When my husband read an early draft of this essay, he asked, "Why doesn't her partner have to support our daughter? After all, they agreed to raise children as Jews." What does it mean to raise a Jewish child?
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If the Book of Ruth, text customarily studied on Shavuot, were written with today's interfaith couples in mind...
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What are the ethical and spiritual messages in Judaism? What are we supposed to learn? And who is Derek Eretz anyway?
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NEXT: A Division of Birthright Israel Foundation connects Birthright Israel trip alumni and their peers with meaningful Jewish living and learning opportunities nationally, locally and in Israel.
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What were you taught about your LGBTQ heritage? Kick off Boston Pride Week with a retelling of the story of LGBTQ liberation using the Passover Seder model. June 1st, Boston, MA.
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Supporting rabbis and cantors looking to engage interfaith couples and families in their communities and help them make a stronger connection with Judaism.
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A great way for Jewish professionals and volunteers who work with and provide programming for people in interfaith relationships to locate resources and trainings to build more welcome into their Jewish communities; connect with and learn from each other; and publicize and enhance their programs and services.
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Tag Archives: Jewish web resourcesThe Second Passover Hodgepodge
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Ok, so maybe the last Passover Hodgepodge didn’t contain everything-and-the-kitchen-sink Passover, but it had a lot to offer. Still, there was more I could have shared. On the Reform Judaism blog, Ben Dreyfus approaches a seemingly simple question: how many days is Passover, 7 or 8? “When does Pesach end? Why do some calendars say it ends April 25 and others say April 26? The answer in most Reform Jewish communities is April 25, but the history is complicated….” G-dcast presents a new spin on the Passover story of the Four Sons: Atlanta Interfaith are hosting an Interfaith Pesach Seder, which is great. But what makes it even better? It’s for a suggested donation of $10! Serious Eats, one of my favourite foodie blogs, has a delicious-looking recipe for “ I’ve tweeted (and posted to Facebook) a Peep S’mores interfaith video before (see below). Now there’s an instructional article on JewishBoston.com too! If you’re looking for yet another free, downloadable Haggadah, you might want to check out Including Women’s Voices: The Jewish Women’s Archive edition of JewishBoston.com’s The Wandering Is Over Haggadah. For a current reinterpretation of the seder plate, Tablet has a News Junkie’s Seder Plate, complete with Qaddafi charoset and bitter Boehner herb. And stay tuned. There’ll be one more Passover hodgepodge before the seders start! The Passover HodgepodgeIt’s been a while since I’ve rounded up some favorite links, but what better excuse than Passover? There’s something for everybody! Let’s start with Passover and Easter in a Box. For your convenience, you can now get Passover standards (matzah, a seder plate and grape juice) packaged with Easter treats (candy, chocolate bunnies and Easter cookies). Sweets aren’t your thing? Is that skewed a little young for your tastes? There’s always the Sipping Seder, a seder in cocktail form! If this isn’t a great way to introduce Passover to your friends and family (of legal age), I don’t know what is. Looking for the 2011 version of the Passover story? Check out this video: This year we found a great crop of Haggadahs for all tastes and styles: Following her recent post on religion, exploration and making Passover kid-friendly, Galit Breen has blogged about more ways to make Passover fun for kids. My buddies at JewishBoston.com are to blame (or be thanked) for this punk seder cover song: You might enjoy the interfaith Passover video ecard, featuring Rabbi David Wolpe and an interesting version of “Eliyahu Ha’Navi” in the background. That’s it for now…. Enjoy! Slacker HamantashenOur friends at JewishBoston.com have been hard at work. Well, as “hard at work” as “slackers” can be. You see, they’ve come up with the simplest hamantaschen recipe ever. It’s so simple, all you need are two ingredients. Seriously. It’s great for making hamantaschen at your office (as they did) or in a dorm room. And if my count is correct, you only need five other items in addition to your two ingredients: a paper cup (“cookie cutter”), a paper plate (serving double duty as a “spatula” and a “plate”), a can opener (optional, depending on your hamantaschen filling), a spoon (optional, depending on the filling type) and a toaster oven. Done. Watch their video for the recipe and instructions. (You might recognize Liz from our Hanukkah video!) If you’re feeling a bit more adventurous, you might also check out our other hamantaschen recipes, submitted by InterfaithFamily.com readers like you. Enjoy! Tu BishvatI feel like there are some basics that could be explained for many of us. For starters, why are there so many different