Tom Lantos was a real mentsch and an important voice for human rights in Congress, even if he would never have been allowed to speak at a Rabbinical Assembly convention. Since Tom Lantos was married to a non-Jewish woman (in photo), he would have been forbidden from addressing the Rabbinical Assembly during its annual convention. As a dues-paying member of the Conservative Movement's Rabbinical Assembly, I was surprised this week to learn of this policy.

Labels: Conservative Judaism, Interfaith, Jewish, Politics, Rabbi

The rabbis say they felt compelled to act because of the gradual dilution of the faith through marriage. Almost half of American Jews marry non-Jews, a rate of exodus that has more than tripled since 1970. "This is about creating an opportunity," says Cahana. Sometimes even Cupid needs a nudge.

Labels: Interfaith, Jewish, Reform Judaism

Should Jews have a Christmas tree in their home? One thing is clear, quite a few do!

How many? In a list of 35 cities in the North American Jewish Data Bank, in most cities, 20% to 30% of the Jewish households say that they "always, usually or sometimes" have a Christmas tree. Here are a few examples: Washington D.C. 27%, Philadelphia, 23%, St. Louis 22%, Los Angeles 20%, and Detroit 15%.

A Christmas tree in a Jewish home has been one of the hottest topics in emails people have sent me over the years as a Jewish advice columnist on AOL and now on my own website, beingjewish.org.

Why so much interest in this topic? Jewish demographers ask because they want to know, in a Christian society where Christmas is pervasive, how Jews react to and assimilate into the larger culture. For these researchers, having a Christmas tree is something of a barometer of Jewish identity, assimilation and the impact of intermarriage.

The many people who have emailed to me asking about the appropriateness of having a Christmas tree are also essentially grappling with questions of assimilation and Jewish identity. Specifically, they are asking whether and how Jews should celebrate Christmas?

I agree with Gil (right) that this is a hot topic for interfaith families. The litmus test interfaith couples seem to use in establishing whether their family has a "Jewish home" is whether they put up a Christmas tree. For Jewish people who have converted to Judaism from Christianity (or are in the process of converting), this is also a very delicate subject. While many converts are able to bid farewell to their Christian past and all Christian theology, it is often the Christmas tree that is the hardest tradition to forgo.

The statistics are revealing. Almost 30% of Jews have a Christmas tree? So many people see the Christmas tree as an innocuous, innocent holiday ritual with no religious significance. However, as Gil Mann points out in his article, "the star that adorns the top of these trees is meant to symbolize the Star of Bethlehem which marked the birth of the messiah Jesus. I see this as a very religious [symbol]." I have also heard that the actual tree is symbolic of the wooden cross.

Gil doesn't address the issue of Santa Claus, but I think this is a separate matter. The Christmas tree is brought into the home and makes a statement about the religious values of the home during the holiday season, whereas getting your children's photo taken on Santa's lap is closer to being photographed with Mickey Mouse at Disney World. True, Santa represents Saint Nick, but he has come to be more of a cartoon figure in our modern society.

When I asked my son if he knew that his buddy and classmate at the Jewish Community Center Preschool was not Jewish, he responded that he did. I asked him how he knew that. He responded that his friend's father had picked him up one day from school and told him to hurry because they were going to see Santa Claus at the mall. I didn't have the heart to tell my son that his dad, the rabbi, sat on Santa's lap too when he was a kid!

I like the way Gil Mann closes his article with advice from Joel Grishaver:

What Jews should accept and adopt from the dominant culture is at the root of the Christmas tree question. My personal response for myself and my children is advice I heed from Jewish educator Joel Grishaver. We have gone to Christian friends and celebrated their holiday with them in their home. In turn, they have come to our home to celebrate Passover and other Jewish holidays.

Going to a friend’s home for their holiday is similar to attending a friend’s birthday party. I can enjoy their celebration even though I know it is not my birthday party. In this case, they are celebrating Jesus’ birthday. My children understand this and respect our friends’ celebration of his birth.

We happily wish our Christian friends and neighbors a Merry Christmas in their celebration. In fact, I love Christmas, Christmas music and the holiday spirit. Still in our home, we do not celebrate this birthday or have a tree because this is not our party. That’s OK with me because as a Jew, I have plenty of Jewish holidays to celebrate and I am delighted to share our parties with my non-Jewish friends and neighbors.

Labels: Christianity, Holidays, Interfaith, Jewish

ANN COULTER: How about eating soup? Is that a classic food of anti-Semites?

ALAN COLMES: Yeah, that's lovely, Ann. I'm going to move on in spite of yourself, and maybe save you from saying something else that's ridiculous.

Labels: Christianity, Conservative Judaism, Interfaith, Jewish, Politics

Labels: Baseball, Christianity, Interfaith, Sports

Labels: Antisemitism, Interfaith, Jewish, Politics

"By the end of the magazine piece, any sympathy I might have had for him had evaporated and in its place was sheer disgust. Reading postings on the blogosphere, I know that I am hardly alone.

Oh, Noah, you meander through childhood memories that are hardly unique to anyone who attended Orthodox Jewish day school. So the Maimonides School had to cloak their obligatory sex ed in the prohibitions of negiah, hauling out the philosophy of Feinstein in a multi-volume set to suppress your teenage hard-on. Big freaking deal. So you got reprimanded for holding hands with a girl? Been there, done that. So, your rebbes said stupid, parochial things about...goyim? Wow. I never heard of that happening.

