I 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 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.)

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 »

I started InterfaithFamily.com as an independent non-profit in January 2002. There was a time three or four years into it that I gave serious thought to closing down. I started to write an essay that I thought I would submit to Moment magazine complaining bitterly about the lack of funding support for outreach to interfaith families.

Yes, we did have pioneering support, without which we couldn’t have gotten started, from the Walter & Elise Haas Fund, the Richard & Rhoda Goldman Fund, the Jacob and Hilda Blaustein Foundation, and Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Boston. But we were plateaued at a low level, and our existing funders were looking for others to join them.

There was a change in the funding climate that began in 2006. Important funders finally realized that attracting more interfaith families to Jewish life was essential to the growth and strength of the Jewish community. After fluctuating below $375,000 for four years, we raised $535,000 in 2006 and $875,000 in 2007, enabling us to take on important new projects with new staff and start a transition from a start up to a more mature organization.

Edgar M. Bronfman was a key catalyst in this change. His Samuel Bronfman Foundation was our first major new funder in 2006 and since then has been among our most generous funders.

We now have some insight as to why Mr. Bronfman supports our organization, as well as our friends at the Jewish Outreach Institute. With Beth Zasloff, he has written an important new book: Hope, Not Fear: A Path to Jewish Renaissance Here are some of the key things he has to say about intermarriage:

If we speak about intermarriage as a disaster for the Jewish people, we send a message to intermarried families that is mixed at best. How can you welcome people in while at the same time telling them that their loving relationship is in part responsible for the destruction of the Jewish people? No one should be made to feel our welcome is conditional or begrudging. The many non-Jews who marry Jews must not be regarded as a threat to Jewish survival but as honored guests in a house of joy, learning and pride.

The oft-cited figure that among intermarried families only 33 percent of children are raised Jewish does not take into account the possibility that if the Jewish community were more welcoming, those numbers could grow dramatically.

Our concern as a community now should be to welcome people into our community, not to build boundaries around it. Conversion should be a choice people make from their hearts and when they are ready, not a condition by which they and their children are accepted into the Jewish community. There are many non-Jews who may not be ready to formally convert – particularly if their parents are living – but may be willing to raise their children as Jews. From my son Adam I learned how insulting it is if your children, who have a non-Jewish mother, are considered not Jews by other Jews, despite the fact that they grew up in a Jewish….”

If more funders and policy makers in the Jewish community adopted Mr. Bronfman’s attitude towards intermarriage, we would see a much greater communal effort to attract interfaith families to Jewish life. We can only hope that that will be the case.

You can find an interesting interview of Mr. Bronfman’s co-author, Beth Zasloff, on Daniel Septimus’ blog at MyJewishLearning.com. You can also listen to an NPR On Point show that focused on the book with a discussion with Mr. Bronfman and Sylvia Barack Fishman.

I 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.

The coolest man on the planet died this weekend.

Sure, Paul Newman had all the outward accoutrements of cool: the mesmerizing blue eyes, the charming smile, the fame, the wealth, the love of car-racing. But what really made him cool was his character.

Here was a man who was still a heartthrob into his 80s, yet was married to the same woman–and by all accounts, a faithful and adoring husband–for more than half a century. His face was so famous that he could have made millions in marketing it outside of movies, but instead he used it to sell an ever-growing line of food products, with all of the profits (more than $200 million!) going to charity. And despite all his achievements, he was humble and self-effacing. Nate Bloom sent me this passage from a Los Angeles Time article on his death:

Friends said Newman abhorred what he called “noisy philanthropy.” He felt the awards and honors offered him were excessive and once declined a national medal in a letter to President Clinton, calling such recognition “honorrhea.” Continue Reading »

I have to admit that I avoided joining Facebook. I am generally a busy person, but yesterday I finally gave in and joined. After moving from city to city and making friends from many walks of life, I needed a way to keep in touch with my friends, hear what is going on in their day to day lives and see updated pictures of their kids. Now I am hooked. I have been registered for a little more than a half a day and have 46 friends. My friends are sending me photos, sharing recipes and the joys and annoyances of their lives. People are even sending virtual challot to each other. (I am hoping one of my friends is reading this and will send me one before Rosh Hashanah!)
If you spend a lot of time on Facebook, you can join the InterfaithFamily.com Friends Group on Facebook.
In an effort to add more to my plate in the New Year, I am going to try and use my bread machine to make challah every week this year. I think it will be a fun activity for my son as we get ready for Shabbat. I found a great cooking segment from the Today Show in 2003 on making round challah with Al Roker! It’s after the jump– Continue Reading »