spellings of the holiday name? I’ve seen Tu B’shvat, T’u B’shvat, Tu Beshvat, Tu Beshevat, and more. On this website, we use Tu Bishvat. Why? Check out Mah Rabu, a great blog, for the explanation. One of the ways people celebrate Tu Bishvat is by having seders. The Jew and the Carrot explained, Over the last decade, seders for Tu Bishvat have spiked in popularity. This growth is largely due to the contemporary Jewish community’s interest in “greening” ritual and holidays. Every year, the number of organizations turning to Tu Bishvat to inject some sustainability-awareness into their annual programming grows, as does the collection of environmentally-inspired haggadot for Tu Bishvat available online. (Like this one from My Jewish Learning, this one from Hillel, and this one from Hazon.) You can also check out this quick video I made, explaining a basic Tu Bishvat seder structure: The Jew and the Carrot continues, listing example menus for different Tu Bishvat seder types: the hippie, the sophisticate, the newbie, the multi-culturalist and the chocolate lover. Check them out. You can also check out a few other organizations for their accessible and easy to follow (or adapt) seders: Hillel, My Jewish Learning, Hazon, nfty.org/_kd/Items/actions.cfm?action=Show&item_id=5275&destination=ShowItem:uhj5fnxk">NIFTY (pdf), JOFA or NeoHasid. Another option, which I’ll be doing this year, is straight from television: “I’d like to make an impression on those guys. Man, I love the Office Halloween Party. It is so much sluttier than the Office Christmas party. Though, not as freaky as the Office President’s Day Rave. Or the Office Tu Bishvat Pajama Jammy Jam.” – Barney Stinson, How I Met Your Mother If, like me, you’re a fan of the show How I Met Your Mother, you might have caught this reference back in October, 2010. My housemate and I were watching when we heard Barney (played by Neil Patrick Harris) mention a Tu Bishvat Pajama Jammy Jam. None of the characters on the show are Jewish, and yet they all just nodded, as if this was a totally normal holiday (and normal way to celebrate it). We knew we had to host our own. So this year, in addition to a seder, we’ll be inviting our friends to show up in their pajamas, we’ll be watching fruit-themed movies (like The Apple and James and the Giant Peach). See? Tu Bishvat really can be celebrated in many ways… So gather some friends and family and give Tu Bishvat a try this year! Take a BreakIt’s that busy time of the year (is there ever not a busy time of the year?). Hanukkah’s over but we’re still celebrating the December holidays with friends and family, colleagues and communities. You need a break, we need a break, time for a hodgepodge of links. Happy reading! Take a break…
And now back to the holidays…
Until the next hodge podge… Slingshot, Hero, Online Group, Quite a Week at InterfaithFamily.comIt has been quite a week here at InterfaithFamily.com. As we reported yesterday, scooped by Julie Wiener in a very nice post, InterfaithFamily.com has once again been included in the Slingshot guide to the fifty most innovative Jewish organizations. We are one of only nine organizations that have been in Slingshot in each of the past six years (see list below). Even better than being included in the guide, InterfaithFamily.com was one of nine organizations (see list below) to receive $40,000 grants from the Slingshot Fund, which pools contributions from young funders and then makes grants to organizations included in the guide. InterfaithFamily.com has received a Slingshot Fund grant in three out of the four years that grants have been made. This generous funding is very helpful to our ongoing efforts to expand the reach of our helpful information and welcoming message – and it makes a statement that the cause of engaging interfaith families in Jewish life is important to the next generation of Jewish funders. We are very grateful to Melissa Brown Eisenberg for her words in announcing the grant to IFF. It means a great deal to all of the staff at IFF to hear this kind of praise for our efforts and to be described as “crucial to the future strength and vitality of the Jewish community:” Since 2001 InterfaithFamily.com has been the destination for individuals, couples, families and their children seeking information on how to make Jewish choices in their everyday lives. The website itself is a resource for information-seekers on how to live Jewishly, be married Jewishly, celebrate Jewish holidays and raise Jewish children. The site also connects interfaith families to each other for support, to local organizations that are inclusionary, and advocates for inclusive attitudes, policies and practices in the wider Jewish community. Melissa’s last comment was a reference to the second big news of the week – I made it into the top twenty vote getters in the Jewish Federations of North America’s Jewish Community Heroes contest. In fact I ended up at number 18, what I hope will turn out to be an auspicious number. Now a panel of judges picks one winner and four honorees, each of whom gets a grant for his or her non-profit. We made a concerted effort to get out the vote, and I’m very grateful to the people who responded to the many email and Facebook voting reminders and the big orange pop-up on our home page. I hope it wasn’t too annoying – thank you to all for