Women And Men, Part 2
Jewish Men Are From Mars…
This one has gotten a lot of response, both favorable and not so. Feel free to add your own thoughts….
http://www.thejewishweek.com/viewArticle/c55_a13164/Editorial__Opinion/Opinion.html
The Jewish-Catholic Connection
http://www.thejewishweek.com/viewArticle/c55_a12917/Editorial__Opinion/Opinion.html
Why are so many Jews, like myself, married to Catholics?
Immigrating To Judaism
This month I talk to people who convert to Judaism many years after they marry a Jew: http://www.thejewishweek.com/viewArticle/c55_a12494/Editorial__Opinion/Opinion.html
Jewish-Gentile In The Jewish State
This month’s post, in honor of Israel’s 60th anniversary, explores what happens when interfaith couples go to the Promised Land: http://www.thejewishweek.com/viewArticle/c55_a9419/Editorial__Opinion/Opinion.html
Strangers At A Strange Meal
Happy Passover!http://www.thejewishweek.com/viewArticle/c221_a7715/Singles/First_Person_Singular_.html
The first time Melinda Young went to a Passover seder, the hosts put an individual seder plate at each place setting.
Assuming this arrangement of symbolic foods comprised the entire meal, Young, a lapsed Catholic who lives in Austin, Texas, remembers looking at the plate thinking, “OK, there’s a piece of matzah, a boiled egg — and I don’t think there’s any meat on that bone.”
When the matzah ball soup came she downed two portions, convinced it would be the last food she’d see for hours.
Which, of course, it was not. “There’s more food at a Jewish celebration than anywhere else in the world!” exclaims Young, who has been married to a Jewish man for 11 years, is raising her
three sons as Jews and jokes that she now considers herself “half-Jewish.”
Unless we have especially dysfunctional families or are, like my daughter Ellie this year, the child asking the Four Questions for the first time, Jews don’t usually find attending Passover seders all that nerve wracking. (As opposed to the notoriously stressful experience of hosting a seder, especially for those who first make their homes fully kosher for Passover.)
But for gentile guests who’ve never before donned a kipa or opened a Haggadah, the holiday — with its numerous rituals and lengthy list of forbidden foods — can be intimidating. Especially if, like Young back when she was a Passover newbie, you’re trying to make a good impression on future in-laws.
Since young Jews tend to socialize more with gentiles than their forbearers did and since virtually every Jewish family is touched by intermarriage, few seders today, at least outside Orthodox circles, are exclusively Jewish affairs. I can think of only a handful of Tribe-only seders I’ve attended in my lifetime — most of them in Israel. And my best friend Stacy, who will be hosting her non-Jewish boyfriend’s parents this year, says that over the years she has invited far more gentiles than Jews for Passover because “they’re the ones who don’t already have plans.”
With a little sensitivity, it’s fairly easy to make gentile newcomers feel comfortable at Passover. But they may need some extra reassurances and should definitely be told that asking questions is not just OK, but encouraged.
Elizabeth Hendler, another lapsed Catholic married to a Jewish man and raising Jewish children in Austin, remembers how self-conscious she initially felt at her first seder.
“I was aware that everyone else knew the words and prayers, that everyone else kind of knew everything and I didn’t,” she recalls.
Nonetheless Hendler ended up enjoying the holiday so much she decided to have one in her home the next year. One aspect that helped make the experience more meaningful and inclusive: each guest was assigned to research one aspect of the Exodus story (Hendler’s was the role of the midwives Shifra and Puah) before they came, and then at the seder they took turns sharing what they learned.
She urges hosts to assure gentile guests that “no one is sitting there judging you if you mess up” and no one cares “if you know the prayers.”
Some guidelines about the family’s pre-meal nibbling rules may also be in order. My friend Mike Kim, who participates in my daughter’s Tot Shabbat with his Jewish wife and daughter, recalls at his first seder he was not sure whether it was OK to nosh on the dipping vegetables and matzah during the Haggadah reading.
“I gauged the level of nibbling I could do — as I was starving — by my father-in-law’s nibbling,” he says. “The more he nibbled, the more I did. When he took a break, so did I.”
My friend Gavin Chuck fondly remembers the efforts his hosts made at the first seder he attended.
