...as my father has been known to say. In this case, speaking out against ostracizing those who intermarry has, as one might have suspected, drawn the trolls who live under the bridge of I Must Defend Traditional Judaism Against Apikorsim and Apostates.
So here's what I had to say, continuing on from this earlier post:
Nothing you have written above, and nothing Noah Feldman wrote in his article, indicates to me that Feldman is "anti-Orthodox" -- and nothing in Rabbi Boteach's article suggests to me that he finds Feldman in any way anti-Orthodox either.
The question is not whether the Maimonides School or Orthodox Judaism "recognizes" Feldman's marriage -- it's what it does in reaction to the fact of that marriage. Not listing his simchas is one thing; taking him AND his then-fiancee out of a group photo, and pretending neither one of them exists, is quite another.
Not to mention that it's incredibly chutzapadik and lacking in derekh eretz (respect for other people) to presume that
1) because the woman with him is Korean-American, she's not Jewish
(I know Asian-American Jews of all sorts: raised Jewish by Jewish parents who are of mixed ethnic descent; raised Jewish after being adopted by Jews; Jews by Choice);
2) his children, when he announces their birth or milestones, are not Jewish -- even if it's known that their mother is not
(some families choose to convert their children at birth if they are not halakhically Jewish; whether or not the mother converts is not immediately germane, as long as she is supportive of the creation of a Jewish household and raising her children as Jews: see JOI's The Mothers Circle for more information and support for non-Jewish women who make this wonderful choice!).
Presumably the marriage depicted in his article, like the marriage of my Jewish mother to my non-Jewish father, does not constitute kiddushin and is not a marriage that takes place within the Jewish legal structure. But I am not convinced that therefore the relationship has NO standing in Jewish law, since there are means of acquiring a spouse other than via kiddushin ( e.g., through cohabitation, etc.): if he wanted to marry a Jewish wife, I think that halakha and not just the laws of the land would demand that he divorce his current one -- and if that's the case, then it's being "recognized" as a marriage for at least some purposes. A non-permitted relationship may be prohibited, but it still exists!
Marriage with someone who is not Jewish has always been a fact of Jewish community life and history --look at the marriages in Tanakh/the Hebrew Bible for countless examples, both positive (Tamar, Asenath, Zipporah) and negative (the "son of an Israelite woman" in Exodus, who abuses the name of God in a fight with another Israelite; he's understood to be the son of a non-Israelite, otherwise why say "son of an Israelite woman"?).
It doesn't sound to me as though Noah Feldman turned his back on Orthodox Judaism. The Orthodox Judaism of that particular community, and his school (or at least its administration), seems to have turned its back on him. I think that's a shame -- but I also want to invite him and his wife to come with us and find a home in a Judaism that opens its arms to them instead. (Hi guys--remember me and my husband Mike W. from Oxford?) My Jew-by-choice husband and I are part of traditional egalitarian Conservative communities -- in fact, I was raised in one here in the DC area by my Jewish mother and non-Jewish father, and never felt ostracized or strange -- where they would be very welcome. I have friends in the Reform and Reconstructionist and Renewal movements (several of whom are rabbis) as well, and know that there too they should find a warm welcome and the encouragement to be involved in any way they choose!
Showing posts with label intermarriage. Show all posts
Showing posts with label intermarriage. Show all posts
25 July 2007
24 July 2007
Shmuley Gets It!
Now I've also read the piece by Shmuely Boteach that was also linked to on the IFF blog.
Here it is, with my comments following:
And my comments:
Yasher koach (well done!), Shmuley!
I knew you were a mensch when I met you at Oxford (my husband M. and I were Rhodes Scholars from '95-'98, and saw you again at Shmully Hecht's son bris in New Haven after our return to the U.S.--you'd know me as Becca B.), even if my Jewish involvement was primarily with the Oxford Jewish Community (including its then-nascent Masorti minyan, which has now been going strong for over 10 years) rather than with the L'Chaim Society (where I did sometimes show up for dinner and at least 2 of your debates, w/a Reform rabbi & a 'Messianic Jewish rabbi').
I was pleased to hear that you'd made sure that the Torah got 'round to the women's side during Simchat Torah festivities at the L'Chaim Society -- that when others tried to keep it away from or take it back from my fellow North American female Rhodes Scholar (she's now a rabbi in NYC, as is her wife--who is a Jew by Choice), you made sure she got to hold on to it.
I was impressed when I heard that you'd written a recommendation for another female friend in her (successful) application for rabbinical school at Leo Baeck -- the story (you can say if it's true or apocryphal) was that, when challenged by someone who couldn't see how you, an Orthodox rabbi, would support a woman's application to a liberal rabbinic seminary, you'd said "What, I should prefer that she be a cocktail waitress?!"
I found both your article here & Noah's essay via the Interfaith Family (IFF) blog. I have a vested interest, even though I'm not intermarried myself: I was raised as a Nice Jewish Girl by my Jewish mother and non-Jewish father, and dated and got engaged to a Nice Non-Jewish Boy who could handle being a supportive part of a Jewish family as my father had done.
Then he decided to become Jewish, surprising us both (we'd known each other for 10 years, we'd been a couple for 8; nice to still be able to have surprises!) and enriching our lives immensely.
In his year of studying for conversion we couldn't have been luckier in our companions: we learned from amazing friends who were exploring their own Judaism, intellectually, ritually and spiritually.
3 are now rabbis; one is a Jewish studies professor and co-founded the Hadar independent minyan in NYC; another is a professor of philosophy at a prominent university and has 2 adorable daughters with his non-Jewish wife, whose Jewish wedding (with chuppah and ketubah) we joyfully attended.
Virtually all of them have non-Jews in their Jewish family life -- as in-laws; as partners or spouses; as parents -- and only one grew up in a traditionally observant (Conservative, as it happens) Jewish home.
You're 100% correct that we're not going to enhance anyone's Jewish life or our Jewish community by ostracizing those who have non-Jews in their family (as partners, parents, what have you) or those who are non-Jews who have chosen to make their lives with someone Jewish.
Ruth said "Your people shall be my people" before she said "and your God, my God" (Ruth 1:16). Anyone who has committed his or her life to being with someone Jewish (a spouse, a child, a parent) is living Ruth's words: "Whither thou goest, I shall go; whither thou lodgest, I shall lodge." Our people ARE their people (but need not be their ONLY people!)--and we should acknowledge, indeed celebrate, that they have gone beyond their "mother's house" (Ruth 1:8) and the "land of your birth, and have come to a people you did not know before" (Ruth 2:11).