There is a Talmudic debate about saving the life of a non-Jew on Shabbat? How fascinating that this took place so many centuries ago! Of course it is as dated as most of the discussions in the Talmud about women. Isn't the proof of the pudding in the fact that Jewish doctors are a worldwide institution, saving the lives of Jews and non-Jews without discrimination on Shabbat, on Yom Kippur, on every day of the week????

Do you hope to reveal some ugly, hidden face of Judaism to your shocked readers who previously had such a positive view of Jews? A pile of gentile corpses outside of Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, all the unlucky goyim in Upper Manhattan who had the misfortune to get sick on Shabbos?

Which readership are you writing for, anyway? The subscribers to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion?" [Ouch!]

Andrew Silow Carrol, Editor of the New Jersey Jewish News (Jerusalem Post)
I once read an essay by a woman who said she "observes Shabbat." On Saturday mornings on the Upper West Side, she sat on a park bench with her newspaper and "observed" her friends and neighbors going to shul. Her joke came back to me as I read the now infamous essay on modern Orthodoxy by Harvard law professor Noah Feldman[...]. I'll leave it to others to debate the Jewish community's treatment of intermarriage. I was less intrigued by Feldman's relationship with his wife than I was by his relationship with Judaism.

Labels: Conservative Judaism, Interfaith, Medicine, Orthodox Judaism, Pluralism

[T]he 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.

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.

Labels: Interfaith, Orthodox Judaism

Labels: Interfaith, Orthodox Judaism

Too many guest ministers are invoking the name of Jesus during their prayers, a no-no under House guidelines, which, based on a 1983 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, requires such prayers to be nondenominational, nonsectarian and nonproselytizing.

Guidelines also say prayers should avoid contentious subjects.

The issue reached a tipping point during Wednesday's invocation when the Rev. Keith Hamblen, pastor of Calvary Bible Church in Lima, made multiple references to Jesus, spoke favorably of church-sponsored schools and mentioned the bills up for debate that day, including a controversial strip-club proposal. [Watch a video of this invocation]

That sparked a memo from House Clerk Laura Clemens to all members.

"I have received several legitimate complaints from members recently about the disregard for the guest minister guidelines, more specifically the increasing tendency of our guest invocators to use language referring to a particular deity," she wrote.

House Speaker Jon A. Husted, R-Kettering, requires that all prayers from guest ministers be delivered to the clerk's office 72 hours in advance -- a deadline that had been loosely enforced.

"We want our guest ministers to be able to speak freely, but we also want to keep in mind all of the members in the chamber," said Karen Tabor, spokeswoman for Husted.

Rep. Chris Redfern of Catawba Island, the Ohio Democratic chairman, was one of two Democrats to walk off the floor during Wednesday's prayer. He said prayers over recent years have become "increasingly evangelical."

"The opening prayer is a time to be mindful of the obligations that we've been granted through our voters and gives us a chance to reflect," he said. "It should not be used as an opportunity to proselytize. At times, all we're lacking is a river to take members down to dip them in."

Other reaction was mixed. Rep. Matt Huffman, R-Lima, who invited Hamblen to give the prayer, said it was inappropriate for him to mention issues on that day's agenda. "I kind of cringed when he did it."

Rep. Josh Mandel, R-Lyndhurst, one of two Jewish members in the House, said he had no problem with the prayer.

"Our country is based on freedom of religion, not a freedom from religion," he said. "Clergy of any religion should have freedom to say the opening prayer of their wish."

Charles Wertz agrees. The Madison County resident and pastor of Journey of Faith Fellowship said it's appalling that for a prayer to pass political correctness, "you have to gut all the things that make any prayer significant."

Christians naturally pray in the name of Jesus, he said.

"There's a stupidity to all this in that if they don't want somebody praying in the name of Jesus, then don't invite a Christian," Wertz said.

The U.S. Supreme Court has generally banned government-sponsored prayer at public events. But in 1983 it made an exception for Congress and state legislatures.

But challenges continue. An Indiana federal district court ruled in November 2005 that legislative prayers no longer could invoke the name of Jesus. The case was appealed.

A 2002 survey by the National Conference of State Legislatures found that 37 legislative chambers had guidelines for invocations and three required clergy members to submit their prayers for review. The Ohio Senate has guidelines on content but does not require prayers to be submitted.

Raymond Vasvari, a First Amendment specialist and former legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio, says the Ohio House is in a bind. While leaders don't want sectarian prayer, government inviting a minister to speak and then vetting his or her prayer is akin to illegal prior restraint, he said.

"They need to pick people who aren't going to say things that are overly divisive," he said. "But once they open the door and invite a guest minister in, they pretty much have to live with what he intends to say until he's done saying it."

Clemens, the House clerk, wrote that the policy may limit the ability to have a guest invocator at every session, but she asked members to help her enforce it.

"I would hate to have to eliminate this program but may find it necessary to do so if this trend continues," she wrote.

Labels: Interfaith, Ohio, Politics

"I don't like his politics or his theology, but we live in a time when friends of Israel are few and far between. We have to recognize that we are receiving support from the evangelical community that we are not receiving from our traditional friends. I'll be happy to talk about the theological context after we achieve a safe and secure Israel."

Labels: Interfaith, Israel

Labels: Interfaith, Israel

Labels: Interfaith, Jewish