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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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The post In a shift, Hebrew College will now admit and ordain rabbinical students whose partners are not Jewish appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Israel Restores Relations With Bolivia, Signs Free Trade Deal With Costa Rica as Latin American Ties Strengthen
Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar (left) and Bolivian Foreign Minister Fernando Armayo (right) sign a Joint Communiqué in Washington, DC on Dec. 9, 2025, formally restoring diplomatic relations between the two countries. Photo: Screenshot
Israel is further expanding its diplomatic and economic presence in Latin America, formally restoring relations with Bolivia and signing a free trade agreement with Costa Rica as the Isaac Accords begin to take shape.
On Tuesday, Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar and Bolivian Foreign Minister Fernando Armayo signed a Joint Communiqué in Washington, DC, formally restoring diplomatic relations between their countries after two years of severed relations amid the war in Gaza.
“Today, we are ending the long, unnecessary chapter of separation between our two nations,” the top Israeli diplomat said during a speech at the signing ceremony.
“Following the election of [Bolivian] President Rodrigo Paz, I am pleased to announce that Israel and Bolivia are renewing diplomatic relations,” he continued.
Israel and Bolivia: We renewed our diplomatic relations!
We’re continuing to work. pic.twitter.com/oUtcXyyaHa— Gideon Sa’ar | גדעון סער (@gidonsaar) December 10, 2025
During their meeting, both leaders committed to fully restoring diplomatic relations, appointing ambassadors, and fostering collaboration between government and private-sector representatives.
They also pledged ongoing dialogue and broader cooperation in areas including agriculture, security, health, innovation, and their shared fight against organized crime and narco-terrorism.
“Bolivia, the Jewish people, and the State of Israel share a long history of true friendship,” Saar said during his speech. “Bolivia opened its doors to Jewish refugees during the Second World War when much of the world closed its gates.”
“Bolivia supported the establishment of the State of Israel in the historic 1947 UN vote,” he continued. “For many decades, our two nations enjoyed warm diplomatic relations. The renewal of our ties is an important and welcome step.”
Bolivia has also announced it will lift visa requirements for Israelis entering the country, a move the top Israeli diplomat praised as helping to “strengthen the human bridge between our peoples.”
With the official launch of the Isaac Accords by Argentina’s President Javier Milei last week, Israel has been working to expand its diplomatic and security ties across Latin America, with the new effort designed to promote government cooperation and fight antisemitism and terrorism.
Modeled after the Abraham Accords — a series of historic US-brokered normalization agreements between Israel and several Arab countries, this initiative aims to strengthen political, economic, and cultural cooperation between the Jewish state and Latin American governments.
The first phase of the Isaac Accords will focus on Uruguay, Panama, and Costa Rica, where potential projects in technology, security, and economic development are already taking shape as the framework seeks to deepen cooperation in innovation, commerce, and cultural exchange.
On Monday, Israel and Costa Rica signed a free trade agreement covering goods, services, and investments, advancing their bilateral relations during Costa Rican Minister of Foreign Trade Manuel Tovar Rivera’s visit to Jerusalem.
Rivera also announced that Costa Rica will open an office for trade and investment innovation in Jerusalem next year.
The newly signed agreement will eliminate over 90 percent of tariffs, providing broad access for Israeli industrial and agricultural products to the Costa Rican market, while also reducing import costs on a wide range of goods, from food and medical equipment to industrial tools.
“This agreement opens significant new avenues for both Costa Rica and Israel,” Rivera said during a speech at the signing ceremony.
“It enhances access to high-quality Costa Rican goods and services while creating a mutually beneficial platform for collaboration in high-technology industries, premium agribusiness and specialized services,” he continued.
Building on the renewed momentum in diplomatic engagement across Latin America, Israel is expanding and strengthening its bilateral relations with several countries in the region.
Argentina announced plans to relocate its embassy to Jerusalem next spring, fulfilling a promise made last year as the two countries continue to deepen their ties.
Last week, Ecuador opened an additional diplomatic mission in Jerusalem, a move that Saar hailed as a “milestone” in strengthening their bilateral relations.
Paraguay, Guatemala, and Honduras, all of which have previously relocated their embassies to Jerusalem, have reaffirmed their support for Israel and signaled intentions to deepen future cooperation.
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What happens when you’re the only Jewish family in Oklahoma?
When her mother Clara dies suddenly of a stroke, Emily is left with her ashes and a note to scatter them on Sylvia’s farm in Chandler, Oklahoma. There’s a problem: Emily has no idea who Sylvia is and has never been to Oklahoma before in her life — and as far as she knows, neither had her mom.