These wonderful people--whose Jewish family and partners treasure them, and who have cast their lot with those Jewish family members and partners--are living the commitment "your God, my God." They may mean it in its universalistic or metaphorical sense--"we share the same Divine Source and force, the same ideals"--but by the very lives they have chosen, whether they live as Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Wiccans, agnostics, humanists, you name it, they are sharing their highest values and ethical selfhood with the Jews in their families. Their God is my God.
If some of them choose to make that statement a particular Jewish one rather than a universalistic one--to worship not only the same deity but in the same words, with the same texts, at the same seasons that the Jewish people do and have done; to embrace Judaism for themselves after having embraced it as the faith or background of someone they love--that's up to them. But our love and respect and welcome should never be contingent upon this choice.
I love my father and am glad that he is who he is. I love my husband and am glad that he is who he is. This Shabbat, my mother and husband and I, as adult Jewish members of our community, will be called up to the Torah (which both M. and I will read from); my friend K. and her 13-year-old daughter will hopefully be called up as well. My father, K.'s husband, and my brother's fiancee will be there with us at Shabbat services: some of them will read prayers in English on behalf of this community of worshippers. They are not Jews -- but they are part of our Jewish families, offering their prayers in Jewish space [the synagogue] and Jewish time [Shabbat morning] on behalf of this Jewish community, of which they are an important part.
They are not second-bests who should have been pushed aside for a Jewish partner but can perhaps be tolerated, now that they're unavoidably and permanently here.
They are not threats to Jewish community or Jewish continuity--in fact, they all have raised or intend to raise children who are exclusively Jewish in faith.
My people is their people; my God, their God.
Here it is, with my comments following:
Stop Ostracizing Those Who Marry Out
This column would not have been written had its subject not first described himself and his predicament in this week's in New York Times magazine.
Noah Feldman was a brilliant, orthodox Jewish Rhodes scholar who arrived in Oxford in my forth year at the University as Rabbi in 1992. He and I quickly hit it off. For one thing, there was scarcely a subject - Jewish or secular - upon which Noah did not have some profound knowledge. We studied Talmud together several times a week and I made Noah a kind of secondary Rabbi at our L'Chaim Society, such was the range of his Jewish erudition and his phenomenal capacity for teaching. His resume easily made him one of the most accomplished young students in the entire Western world. He was valedictorian of Harvard, a Rhodes and Truman scholar, and completed his Oxford doctorate in about eighteen months, which may or may not be a University record. It was a source of great pride for me that Noah was observant and wore a Yarmulke. A student that gifted was a natural leader to others and was looked up to by so many of the other students. We all marveled every Shabbat at Noah's incredible ability to lein (read with its proper notes) any section of the Torah for our student Synagogue.
After graduating from Oxford, Noah went to Yale where his observance began to wane. I heard from some of his class mates that he was now dating a non-Jewish girl. Hearing that he was quite serious about her, when his girlfriend came in turn to Oxford as a Marshall scholar, I made a point of reaching out to her and inviting her to our Shabbat dinner. My thinking was that Noah was far too precious to me and to the Jewish people to lose. If he was dating a woman whom he wished to marry, then it was our duty to try and expose her to the friendliness of the Jewish community with a view toward her exploring whether a serious commitment to our tradition was something that would suit her.
Sadly, however, others took a far different view. A mutual friend of ours who was a Rabbi in Noah's life essentially told him that if he married outside the faith he would have to sever his relationship with him. Apparently, many of Noah's orthodox friends made the same decision. The net result was that one of the brightest young Jews in the entire world was made to feel that the Jewish community was only his family if he made choices with which we agreed.
I took a different view. Of course I wanted Noah to marry Jewish, and I took pride in the fact that I had helped to sustain his observance in his two years at Oxford. But the choice of whom he would marry was not mine to make. Before he got married I wrote him a note that said, in essence, that we are friends and that my affection for him would never change. I told him that he was a prince of the Jewish nation, that his obligations to his people were eternal and unchanging, that whether or not his wife, or indeed his children were Jewish would never change his own personal status as a Jew and that, as a scholar of world standing, I knew he would do great things with his life and that he would should always put the needs of the Jewish people first.
Till today we remain good friends. I admire and respect Noah and my wish is that perhaps, some day, his brilliant wife might see, of her own volition, the beauties of our tradition and how family life is enhanced by husband and wife being of the same faith and practicing the same religious rituals.
True to my prediction, Noah went on, in his thirties, to become one of the youngest ever tenured law professors, first at NYU and then at Harvard, and was chosen by the American government to serve as the constitutional consultant for the Iraqi provisional government in drawing up their constitution. Today he ranks, arguably, as the youngest academic superstar in the United States.
How tragic, therefore, that his article in the New York Times magazine is a lengthy detailing of the alienation he has experienced from his former orthodox Jewish day school and friends, who even cut him out of a class reunion photograph in which he participated.
For more than two centuries now, since the emancipation, Jews have been debating how to deal with those who marry outside the community. The conventional response has been to treat them as traitors to the Jewish cause. We are all familiar with the old practice of sitting shiva on a child who marries out, as if he or she were dead, made famous in Fiddler on the Roof. The extreme practice of ostracization was justified by the belief that only by completely cutting off those who married out would we be making a sufficiently strong statement as to the extent of their betrayal, thereby dissuading those who might follow suit.
There is one problem with this practice. Aside from the ethical and humanitarian considerations, it does not work. We have been practicing this alienation for decades and yet intermarriage has grown to approximately fifty percent of the Jewish population! Worse, the practice is a lie insofar as it propagates the false notion that our Jewishness is measured only in terms of our being a link in a higher chain of existence, and that our Jewish identities have meaning only through our children. This absurd notion would deny they idea of Jewish individualism and how we are Jews in our own right.
I am well aware of the fact that intermarriage is a direct threat to the very continuity of the Jewish people. But that does not change the fact that those who have chosen to marry out are still Jewish, should still be encouraged to go to Synagogue, should still be encouraged to put on tefillin and keep Shabbat, should still have mezuzos on their doors, and should still be encouraged to devote their lives and resources to the welfare of the Jewish people and the security of the State of Israel.
And as far as their non-Jewish spouses are concerned, do we really believed that by showing the most unfriendly behavior we are living up to our Biblically-mandated role of serving as a light unto the nations? Is there any possibility that a non-Jew who is married to a Jew would look favorably at the possibility of becoming halakhically Jewish if they witness orthodox Jews treating their husband or wife as pariahs?
