Posted in Bar Mitzvah/Bat Mitzvah, Shabbat and Other Holidays, Parenting, Popular Culture on Oct 30th, 2008
On 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 […]
Posted in Uncategorized on Oct 24th, 2008
There are a lot of nifty ways to study Torah on the internet. It’s a great way to get an introduction to Judaism–you can get weekly commentaries from a Reform, Conservative, Orthodox, Reconstructionist or Jewish Renewal perspective. But this new one has me smiling.
My old friend Michael Carasik, who is involved in the amazingly cool […]
Posted in Bar Mitzvah/Bat Mitzvah on Oct 20th, 2008
When I had my bar mitzvah 18 years ago, it was truly all about the party. Back then, at least at my synagogue and in my community, there was no required community service project, kids didn’t lead the service and the theme of the party was more relevant than the theme of your haftarah portion.
Back […]
Posted in Shabbat and Other Holidays, Parenting, Popular Culture on Oct 17th, 2008
I 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 […]
Posted in Popular Culture on Oct 13th, 2008
Love him or loathe him, there’s one thing we can all agree on about Bill Maher: he’s a jerk.
In Religulous, his documentary-cum-diatribe on the horrors of religion, his approach to his interview subjects is at best mocking, at worst contemptuous. He variously interrupts, laughs at, winces at and provokes his subjects. He edits the interviews to […]
Posted in Shabbat and Other Holidays, Parenting, Popular Culture on Oct 10th, 2008
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 […]
Posted in Uncategorized on Oct 6th, 2008
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 […]
Posted in Shabbat and Other Holidays, Growing up in an Interfaith Family, Conversion on Oct 2nd, 2008
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 […]
