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In a shift, Hebrew College will now admit and ordain rabbinical students whose partners are not Jewish
(JTA) — Hebrew College will begin admitting and ordaining rabbinical students in interfaith relationships, according to new admissions standards revealed on Tuesday.
The decision makes the pluralistic seminary outside of Boston the second major rabbinical school in the United States to do away with rules barring students from dating or marrying non-Jews. The Reconstructionist Rabbinical Seminary was the first to do so in 2015.
Hebrew College’s decision comes as rabbinical schools compete over a shrinking pool of applicants and after decades of rising rates of intermarriage among American Jews.
Rabbi Sharon Cohen Anisfeld, Hebrew College’s president, announced the policy change in an email to students and graduates on Tuesday evening. She said the decision, which followed a year and a half of review, came amid a broad revision of the seminary’s “guiding principles for admission and ordination.”
Those new guiding principles were published on the admissions page of Hebrew College’s website late Tuesday, replacing different language that had included the partner policy. “We do not admit or ordain rabbinical students with non-Jewish partners,” the page had previously said, adding that applicants whose partners were in the process of converting would be considered.
“This is a really exciting moment for Jewish communities everywhere,” said Jodi Bromberg, the CEO of 18Doors, a Jewish nonprofit that supports interfaith families. “We all will get to benefit from Jewish leaders in interfaith relationships who have been sidelined from major seminaries up to now.”
Hebrew College has set aside time on Wednesday for its roughly 80 rabbinical students and others to process their reactions about the change, which Anisfeld had previously said she expected to be intense no matter the decision. She declined to comment late Tuesday, saying that she was focused on communication with members of her community.
“This has not been a simple process and, in addition to the strong feelings raised by the policy itself, there have been complex feelings about various stages of the process we’ve undertaken over the past year,” Anisfeld wrote in a message to students in October, in a series of emails obtained by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Hebrew College’s policy change reflects a longstanding and sometimes painful dynamic in American Jewish life: While nearly three-quarters of non-Orthodox Jews who married in the last decade did so to non-Jews, few traditional rabbinical schools have been willing to train or ordain rabbis in interfaith relationships. Their policies have roots in Jewish law, known as halacha, which prohibits marriages between Jews and non-Jews. But they also reflect anxiety among American Jewish leaders over whether high rates of intermarriage threaten the future of Judaism, and whether rabbis must model traditional practices in their families.
At Hebrew College, which launched its rabbinical school 20 years ago, the prohibition against interfaith relationships had been the only admissions requirement rooted in Jewish law beyond the rule that applicants must be considered Jewish according to at least one Jewish movement. There was no requirement that rabbinical students keep kosher or observe Shabbat.
When the school’s leadership first solicited feedback from students a year ago, several took aim at what they said was hypocrisy in the approach to Jewish law.
“This is the one area of students’ halachic life where I am acutely aware that the school does not trust us, does not think we are capable of navigating our own personal lives, and does not believe that the choices we may make for ourselves have the capacity to expand and enrich our Jewish practice,” wrote one student, according to a collection of anonymous comments shared among students at the time.
A chuppah at a Jewish wedding. More than 60% of American Jews who have married in the last decade have done so to non-Jewish partners, according to a 2021 study from the Pew Research Center. That proportion rises to nearly 75% for non-Orthodox American Jews. (Scott Rocher via Flickr Commons)
Most of the 15 comments that students and graduates shared with their peers called for doing away with the ban on interfaith student relationships, often citing the benefits of having Hebrew College-ordained rabbis reflect the families they are likely to serve.
“We should be training rabbis for the Jewish community that exists and that we want to cultivate, not the one we wish existed or that existed in the past,” one student wrote. “Having intermarried rabbis could do a lot of good: perhaps having role models for a fulfilling, active, intermarried Jewish can help people feel welcomed, not just grudgingly tolerated after the fact — and can increase the likelihood that those intermarried couples want to raise Jewish children.”