I am proud today to call Noah my friend. I do my best to reiterate to him the message that, amid marrying out, we are proud of his achievements and need his participation in Jewish organizational life, especially given the immense clout he carries in academic circles. And it is my fervent hope that, given the love and respect that we show him, he will choose to show his wife and two children the glories of the tradition he knows so well with a view toward impressing upon them a desire to have them join in our eternal faith.
Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, who served as Rabbi at Oxford for 11 years, is a national TV host and the author, most recently, of 'Shalom in the Home' (Meredith). www.shmuley.com
And my comments:
Yasher koach (well done!), Shmuley!
I knew you were a mensch when I met you at Oxford (my husband M. and I were Rhodes Scholars from '95-'98, and saw you again at Shmully Hecht's son bris in New Haven after our return to the U.S.--you'd know me as Becca B.), even if my Jewish involvement was primarily with the Oxford Jewish Community (including its then-nascent Masorti minyan, which has now been going strong for over 10 years) rather than with the L'Chaim Society (where I did sometimes show up for dinner and at least 2 of your debates, w/a Reform rabbi & a 'Messianic Jewish rabbi').
I was pleased to hear that you'd made sure that the Torah got 'round to the women's side during Simchat Torah festivities at the L'Chaim Society -- that when others tried to keep it away from or take it back from my fellow North American female Rhodes Scholar (she's now a rabbi in NYC, as is her wife--who is a Jew by Choice), you made sure she got to hold on to it.
I was impressed when I heard that you'd written a recommendation for another female friend in her (successful) application for rabbinical school at Leo Baeck -- the story (you can say if it's true or apocryphal) was that, when challenged by someone who couldn't see how you, an Orthodox rabbi, would support a woman's application to a liberal rabbinic seminary, you'd said "What, I should prefer that she be a cocktail waitress?!"
I found both your article here & Noah's essay via the Interfaith Family (IFF) blog. I have a vested interest, even though I'm not intermarried myself: I was raised as a Nice Jewish Girl by my Jewish mother and non-Jewish father, and dated and got engaged to a Nice Non-Jewish Boy who could handle being a supportive part of a Jewish family as my father had done.
Then he decided to become Jewish, surprising us both (we'd known each other for 10 years, we'd been a couple for 8; nice to still be able to have surprises!) and enriching our lives immensely.
In his year of studying for conversion we couldn't have been luckier in our companions: we learned from amazing friends who were exploring their own Judaism, intellectually, ritually and spiritually.
3 are now rabbis; one is a Jewish studies professor and co-founded the Hadar independent minyan in NYC; another is a professor of philosophy at a prominent university and has 2 adorable daughters with his non-Jewish wife, whose Jewish wedding (with chuppah and ketubah) we joyfully attended.
Virtually all of them have non-Jews in their Jewish family life -- as in-laws; as partners or spouses; as parents -- and only one grew up in a traditionally observant (Conservative, as it happens) Jewish home.
You're 100% correct that we're not going to enhance anyone's Jewish life or our Jewish community by ostracizing those who have non-Jews in their family (as partners, parents, what have you) or those who are non-Jews who have chosen to make their lives with someone Jewish.
Ruth said "Your people shall be my people" before she said "and your God, my God" (Ruth 1:16). Anyone who has committed his or her life to being with someone Jewish (a spouse, a child, a parent) is living Ruth's words: "Whither thou goest, I shall go; whither thou lodgest, I shall lodge." Our people ARE their people (but need not be their ONLY people!)--and we should acknowledge, indeed celebrate, that they have gone beyond their "mother's house" (Ruth 1:8) and the "land of your birth, and have come to a people you did not know before" (Ruth 2:11).
These wonderful people--whose Jewish family and partners treasure them, and who have cast their lot with those Jewish family members and partners--are living the commitment "your God, my God." They may mean it in its universalistic or metaphorical sense--"we share the same Divine Source and force, the same ideals"--but by the very lives they have chosen, whether they live as Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Wiccans, agnostics, humanists, you name it, they are sharing their highest values and ethical selfhood with the Jews in their families. Their God is my God.
If some of them choose to make that statement a particular Jewish one rather than a universalistic one--to worship not only the same deity but in the same words, with the same texts, at the same seasons that the Jewish people do and have done; to embrace Judaism for themselves after having embraced it as the faith or background of someone they love--that's up to them. But our love and respect and welcome should never be contingent upon this choice.
I love my father and am glad that he is who he is. I love my husband and am glad that he is who he is. This Shabbat, my mother and husband and I, as adult Jewish members of our community, will be called up to the Torah (which both M. and I will read from); my friend K. and her 13-year-old daughter will hopefully be called up as well. My father, K.'s husband, and my brother's fiancee will be there with us at Shabbat services: some of them will read prayers in English on behalf of this community of worshippers. They are not Jews -- but they are part of our Jewish families, offering their prayers in Jewish space [the synagogue] and Jewish time [Shabbat morning] on behalf of this Jewish community, of which they are an important part.
They are not second-bests who should have been pushed aside for a Jewish partner but can perhaps be tolerated, now that they're unavoidably and permanently here.
They are not threats to Jewish community or Jewish continuity--in fact, they all have raised or intend to raise children who are exclusively Jewish in faith.
My people is their people; my God, their God.
In and Out -- Intermarriage, Modern Orthodoxy, Claiming Our Pasts or Being Rejected By Them...
So much to blog, so little time -- watch this space for thoughts on:
I've re-bolded the section headers, etc., below -- but some of the formatting has no doubt been lost -- so you may want to follow the link above, or pull out your NYT Magazine (or borrow it from your neighbor or read it in the library) so you can put up your feet & read it...
- my new stealth tallit (which I love, and will use at mincha in 2 1/2 hours in a non-stealth Conservative egalitarian context: it was debuted on Shabbat morning at the Chabad synagogue in Cleveland for my cousin Noam's bar mitzvah),
- Rabbi Strangeblood, Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Mikvah (really! I'm going tomorrow morning for the third time this year -- prior to that, I'd only been as part of the pre-wedding preparation 10 years ago--and I've been looking forward to it!)
