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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Check out all the news posts by the G-dcast team! But don't forget to stop by the Network blog (written by InterfaithFamily staff) and the Parenting Blog too!
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Tag Archives: Shabbat and Other HolidaysHouse Fire and Warm Memories
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This has been a crazy week for me. My parents’ house had a huge fire. Do not worry, they made it out in plenty of time and no one was hurt. My dad just called while he was standing in what used to be our family home wanting to know what he could take for me. Everything was under mud and insulation; the house is no longer structurally sound. The first thing I thought of was Zayde’s siddur–my great-grandfather’s prayerbook. Clothing can be replaced and homes can be rebuilt, but what I can’t recreate is the worn pages of this book or the times that prayerbook saw him through. I think everyone has objects they relate to family tradition. I hope as we move into the Thanksgiving, Hannukah, Christmas, Kwanza, Winter Solstice, Chinese New Year holiday season, everyone can create memorable traditions for our diverse families which transcend our differences and celebrate our spirit. We at InterfaithFamily.com are proud of our role in helping people create new holiday traditions. As we look forward to Thanksgiving dinner, which is always a great experience in my family, I am full of gratitude. Even though my parents’ house is gone, I have memories of family events and late night chats in the kitchen. This year I am thankful for those memories, and so much more for the new ones my family will create. Ron Klain, Rahm Emanuel and the Christmas MadnessA story in IsraelNationalNews.com commenting on the appointment of Rahm Emanuel as President-Elect Obama’s chief of staff, and of Ron Klain as Vice President-Elect Biden’s chief of staff, leads with:
The author, Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu, could have said: “Both appointees are Jewish. Emanuel is a traditionally observant Jew. Klain intermarried more than 20 years ago and his family observes Christmas, but he and his wife raised their children as Jews.” The author knows this, because buried at the end of the article, he cites a New York Times article which states: “He is married to a non-Jew with an agreement that they celebrate Christmas but raise their children as Jews.” For all we know, Klain and his family belong to a synagogue and send their children to Hebrew school. Their children may already have become, or plan to become, bar or There are thousands and thousands of intermarried parents like that — who participate in Christmas celebrations and who are raising their children as Jews. Many of them belong to synagogues, send their children to Hebrew school, and have bar and bat mitzvahs, at rates comparable to Reform in-married parents, as Boston’s most recent demographic study reports. At InterfaithFamily.com we are completing our fifth annual December holidays survey. Thousands of respondents over the years have told us that their Christmas celebration has no religious meaning for them, that it is a way of respecting the tradition of the non-Jewish parent without compromising the Jewish identity of their children. Jewish people celebrate Christmas with Christian friends and relatives as a gesture of connection, not denial of Jewish identity. The Jewish community ought to be just as proud of the appointment of Klain as it is of Emanuel, and not create artificial distance between Klain and the community because of his marriage. Dreidel? Dreydel? Dreyidel?
It turns out my nephew’s pre-school asked parents to tell them how their kids spend the holidays. In our family, my husband is Roman Catholic and we are raising my two sons Jewish, we throw a family Hanukkah party each year. It started about four years ago when I invited my sister, her husband and my husband’s family (two brothers, his parents, grandmother, kids and spouses) over for Hanukkah. His family was so excited to learn the songs, light the candles, hear the story of Hanukkah, eat homemade latkes (the first and last time I actually made them from scratch) and jelly doughnuts and learn how to spin the dreidel. Since then my sister has moved away, but we still have the annual Hanukkah party at our house with my husband’s family. This was why my sister-in-law needed to know how to spell dreidel, so she can tell my nephew’s preschool how he celebrated Hanukkah. Now, let’s hope she doesn’t need to know how to spell sufganiot. InterfaithCandy.com and Werewolf Bar MitzvahOn the main site, we are running two opinion pieces, one in favor and one opposed to doing Halloween as a Jew. I admit it. I’ve never been that interested in Halloween. I went through a phase of feeling guilty that Halloween was a watered-down version of this major Celtic pagan holiday Samhain. Then several pagan and Wiccan friends of mine told me that I shouldn’t feel guilty. Well, all right. I can go feel guilty about something else, and go trick-or-treating with my kid if he wants. He wants.
In the meantime, some wonderful person left a bowl of these amazing chocolate covered stuffed dates in the kitchen of the offices we share with many other Jewish organizations. So I had the insight that, because the dates are from Saudi Arabia, we could be interfaithCANDY.com. Ha ha, thank you, thank you, I’m here all week folks. I’ll just embed my Jewish-themed Halloween video now, shall I? It’s below the cut. Continue reading GrandmothersI miss my grandmother lately, and apparently I’m not the only one. Perhaps it is the season of the year, one in which Jews commemorate dead relatives and friends at memorial (Yizkor) services on Yom Kippur and on Shemini Atzeret at the end of Sukkot. Perhaps it is because of the economic downturn–we wish we could have a voice of wisdom.