Oklahoma Samovar, a new play opening at La MaMa’s Downstairs Theater, starts at the end of Emily’s trip to find Sylvia, who turns out to be an old woman with a bit of a memory issue and the sister of Emily’s grandmother Rose. When Emily asks why her mother would want her ashes left on the farm, Sylvia launches into their family history. She goes all the way back to 1887, when Emily’s great-grandparents Jake and Hattie fled persecution in Latvia with nothing but a feather bed and a samovar, and unfolds the stories of each generation over the play’s acts.
While most immigration stories usually focus on big cities, Oklahoma Samovar explores the little-known history of Jews in the Midwest in a deeply-human way. It is a tender portrayal of an immigrant family struggling to survive and figuring out their identity over multiple generations. Instead of villanizing or lionizing its characters, Oklahoma Samovar presents people with all their complexities, allowing them moments of moral failing while portraying them with empathy.
A fictional drama based on her own family history, playwright Alice Eve Cohen considers the play her “foundational work.”
“I’ve truly been working on Oklahoma Samovar since the day I met my Aunt Sylvia,” she said. “I met her in 1987. And I was so enthralled and inspired by her stories that I started writing about it probably the next day.”
After putting on a workshop production of the play in 2007, Cohen shelved Oklahoma Samovar to focus on other projects, including authoring two memoirs, writing several other plays, and teaching playwriting and creative writing at The New School. Over a decade later, she returned to working on Oklahoma Samovar and submitted it to the National Jewish Playwriting Contest, where it won in 2021.
“My very first draft of this play was almost verbatim documentation of the stories that Sylvia told me,” Cohen said. “It was very romantic. It was very fanciful. It was almost all positive, and there was no conflict.”
While some elements of the original play remain — such as the use of puppetry, which depicts long boat voyages and dream sequences — the new iteration is not an idealized version of the American Dream. Its characters are complex and flawed to the point that Jake kills someone trying to secure a home for his family during the Oklahoma Land Runs.
“I knew that I had incomplete stories,” Cohen said about the original conversation that inspired the play’s events.
“I’ve done research into the Oklahoma Land Run, which Sylvia described in the most romantic way,” Cohen went on. “In fact, the land run was a violent land grab, it was a theft of land from the Native Americans who had been forced to relocate to what was then called Indian territory.” Cohen explained. “I took this kernel of the story that Sylvia remembered from her childhood, her dad saying, ‘I lost my thumb, but I kept the farm,’ and I realized there was a shootout.”
Although Cohen’s exact version of events is imagined, the harsh depiction of the Land Runs encapsulates the brutality of the immigrant experience and the family’s desperate actions in pursuit of starting their lives in America.
Immigrants also had to choose between assimilating and preserving tradition, a conflict that is exacerbated for Hattie and Jake when they settle in Chandler, an Oklahoma town with virtually no Jewish community. Hattie struggles to connect with her new environment, concerned about the lack of a rabbi and a minyan, but Jake wholeheartedly embraces a new, goyish American cowboy persona. He even adopts a signature catchphrase: “Hot Diggety Damn!”
This struggle with identity follows their oldest daughter Rose into adulthood. Having grown up learning the Bible at Chandler’s Presbyterian Sunday School, Rose is unprepared for the level of Orthodoxy her new mother-in-law expects of her. A Russian immigrant who believes Rose’s lifestyle amounts to heresy, Mrs. Giventer spends her days dismissing Rose as a convert and poor excuse for a wife.
Cohen says these characters serve as a reflection of the diverse experiences in the Jewish diaspora. “They all practice Judaism in different ways. They’ve assimilated in different ways,” Cohen said. “They’ve either held on to their original accents and their original Yiddish language, or they have intentionally spurned them and Americanized as quickly and as completely as they can.”
“When family members from these different traditions and different positions in the spectrum of American Judaism meet, it isn’t always easy,” Cohen said. “There are often huge clashes.”
Even though virtually all the characters of Oklahoma Samovar are Jewish, Cohen does not imagine Jews to be her only audience.
“I think there are universal themes that relate to immigration and assimilation that anybody of any culture can relate to,” Cohen said. “While the play is set in Oklahoma and in New York and in Latvia, I think its stories transcend geographic boundaries.”
And perhaps it will inspire others to find the complicated truths that lie in the sweet family stories they’ve always heard.
Oklahoma Samovar is playing at LaMaMa’s Downstairs Theater through December 21st.
The post What happens when you’re the only Jewish family in Oklahoma? appeared first on The Forward.
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UC Berkeley Settles Lawsuit Brought by Israeli Professor Denied Teaching Position
Students attend a protest encampment in support of Palestinians at University of California, Berkeley during the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, in Berkeley, US, April 23, 2024. Photo: Carlos Barria via Reuters Connect
The University of California, Berkeley has agreed to pay a five-figure sum to settle claims that it unlawfully denied a teaching position to a dance instructor because she is Israeli, both the victim’s legal counsel, provided by the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, and the school announced on Wednesday.