- 10 Years of This Jewish Life -- Saturday, Shabbat Nachamu, the 13th of Av, is the 10th anniversary of our aufruf; Sunday, the 14th of Av, we will have been married fro 10 years on the Jewish calendar. We have already marked this summer the 20th anniversary of the day M. and I met (June 26, 1987); 18th anniversary of the day we first saw each other again 2 years later/for the first time as a couple (June 24, 1989)... and of the day M. asked me to marry him (June 28, 1989); and the 10th anniversary of his becoming a Jew (the week of Parshat Pinchas in 1997--late July).
I've re-bolded the section headers, etc., below -- but some of the formatting has no doubt been lost -- so you may want to follow the link above, or pull out your NYT Magazine (or borrow it from your neighbor or read it in the library) so you can put up your feet & read it...
Orthodox Paradox
R. Kikuo Johnson
A number of years ago, I went to my 10th high-school reunion, in the backyard of the one classmate whose parents had a pool. Lots of my classmates were there. Almost all were married, and many already had kids. This was not as unusual as it might seem, since I went to a yeshiva day school, and nearly everyone remained Orthodox. I brought my girlfriend. At the end, we all crowded into a big group photo, shot by the school photographer, who had taken our pictures from first grade through graduation. When the alumni newsletter came around a few months later, I happened to notice the photo. I looked, then looked again. My girlfriend and I were nowhere to be found.
I didn’t want to seem paranoid, especially in front of my girlfriend, to whom I was by that time engaged. So I called my oldest school friend, who appeared in the photo, and asked for her explanation. “You’re kidding, right?” she said. My fiancée was Korean-American. Her presence implied the prospect of something that from the standpoint of Orthodox Jewish law could not be recognized: marriage to someone who was not Jewish. That hint was reason enough to keep us out.
Not long after, I bumped into the photographer, in synagogue, on Yom Kippur. When I walked over to him, his pained expression told me what I already knew. “It wasn’t me,” he said. I believed him.
Since then I have occasionally been in contact with the school’s alumni director, who has known me since I was a child. I say “in contact,” but that implies mutuality where none exists. What I really mean is that in the nine years since the reunion I have sent him several updates about my life, for inclusion in the “Mazal Tov” section of the newsletter. I sent him news of my marriage. When our son was born, I asked him to report that happy event. The most recent news was the birth of our daughter this winter. Nothing doing. None of my reports made it into print.
It would be more dramatic if I had been excommunicated like Baruch Spinoza, in a ceremony complete with black candles and a ban on all social contact, a rite whose solemnity reflected the seriousness of its consequences. But in the modern world, the formal communal ban is an anachronism. Many of my closest relationships are still with people who remain in the Orthodox fold. As best I know, no one, not even the rabbis at my old school who disapprove of my most important life decisions, would go so far as to refuse to shake my hand. What remains of the old technique of excommunication is simply nonrecognition in the school’s formal publications, where my classmates’ growing families and considerable accomplishments are joyfully celebrated.
The yeshiva where I studied considers itself modern Orthodox, not ultra-Orthodox. We followed a rigorous secular curriculum alongside traditional Talmud and Bible study. Our advanced Talmud and Hebrew classes were interspersed with advanced-placement courses in French literature and European political history, all skillfully coordinated to prime us for the Ivy League. To try to be at once a Lithuanian yeshiva and a New England prep school: that was the unspoken motto of the Maimonides School of Brookline, Mass., where I studied for 12 years.
That aspiration is not without its difficulties. My own personal lesson in nonrecognition is just one small symptom of the challenge of reconciling the vastly disparate values of tradition and modernity — of Slobodka and St. Paul’s. In premodern Europe, where the state gave the Jewish community the power to enforce its own rules of membership through coercive force, excommunication literally divested its victim of his legal personality, of his rights and standing in the community. The modern liberal state, though, neither polices nor delegates the power to police religious membership; that is now a social matter, not a legal one. Today a religious community that seeks to preserve its traditional structure must maintain its boundaries using whatever independent means it can muster — right down to the selective editing of alumni newsletters.
Despite my intimate understanding of the mind-set that requires such careful attention to who is in and who is out, I am still somehow taken by surprise each time I am confronted with my old school’s inability to treat me like any other graduate. I have tried in my own imperfect way to live up to values that the school taught me, expressing my respect and love for the wisdom of the tradition while trying to reconcile Jewish faith with scholarship and engagement in the public sphere. As a result, I have not felt myself to have rejected my upbringing, even when some others imagine me to have done so by virtue of my marriage.
Some part of me still expects — against the judgment of experience — that the individual human beings who make up the institution and community where I spent so many years of my life will put our longstanding friendships ahead of the imperative to define boundaries. The school did educate me and influence me deeply. What I learned there informs every part of my inner life. In the sense of shared history and formation, I remain of the community even while no longer fully in the community.
If this is dissonance, it is at least dissonance that the modern Orthodox should be able to understand: the desire to inhabit multiple worlds simultaneously and to defy contradiction with coexistence. After all, the school’s attempt to bring the ideals of Orthodox Judaism into dialogue with a certain slice of late-20th-century American life was in many ways fantastically rich and productive. For those of us willing to accept a bit of both worlds, I would say, it almost worked.
Fitting In
Since the birth of modern Orthodox Judaism in 19th-century Germany, a central goal of the movement has been to normalize the observance of traditional Jewish law — to make it possible to follow all 613 biblical commandments assiduously while still participating in the reality of the modern world. You must strive to be, as a poet of the time put it, “a Jew in the home and a man in the street.” Even as we students of the Maimonides School spent half of every school day immersed in what was unabashedly a medieval curriculum, our aim was to seem to outsiders — and to ourselves — like reasonable, mainstream people, not fanatics or cult members.
This ambition is best exemplified today by Senator Joe Lieberman. His run for the vice presidency in 2000 put the “modern” in modern Orthodox, demonstrating that an Orthodox Jewish candidate could be accepted by America at large as essentially a regular guy. (Some of this, of course, was simply the result of ignorance. As John Breaux, then a senator from Louisiana, so memorably put it with regard to Lieberman during the 2000 campaign, “I don’t think American voters care where a man goes to church on Sunday.”) Whatever concerns Lieberman’s Jewish identity may have raised in the heartland seem to have been moderated, rather than stoked, by the fact that his chosen Jewish denomination was Orthodox — that he seemed to really and truly believe in something. His Orthodoxy elicited none of the half-whispered attacks that Mitt Romney’s Mormonism has already prompted in this electoral cycle, none of the dark hints that it was, in some basic sense, weird.