I loved this short film The Tribe on Jewish identity when I saw it online last week. It’s funny–all that stuff about Barbie, and the animation–but I think what it has to say about Jewish identity will resonate with our readers. I liked the poetry-slam style poem by Vanessa Hidary at the end of the film. I’m happy to say that I found the full text of the poem here–apparently what was in the film was just an excerpt. The film is embedded below the cut. Continue Reading »

I get a lot of Jewish blogs in my RSS reader, and one of the ones I follow, The Velveteen Rabbi, had a link to another blogger who had liveblogged a conference call with Barack Obama. A group of rabbis has started a group called Rabbis for Obama, which the Jewish Telegraphic Agency has called “a first in US politics.” Apparently 900 rabbis from all denominations were on the call; three rabbis asked questions of the candidate. Obama quoted from the Talmud and used Hebrew phrases with some facility.

Interesting! As both candidates court the Jewish vote and attract Jewish supporters, we’re going to get to see a lot about Jewish culture in the news.

In other Jewish blogging news, and on a completely different, non-political note I have been digging Sefer Ha-Bloggadah. It’s a group blogging effort by a group of diverse Jewish writers. They have begun a three-year reading ofThe Book of Legends (in Hebrew, Sefer Ha-Aggadah) by Haim Nahman Bialik, in honor of the 100th anniversary of the publication of the collection of Jewish legends by the famous Hebrew poet. I love the diversity of the writers’ perspectives.

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 shul shopping and think that we have found a synagogue which is family friendly and suits our needs. I looked into membership and for the first year the High Holiday tickets are free and the membership is half price! Yes, we can afford this!

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.

My son started kindergarten this week. At our Havurah, we did a ceremony for him and the other new kindergartner in our little community. The other little girl’s mom baked cookies in the shape of the Hebrew alef-bet. Each set of parents came up and said the blessing on part of the Torah reading.Then our resident blesser--we don’t have a rabbi in our lay-led group, but we do have members with special talents, like the ability to make bilingual puns in Hebrew and English–said a blessing on our families in honor of the milestone of starting formal education. As part of the ritual, my son got the first Hebrew letter of his name with honey drizzled on top.

This is a Jewish folk custom that I wanted to do with my son, but probably would have forgotten in the rush to get out the door the first day of school. In Eastern Europe, Jews sent their little boys to school at a young age, and used to put honey on the slate they would be using to learn the letters, or even, on the cover of a book. Reading and writing should be sweet.

Yesterday my son was home sick–yes, on the third day of school–and was watching an Elmo video on Youtube. I overheard a little story from the computer screen about a girl whose house was made of books, whose bed was made of books, who read while she walked around and who had books everywhere. I thought, “That’s supposed to be funny and absurd but that’s what our house is like.”

Soon my desk is going to look as bad as my house. (It doesn’t yet, coworkers.) I get books here at work, a steady stream of books for us to review on the site. Whatever publishers don’t send us, I request. I’ve made friends with some of the people who send out the review copies from the Jewish publishers. We all ooohed and aaahed over a beautiful cookbook, The Book of New Israeli Food by Janna Gur, with its gorgeous photos of pomegranates, halvah and stuffed vegetables. We’re going to review it. One of our frequent book reviewers, Jayne Cohen, just came out with a great-looking book called Jewish Holiday Cooking, which we’re also going to have reviewed.  It was hard to let these yummy-looking books go. Continue Reading »

Michelle Obama has a rabbi in her family, Anthony Weiss of The Forward reported on Tuesday:

Michelle Obama, wife of the Democratic presidential nominee, and Rabbi Capers Funnye, spiritual leader of a mostly black synagogue on Chicago’s South Side, are first cousins once removed. Funnye’s mother, Verdelle Robinson Funnye (born Verdelle Robinson) and Michelle Obama’s paternal grandfather, Frasier Robinson Jr., were brother and sister.

Funnye (pronounced fuh-NAY) is chief rabbi at the Beth Shalom B’nai Zaken Ethiopian Hebrew Congregation in southwest Chicago. He is well-known in Jewish circles for acting as a bridge between mainstream Jewry and the much smaller, and largely separate, world of black Jewish congregations, sometimes known as black Hebrews or Israelites. He has often urged the larger Jewish community to be more accepting of Jews who are not white.

Meanwhile, according to Ron Kampeas and Eric Fingerhut of JTA, Joe Biden’s son married into a Jewish family.

On the Republican side, no Jewish connections in John McCain’s or Sarah Palin’s families have come to light (unless you count McCain’s newly adopted pet Democrat, Joe Lieberman). But don’t worry, as the 2004 election cycle showed us, if there’s a Jew–or even a miniature Israeli flag–somewhere in their family trees, somebody will find it.