The interfaith community of Huntsville, Alabama, has put the “heart” back in the “Heart of Dixie.” For months, we’d listened as our state leaders railed against Muslims in general and Syrian refugees in particular. It was a local attitude as well. We saw an increase in anti-Muslim rhetoric on social media and local talk radio….
Finally, some heartwarming news. A Canadian congregation in Ontario to use its synagogue as a place to worship after their mosque was fire-bombed in a suspected hate crime following the Paris attacks. The attack, which caused an estimated $80,000 worth of damage, rendered Masjid al-Salaam mosque — the only one in Peterborough, Ontario — unusable. That’s…
(JTA) — For two days, 38 leading Jewish and Orthodox Christian clerics and scholars sat in a hotel outside the Greek capital for a rare dialogue on relations between the two ancient faiths. The talks, held last month, were only the eighth round since formal interfaith dialogue between Jews and Orthodox Christians began in 1972, and…
The late great baseball player and philosopher Yogi Berra once quipped, “It ain’t over till it’s over.” Our new study, “Millennial Children of Intermarriage: Touchpoints and Trajectories of Jewish Engagement,” attests to Berra’s wisdom. Despite decades of worry that American “children of intermarriage” would be lost to the community, a large-scale study of young adult…
In the long communal discussion over how to relate to Jews who marry non-Jews, those in the “be welcoming” camp won a major battle this year, thanks in large part to Rabbi Deborah Waxman. Waxman is president of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Seminary, which, after more than a year of deliberation, decided in a September faculty…
A survey of 249 Conservative rabbis finds that almost half have defied the movement’s ban on attending interfaith weddings and that 40 percent would officiate at such weddings if the movement permitted them to do so. The survey, conducted by the New York-based Big Tent Judaism (formerly named the Jewish Outreach Institute) is believed to…
Jane Eisner is right to attribute the change in Reconstructionist Rabbinical College’s intermarriage policy to a disagreement about the rabbi’s role in his or her community. But she misses the reason for this disagreement. : “Clergy don’t reflect their congregations. Clergy lead their congregations — and do so not as leaders who bow to the…
The idea that one must marry a Jew to be an effective Jewish leader, as argued in Jane Eisner’s recent editorial is outdated and counter productive to 21st century Judaism. Not only do intermarried Jewish leaders who already work in the Jewish community debunk stereotypes about Jews who fall in love with a “stranger,” they…
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