Lieberman’s overt normalcy really is remarkable. Though modern Orthodox Jews do not typically wear the long beards, side curls and black, nostalgic Old World garments favored by the ultra-Orthodox, the men do wear beneath their clothes a small fringed prayer shawl every bit as outré as the sacred undergarments worn by Mormons. Morning prayers are accompanied by the daily donning of phylacteries, which, though painless, resemble in their leather-strappy way the cinched cilice worn by the initiates of Opus Dei and so lasciviously depicted in “The Da Vinci Code.” Food restrictions are tight: a committed modern Orthodox observer would not drink wine with non-Jews and would have trouble finding anything to eat in a nonkosher restaurant other than undressed cold greens (assuming, of course, that the salad was prepared with a kosher knife).
The dietary laws of kashrut are designed to differentiate and distance the observant person from the rest of the world. When followed precisely, as I learned growing up, they accomplish exactly that. Every bite requires categorization into permitted and prohibited, milk or meat. To follow these laws, to analyze each ingredient in each food that comes into your purview, is to construct the world in terms of the rules borne by those who keep kosher. The category of the unkosher comes unconsciously to apply not only to foods that fall outside the rules but also to the people who eat that food — which is to say, almost everyone in the world, whether Jewish or not. You cannot easily break bread with them, but that is not all. You cannot, in a deeper sense, participate with them in the common human activity of restoring the body through food.
And yet the Maimonides School, by juxtaposing traditional and secular curricula, gave me a feeling of being connected to the broader world. Line by line we burrowed into the old texts in their original Hebrew and Aramaic. The poetry of the Prophets sang in our ears. After years of this, I found I could recite the better part of the Hebrew Bible from memory. Among other things, this meant that when I encountered the writings of the Puritans who founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony, I felt immediate kinship. They read those same exact texts again and again — often in Hebrew — searching for clues about their own errand into the American wilderness.
In our literature classes we would glimpse Homer’s wine-dark sea, then move to a different classroom and dive headlong into the sea of the Talmud. Here the pleasure of legal-intellectual argument had no stopping place, no end. A problem in Talmud study is never answered, it is only deepened. The Bible prohibits work on the Sabbath. But what is work? The rabbis began with 39 categories, each of which called for its own classification into as many as 39 further subcategories. Then came the problem of intention: What state of mind is required for “work” to have occurred? You might perform an act of work absent-mindedly, having forgotten that it was the Sabbath, or ignorantly, not knowing that action constituted work. You might perform an action with the goal of achieving some permissible outcome — but that result might inevitably entail some prohibited work’s taking place. Learning this sort of reasoning as a child prepared me well, as it has countless others, for the ways of American law.
Beyond the complementarities of Jewish learning and secular knowledge, our remarkable teachers also offered access to a wider world. Even among the rabbis there was a smattering of Ph.D.’s and near-doctorates to give us a taste of a critical-academic approach to knowledge, not just a religious one. And the teachers of the secular subjects were fantastic. One of the best taught me eighth-grade English when he was barely out of college himself, before he became a poet, a professor and an important queer theorist. Given Orthodoxy’s condemnation of homosexuality, he must have made it onto the faculty through the sheer cluelessness of the administration. Lord only knows what teachers like him, visitors from the real world, made of our quirky ways. (In the book of poems about his teaching years, we students are decorously transformed into Italian-Americans.)
In allowing us, intentionally or not, to see the world and the Torah as profoundly interconnected, the school was faithful to the doctrines of its eponym, the great medieval Jewish legalist and philosopher Moses Maimonides. Easily the most extraordinary figure in post-biblical Jewish history, Maimonides taught that accurate knowledge of the world — physical and metaphysical — was, alongside studying, obeying and understanding the commandments, the one route to the ultimate summum bonum of knowing God. A life lived by these precepts can be both noble and beautiful, and I believe the best and wisest of my classmates and teachers come very close indeed to achieving it.
The Dynamics of Prohibition
For many of us, the consilience of faith and modernity that sometimes appears within the reach of modern Orthodoxy is a tantalizing prospect. But it can be undermined by the fragile fault lines between the moral substructures of the two worldviews, which can widen into deep ruptures on important matters of life and love.
One time at Maimonides a local physician — a well-known figure in the community who later died tragically young — addressed a school assembly on the topic of the challenges that a modern Orthodox professional may face. The doctor addressed the Talmudic dictum that the saving of a life trumps the Sabbath. He explained that in its purest form, this principle applies only to the life of a Jew. The rabbis of the Talmud, however, were unprepared to allow the life of a non-Jew to be extinguished because of the no-work commandment, and so they ruled that the Sabbath could be violated to save the life of a non-Jew out of concern for maintaining peaceful relations between the Jewish and non-Jewish communities.
Depending on how you look at it, this ruling is either an example of outrageously particularist religious thinking, because in principle it values Jewish life more than non-Jewish life, or an instance of laudable universalism, because in practice it treats all lives equally. The physician quite reasonably opted for the latter explanation. And he added that he himself would never distinguish Jewish from non-Jewish patients: a human being was a human being.
This appealing sentiment did not go unchallenged. One of my teachers rose to suggest that the doctor’s attitude was putting him in danger of violating the Torah. The teacher reported that he had himself heard from his own rabbi, a leading modern-Orthodox Talmudist associated with Yeshiva University, that in violating the Sabbath to treat a non-Jew, intention was absolutely crucial. If you intended to save the patient’s life so as to facilitate good relations between Jews and non-Jews, your actions were permissible. But if, to the contrary, you intended to save the patient out of universal morality, then you were in fact guilty of violating the Sabbath, because the motive for acting was not the motive on the basis of which the rabbis allowed the Sabbath violation to occur.
Later, in class, the teacher apologized to us students for what he said to the doctor. His comments, he said, were inappropriate — not because they were wrongheaded, but because non-Jews were present in the audience when he made them. The double standard of Jews and non-Jews, in other words, was for him truly irreducible: it was not just about noting that only Jewish lives merited violation of the Sabbath, but also about keeping the secret of why non-Jewish lives might be saved. To accept this version of the tradition would be to accept that the modern Orthodox project of engagement with the world could not proceed in good faith.
Nothing in the subculture of modern Orthodoxy, however, brought out the tensions between tradition and modernity more vividly for a young man than the question of our relationship to sex. Modernity, and maybe the state-mandated curriculum (I have never checked), called for a day of sex ed in seventh grade. I have the feeling that the content of our sex-ed class was the same as those held in public schools in Massachusetts around the same time, with the notable exception that none of us would have occasion to deploy even the most minimal elements of the lesson plan in the foreseeable future. After the scientific bits of the lesson were over, the rabbi who was head of the school came in to the classroom to follow up with some indication of the Jewish-law perspective on these questions. It amounted to a blanket prohibition on the activities to which we had just been introduced. After marriage, some rather limited subset of them might become permissible — but only in the two weeks of the month that followed the two weeks of ritual abstinence occasioned by menstruation.
