Posted in Other religions on Jul 28th, 2008
When I heard that there was a shooting at a Unitarian Universalist Church in Knoxville, Tennessee, I thought about the shooting at the Seattle Jewish Federation. I didn’t consider for a second that this was something random–I thought that the shooter must be targetting these people because of what he thinks they believe. It’s scary […]
Posted in Outreach on Jul 25th, 2008
As a member of the Jewish Outreach Institute’s Big Tent Judaism, we recently received JOI’s newest outreach tool, a business-card sized glossary to common Jewish terms. This little pamphlet, called “Cracking the Code,” defines words familiar to insiders–like Shabbat, minyan, Reform Judaism, Hillel–but often bewildering to outsiders.
It’s a great little resource; I gave one to a non-Jewish […]
Posted in Intermarriage on Jul 23rd, 2008
In The Jerusalem Post two weeks ago, Larry Derfner wrote about how both of his friend’s sons are marrying children of Asian immigrants. Part elegy, part rant, the piece explores why “old-fashioned, secular unrich” Jews like his friend’s sons are coupling with Asian women rather than Jewish ones.
His answer?
The simplest reason … is that both couples met […]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jul 15th, 2008
Sometimes the most Jewish thing a person can do is to send a donation to a Catholic church.
I’ve been following the Agriprocessors scandals since they first broke. The largest kosher meatpacker in the United States in Postville, Iowa first made the news in 2000 with Steven Bloom’s book Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland […]
Posted in Synagogues, Statistics, Intermarriage on Jul 11th, 2008
Back in April, I read “The Missing” in the World Jewish Digest, and found it absolutely amazing. (The title has been changed: it was “A Jewish Man is Hard to Find.”)
The article was advocating that single Jewish women should “panic” if they hadn’t found a Jewish man to marry. (Click the link, I’m not exaggerating!) […]
Posted in Parenting/raising children on Jul 9th, 2008
Yesterday I wrote about the fictional story of a successful man whose child inexplicably descends into self-destruction in her teens. Today, my friend Nate Bloom alerted me to a similar story in The New York Times. The big difference is that the story in the Times is true.
In Sunday’s edition, Julie Schumacher, a novelist and […]
Posted in Popular culture on Jul 8th, 2008
I recently finished reading Philip Roth’s American Pastoral, which won the Pulitzer for fiction in 1997. Roth of course has written extensively about Jewish men who fall in love with non-Jewish women–and the parents who disapprove–and American Pastoral is no different. Except when it is.
Unlike most of his other protagonists, the central character in American Pastoral is […]