Several students and graduates wrote that the policy as it stood incentivized students to obscure their relationships, denying them dignity and preventing their mentors and teachers from fully supporting them. Several suggested that prohibiting students in interfaith partnerships could have a disproportionate effect on queer Jews and Jews of color.
At least one person argued against changing the policy, instead suggesting that the school strengthen enforcement and clarify expectations about other Jewish practices and values.
“By changing the policy Hebrew College is sending the message to the Jewish world that love-based marriages are more sacred than the covenant with which we made at Sinai,” that student wrote, referring to the moment in Jewish tradition when God first spoke to the Israelites. “However, by not changing the policy Hebrew College is affirming that students learn the art of lying. Therefore, my suggestion is to keep the policy but change the ethics on how it is enforced.”
Those comments followed a two-day workshop, facilitated by experts in conflict resolution, about the policy a year ago. The experience was challenging for many of those in attendance, according to the student comments.
“The pain of the need to hide was on full display during Winter Seminar, and I found myself wondering if I could remain in a community whose first response was anything other than to seek healing for the hurt that the policy has inflicted,” one wrote at the time.
With tensions high, an initial deadline to decide whether to keep the policy came and went last June. In late October, Anisfeld wrote to students with an update. A special committee including both rabbinic and academic faculty members had been meeting regularly since July, she said, and would be presenting their recommendation by the end of January.
Last week, she said in her message to students and graduates on Tuesday, Hebrew College’s board approved the policy change and admissions principles revisions.
The decision could renew pressure on other rabbinical schools amid steep competition for students. Several non-traditional rabbinical schools that do not have a requirement about the identities of students’ spouses have grown in recent years, while Hebrew College; the Reform movement’s Hebrew Union College; and the Jewish Theological Seminary and the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies in the Conservative movement all shrunk. Hebrew College recently completed a move to a shared campus after selling its building under financial duress.
“We continue to hear from folks who want to be rabbis and up until this moment had really limited choices,” said Bromberg. “I can’t help but think that this will have a really positive impact on the enrollment in Hebrew College’s rabbinic program.”
The pressure could be especially acute for Hebrew Union College, the Reform seminary with three campuses in the United States. (Because of declining enrollment, the school is phasing out its Cincinnati program.) HUC does not admit or ordain students in interfaith relationships, even though the Reform movement, which does not consider halacha to be binding, permits its rabbis to officiate at intermarriages and to be intermarried themselves.
That policy, which the movement reaffirmed after extensive debate in 2014, has drawn resentment and scorn from some who say it is the only thing holding them back from pursuing Reform ordination.
“All my life, my community had told me that no matter who you are or who you love, you are equal in our community and according to the Divine. But now it feels like I’ve been betrayed, lied to, misled,” Ezra Samuels, an aspiring rabbinical student in a queer relationship with a non-Jewish man, wrote on Hey Alma in 2020, expanding on a viral Twitter thread.
But even the Conservative movement, which bars rabbis from officiating at intermarriages and only recently began permitting members of its rabbinical association to attend intermarriages, is grappling openly with how to balance Jewish law and tradition against the reality around interfaith relationships.
The movement recently held a series of online meetings for members of its Rabbinical Assembly to discuss intermarriage, sparking rumors that the movement could be headed toward policy changes. That’s not the case, according to movement leaders — though they say other shifts may be needed.
“There are no proposals at present to change our standard,” said Rabbi Jacob Blumenthal, the CEO of the RA and United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, the movement’s congregational arm. “But there is a conversation about what are the ways that we can provide more pastoral guidance to colleagues, especially around moments of marriage.”
The Pew study found new high rates of intermarriage in the Jewish community. (iStock/Getty Images)
Keren McGinity, the USCJ’s interfaith specialist, previously directed the Interfaith Families Engagement Program, a now-defunct part of Hebrew College’s education school. She declined to comment on the internal conversations underway within the Conservative movement. But in 2015, she argued in an op-ed that the Jewish world would benefit from more rabbis who were intermarried.