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, Dr. Yael Nativ, who taught in UC Berkeley’s Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies as a visiting professor in 2022, was denied another appointment in the department because a hiring official allegedly believed that her employment would be unpalatable to students and faculty in the aftermath of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, amid the ensuing Gaza war.
“My dept [sic] cannot host you for a class next fall,” the official allegedly told Nativ in a WhatsApp message. “Things are very hot here right now and many of our grad students are angry. I would be putting the dept and you in a terrible position if you taught here.”
Berkeley’s Office for the Prevention of Harassment and Discrimination (OPHD) later initiated an investigation into Nativ’s denial after the professor wrote an opinion essay which publicly accused the school of cowardice and violations of her civil rights. OPHD determined that a “preponderance of evidence” proved Nativ’s claim, but school officials went on to ignore the professor’s requests for an apology and other remedial measures, including sending her a renewed invitation to teach dance.
After nearly two years, the situation had remained unresolved, prompting Nativ to file suit and seek damages as well as the apology UC Berkeley refused to pronounce at the time. Now, just under four months after the filing of Nativ’s complaint, the two parties have reached an amiable settlement and disclosed its terms in a joint statement.
“As part of the settlement, UC Berkeley has agreed to continue to strictly enforce the University of California’s Anti-Discrimination Policy and ‘respond promptly and equitably to reports’ of prohibited conduct as defined in that policy,” the statement said. “Dr. Nativ will receive a personal apology from UC Berkeley’s Chancellor Rich Lyons and monetary damages in the amount of $60,000, a portion of which she has decided to donate to a charitable organization.”
The statement added that Nativ will be invited to teach the course she was denied, a major victory for the professor and a positive, if unusual, act of reconciliation between an employer and employee who were only recently contesting claims of discrimination in civil court.
“The excellence of Dr. Nativ’s teaching was never in question, and UC Berkeley appreciates Dr. Nativ’s willingness to teach the course despite the discrimination that OPHD found to have occurred,” the statement added.
In her own statement, Nativ said, “Incidents of discrimination of any kind must have no place within environments dedicated to learning and the free exchange of ideas. It is my hope that this outcome contributes to strengthening these commitments for all scholars and students.”
UC Berkeley was the site of one the most shocking antisemitic incidents in recent memory in the months which followed the Hamas-led Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel, as previously reported by The Algemeiner.
In February 2024, a mob of hundreds of pro-Palestinian students and non-students shut down an event at UC Berkeley featuring an Israeli soldier, forcing Jewish students to flee to a secret safe room as the protesters overwhelmed campus police.
Footage of the incident showed a frenzied mass of anti-Zionist agitators banging on the doors of Zellerbach Hall while an event featuring Israeli reservist Ran Bar-Yoshafat — who visited the university to discuss his military service during Hamas’s Oct. 7 invasion — took place inside. The mob then stormed the building — breaking glass windows in the process, according to reports in the Daily Wire — and precipitated school officials’ decision to evacuate the area.
During the infiltration of Zellerbach, one of the mob — which was recruited by Bears for Palestine, which had earlier proclaimed its intention to cancel the event — spit on a Jewish student and called him a “Jew,” pejoratively.
“You know what I was screamed at? ‘Jew, you Jew, you Jew,’ literally right to my face,” the student who was attacked said to a friend. “Some woman — then she spit at me.”
Shaya Keyvanfar, a student, told The Algemeiner that her sister was spit on and that the incident was unlike any she had ever witnessed.
“Once the doors were closed, the protesters somehow found a side door and pushed it open, and a few of them managed to get in, and once they did, they tried to open the door for the rest of them,” Keyvanfar said. “It was really scary. They were pounding on the windows outside — they broke one — they spit at my sister and others. They called someone a dirty Jew. It was eerie.”
In July, the chancellor of UC Berkeley described a professor who cheered Hamas’s Oct. 7 atrocities as a “fine scholar” during a congressional hearing held at Capitol Hill.
Richard K. Lyons, who assumed the chancellorship in July 2024, issued the unmitigated praise while being questioned by members of the US House Committee on Education and the Workforce, which summoned him and the chief administrators of two other major universities to interrogate their handling of the campus antisemitism crisis.
Lyons stumbled into the statement while being questioned by Rep. Lisa McClain (R-MI), who asked the chancellor to describe the extent of his relationship and correspondence with Professor Ussama Makdisi, who tweeted in February 2024 that he “could have been one of those who broke through the siege on Oct. 7.”
“What do you think the professor meant,” McClain asked Lyons, to which the chancellor responded, “I believe it was a celebration of the terrorist attack on Oct. 7.” McClain proceeded to ask if Lyons discussed the tweet with Makdisi or personally reprimanded him, prompting an exchange of remarks which concluded with Lyons saying, “He is a fine scholar.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.