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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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Netanyahu leads in exit polls, but change bloc by Eisenkot has more seats
(JTA) — JERUSALEM – Israel’s parliamentary election has ended with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling Likud party remaining the largest faction, according to exit polls published as voting ended at 10pm local time.
However, the results showed that Netanyahu’s bloc of parties falls far short of the 61 seats needed to form a government. No other party or bloc of party has the ability to a government either.
Exit polls, taken through the day and published as polling stations closed, are only an indication of the final results, the official count can take hours or days to become clear. Also, exit polls are not always accurate.
And in an election that analysts have predicted will be tight, it’s too early to tell who will lead the next Israeli government.
It was a dramatic day in Israel, with voter turnout reaching its highest level in decades, according to the Central Elections Committee. An hour prior to polls closing, the committee said some 74.3% of the 7.3 million eligible voters had cast their ballot, compared to just 66.3% in the last election in 2022.
Indeed, lines at polling stations were longer than usual, with some Israelis waiting more than an hour to cast their votes.
Israelis have described this election, the first national election since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023 attack, as a battle over the country’s character and how best to address the security concerns that have arisen over the past three years.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his coalition partners, a bloc comprising mostly far-right and ultra-Orthodox parties, have largely campaigned on a platform of protecting Israel from existential threats, including what they describe as security threats posed by the country’s Arab population.
Casting his ballot in a school in Jerusalem, Netanyahu said he was voting “For the future of the State of Israel.”
“We cannot leave this battle in the hands of the left and the Arab parties,” Netanyahu said, accusing them of wanting “to bring an end to the Jewish state.”
Adalah, a legal center for Arab minority rights, filed a complaint with the Central Elections Committee. It said in a statement that “senior government officials have been inciting against Palestinian citizens of Israel exercising their right to vote as turnout in Arab towns rises.”
The group of parties trying to oust Netanyahu – the “change bloc” led by former army chief Gadi Eisenkot – has argued that the election is a vote on Israel’s future as a liberal and democratic nation.
The opposition has framed the election as a referendum on Netanyahu’s handling of the aftermath of Oct. 7 and the subsequent wars in Gaza, Lebanon and against Iran.
After casting his vote at a school in the city of Herzliya, Eisenkot told the crowd: “We are setting Israel on a new path. We will be worthy of your trust. I promise.”
It is traditional for party leaders to cast their votes in front of cameras and to campaign right up until polling stations close. Netanyahu and his coalition partners traveled the country trying to mobilize their supporters, warning they would not be re-elected unless more right-wing voters turned out to vote.
However, under Israel’s system of proportional representation, differences in turnout among communities could drastically change the political map. Larger numbers of Arab voters, who tend to vote for one of the two Arab political factions, can affect the distribution of seats and the balance of power between the blocs, potentially complicating Netanyahu’s efforts to form a government.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Netanyahu leads in exit polls, but change bloc by Eisenkot has more seats appeared first on The Forward.
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Why I went to Michigan to talk to Jewish voters about Abdul El-Sayed
I’d just climbed the steps to another home on my canvassing list, a lovely residence in the suburbs of Detroit, and rang the doorbell. I was there last week to talk with Jewish voters about the upcoming Michigan Senate election. The woman who answered asked me to come inside, and I demurred, telling her that my project discourages its volunteers from accepting such invitations, for safety reasons. She was petite and elderly, with a soft, open face. She reminded me of my long deceased mother. We chit-chatted a little, then I got down to brass tacks. “What are your feelings about the race?” I asked. “About Abdul El-Sayed?”
Her face sagged. “You’re too late,” she said. “My husband and I already voted. For Mike Rogers. And I feel terrible!” She looked like she was about to cry. “Please,” she said, “Come inside.” I relented (but didn’t sit down on her sofa).
The Michigan race pits El-Sayed, a progressive young Democrat, against Rogers, a Republican former Congress member who is closely allied with Donald Trump. As a New Yorker, I don’t have a vote in the election. But I came to Michigan as a Jew who is increasingly frightened by the threat posed by MAGA and horrified by what Trump-think and Trump power is doing, and not just to immigrants, people of color, sexual and gender minorities, middle-class and working people, students, intellectuals, and those whose jobs and civic activity nurture liberal and progressive causes.