After that memorable disquisition, the question of relations between the sexes went essentially unmentioned again in our formal education. We were periodically admonished that boys and girls must not touch one another, even accidentally. Several of the most attractive girls were singled out for uncomfortable closed-door sessions in which they were instructed that their manner of dress, which already met the school’s standards for modesty, must be made more modest still so as not to distract the males around them.
Whatever their disjuncture with American culture of the 1980s, the erotics of prohibition were real to us. Once, I was called on the carpet after an anonymous informant told the administration that I had been seen holding a girl’s hand somewhere in Brookline one Sunday afternoon. The rabbi insinuated that if the girl and I were holding hands today, premarital sex must surely be right around the corner.
My Talmud teacher — the one who took the physician to task — handed me four tightly packed columns of closely reasoned rabbinic Hebrew, a responsum by the pre-eminent Orthodox decisor, Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, “in the matter of a young man whose heart lures him to enter into bonds of affection with a young woman not for purposes of marriage.” Rabbi Feinstein’s legal judgment with respect to romantic love among persons too young to marry was definitive. He prohibited it absolutely, in part on the ground that it would inevitably lead to nonprocreative seminal emissions, whether intentional or unintentional.
What Feinstein lacked in romantic imagination was more than made up for by Moses Maimonides, who understood the soul pretty well. He once characterized the true love of God as all-consuming — “as though one had contracted the sickness of love.” Feinstein’s opinion directed my attention to a passage in Maimonides’s legal writings prohibiting various sorts of contact with women. The most evocative bit runs as follows: “Even to smell the perfume upon her is prohibited.” I have never been able to escape the feeling that this is a covert love poem enmeshed in the 14-volume web of dos and don’ts that is Maimonides’s Code of Law. Perfume has not smelled the same to me since.
Difference and Reconciliation
I have spent much of my own professional life focusing on the predicament of faith communities that strive to be modern while simultaneously cleaving to tradition. Consider the situation of those Christian evangelicals who want to participate actively in mainstream politics yet are committed to a biblical literalism that leads them to oppose stem-cell research and advocate intelligent design in the classroom. To some secularists, the evangelicals’ predicament seems absurd and their political movement dangerously anti-intellectual. As it happens, I favor financing stem-cell research and oppose the teaching of intelligent design or creationism as a “scientific” doctrine in public schools. Yet I nonetheless feel some sympathy for the evangelicals’ sure-to-fail attempts to stand in the way of the progress of science, and not just because I respect their concern that we consider the ethical implications of our technological prowess.
Perhaps I feel sympathy because I can recall the agonies suffered by my head of school when he stopped by our biology class to discuss the problem of creation. Following the best modern Orthodox doctrine, he pointed out that Genesis could be understood allegorically, and that the length of a day might be numbered in billions of years considering that the sun, by which our time is reckoned, was not created until the fourth such “day.” Not for him the embarrassing claim, heard sometimes among the ultra-Orthodox, that dinosaur fossils were embedded by God within the earth at the moment of creation in order to test our faith in biblical inerrancy. Natural selection was for him a scientific fact to be respected like the laws of physics — guided by God but effectuated though the workings of the natural order. Yet even he could not leave the classroom without a final caveat. “The truth is,” he said, “despite what I have just told you, I still have a hard time believing that man could be descended from monkeys.”
This same grappling with tension — and the same failure to resolve it perfectly — can be found among the many Muslims who embrace both basic liberal democratic values and orthodox Islamic faith. The literature of democratic Islam, like that of modern Orthodox Judaism, may be read as an embodiment of dialectical struggle, the unwillingness to ignore contemporary reality in constant interplay with the weight of tradition taken by them as authentic and divinely inspired. The imams I have met over the years seem, on the whole, no less sincere than the rabbis who taught me. Their commitment to their faith and to the legal tradition that comes with it seems just as heartfelt. Liberal Muslims may even have their own Joe Lieberman in the Minnesota congressman Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to the U.S. Congress.
The themes of difference and reconciliation that have preoccupied so much of my own thinking are nowhere more stark than in trying to make sense of the problem of marriage — which is also, for me, the most personal aspect of coming to terms with modern Orthodoxy. Although Jews of many denominations are uncomfortable with marriage between Jews and people of other religions, modern Orthodox condemnation is especially definitive.
The reason for the resistance to such marriages derives from Jewish law but also from the challenge of defining the borders of the modern Orthodox community in the liberal modern state. Ultra-Orthodox Judaism addresses the boundary problem with methods like exclusionary group living and deciding business disputes through privately constituted Jewish-law tribunals. For modern Orthodox Jews, who embrace citizenship and participate in the larger political community, the relationship to the liberal state is more ambivalent. The solution adopted has been to insist on the coherence of the religious community as a social community, not a political community. It is defined not so much by what people believe or say they believe (it is much safer not to ask) as by what they do.
Marriage is the most obvious public practice about which information is readily available. When combined with the traditional Jewish concern for continuity and self-preservation — itself only intensified by the memory of the Holocaust — marriage becomes the sine qua non of social membership in the modern Orthodox community. Marrying a Jewish but actively nonobservant spouse would in most cases make continued belonging difficult. Gay Orthodox Jews find themselves marginalized not only because of their forbidden sexual orientation but also because within the tradition they cannot marry the partners whom they might otherwise choose. For those who choose to marry spouses of another faith, maintaining membership would become all but impossible.
Us and Them
In a few cases, modern Orthodoxy’s line-drawing has been implicated in some truly horrifying events. Yigal Amir, the assassin of Yitzhak Rabin, was a modern Orthodox Jew who believed that Rabin’s peace efforts put him into the Talmudic category of one who may be freely executed because he is in the act of killing Jews. In 1994, Dr. Baruch Goldstein massacred 29 worshipers in the mosque atop the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron. An American-born physician, Goldstein attended a prominent modern Orthodox Jewish day school in Brooklyn. (In a classic modern Orthodox twist, the same distinguished school has also produced two Nobel Prize winners.)