Clara might be competition for my favorite youtube grandma on Feed Me Bubbe. The 89-year-old Bubbe is nothing like my grandmother. For one thing, my grandmother did not grow up speaking Yiddish, and I called her Grandma. My son really loves this bubbe though. I like the way she sells the food to you while she cooks it. My colleague circulated a link to the blog Margaret and Helen. I don’t know. This doesn’t sound a lot like any of the grandmothers I know. She’s very political and her language is kind of salty. Whether Helen Philpot is for real or not, she fills a need. We want to hear from grandmothers. I always thought that being into our grandparents was a Jewish cultural value. After all, we have the expression, “and you will see your children’s children and peace will be on Israel.” If so, then probably everyone is Jewish. Elephants are Jewish, because they have grandmothers, and dolphins are Jewish, and a whole lot more people are Jewish than we thought. Well, if loving your grandma makes you Jewish, I mean. You might as well say that it’s uniquely Jewish to like chocolate, or hugging. Or blintzes. Bubbe will show you how to make them from scratch below the cut. Continue reading Post Yom KippurI don’t know why, but this Yom Kippur was really good for me, like the exhilarating ones I use to have when I was in my 20s. Maybe working here at IFF has made a dent in my spiritual ennui? I was swept up in the traditional prayers, and yet it all–fasting, praying, thinking about sin–felt a lot easier to do than usual. I looked with fresh eyes at the fact that we confess our sins in alphabetical order, thinking both about all the families at IFF who were doing it for I have a few post-Yom Kippur links to share–two serious and one very silly–and then it’s on to the next big serious Jewish holiday of the fall season, Sukkot! I received a book in the mail this morning, I Live Here. The book is actually a four volume graphic novel documenting with art and words the experiences of individuals living through major world crises. Actress Mia Kirschner, a child and grandchild of Holocaust survivors, led the large team that put together the project. The website is full-bore multimedia with a lot of video, and you can see pages from the book there if your computer system is up to it. I also wanted to link people to another online resource, Centropa.org. This is a site that makes available interviews with Holocaust survivors from Central Europe. It’s got a tool for high school students to share their history projects with each other, and lots of ways to search. Our regular columnist Nate Bloom made sure we saw this video, all about the practice in the Jewish community of selling tickets for High Holiday services. My Havurah doesn’t sell tickets, but I still found this funny. Thanks, Nate! Video is below the cut. Continue reading Upcoming and GoodI hope all our readers had a good and meaningful Rosh Hashanah. I have some good and meaningful links for you. Lilith magazine sent us a preview of some articles that they are going to run in their next print issue called Switchbacks on the Road to Judaism. The three writers of the articles in the .pdf file are sensitive in their treatment of gender issues and interfaith families. Another good and serious thing (appropriate for the Days of Awe between Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, is Jewish Social Action Month. This year it will begin on October 30, in order to overlap with the month of Heshvan on the Hebrew calendar. It’s a great chance to take advantage of the end of the Jewish holiday season and reinfuse your Judaism with social meaning. Facebook and challah!I have to adm Shul Shopping for the Holidays
For our second year, the prices go up for membership and High Holiday tickets, plus the obligation to pay our part of the building fund kicks in, and this will become one more added expense. Joining a shul is a priority for my family. We have held a membership since our engagement. So we will join for the next year, but for the first time, we are considering whether our long term goals involve active synagogue participation…. I know there a lot of other families who want to join in the Jewish community, but memberships and tuitions add up quickly. If you look, there are certainly scholarships, but there are also organizations that are inviting and attach few or no strings. Many of them are listed in our Connections In Your Area System. Another, near universal source of free Orthodox High Holiday services is the Hasidic Jewish organization Chabad. You can also use Google with the terms “High Holiday services” and your location. If you find a welcoming place, please let me know and I will work to get them listed on InterfaithFamily.com’s website. Days of AwesomeThere are many advantages to working here at InterfaithFamily.com. One is that Jewish holidays do not sneak up on you. We’re starting with the High Holiday content this week! Can you believe it? It’s the beginning of Elul, the Jewish calendar month before Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. I wrote a Guide to the High Holidays for Interfaith Families. There will be no excuse this year when I fail to buy myself new clothing or a white shirt for the holiday, no excuse for scrambling around like a maniac to arrange the holiday meals. Also, my husband (who reads this blog, right?) will remember to start practicing blowing the shofar starting on Sunday, the first day of Elul. Maybe. We’re going out of town and it might be a risk to take it on the airplane. I don’t know how airport security feels about people taking ram’s horns on planes.  (Doesn’t this photo just rock? I got it from flickr.com–it was from a whole neat Rosh Hashanah sequence by an Israeli photographer.) More goodies below the cut! I have a new coworker here who took a look at my Guide and wished I could include a sound file of Barbra Streisand singing Avinu Malkenu. Well, it is here on Youtube–I can’t embed it, but I don’t mind–it’s schmaltzier than what I usually like. That’s OK, we’re all about the pluralism here! If you like it, click the linked text (and tell me all about it, I want to know!) I was kind of excited to find a video of a jam by the band Phish from 1999 that ends with a long riff on Avinu Malkeinu–but I’m not embedding that either, because it’s over 7 minutes and Avinu Malkeinu comes after another song. It made me think of my Judaic Studies students from UMass Amherst back in that year who were totally into Phish, and loved it that they played something Jewish. I think instead I’m going to embed this adorable song from Michelle Citrin from last year, “I Gotta’ Love You Rosh Hashanah,” because it’s so cute. Is she wearing a t-shirt that says Brooklyn Bubbelehs? Now that’s awesome! |
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This is the kind of careless comment, typical of Israeli journalists, that buys into the mistaken notion that a Jew who intermarries and whose family participates in Christmas celebrations is lost to Jewish life.
the first time and about my kindergartener, who loves coming up with lists of words in alphabetical order. (He was in childcare while I was reciting the confessions, but I still thought about his alphabet love and it made me feel like we were part of a a great tradition together.)
it that I avoided joining 
My family just moved to Massachusetts a few months ago from the Midwest. My husband and I are a typical Jewish Boston couple: he is a medical fellow and I am the Network Director at InterfaithFamily.com. Our son is enrolled in the JCC preschool. We are a middle class family living in a very expensive city. We have been 