“They hid two afikomen: one for the kids and one for me, the first-timer,” he says. “I thought that was a great welcoming gesture.”
Thanks to her role as volunteer coordinator of an international student hosting program, Rhona Goldman of Stony Brook, L.I., has introduced scores of gentiles to Passover.
Goldman has written her own Haggadah that includes “a lot of quotes from American history so that people who are not Jewish can understand the universality of it.”
She also tries to keep the Hebrew readings and blessings to a minimum and gives guests “the opportunity to participate if they choose and talk about customs in their country that they find to be similar.”
Passover’s universal themes — liberation, remembering the stranger since we were strangers in Egypt, inviting all who are hungry to eat — make the holiday easy for people of virtually all backgrounds and political persuasions (at least on the leftist spectrum) to relate to and make their own. The Haggadah used at my husband’s first seder — hosted by grad students at the University of Michigan — even referenced (approvingly) Ho Chi Minh.
Once they get over the initial learning curve and the self-consciousness, many non-Jews, even those not married to Jews, become regular and enthusiastic seder-goers.
My afikomen-hunting friend Gavin, who was raised Catholic in Jamaica and is single, but has many Jewish friends, says Passover impresses him with its “free-flowing mix between ritual and contemplation — especially coming from a background that emphasized the former over the latter.”
Jimmy Tierney, a Catholic (yes, every gentile I know seems to be Catholic) who has been married to a Jewish woman for 19 years, enjoys Passover’s “combination of togetherness, historical tradition and ritual, great food, good conversation, stories with intelligent people, and of course the wine and the fresh horseradish.”
Young, who once assumed the seder plate was dinner, says Passover has edged out Christmas as her favorite holiday.
“It’s good family-centered time, and the meaning behind it is so wonderful. There’s nothing commercial about it, and the kids aren’t waiting to get presents.” (Although they may demand a steep ransom for the afikomen.) n
“In The Mix” appears the third week of the month. For past columns go to http://intermarried.wordpress.com. E-mail julie.inthemix@gmail.com.
Friday Night Lights
Why interfaith families (raising Jewish children) light Shabbat candles more than their in-married peers — and other surprising news… http://www.thejewishweek.com/viewArticle/c55_a5357/Editorial__Opinion/Opinion.html
The Two Faith Solution
I’ve lost all hope of The Jewish Week archives getting fixed but have been too swamped to set up my own archive links. Nonetheless, feel free to e-,mail me (julie.inthemix@gmail.com) for Word versions of old columns. This month I visit The Interfaith Community, a unique place for Jewish-Christian couples and their children. http://www.thejewishweek.com/viewArticle/c55_a4439/Editorial__Opinion/Opinion.html#
Intermarriage And The Orthodox
No sign of when the Jewish Week archives will be repaired, but please feel free to e-mail me for any back columns. When I get a chance, I promise to post Word versions of everything, so you, my millions (ha ha) of readers will have ready access! In the meantime, here’s the January installment: http://www.thejewishweek.com/viewArticle/c55_a1809/Editorial__Opinion/Opinion.html
More Than Noah Feldman
Julie Wiener
Special To The Jewish Week
For many years after she married John, Ilana’s parents refused to speak to her.
Ashamed that their daughter, a yeshiva high school grad, had wed a non-Jew, they told none of their friends. And when they finally renewed contact, after Ilana and John’s second son was born, Ilana was urged to hide her children from her grandfather and tell him she was still single, for fear the news of her intermarriage would trigger a heart attack.
Her parents weren’t the only ones to cut her off. At one of the few family simchas to which Ilana was invited, her Orthodox cousins “literally looked at me and then looked away,” she recalls.
“I was dead to them,” Ilana, now in her late 40s, adds. “These
were my cousins, who I’d grown up with and played on the beach with.”
In the liberal Jewish circles I frequent, this story sounds like something out of a Greek tragedy — Ilana’s family’s behavior so harsh that it can be hard to fathom in modern America. And her experience may be extreme even for the Orthodox world, where — in a “love the sinner, hate the sin” approach similar to the evolving attitude toward homosexuals — many are reporting a gradual softening toward individuals who have married out.