I’m also worried about us Jews.
We are disproportionately members of the communities I just listed. We are also vulnerable to antisemitic acts and policies, which appear to be increasing. (At my shul on Rosh Hashanah I was chilled to find flyers placed by the Siddurs, instructing how to hide or flee if a terrorist were to enter the sanctuary.) And we are vulnerable to the politics of Christian nationalism. I grew up in Texas in the 1950s and 1960s. I vividly recall being made to sing “The Crusaders’ Hymn” in grade school and memorize the words (“Onward Christians soldiers, marching as to war. With the cross of Jesus, going on before!”). Making public school kids do this is now illegal. But for how long?
Mike Rogers’ campaign gets much of its money from a rich Texan named Tim Dunn, a Christian nationalist who wants to abolish public schools. Not long ago, Dunn told a member of the Texas legislature — a Jew — that Jews should not hold major political office.
El-Sayed, on the other hand, is a public health expert with a long history of activism for progressive causes. A native-born American, he went to a suburban Detroit high school where he was on the football team and had many Jewish classmates. He has repeatedly said that the fact that he is Muslim is merely incidental to the fact that he is an American who deeply respects the rights guaranteed to everyone in this country under the U.S. Constitution — including to worship, or not, as one pleases.
Polling shows El-Sayed leading Rogers, but the margin of error puts them very close, and the race is tightening. Pundits say that if El-Sayed loses, the Senate could remain Republican. But if he wins, it would signal to the whole country that the Democratic Party is entering a new phase of progressivism — one prefigured by Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral win in New York City.
Like El-Sayed, Mamdani is a Muslim who sharply criticizes the Israeli government. And though many New York City Jews are wary of him, his main opponent during his campaign, Andrew Cuomo, wasn’t part of MAGA or surrounded by antisemites, as Mike Rogers is. I’d canvassed for Mamdani, and the stakes are much higher in Michigan. So I decided to spend five days in suburban Detroit as part of a joint canvassing effort by Jews in Seed the Vote, Bend the Arc Action, IfNotNow Movement, and Michigan United Action. Our goal was to knock on doors and share our own stories with fellow Jews.
Mine is that my maternal grandparents fled here from the Pale of Settlement, and my mother told me about my grandmother escaping a pogrom after her parents dressed her with a large cross around her neck, and paid a peasant to hide her under hay in a cart. She was fifteen years old when the pogrom happened — prime age for a Jewish girl to be raped.
She and her extended family made it to Pittsburgh. To the United States, the capital of democracy and pluralism. In all of history, Jews have never done so well as we have under democracies like this one. We’ve become so comfortable, as one Detroit-area rabbi remarked in his Kol Nidre sermon this year, that his community’s biggest intramural argument used to be over where to get the best bagels.
Then a Lebanese-American man whose relatives had just been killed by an Israeli air strike on Lebanon drove a truck into Temple Israel, a metro-Detroit synagogue. Dozens of preschoolers were inside. No one was hurt, but the building was damaged. El-Sayed, quickly made a lengthy statement condemning the culprit’s inexcusable antisemitism and vowing to support Jewish safety. But he also tried to explain the man’s terrorism. “Hurt people hurt people,” he said.
He later apologized for introducing political context so soon. But months later, his words still anger some people with whom I spoke. One woman glared, said she had grandchildren at the synagogue preschool, and slammed the door on me. Other canvassers described a man in a car who saw their t-shirts, sporting slogans like “Jews for Shared Safety,” and screamed that if he were to see El-Sayed and his family on fire right now across the street, he would do nothing to help them. He added that he was on the board of a shul.
Rogers’ campaign and its supporters are flooding TV and the social media with material excoriating El-Sayed as a dangerous Islamic fundamentalist and antisemite. AIPAC has also painted him as a threat to Jews, and spent over $30 million attacking him to defeat him in the primary. El-Sayed won anyway, but Michigan’s Jews remain saturated with a miasma of anti-El-Sayed propaganda. The woman who reminded me of my mother said she voted for Rogers because her father was a Holocaust survivor and she had to put Israel first, even though she knew Rogers could “roll back everything, including civil rights and abortion rights, that we Jews have worked so hard for. And even though I’ve never voted Republican in my life!”