Because of the proximity of Goldstein’s background and mine, the details of his reasoning have haunted me. Goldstein committed his terrorist act on Purim, the holiday commemorating the victory of the Jews over Haman, traditionally said to be a descendant of the Amalekites. The previous Sabbath, he sat in synagogue and heard the special additional Torah portion for the day, which includes the famous injunction in the Book of Deuteronomy to remember what the Amalekites did to the Israelites on their way out of Egypt and to erase the memory of Amalek from beneath the heavens.
This commandment was followed by a further reading from the Book of Samuel. It details the first intentional and explicit genocide depicted in the Western canon: God’s directive to King Saul to kill every living Amalekite — man, woman and child, and even the sheep and cattle. Saul fell short. He left the Amalekite king alive and spared the sheep. As a punishment for the incompleteness of the slaughter, God took the kingdom from him and his heirs and gave it to David. I can remember this portion verbatim. That Saturday, like Goldstein, I was in synagogue, too.
Of course as a matter of Jewish law, the literal force of the biblical command of genocide does not apply today. The rabbis of the Talmud, in another of their universalizing legal rulings, held that because of the Assyrian King Sennacherib’s policy of population movement at the time of the First Temple, it was no longer possible to ascertain who was by descent an Amalekite. But as a schoolboy I was taught that the story of Amalek was about not just historical occurrence but cyclical recurrence: “In every generation, they rise up against us to destroy us, but the Holy One, blessed be He, saves us from their hands.” The Jews’ enemies today are the Amalekites of old. The inquisitors, the Cossacks — Amalekites. Hitler was an Amalekite, too.
To Goldstein, the Palestinians were Amalekites. Like a Puritan seeking the contemporary type of the biblical archetype, he applied Deuteronomy and Samuel to the world before him. Commanded to settle the land, he settled it. Commanded to slaughter the Amalekites without mercy or compassion, he slew them. Goldstein could see difference as well as similarity. According to one newspaper account, when he was serving in the Israeli military, he refused to treat non-Jewish patients. And his actions were not met by universal condemnation: his gravestone describes him as a saint and a martyr of the Jewish people, “Clean of hands and pure of heart.”
It would be a mistake to blame messianic modern Orthodoxy for ultranationalist terror. But when the evil comes from within your own midst, the soul searching needs to be especially intense. After the Hebron massacre, my own teacher, the late Israeli scholar and poet Ezra Fleischer — himself a paragon of modern Orthodox commitment — said that the innocent blood of the Palestinian worshipers dripped through the stones and formed tears in the eyes of the Patriarchs buried below.
Lives of Contradiction
Recently I saw my oldest school friend again, and recalling the tale of the reunion photograph, we shared a laugh over my continuing status as persona non grata. She remarked that she had never even considered sending in her news to our alumni newsletter. “But why not?” I asked. Her answer was illuminating. As someone who never took steps that would have led to her public exclusion, she felt that the school and the community of which it was a part always sought to claim her — a situation that had its own costs for her sense of autonomy.
For me, having exercised my choices differently, there is no such risk. With no danger of feeling owned, I haven’t lost the wish to be treated like any other old member. From the standpoint of the religious community, of course, the preservation of collective mores requires sanctioning someone who chooses a different way of living. But I still have my own inward sense of unalienated connection to my past. In synagogue on Purim with my children reading the Book of Esther, the beloved ancient phrases give me a sense of joy that not even Baruch Goldstein can completely take away.
It is more than a little strange, feeling fully engaged with a way of seeing the world but also, at the same time, feeling so far from it. I was discussing it just the other day with my best friend — who, naturally, went to Maimonides, too. The topic was whether we would be the same people, in essence, had we remained completely within the bosom of modern Orthodoxy. He didn’t think so. Our life choices are constitutive of who we are, and so different life choices would have made us into different people — not unrecognizably different, but palpably, measurably so.
I accepted his point as true — but for some reason I resisted the conclusion. Couldn’t the contradictory world from which we sprang be just as rich and productive as the contradictory life we actually live? Would it really, truly, have made all that much difference? Isn’t everyone’s life a mass of contradictions? My best friend just laughed.
16 April 2007
My 15 minutes of fame last Shabbat/final days of Pesach: "Hey, I saw you in the Washington Jewish Week!" The print version even had my smiling face on the final jump page (a photo Mike had taken!), but the online article about adult children of intermarriage can be found there, without the photos. Also, alas, without the list of resources that were in the print edition that I thought were interesting & valuable. Ah well!
For those of you who don't want to hunt it up, here it is! (With some MiriyaB editorial comments...)
For those of you who don't want to hunt it up, here it is! (With some MiriyaB editorial comments...)
Jewish/Latina: Hola & Shalom, hermana, sistah!
Something I put on the Message Board Forum of the Half-Jewish Network, in a thread titled "Half Jewish-Half Latin":
[if you're interested in the full discussion/post by D. that I was responding to, go to the thread]
D. said: "The problem with being a halfie is other peoples insistance on telling you what you should be instead of allowing you to decide for yourself."
Agreed! So (hard as it is), I think that we should be proud of who we are and of our necessarily complicated explorations of our rich mixed heritages -- which then will allow us to decide for ourselves. And even to make different decisions along the way, at different times.
D. says: "I'm not sure how to embrace being Jewish or if I even have the right."
You absolutely have the right to explore and determine what your Jewish heritage means to you: others can give information and models for what they think "being Jewish" is or should be, but they have no right to impose them upon you as the only correct way.
My mother & her side of the family are Jewish (she grew up as a Brooklyn Jew like Diana's dad), my father & his are not: he was born in Cuba to a Cuban Catholic mom & American Protestant dad, but raised in Kentucky and didn't learn Spanish until high school or college. My brothers & I are Jews, raised Jewish, and also aware of our Hispanic heritage--but without much "content" to that last part (my dad's parents died when we were all quite young, we're not in touch with that much of the Cuban part of our family, etc.--though we all did learn Spanish and I used to write/phone my great-grandmother in Miami in it when she was still alive, through my college years). So in a way it sounds like mine is something of the flip side of your experience: I feel thoroughly Jewish, and I have interest in my Latina side but wasn't immersed in that culture growing up.
I just checked the website for Makor (92nd St Y) in NYC and see that the main event featured there right now is the upcoming Feria Artistica weeklong celebration of Latino Jewish culture, with a big kickoff event April 29: http://www.92y.org/shop/category.asp?category=888Feria%5FArtistica888&adsource=mb_fera
Even though we are both Jewish and Latina but not from the same sides, it could be interesting to see how those 2 cultures go together...