“Seeing rabbis — who have committed their careers, indeed their lives to Judaism — intermarry, create Jewish homes and raise Jewish children should convincingly illustrate how intermarriage does not inhibit Jewish involvement,” she wrote, citing her research on intermarried couples.
That argument got a boost two years ago, when a major survey of American Jews found that most children of intermarried couples were being raised Jewish. And on Tuesday, McGinity said she was glad to hear that Hebrew College was dropping its partner requirement, which she said she knew had caused students to leave the program in the past.
“The decision to admit rabbinical students who have beloveds of other faith backgrounds is a tremendous way of leading in the 21st century, illustrating that interpartnered Jews can be exemplars of Jewish leaders,” she said.
She added, “Knowing my colleagues, I can only imagine the hours and hours of thought that went into this decision.”
—
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ITV’s ‘Breaking Ranks’: The IDF Soldier Documentary That Broke From the Truth
Then-IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, center, speaking to commanders and soldiers in the Golan Heights on Dec. 13, 2024. Photo: IDF.
A new documentary airing on ITV, Breaking Ranks: Inside Israel’s War, claims to be “the story of the war in Gaza told by the soldiers who fought it.”
An insider account of war sounds promising, especially amid the flood of misinformation online from people who were never on the ground as IDF soldiers and have no experience of the reality of fighting a terrorist organization.
Yet, of all the thousands of soldiers, both in mandatory service and reserve duty, the documentary presents a carefully selected handful of soldiers to tell the story of what they believe really happened in Gaza.
But the story they tell distorts — if not entirely omits — key facts. The film overlooks the reality of what it means to fight a terrorist organization driven by an ideology of extermination, one that deliberately embeds itself among civilians to wage war from within their communities.
That didn’t stop other media outlets from jumping on allegations of war crimes, with outlets such as The Guardian and Independent publishing pieces based on the documentary’s conclusions. That the Tehran Times gleefully pounced on it as well tells a story in itself.
The War Against Hamas
While the film does spend a few minutes showcasing the horrific tragedies of the October 7, 2023, massacre led by Hamas, it quickly shifts its focus to alleged atrocities committed by the IDF in the aftermath.
From the very beginning, the IDF made it explicitly clear that the war was against terrorist organizations only – there was no deliberate targeting of innocent civilians in Gaza. The IDF has maintained this throughout the war, taking every measure possible to warn the civilian population of any potential danger, including sending leaflets before a targeted strike and creating civilian zones to ensure the safety of non-combatants.
The complexity of fighting a terrorist organization is largely overlooked throughout the film. At one point, the use of force in Gaza is called “unprecedented in combat in terms of the number of explosives dropped per square mile,” making it out to be worse than the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. What it fails to acknowledge is that Israel precisely targets terrorists and terrorist infrastructure.
That viral cartoon comparing Gaza to Hiroshima and London is seriously misleading. Designed to provoke outrage, the reality shows Israel’s precision in targeting terrorists, even in the toughest situations. Context matters. pic.twitter.com/rxvi2YBvl2
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) December 14, 2024
Of course, for the documentary to accurately acknowledge the terrorist infrastructure in Gaza, it would have to spend a considerable amount of time discussing the vast tunnel network Hamas has built beneath the entirety of the Gaza Strip. However, this undeniable fact gets quickly glossed over. The filmmakers suggest the tunnels are merely used for “smuggling, warfare, and to avoid Israeli airstrikes.”
This framing subtly shifts blame onto Israel, as if Hamas’s need to “avoid” the Israeli air force is a defensive response rather than a deliberate strategy to wage war from beneath civilian areas. Terrorism? The inhumane holding and torture of hostages in clear violation of every facet of humanitarian law? Entirely unmentioned.
