Intermarriage

This is an issue I will have to face sometime in the future. My boyfriend and I are getting very serious and occasionally we'll talk about our future together (mostly being cute). However, I am from a Jewish family and he is from a Christian family. I asked him if he would convert to Judaism if we wanted to get married and he confessed that he isn't religious and doesn't see the point in converting. He said he had no problem with me raising any future children to be Jewish, but it does raise the question of how my children would identify as Jews. Would they consider themselves half-Jews? If I do marry this man, is he going to let me celebrate Jewish holidays with the children? Will he want to celebrate Christmas with them? Is he going to be uncomfortable if I wanted to circumcise any sons we may have? These are questions that are concerning me about this. Now, we aren't planning on getting married anytime soon. It's just a thought we both have. I'm also worried about my parents. Are they going to be okay with him not converting if he wants to marry me? Are my parents going to accept this? Also, his parents are devoted Christians. Are they going to be okay with me raising their grandchildren to be Jewish?

Messianic Judaism

I don't understand this at all. How can anyone be Jewish and Christian at the same time? It doesn't make any sense. A huge part of Judaism is that we are still waiting for our messiah while Christianity accepts Jesus as the messiah. How do you overcome that? Do you argue that Messianic Jews are waiting for the second coming of Jesus as their messiah? Doesn't that just make them Christian?

On their website, www.mjaa.org (Messianic Jewish Alliance of America) on Joel Chernoff's blog, he describes the correlation between Passover and Communion. "This brings me to the New Covenant Passover. Did you know that the Christian Communion, that is celebrated at various times throughout the year, depending on what denomination and church you are associated with, is actually a Passover celebration. In other words the Last Supper was a Passover meal." I guess this makes sense and he is really trying to argue the connection between Judaism and Christianity. I suppose that they are worshiping the same G-d essentially so I guess it's harmless. I still find it confusing but, whatever.

African American Jews

Several years ago, we had a black rabbi visit my temple. He came to discuss race and religion within Judaism. His name escapes me at the moment. Anyway, he said that he was raised in a Catholic home where he was told to not read the Bible and to listen to the pastor. When he went to college, he decided to read the Bible and he discovered that "there were a lot of Jews in the Bible". Apparently, his pastor never mentioned that. Eventually, this African American man started studying Judaism and converted after college. A few years later, he married an African American woman who was willing to convert to Judaism. He described the obstacles facing a man who is African American and Jewish. For one, "he is a KKK's worst nightmare" and additionally, his children were accepting of two powerful ethnic groups. He went on to describe their temple at home. The demographics of this temple is mostly white. He said that he is sometimes worried that the white children in the temple will feel weird about being in class with African American Jews but that wasn't the case.

African American Jews are starting to become a larger part of the Jewish community. Additionally, it helps to have an African American president with a wife who has a cousin who is a rabbi. (Sorry if this post is odd, but I'm tired and not exactly sure what to say)

Jews and Israel

I've been working on the paper for class all of this week. Basically, my paper is based off a JTA article which reports a speech Obama did on March 26th to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the Egypt-Israel peace treaty. He announced that peace was possible in the middle east between the Arabs and the Israelis. My paper serves to question why the president feels a need to use Israel as part of his foreign policy. My proposal is that he uses Israel as a way to connect to the Jewish people. Jews identify with Israel. Now, I tried to explain this to my boyfriend but he didn't understand. He doesn't understand how a group of people can feel so attached to a small patch of land that is merely the size of New Jersey. I tried to explain but I don't think I could explain it. I tried to explain the historic significance of Israel. Is it because of the history? I also tried to explain the religious significance to my boyfriend. I told him about the temple and the western wall but he still didn't understand. Is it because of our religion? What connects Jews to Israel?

Birthright definitely tries to explain that Israel is an important part of Judaism with their program to send young Jews to Israel. Complete with attractive Israeli troops. Why is Israel Jewish? What makes Israel Jewish? I don't know anymore.

