecting the state of the Jewish and/or Jeshuaist family

Since childhood, we are taught ideal philosophies like we all are equal, one God, gender equality, secularism, brotherhood, etc. Moral books are full of such teachings. But when we grow up and get to know someone else whom we would like to take as a partner to go together through life it all becomes different, suddenly religion, culture, skin colour, genetic makeup, or country of origin matter a lot. In this article, we look at the result of an American survey and the way different Jewish branches handle the way of life and marriage of their people.

Jewish millennials between 2013 and 2017

Looking at the results of two surveys (one from 2013 and one from 2017) which mainly looked at one group of "Messianic Jews" instead of looking at all sorts of millennial Jews.