Breaking the Silence
The omission of the true purpose of the tunnels instead becomes spun into a claim based on hearsay that the IDF uses human shields in Gaza. Despite the IDF’s unequivocal denial of such allegations, this assertion is amplified by the interviewees.
However, this should come as no surprise, as one of the interviewees, under the name “Yaakov,” has previously espoused this claim to the New York Times via Breaking the Silence. This highly politicized Israeli organization spends less of its time trying to convince the Israeli public of its case and more on providing the foreign media with fodder to attack Israel.
While the organization seeks to “expose the public to the reality of everyday life in the Occupied Territories,” in reality, it relies on unverified and exaggerated claims provided by IDF soldiers, some of whom receive a paycheck from the organization and therefore may very well have ulterior motives.
“Yaakov” shared photos he took during his time in reserve duty in Gaza, including one now infamous photo that was previously shared in his New York Times article. The photo is said to display civilians who are used as human shields by the IDF when exploring the tunnel network. But the blurry and contextless image offers no evidence whatsoever to support such a serious accusation.
The credits of the documentary give special “thanks” to “Yaakov” from Breaking the Silence, revealing a clear bias in its sources in order to frame a specific narrative about the IDF as a whole. Instead of drawing on a range of credible voices – including a wide array of active-duty soldiers, independent analysts, and military experts – they elevate a figure tied to a controversial advocacy group with a record of misrepresentation.
Amplifying Non-Neutral Voices
“Yaakov” from Breaking the Silence is not the only biased source. Dr. Itamar Mann, a professor of international law at Haifa University, for instance, gives highly critical commentary on the IDF’s actions.
Dr. Mann is listed as an author and legal consultant on a report by Physicians for Human Rights (Israel), claiming there is genocide in Gaza. The organization has been known to spread false, distorted narratives as a way of delegitimizing Israel. In fact, in the immediate aftermath of October 7, the organization stated that it is our “human obligation to contextualize yesterday’s violence.”
The documentary also brings in Amjad al-Shara, the director of the Palestinian NGO Network (PNGO), who refers to the IDF as the “occupation forces,” and is himself described as a “pro-Hamas” figure. PNGO has in the past supported terrorism and hosted conferences or speakers connected to the PFLP.
False Casualty Statistics and Disproved Claims
With the poor sourcing and reliance on problematic organizations, it is no surprise that the documentary also fell into the trap of repeating already thoroughly debunked claims about casualty statistics, genocide, and famine in Gaza.
At one point, the film refers to a previously debunked statistic from a so-called study by The Guardian and +972 Magazine, which claims that 83% of all casualties in Gaza are women and children. This figure is based on data from the Hamas-run Ministry of Health, creating a misleading comparison to the IDF’s confirmed count of 8,900 identified terrorists. By subtracting that number from Hamas’ unverifiable total of 53,000 casualties at the time, these outlets and the documentary falsely present the remaining 83% of casualties as civilians, echoing Hamas propaganda.
Naturally, given the bias of the documentary, the claims of genocide and famine are also leveled against Israel. Even though the definitions of both terms have been distorted in order to accuse Israel of such atrocities, the film presents these allegations as fact, rather than propaganda.
Final Gaza fake “famine” analysis: IPC declared famine on Aug 22. Through ceasefire on Oct 10 there should have been 10,000 starvation deaths. But Hamas/UN counted 192 (most if not all with pre-existing conditions). That’s 98% below famine levels. It was always a hoax. 1/ pic.twitter.com/jWcZOnwdAe
— Aizenberg (@Aizenberg55) October 21, 2025
For a documentary to do its job and remain neutral on such serious allegations, the contrary evidence must be presented, but throughout the documentary, this was deliberately avoided.
War, especially against a terrorist organization that operates using guerrilla tactics, presents immensely challenging scenarios. In the fog of war, mistakes and errors of judgment can and do happen. But it is also true that the IDF has consistently held its soldiers to the highest of standards, investigating any wrongdoing as it occurs.