I also canvassed Jews who were enthusiastically voting for El-Sayed. Other supporters, though, were terribly conflicted. At one door, a person — I won’t say their gender because they were so anxious about being identified — told me they are high up in local, Jewish-inflected Democratic Party politics. (I looked them up later and verified this.)
They, too, invited me into the sanctum of their home, as though afraid for the neighbors to see them talking with me. “I voted for El-Sayed,” they said. “But it was a horrible decision to have to make!” They strongly agreed with me about the need to vote for him, but they didn’t want their Jewish bigwig colleagues to know. “Half of them would never speak to me again,” they said. “What about your personal friends?” I asked. “Could you talk to them about the need to vote for El-Sayed?” “Yes,” they said. “I can do that.”
“This is what canvassing is about,” I told myself as I left.
Some Jewish bigwigs who openly support El-Sayed have been holding wine-and-cheese house parties for the un-decideds. Michigan Jews for Democracy sponsors these intimate gatherings. I went to one last week, at the house of Elaine Driker, formerly board president of Hillel of Metro Detroit. Former Michigan Congress member and political progressive Andy Levin addressed the group.
The setting was a cozy living room. To ensure that attendees felt comfortable voicing their feelings, journalists were told they could quote the speakers, but questions from the audience were off the record unless the individuals asking them agreed later to be quoted. The attendees were engaged, intent, and split, with some expressing strong support for El-Sayed and others venting reservations.
At the end. Levin summed things up. “We’re here struggling as Jews,” he told the audience. With young progressives entering the Democratic Party, he added, “We are really coming into a new era of politics in the United States, and I’m really hopeful about it.” He talked of the need to elect El-Sayed, then “hold him to be a great senator for the Jewish community.” Yes, he is a Muslim, Levin noted, and that is good. He added that, for Jews as for everyone, pluralism in government “has been great for us.”
This election in Michigan, Levin concluded, is “a time of great wrestling with God. Of wrestling with each other.” Then we all repaired to a room to eat brie and fine bread and wrestle some more.
The post Why I went to Michigan to talk to Jewish voters about Abdul El-Sayed appeared first on The Forward.
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Noah Wyle, TV’s nice Jewish doctor, is People’s Sexiest Man Alive
(JTA) — Noah Wyle, the Jewish actor who both mends and steals hearts as a doctor on the hit HBO Max medical drama “The Pitt,” has been named People magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive.
Tuesday’s announcement described the actor’s “smoldering intensity” and “leading-man looks,” while noting that “he loves to do the dishes.”
Wyle, 55, told People he initially thought the news was “a classic set-up for a prank.” His wife, Sara Wells, helped persuade him to accept the honor, he said, because she believes his qualities as a husband and father are worth celebrating.
The actor, who starred in the ’90s medical drama “ER,” is enjoying a career resurgence as Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch, the brilliant, troubled emergency-room physician at the center of “The Pitt.” The role has earned Wyle two consecutive Emmy Awards for outstanding lead actor in a drama series, along with renewed attention to his own Jewish heritage.
As JTA reported last year, Wyle drew on his father’s Russian-Jewish background in helping create Robby, his first Jewish character. The doctor wears a Star of David necklace and, in a pivotal scene in the show’s first season, clutches it while reciting the Shema, a central Jewish prayer, during an emotional crisis.
Wyle, whose father is Jewish and mother is Episcopalian, did not grow up in a religious household. But in an interview with the Jewish Chronicle this year, he said Judaism had become more relevant to his life through the show and that his daughter, then 10, has expressed the most interest to “pick up the mantle of Judaism.” She helped him with the pronunciation of the Shema, he said, and her bat mitzvah has been scheduled.
Wyle has also brought Jewish history into “The Pitt.” In an episode he wrote for the show’s second season, a patient with ties to the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh struggles with post-traumatic stress disorder.
Wyle said portraying a Jewish character offered an opportunity to present a humanist and healer at a time of heightened antisemitism. “I have come to learn that the world’s knowledge of Jews comes through depictions of them in the media,” he told the Jewish Chronicle.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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