Old Backgrounder

InterfaithFamily.com is an independent non-profit publisher and advocacy membership association that works to encourage Jewish choices by interfaith families and increase acceptance of interfaith families by the Jewish community. InterfaithFamily.com is the only national organization that focuses exclusively on reaching, working with and encouraging interfaith families themselves, and advocating on a grass-roots level as their "voice" -- a voice that must continue to be heard.

With up to 27,000 unique monthly users visiting more than 68,000 times a month, InterfaithFamily.com is the leading online magazine, community and resource for interfaith families. It provides welcoming and helpful information for interfaith families exploring Jewish life and connects them to local Jewish communities. Its InterfaithFamily.com Network membership association advocates making the Jewish community genuinely welcoming and inclusive of interfaith families.

Mission
Although a high percentage of Jewish families include intermarried members, until InterfaithFamily.com there was a notable gap in the contemporary Jewish community. Through our website and our advocacy membership association, we provide useful educational information, connect interfaith families to local Jewish communities, build community for interfaith families, and advocate for inclusive attitudes, policies and practices.

InterfaithFamily.com offers a Jewish perspective, respecting the faith of individuals from all religious backgrounds as well as appreciating differences in nationality, race and culture. While InterfaithFamily.com provides information that presents various viewpoints on the wide range of issues and decisions faced by interfaith families, it encourages Jewish choices.

As interfaith families journey through life together, many partners gradually adopt a religious culture and life they would not have anticipated when they first married. Whether they convert or not, InterfaithFamily.com believes these partners should be honored for their commitment to raising Jewish children, not made to feel inferior because, for whatever personal reasons, they did not convert. Their support of their children's religion strengthens rather than diminishes the Jewish community.

Supportive Educational Information
InterfaithFamily.com publishes a biweekly online magazine designed to provide interfaith families with support in the practical suggestions and personal stories from individuals whose experiences resonate with their own. It has published more than 150 issues to date, on every theme of interest to people in interfaith relationships, including holidays, life-cycle celebrations, relationship issues, and spirituality, as well as reviews, interviews and profiles, and news stories.

Recent themes have included interdating; divorce and step-families; weddings; "religious journeys"; birth ceremonies; mourning; the December holidays; and Passover and Easter. The magazine has also run multi-part series on conversion (with a diverse set of perspectives, including writers who had converted, some who hadn't, and relatives of converts) and on multicultural and multiracial interfaith families (including special issues on Jewish-Muslim relationships).

InterfaithFamily.com's searchable archive contains more than 1000 articles -- the broadest base of writing on subjects of interest to people in interfaith relationships. Readers contribute to and change the more than 50 online discussions every day.

The magazine led to the publication of The Guide to Jewish Interfaith Family Life: An InterfaithFamily.com Handbook (Jewish Lights Publishing, 2001), the first-of-its-kind resource and anthology for Jewish and non-Jewish members of interfaith families -- grandparents, parents, children, dating and committed couples, Jews-by-Choice, and extended family members -- and the rabbis, cantors, family educators and outreach professionals who work with them. The book offers first-hand experience and essential support for families in any constellation who are exploring Jewish life while respecting the heritage and traditions of those they love.

In 2004 Jewish Lights published, as part of its LifeLights series, our pamphlet, Interfaith Families Making Jewish Choices.

Connecting Interfaith Families to Local Jewish Communities
The "Connections In Your Area" section of InterfaithFamily.com connects interfaith families to local Jewish communities throughout North America. "Connections In Your Area," developed in partnership with PlanitJewish.com, offers a powerful interactive, searchable organization listing and program calendar that allows readers to search for welcoming organizations and particular types of events in their local communities; they can register to receive weekly reminders of programs of the type they are interested in, invite friends to events, provide feedback, view photos of events, and more.

Building Community
InterfaithFamily.com makes users feel that they are not alone by providing advice and resources. It builds an online community through its active discussion boards, which are moderated to ensure that they are welcoming to readers, and offers list serve discussion groups, which serve as places where readers can "talk" with and learn from how others have dealt with situations. The InterfaithFamily.com Network enables members to meet one another either online or in person in their local communities.

Advocating for Inclusive Attitudes, Practices and Policies
The InterfaithFamily Network is the leading grass-roots advocate for a Jewish community that is welcoming and inclusive of interfaith families. The association actively engages in advocacy initiatives, from writing letters to the editor and op-ed essays, to securing quotes and mentions in articles, developing partnerships with others, traveling around the country to give speeches and participate in panels. The Network conducted a "Save Reform Outreach" campaign, an effort to persuade the leadership of the Reform Movement to reverse a decision to eliminate the Movement's outreach director positions in regions around the country due to budget shortfalls. The initiative played a key role in helping to preserve three of the positions, and fund-raising continues to save positions in other regions.

One of the most effective initiatives was the "We're Interfaith Families... Connecting with Jewish Life" Essay Contest, a campaign to raise public awareness made possible by generous support from the Walter & Elise Haas Fund. In addition to bringing in more than 135 entries, the contest attracted wide publicity, including a very favorable story in the New York Jewish Week, reprinted in other publications, that captured exactly what InterfaithFamily.com hoped to accomplish: "Éthe contest seeks to counter the widespread assumption that intermarriage signals 'the loss of Jewish identity and involvement' and instead to give people in interfaith families the opportunity to tell 'the personal stories of their involvement in Jewish life.' This will produce many stories of positive involvement in Jewish life by interfaith families.... Hopefully it will attract people who are thinking of getting involved but are unsure and hopefully it will also persuade Jewish leaders that they ought to be doing whatever they can to get more involvement in Jewish life by interfaith families."

Membership
The InterfaithFamily.com Network has two levels of membership:
* "Associate Members" who give us their name and mail address and ask to be included among the people that the Network represents; and
* "Supporting Members" who contribute annual dues of $36 or more. Supporting members receive a thank-you gift for their support.

To learn more about the Network, including how you can join, visit Join the Network.

Founders & Funders
The online magazine InterfaithFamily.com was launched as a project of Jewish Family & Life!, an entrepreneurial non-profit organization that is the world's leading publisher of original Jewish content online, in November 1998. Edmund Case became the publisher of the online magazine in April 1999, and in late 2001 founded InterfaithFamily.com, Inc. which acquired the online magazine. As someone who was intermarried for 30 years (when his wife converted to Judaism), Ed knows first-hand that couples from different religious traditions can feel isolated and can benefit from welcoming attitudes and resources to help them -- and their parents, children and extended families -- deal with the life issues that interfaith families face. As they journey together, interfaith couples navigate many challenges, starting with relationship issues, the wedding, choosing a religious identity for children, sharing that choice with parents, deciding on birth ceremonies for their children, raising children whose religious identity is different from that of one or his or her parents, extended family relations, handling holiday celebrations, and more.

InterfaithFamily.com has been funded by people with the foresight and understanding that the Jewish community needs to embrace, not isolate, interfaith families. Benefactors include: the Walter & Elise Haas Fund, which enabled the creation of the InterfailthFamily.com website and the creation of the membership association, the InterfaithFamily.com Network; the Richard & Rhoda Goldman Fund, which allowed the organization to greatly expand its offerings and funded creation of the "Interfaith Family Connections in Your Area" section; Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Boston; the Jacob and Hilda Blaustein Foundation; the Koret Foundation; the Rita and Harold Divine Foundation; and members of the InterfaithFamily.com Board of Directors and other individual supporters.