It would be naive to suggest that every soldier in the IDF or any other comparable army behaves in an exemplary fashion. In September 2024, The New Yorker published a database of what it said is the “largest known collection of investigations of possible war crimes committed [by the US military] in Iraq and Afghanistan since 9/11—nearly eight hundred incidents in all.”
Some of the alleged crimes include “the case of soldiers raping a fourteen-year-old girl and subsequently murdering her and her family; the alleged killing of a man by a Green Beret who cut off his victim’s ear and kept it; and cruelty toward detainees at Abu Ghraib prison and at the Bagram Air Base detention facility.”
All of this is not to claim that the IDF is necessarily more moral than the American military, although there is certainly a good case to be made. The point is that nobody would condemn the entirety of the U.S. Army as an immoral entity that brings shame to its country despite the behavior of a minority of its troops.
And ultimately, ITV’s documentary relies on a tiny number of Israeli soldiers as “eyewitnesses,” most of whom appear to have a political agenda backed by Breaking the Silence.
Rather than offering an honest insight into the complexities of modern warfare against a terrorist organization, the filmmakers chose a simplified, one-sided narrative of Israel’s supposed aggression. In doing so, ITV’s Breaking Ranks fails the very test it set for itself: to tell the story of the war “through the soldiers who fought it.” Instead, it tells a story already written — one shaped by bias, omission, and a refusal to confront the full truth.
The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.
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Musician-ethnographer Michael Alpert to receive Dreaming in Yiddish Award
Michael Alpert, an influential klezmer musician and ethnographer who has played a key role in the global renaissance of Yiddish music and culture, has been selected as this year’s recipient of the prestigious Adrienne Cooper Dreaming in Yiddish Award.
The ceremony will take place at the Dreaming in Yiddish Award Concert during the Yiddish New York festival — the largest annual Yiddish culture festival in the world — in December.
Now in its eleventh year, the hybrid festival brings together a global community for in-person events at Hebrew Union College in downtown New York, as well as online programming via Zoom. The festival includes concerts, workshops, lectures, films, Yiddish classes, dance parties and intergenerational community events.
Adrienne Cooper was a popular Yiddish singer, musician and activist who was integral to the revival of klezmer music. The Dreaming in Yiddish Award supports artists who have contributed to the contemporary Yiddish cultural scene.
Michael Alpert, also known by his Yiddish name Meyshke, received an NEA National Heritage Fellowship — the nation’s highest honor in the traditional and heritage arts — in 2015. He has been a pioneering singer, multi-instrumentalist, ethnographer and educator for over five decades. His award-winning work with ensembles including Brave Old World, Kapelye, Khevrisa and Itzhak Perlman’s In the Fiddler’s House has shaped generations of performers and listeners alike.
A native Yiddish speaker and cultural bridge between East European-born tradition bearers and contemporary artists, Alpert is celebrated both for preserving the roots of Yiddish folk and klezmer music and for composing a new body of Yiddish songs that speak to today’s world.
The Dreaming in Yiddish Award Concert — an evening of music, memories, and celebration — is sponsored by Yiddish New York and GOH Productions. It will take place on Wednesday, Dec. 24, 2025 at 7 p.m. ET at Hebrew Union College and will be livestreamed as well.
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A new documentary humanizes Israeli soldiers. It also alleges war crimes.
“It feels like a betrayal to be interviewed by foreign media,” an IDF combat veteran says. He’s out of uniform, brow furrowed, plucking nervously at his goatee. His name is Yuval Ben-Ari, and he is here — on camera, using his real name — telling us what he saw in Gaza.
Ben-Ari, who served in an infantry unit, is one of nearly a dozen soldiers who appear in Breaking Ranks: Inside Israel’s War, a new documentary from indie production company Zandland which streamed in the U.K. and can be viewed on YouTube. Four of the speakers appear on camera, identified by their real names; the rest are disguised and use aliases. Taken together, their testimonies are a scathing indictment of what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has called the “world’s most moral army.”