putting up with it. I didn’t seek the nomination and I’m not interested in personal glory – but it surely would be great if the federation world, at its important annual meeting, got a message from first the voters and then the judges that the cause of engaging interfaith families in Jewish life deserves recognition and priority. That’s what I hope the result of the contest is. We were invited to submit a one-minute video explaining what an award would mean, and if the JFNA makes that publicly available, we’ll provide a link to it. The last and perhaps most important development of the week isn’t a grant or an award – it’s the debut on Wednesday night of Love and Religion – Online, our first online group for couples to discuss how they can have religion in their lives. Four pioneering couples have signed up for an online version of a workshop Dr. Marion Usher has offered for 16 years at the Washington DC JCC. We had some technical difficulties to work out, but it was a great session. It was reassuring and reaffirming to me to see bright, articulate, serious, dating or newly-married young couples thinking about important questions in their lives: whether they will be able to find a Jewish religious community where they will feel comfortable and welcomed, how they will incorporate celebrations of holidays, how the partner who is not Jewish will feel about raising Jewish children, how the Jewish partner will feel at his or her partner’s holiday times and religious services. I have been involved in interfaith family issues for over forty years now, first personally, then as a lay leader in the Reform movement, then professionally for the past thirteen years. I call the issues that the couples in our online group raised this week “eternal” in the sense that every pair of interfaith partners who are interested in having religion in their lives need to address and resolve these questions. They’re not “eternal” in the sense that they never get resolved, but the issues that came up forty years ago are still coming up today. Every community should offer discussion groups for couples to address these issues, and we are really pleased to make the option available on an online basis. I feel very honored this week because of the Slingshot listing and grant and making it into the Jewish Community Heroes semi-finals, but what was most gratifying about this week was offering another resource that will help interfaith couples learn about and connect with Jewish life and community. That is what I really love about this work. * * * Organizations that received Slingshot fund grants this year in addition to IFF: JDub, Jewish Funds for Justice, Reboot, Encounter, Gateways: Access to Jewish Education, Institute for Curriculum Services, Moishe House, Project Chessed, and Six Points Fellowship for Emerging Jewish Artists. The Text in ThemThe artist behind www.talmud.comics.net, Yonah Lavery, got in touch with her fans in North America last night. She has been in Jerusalem studying Talmud (what else?) all year, and just got married! Now she’s Yonah Lavery-Israeli. I was so happy for her. I was even more happy for myself because she sent along a blog post and a comic about things that are really important to our readers. Like all of her comics, it’s an illustration of a passage of Talmud, presented in an accessible style–in this case the story of the sons of Rabbi Chiyya in Tractate (that’s one of the 60 or so chapters of Talmud, also called a massechet in Hebrew) Berachot (Blessings) 3:18. Here’s the part of the comic I wanted to write about (click on it to see the whole thing at her site): I was working on this comic in a little park in Netanya, and a religious Teimani (Yemenite) girl of about 8 or 9 came up and asked to look through. She asked what they were, and I told her comics of Masechet Berachot, and she was thrilled. It was really gratifying! “This comes from Talmud??” she asked a few times. I was suddenly very glad that I drew some (not enough) sages as people of colour and focussed on or drew in more (not enough) women. It’s so important that religious Jews be able to see themselves in the text and the text in them. The other piece that makes this comic appropriate is that it’s about the pain of lost knowledge. It’s kind of amazing that this has been a cultural trope since the time of the Talmud. And here’s where we get to make the interfaith family link–it immediately made me think of Jane Larkin’s recent piece for us, Outreach Matters. In her discussion of why in-married families like to participate in interfaith family programs in her synagogue, she considered: It’s a non-threatening environment. Our groups provide a safe learning environment. An inmarried mom said she felt embarrassed that she had questions about mitzvahs. In a setting where many of the other the participants weren’t raised Jewish and so didn’t expect themselves to know about Jewish concepts, it was safe for this mom to say, “I don’t know.” We think of ourselves as the first generation to grapple with these issues, but in the learning-based culture of rabbinic Judaism, there’s been always been this sense of having lost knowledge. We learn again and again what it says in the Talmud (also in the same tractate or masechet, Berachot): “Teach your tongue to say, ‘I don’t know.’” (I will never forget this one because of the