(JTA) — When Eric Woodward started rabbinical school at the Conservative movement’s Jewish Theological Seminary, he assumed he would be be the only student who grew up celebrating Christmas along with Hanukkah. But midway through his training, when Woodward started a discussion group for students of interfaith families, more than 20 people showed up. Not all…
The good people at Pew Research have come up with a brief, fascinating addendum to their recent survey of Jewish Americans, aiming to clear up some of the furor the survey touched off over the closely related questions of intermarriage, religious identity and overall Jewish population numbers. Some quick background, in case you just got…
The Orthodox population is growing even faster than earlier reports from the Pew Research Center’s recent survey of American Jews suggested. A new analysis of data from Pew finds that 27% of Jews younger than 18 live in Orthodox households. That’s a dramatic jump from Jews aged 18 to 29, only 11% of whom are…
Let’s call it a Pew-haha, these last few weeks of hand wringing, debate, and general brouhaha about the recent Pew survey on American Judaism. “Of making books there is no end,” Ecclesiastes reminds us. Op-eds, too. Now that the dust is settling, perhaps it’s worth asking a seemingly obvious question: Who cares? And more importantly,…
Those who read my Friday blog post about the Israel-Diaspora deliberations going on in Jerusalem this week might have noticed that I mentioned a paradox in the way the discussions are going, but I never detailed the substance of the paradox. The sun was setting over the Mediterranean before I had a chance to finish…
Susan Katz Miller, the author of a new book, “Being Both: Embracing Two Religions in One Interfaith Family,” recently argued in a New York Times op-ed that children being raised as Jewish and something else are not totally lost to Judaism. She said that kids who learn about the faith when they are young may…
The Forward 50 is our annual look at the American Jews who made a difference in the past year. Each day, we will spotlight one of our Top 5 picks, leading up to Sunday night when the entire package — along with some very special surprises — will go live. Joseph Neubauer is a data-driven…
With the startling results of the Pew survey on American Jewish identity still echoing loudly around the globe, this was a fortuitous moment for an international Jewish summit to convene in Jerusalem and hash out strategies for shoring up the next generation. In fact the two-day summit, beginning November 6 and involving some 120 community…
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