Nonetheless, while it has become unheard of even in haredi circles to uphold the once standard practice of sitting shiva for a child who intermarries, the Orthodox taboo against intermarriage remains intensely strong, even as a small, but hardly insignificant, number of Orthodox-raised Jews find themselves falling in love with gentiles.
One Modern Orthodox woman with whom I spoke noted that two of her daughters have close friends — both Orthodox, one a Stern College grad — who are seriously dating non-Jewish men. Last year, a 34-year-old Orthodox woman e-mailed me about her relationship with a Catholic man.
“I am struggling with this as it goes against everything I have ever been taught,” she wrote. “On the other hand, connecting with a loving, generous soul does not happen every day and I am hesitant to end the relationship.”
While certainly far less common in the Orthodox world than in secular and liberal circles, intermarriage — like homosexuality, sexual abuse and other uncomfortable phenomena — is often assumed to be rarer among the frum than it really is simply because it is kept so quiet.
Take Ilana’s family. Her father, a very traditional Conservative pulpit rabbi (most of the extended family and their friends identify as Orthodox, and Ilana and her sisters attended Orthodox schools and summer camps as children), left his job for a new shul where none of the congregants knew about her. And the Orthodox woman whose daughters’ friends are interdating? Not only were the friends uncomfortable being interviewed, even if I protected their identities and even though both are involved with men who are converting to Judaism, they requested that I not identify even the mother by name. And at Ilana’s insistence, I changed both her name and John’s name and omitted all identifying details.
When I ask Rabbi Avi Shafran, the spokesman for the fervently Orthodox Agudath Israel of America, if he knows any Orthodox Jews whose children have intermarried he insists he does not. While I don’t question his honesty, it makes me wonder whether he does in fact know such people, but that they are too ashamed or embarrassed to tell him.
Last summer, when Harvard law professor Noah Feldman wrote in The New York Times Magazine about his yeshiva high school ostracizing him for marrying a non-Jewish woman, he sparked a furor in the Orthodox community. The anger at Feldman’s “Orthodox Paradox” article was in part attributable to Feldman’s often misleading critiques of Orthodox teachings, as well as his apparently false assumption that he and his then girlfriend were the only people cropped from a reunion photo. However, I suspect that part of the rage toward Feldman was not just a response to his accusations, but anger at him stating, in the most public of forums, that it is possible — even after 12 years of Orthodox Jewish education in one of the nation’s most prestigious day schools — to marry a gentile.
Despite the community’s lingering denial that intermarriage exists within its ranks, there are definitely rumblings of change.
Although he avoids commenting on how Orthodox family members who marry out are treated, Agudath Israel’s Rabbi Shafran notes in an e-mail to me that “intermarried couples from outside the community are, I think, increasingly seen by many Orthodox Jews as people not to be summarily rejected, at least if there is any chance of the non-Jewish partner’s sincere and halachic conversion.”
Naomi Mark, an Upper West Side psychotherapist who is Orthodox and has many Orthodox patients, says she too sees a shift away from shunning and in favor of encouraging conversion.
“There are so many examples of couples I’ve worked with where even if there’s not a conversion initially, over time … the non-Jewish partner begins to feel [more open to] conversion, especially when they’re doing it of their own accord and not because of pressure. Orthodox parents have witnessed that … and most rabbis will come down on the side of keeping the relationship [with an intermarried child] going.”
Mark notes that many gentiles who fall in love with Orthodox Jews are good candidates for conversion because often their partner’s strong Jewish background is part of what attracted them in the first place.
That is certainly the case with John. He enthusiastically agreed to send his and Ilana’s children to Conservative Jewish day schools. The couple divorced three years ago, and both are currently dating Jews; John’s new girlfriend is not only Orthodox but a Bible scholar. n
“In The Mix” appears the third week of the month. For past columns, go to http://intermarried.wordpress.com. E-mail julie.inthemix@gmail.com
Oy Christmas Tree
Sadly, the Jewish Week Web archives are still in shambles. Nonetheless, my offer still stands on old columns. E-mail me and I’ll be happy to send you a Word version of any back column. In the meantime, here’s my take on that evergreen, so to speak, the December Dilemma: http://www.thejewishweek.com/viewArticle/c55_a1447/Editorial__Opinion/Opinion.html