Jewish Studies

For the purposes of the Jewish Studies, I examined Indiana Unversity’s major in Jewish Studies. According to the College of Arts and Sciences catalog, “The Jewish Studies Program has as its objective the study of Jewish civilization from antiquity to the present and its interaction with and impact on world civilization. There is broad agreement that the various facets of Jewish culture-literature, history, religion, philosophy, languages, and other constituent features of Judaism-comprise one of the richest complexes within the whole of recorded cultural history.”
The description also goes on to describe the various departments within the College of Arts and Sciences which identifies Jewish Studies as history, religion, literature, political science etc. According to the standards created by IU, a student wishing to major in Jewish Studies needs the following:

2 semesters of Hebrew
Intro to Judaism or Jewish History: Bible to Spanish Expansion
Jewish History: Spanish Expansion to Modern
A specialization in Literature, History or Religion

This means that the university divides ‘Jewish Studies’ into language, religion, history and literature. Additionally, the school offers classes with Jewish topics in the folklore, philosophy, political science, anthropology etc. Additionally, the language of the Jewish people extends into Germanic and Slavic language.

'Queer Judaism'

For the purposes of this blog entry, I decided to review the Jewish Queer Youth's website. First, I notice the use of bright colors originating from the rainbow as the icon of homosexual culture. A nifty paragraph on the homepage announces their goal is to give young (18-30) homosexual Jews a comfortable place to anonymously discuss various issues facing their identity as both Jews and homosexuals.

Directly under the Home link is a link which leads to an article titled "Gay?" which addresses the issue of 'coming out'. "No matter how you look at it, according to Yahadut (Judaism), there is no aveirah (transgression) in having homosexual or transgendered feelings. What prohibitions are involved in terms of actually carrying out one's desires involves major halachic (Jewish legal) discussions. The GayJews' Homepage goes more into a halachic discussion of homosexuality. You may also want to check out the Open Halacha website." I tried to look at the links to see what they were referring to, but they were broken links.

An interesting thing about JQY is found in the FAQs page. After looking over the various questions and answers, I found that most, if not all the questions were about homosexuality and didn't reflect any concerns of judaism. For me, it seems that this organization focuses more on the homosexual identity than the jewish identity.

Another interesting tab was the 'experiences' tab where young Jews described their struggles with between their homosexuality and their Jewish ancestry. One woman tells a sad story of how her parents arranged her marriage (I believe she was Hasidic or Chabad. I don't remember which). She married the man and had children quickly but in a few years, she fell in love with a woman. Eventually, this led to a 'road to discovery' and she took the children and left her husband to pursue a new life, free to explore her new found identity. These messages were very touching and really captured the suffering some people go through, simply trying to be themselves.

Paskudnyak by Sonia Pilcer

First, I'd like to point out that I did a little research on Sonia Pilcer. (Thank you Wikipedia). According to Wikipedia, she has written stories that are loosely based on her own life.

In this story, Zosha is part of a Polish Jewish family. Her parents are Holocaust survivors Genia and Heniek (he escaped from Auschwitz so he has numbers). If Wikipedia is to believed, these people were real people. Anyway, this short story deals with the pressures on young people to assimilate into American culture while traditional households encourages tradition. This leaves our protagonist and narrator, Zosha torn between two worlds. There is an interesting progression in this story because in the beginning, little Zosha seems to enjoy the Jewish traditions, even to the point of wanting to ink numbers on her arm to be like her mother (though it's father who has the numbers). As usual, a young child doesn't really understand what it means to be Jewish and in this case, she thinks that numbers and as such, suffering is a part of her identity. As the girl grows into a teenager, she comes to abandon her Jewish identity in favor of being an American teenager. She dresses as her friends dress, wearing tight outfits, short skirts and boots (something her parents detest, thus conveying their traditional lifestyle). Desperate, her parents take her to a rabbi but she will have none her it. She refuses to speak hebrew and denies entry to a hebrew school. This is an emotional scene but she has effectively abandons her faith in favor of her American life.