It sounded from one of your posts like you live in NYC? And that you're more interested in cultural than in religious Jewish stuff? I would think that there should be lots of interesting Jewish cultural stuff at places like MAKOR/the 92nd St Y: I don't live in NYC but I have friends who do, so if you'd be interested in my finding out more for what you're specifically interested in/where you live or hang out, I'd be happy to. One of my best friends in NYC is a woman who converted to Judaism (on her own, not in a relationship with someone) about 10 years ago, so she knows what it's like to "join" a community and a culture as an adult, having been brought up outside it though with some interest in it.
I've only had good experiences, generally, with my Jewishness and mixed background. My husband converted to Judaism and similarly has had mostly good experiences (more of a rocky road in Europe). It may be that the more traditional someone is, the more they do see Jewishness as a closed club where only certain people who pass muster are welcome--but there are plenty of more progressive and cultural contexts where I would certainly hope that's not the case.
I hope that some of the information at places like interfaithfamily.com (which I think had an issue of their web magazine about Jews & Latinos recently?) and JOI.org would also help you feel more welcomed and to know that we are not alone, and there is institutional support for opening, not closing, the door to people like you & me. Anyway -- though I may not be someone who's "on your Jewish side" geneologically, I'm definitely "on your (Jewish) side" as someone else of mixed descent who wants to welcome you. Maybe your mom & my dad aren't the people that Brooklyn Jews expected your dad & my mom to marry -- but they did, and now you & I are here & laying claim to all parts of our heritage.
Shalom y un abrazo,
Rebecca
[if you're interested in the full discussion/post by D. that I was responding to, go to the thread]
D. said: "The problem with being a halfie is other peoples insistance on telling you what you should be instead of allowing you to decide for yourself."
Agreed! So (hard as it is), I think that we should be proud of who we are and of our necessarily complicated explorations of our rich mixed heritages -- which then will allow us to decide for ourselves. And even to make different decisions along the way, at different times.
D. says: "I'm not sure how to embrace being Jewish or if I even have the right."
You absolutely have the right to explore and determine what your Jewish heritage means to you: others can give information and models for what they think "being Jewish" is or should be, but they have no right to impose them upon you as the only correct way.
My mother & her side of the family are Jewish (she grew up as a Brooklyn Jew like Diana's dad), my father & his are not: he was born in Cuba to a Cuban Catholic mom & American Protestant dad, but raised in Kentucky and didn't learn Spanish until high school or college. My brothers & I are Jews, raised Jewish, and also aware of our Hispanic heritage--but without much "content" to that last part (my dad's parents died when we were all quite young, we're not in touch with that much of the Cuban part of our family, etc.--though we all did learn Spanish and I used to write/phone my great-grandmother in Miami in it when she was still alive, through my college years). So in a way it sounds like mine is something of the flip side of your experience: I feel thoroughly Jewish, and I have interest in my Latina side but wasn't immersed in that culture growing up.
I just checked the website for Makor (92nd St Y) in NYC and see that the main event featured there right now is the upcoming Feria Artistica weeklong celebration of Latino Jewish culture, with a big kickoff event April 29: http://www.92y.org/shop/category.asp?category=888Feria%5FArtistica888&adsource=mb_fera
Even though we are both Jewish and Latina but not from the same sides, it could be interesting to see how those 2 cultures go together...
It sounded from one of your posts like you live in NYC? And that you're more interested in cultural than in religious Jewish stuff? I would think that there should be lots of interesting Jewish cultural stuff at places like MAKOR/the 92nd St Y: I don't live in NYC but I have friends who do, so if you'd be interested in my finding out more for what you're specifically interested in/where you live or hang out, I'd be happy to. One of my best friends in NYC is a woman who converted to Judaism (on her own, not in a relationship with someone) about 10 years ago, so she knows what it's like to "join" a community and a culture as an adult, having been brought up outside it though with some interest in it.
I've only had good experiences, generally, with my Jewishness and mixed background. My husband converted to Judaism and similarly has had mostly good experiences (more of a rocky road in Europe). It may be that the more traditional someone is, the more they do see Jewishness as a closed club where only certain people who pass muster are welcome--but there are plenty of more progressive and cultural contexts where I would certainly hope that's not the case.
I hope that some of the information at places like interfaithfamily.com (which I think had an issue of their web magazine about Jews & Latinos recently?) and JOI.org would also help you feel more welcomed and to know that we are not alone, and there is institutional support for opening, not closing, the door to people like you & me. Anyway -- though I may not be someone who's "on your Jewish side" geneologically, I'm definitely "on your (Jewish) side" as someone else of mixed descent who wants to welcome you. Maybe your mom & my dad aren't the people that Brooklyn Jews expected your dad & my mom to marry -- but they did, and now you & I are here & laying claim to all parts of our heritage.
Shalom y un abrazo,
Rebecca
07 March 2007
Sensible op-ed in the Forward by Shaul Kelner, which begins:
"If you happen to have missed the latest round in the debate over interfaith marriage, outreach and in-reach, fret not. This dog has been chasing its tail for nearly two decades, and shows no sign of tiring or jumping out of the deep groove it has cut as it runs in circles."
Ain't that the truth!
"Intermarriage has since become a normal part of most American Jews’ friendship and family networks, but the conceptual frameworks that policymakers and expert observers offer seem strangely frozen in time, as if the experience of the past 17 years has meant nothing."
Unh-hunh. And to judge by many of the comments posted on the op-ed, it continues to mean nothing to those who have already made up their minds.
"If you happen to have missed the latest round in the debate over interfaith marriage, outreach and in-reach, fret not. This dog has been chasing its tail for nearly two decades, and shows no sign of tiring or jumping out of the deep groove it has cut as it runs in circles."
Ain't that the truth!
"Intermarriage has since become a normal part of most American Jews’ friendship and family networks, but the conceptual frameworks that policymakers and expert observers offer seem strangely frozen in time, as if the experience of the past 17 years has meant nothing."
Unh-hunh. And to judge by many of the comments posted on the op-ed, it continues to mean nothing to those who have already made up their minds.
01 March 2007
Are you a FrankenJew?
Not the term I'd choose, but it does have a certain attention-getting value...
I've got some comments on this Jewcy blogpost. (Warning: the discourse goes downhill pretty fast!)
I've got some comments on this Jewcy blogpost. (Warning: the discourse goes downhill pretty fast!)
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Posted July 22, 2007 | 09:04 PM (EST)