Susan Katz Miller's Blog, page 12
February 19, 2018
2018 Spring Interfaith Connections
In nine years of writing this interfaith blog, I have posted multiple essays on many of the spring Jewish and Christian holidays: Purim, St Patrick’s Day, Passover, Easter. But the complex, interlocking quilt squares of #GenerationInterfaith now go far beyond Judaism and Christianity. Speaking in Chicago a couple of years ago, I met a woman from a Jewish and Christian interfaith family with a Hindu partner, and a man from a Jewish and Chr...
January 31, 2018
December 12, 2017
December 7, 2017
October 31, 2017
“Intermarriage” and a Rabbi Roundtable
[image error]
I could not resist responding to a piece posted today in The Forward, as part of a new regular feature called the Rabbi Roundtable.
The topic: “Is Intermarriage a Problem or an Opportunity?”
Where to start? Let’s start with the sample. The Forward published answers from 22 rabbis, and half of them are Orthodox. Only two are Reform. According to Pew Research (2013), 10% of American Jews claim Orthodox affiliation, and 35% Reform (by far the largest denomination). As I read through the first f...
September 12, 2017
High Holy Days 2017: Finding Interfaith Community
[image error]
September means back to school. The last of the tomatoes, and the first pumpkins. Cooler nights. The angle of the autumn light. And for many families celebrating Judaism, a scramble to figure out how to celebrate the High Holy Days.
The New Year of 5778 in the Hebrew calendar starts at sundown on September 20th this year. That means that the High Holy Days start with Rosh Hashanah on the evening of September 20th. And the Days of Awe always conclude ten days later with Yom Kippur, which star...
August 22, 2017
Children’s Books, Interfaith Education
Books my interfaith kids read Photo, Susan Katz Miller
How do we educate interfaith children about the various religions in the family tree? These days, a child may have a Jewish father, Hindu mother, Buddhist uncle, and Christian step-grandparent. Such children benefit deeply from understanding the religions they encounter at home and at family gatherings. And many interfaith parents are on the lookout for supportive tools for interfaith educat...
July 24, 2017
Jew by Cynthia M. Baker: Book Review
[image error]
As someone who has been labeled a “first class disrupter,” I was of course immediately attracted to the chutzpah of a book entitled, simply, Jew. Published recently as part of the Rutgers University Press series “Key Words in Jewish Studies,” this slim volume by Cynthia M. Baker, a Religious Studies professor at Bates College, is dense with insight, nuance, and helpful frameworks for thinking about the complex histories and meanings of the word Jew, and more broadly, the complex histories an...
June 20, 2017
What Do Interfaith Families Want From Rabbis?
Photo by Susan Katz Miller
Over at the Forward, I published an Op-Ed today as part of a recent series of opinions on rabbinic officiation and interfaith marriage. Take a look on their site if you want to engage in the discussion there. Or read it here…
In the most recent round of wrestling over interfaith marriage, we have heard from rabbis, academics and community leaders. As someone in the middle generation of a three-generation interfaith family, one founded in 1960 when my Jewish fath...