famous Ben Shahn poster–I try to keep those words in mind always.) There’s no way we could ever know as much as we think we should–so we might as well start where we are. Back to PolandThe Forward ran a feature story by Mladen Petrov , “Poles Create Images That Say ‘I Miss You, Jew’”. It’s about an art project conducted by a Warsaw ad executive, Rafal Betlejewski. On the front page of the paper is a person sitting in a chair in Lodz, where my best friend’s grandmother grew up–next to an empty chair to symbolize all the Jews who aren’t there. You can see the website of the project, where many Poles have collected their memories of Jews, at tesknie.com. Betlejewski was moved by reading Jan Gross’ book Neighbors, about a pogrom during the Second World War in the small Polish town of Jedwabne. I’d read about this project before, because I knew about Gross and Jedwabne from working with Joanna Michlic, a historian of Polish Jewry. Dr. Michlic is a specialist on the history of the relationships of Poland’s Jews with the broader community of non-Jewish Poles. She’s also a child of an interfaith family. She and I are about the same age. I was reading about the Solidarity movement in the Cleveland Plain Dealer while she was active in the Solidarity movement–and it was in that context she first understood herself to be Jewish. She was raised with no Jewish identity. Her family didn’t think it was safe. Her experience of growing up in an interfaith family is nothing like the experiences of the people who use our site. In the Forward article, Petrov writes: The idea is not strongly supported everywhere. During a recent photo shoot in Grodzisk Mazowiecki, a town near Warsaw where Jews constituted 87% of the population at the beginning of the 19th century, only 15 people showed up. At the Gdański train station, a large number of those who came were in attendance mainly because of their own Jewish roots. Some critics see in the project both a hidden Jewish agenda and a simple gimmick for self-promotion by Betlejewski, who has conducted two unrelated social campaigns in his work as an ad agency executive. Betlejewski’s partner in the project, Judyta Nekanda-Trepka, tells the reporter, “With the campaign, we wanted to remind people of the actual meaning of the word. ‘Jew’ is not an offensive word!” Joanna Michlic has made the point that Polish nationalism could have two characters: an ethnic exclusivist character or an inclusivist civic character. In the present day, Poles are choosing inclusivist civic nationalism, and over 3,000 people have posted to tesknie.com to tell the stories they felt they couldn’t tell about their Jewish neighbors.There’s more than one lesson to pull out of this story for American Jews, for people in interfaith families, for people in the United States grappling with how to deal with ethnic difference and immigration. We have the same choices in front of us–to be hidden or to be open, to include or to exclude. Shakshuka and Anne FrankIt’s lovely to see sunny Tori Avey, who wrote a great piece on how to run a Passover seder for us, telling the story of her Journey From Shiksa to Shakshuka in the Los Angeles Jewish Journal. She is one of my favorite finds of the last few months–like a younger, American apprentice to Claudia Roden. (I know, if Tori reads that she’ll faint–Claudia Roden is every foodie’s hero. She’s certainly mine.) But she does the same thing–the recipe collecting and preserving–that Roden does so well. Because it’s partly about collecting and transcribing, but it’s also about testing and having the taste buds to choose the best variation. I also really like to eat shakshuka. I haven’t made it in a long time–a bed of sauteed onions, tomatoes and sometimes peppers with fried eggs on top. My friend Rebecca Lesses, a professor of Judaic Studies at Ithaca College, mentioned on her blog Mystical Politics a new feature on the Anne Frank House website. You can now see a lot of the exhibits in the museum without traveling to Amsterdam. History of Jewish IntermarriageI read the blog On the Main Line, even though I can never figure out how to justify it. It’s not like this Jewish history blogger who posts such diverse reproductions of primary sources is ever going to cover interfaith marriage, right? Most of my Jewish blogs eventually have posts I can use on this one. Well, today On the Main Line posted an item from the 1909 Reform Advocate and called it Jewish-Chinese Intermarriage in 1909. SCORE! The whole blog is a repository for nifty stuff. The blogger, who uses an alias, has an admirably omnivorous mind and must know some crazy number of languages. If you don’t know much Jewish history and can’t place any of the primary sources in context, it might be overwhelming. But if you took a course like Me’ah, an adult ed program in Jewish history that started here in Boston and has been replicated in other cities, you might be ready to dive into some of these posts. Anyway, check out the blog, because it’s cool even if not to all of our readers’ tastes. A piece like Where did Chad Gadya Come From Anyway?, discussing a famous song from the Passover seder, might be just your speed. If you’ve seen anything Jewish on the web that you think we should be linking for interfaith families because it’s cool, let me know. |
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