Just over five years ago, a well-intentioned rebbetzin presented me with a gift. I thought it might be a book on Jewish feminism or ritual, the things I am most passionate about academically. Instead, I found an orange book that boldly displayed its title: “Dear Rabbi, Why Can’t I Marry Her?” At the time, I…
Welcome back to Jane Looking Forward! We’re now in the last week of summer vacations, with Rosh Hashanah fast approaching. If you wish to continue reading this weekly newsletter, sign up here. And spread the word! Earlier this year, the Fourth Universalist Church, a progressive congregation on a lovely corner of Central Park West, was…
A Denver, Colorado synagogue and church are joining forces to help an immigrant from El Salvador who fears her life will be in danger if deported back to her homeland. Temple Micah and the Park Hill United Methodist Church are holding a joint interfaith prayer service Wednesday welcoming Araceli Velasquez and her family to take…
A Hindu woman and a Jewish woman tied the knot this week in a ceremony that’s being hailed as Britain’s first interfaith lesbian wedding. “It’s really nice to now have a Hindu wedding here, because it brings both of us together and completes both of us in my eyes,” Miriam Jefferson told the Daily Mail,…
My agnostic, Presbyterian-raised husband and I, a reform Jew, never had conflict between our outlooks on life. We had a Jewish wedding; we are raising our child as Jewish, too. But the election of Trump, surprisingly, highlighted one difference between us, one that I had never noticed before. To me, the Holocaust was still very…
Earlier this week, our colleague Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie resigned from the Conservative movement’s Rabbinical Assembly over his decision to perform intermarriages, as part of a larger initiative to embrace the non-Jews within his community. He is in good company. For years, many American rabbis – including some in our network – have been officiating interfaith…
The current crisis in Conservative Judaism can be traced to a potentially fatal flaw that has been present in the movement since its inception: It has never been one movement. It is really two movements: The movement of its rabbis and philosophical leaders, and the movement of its constituents, the laity. For generations, this tension…
It’s official: Jared Kushner is the least popular member of the first family — by far. This may or may not have something to do with his being an Orthodox Jew, as the Forward’s editor-in-chief, Jane Eisner argued in her July 25 op-ed. But is Kushner’s religion really the guy’s most salient feature, even in…
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