If their stories are true — and nearly everything the soldiers say has already been corroborated by other media reports — they are describing war crimes as the rule in Gaza, not the exception. Unarmed civilians are shot or bombed as a matter of course. Homes are torched without cause. Humanitarian aid sites are shelled out of sheer resentment. The people telling us this — young men and women who served hundreds of days in the territory over the past two years — are still reckoning with their role in the destruction.
Breaking Ranks is not the first documentary to be made about the war in Gaza, and it will not be the last. But it may be the only one to focus on the targeting of innocent Palestinians while also humanizing Israeli soldiers. The soldiers outline their belief in the IDF and the importance of the mission in Gaza. The film contextualizes the war, showing footage of the atrocities of Oct. 7 and noting that Hamas leaders, too, have been charged with war crimes in international courts. Palestinian casualty figures are provided, the film notes, by the “Hamas-run Gaza health ministry”; the tunnel network, it explains, is used for smuggling and warfare. It does not avoid discussing the 251 Israeli hostages.
Those elements ultimately strengthen the film’s argument about how the war was conducted. They do not, however, soften the accounts that follow. The picture that emerges is one of lawlessness and cruelty, coupled with a tolerance for collateral damage and a lack of accountability that runs counter to the IDF’s “Purity of Arms” statute. Yet that portrait also shows the rank-and-file — not all, but some — resisting the practices of their superiors.
A tank commander (“Daniel,” an alias) recounts a time his commander informed troops he planned to destroy a humanitarian aid building. The unit warned him the building was off-limits, but the commander shelled it anyway. Then — according to the soldier — the commander made up an excuse to justify the attack: “I had an anti-tank weapon pointed at me.”
A member of a different unit tells a similar story: When a man hanging laundry on the roof of a building is deemed a “spotter,” a commander shells the structure, killing and injuring many people inside. “This kind of thing happened every week,” says the soldier telling us this story. “And that’s just my unit.”
A platoon sergeant, using the alias “Yaakov,” tells how a pair of Palestinian teenage boys came to be his unit’s human shields, sent down into Gaza’s tunnels as scouts. The unit’s objections eventually won out — they cited international law — but Yaakov insists the IDF has a policy sanctioning the practice called “Mosquito Protocol.” (The Associated Press published an investigative report on the practice earlier this year; the IDF denies that it uses human shields.)
“I carried out these things,” says Yaakov. “I hope I can find a way to live without feeling shame with every step I take.”
One soldier says his unit once reported killing 112 people over the course of a deployment. Only one of the 112, he said, was even suspected of holding a weapon.
Not all of the soldiers recalling their enlistment in Breaking Ranks regret their participation. We meet Rabbi Avraham Zarbiv, who claims to have invented the tactic of razing entire Gaza neighborhoods, block by block, with a bulldozer. Another, given the alias “Lt. Col. F.,” says he would have happily pushed every Palestinian in Gaza into the ocean, given them snorkels and “let them swim to Egypt.”
Their hawkishness puts the defiance and disillusionment of soldiers like Yaakov in stark relief. And it raises questions as to why the IDF — which says it has launched dozens of Military Police investigations into alleged misconduct by soldiers — has not found more wrongdoing.
Ben-Ari, who admits that after Oct. 7 he was “consumed by rage and a desire to fight and avenge,” has since become a peace activist; he was injured last week in the West Bank, attacked by Israeli settlers, while accompanying Palestinians during the annual olive harvest.
He vows to never return to Gaza. But Ben-Ari will not quit the IDF entirely, either. Toward the end of the film, he says he would answer a call to protect Israel’s other borders because that is what he is trained to do, and because he still believes it’s necessary.
“This separation works for me,” he says. “I totally understand if people would say I’m a hypocrite, but this is my decision.”
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