I suppose you’ve followed the news from Israel about Charedi authorities revoking conversions, even Orthodox ones. Since the state of Israel accepts them as an authority, it is an significant move.

BTW, Chasidim consider all of us on here goyim. If you don’t keep all the mitzvot to their standards, you’re not a Jew in their eyes.

Anyway, I’m basically Mitnagdish mainstream Modern Orthodox. I figure the Chassidim think I’m a goy anyway, so I don’t particularly care what they think.

I’m pretty sure KFJ feels the same way about how I feel about his ideas too, so zei gezunt. Useless to discuss it further.

Then you’ll have a lot of cleaning up to do, my dear. Told you, there’s a reason why I like your chanukia.
As for those stats, they’re not really telling as they don’t tell to what degree people affiliate (as you already suggested above). You’ll more likely have people with mixed backgrounds embrace Judaism if you can convince people to be just as welcoming of them as you are. Many are not.

Look, I even accept the possibility that someone coming from an interfaith household can still live a more Jewish life than me. When I am critical of multi-faith families it’s just because on a societal level they don’t tend to produce a high percentage of people that even identify as Jews. What I am stating is statistical fact – I hate being criticized as some kind of close minded bigot when I state that 2 + 2 = 4.

As for children swaying spiritually, I don’t know whereabout you dwell, but in Brooklyn “henna parties” for Chasidishe bachelorettes / brides-to-be are all the rage. Those henna tattoos are either Hindu or Northern African Nomad magic symbols, so as things are, incense sticks are just a matter of buying stuff off the next shelf. That’s what I meant by kitsch in my recent post; Judaism has become a label even among many Orthodox, but the jar is void of content.

I’ll translate the recipe for you later. I <3 Sauerbraten.

I’m quite aware that there are plenty of Jewish racists. I question whether Judaism itself is racist, though. Exclusive, yes, no question. But every group is, be definition, exclusive in some way. That’s not the same thing as racism, however.

The Torah says that after three generations Egyptian converts could be accepted into Am Israel. If Judaism were racist, this would be impossible. But three generations is just about the amount of time it takes for malign cultural and religious elements to be assimilated out. The grandparents are dead, and no one lights the tree anymore (so to speak). It is around the third generation that a child of converts in such a situation could conceivably be raised with no Egyptian religious and spiritual nostalgia. All they would know is Judaism. In marrying such a person there’s no danger that your kids are going to start insisting that mummification and burning incense to gods that look like they’re from some bestiary like what Oma and Opa do is just as legitimate as keeping Shabbes.

I have a sour cream-less saurbraten recipe, but I’m always happy to have another.

Judaism has little or nothing to do with what most people call “race”, as you seem to think. You need to get over your obsession with DNA. It’s unhealthy.

I come from a mixed background too. We celebrated Christmas when I was a kid. I still have very fond memories of it. It was hard to give it up.

So the fuck what? It was hard to give up the comfort foods of my father’s side of the family too, things like fleishpankacken (a delicious oven-baked custard-like pancake filled with crisp bacon and served with appelsauce), shinckenflecken (a layered noodle and ground ham kugel baked with eggs and milk, flavored with nutmeg and served with applesauce), and saurbraten (a braised beef roast marinated in wine, vinegar and pickling spices and served with a sourcream gravy). I grew up on these foods (along with latkes and chicken soup with knaidlech, of course). But I got over that too.

Your point seems to be, basically, that “mixed” Jews are better Jews than “pure” Jews and can “solve” the “problems” of the Jewish people by bringing in all of their conflicting and incompatible cultural baggage. Sorry, that won’t help the Jewish people, it will just speed our complete disintegration as an identifiable community with shared values.

You say that you’re tired of the “stereotype” of mixed Jews being confused. And your example is a guy with a Magen David and the Shema (in Hebrew that he can’t read) tattooed on one arm and a crucifix and the flames of Hell tattooed on the other? What do you call a person like that if not terminally confused? Way to make your point, dude.

Your post, and the examples you bring, are pretty much the best argument against intermarriage that I can think of. Like I said earlier, it’s not that such people are not confused about what it means to be Jewish (they are). You just think the confusion is a good thing, not a bad thing, because you think that the Jewish and goyish sides are both equally valid. They aren’t, at least not in a Jewish context. It’s like saying you can be a Communist and a Republican at the same time. Not possible.

I’ve said this before, so I’ll say it again: my wife is a Japanese giyoret and my sons could all pass in Tokyo if they wanted to. We speak Japanese at home, and we eat a delicious and varied 100% kosher Japanese diet. We are also shomer shabbat and my one of my sons is an ordained Orthodox rabbi. It would be hard to find a more racially mixed family than mine. And yet we are 100% accepted by the Orthodox community. Why? Because we accepted the price of admission. The people you talk about either aren’t at that point yet or are actively fighting against the traditional definition of what it means to be Jewish. To the extent that someone insists that they must be accepted as Jewish even as they insist that celebrating Christmas is a perfectly acceptable thing for a Jew to do, they should not be surprised if people have a problem with this.

I am not saying the road my family took is for everyone. Nor am I saying it was easy. But this is the kind of mixing that the Jewish people need: everything goes through the kosher filter, and what comes out the other end is Jewish because it’s kosher. The kind of facile everybody-is-Jewish-because-everybody-is-racially-mixed-and-no-one’s-definition-of-what-it-means-to-be-Jewish-is-better-than-anyone-else’s definition you seem to favor is a dead end.

Any one and every one of the people you mention could be authentically Jewish if they really want to be. I wish them all the best of luck as they try to sort things out. I really do. But the halacha and the mesorah are the only legitimate things that define who and what a Jew is. And race has nothing, but nothing, to do with it.

But crucifixes and Magen Davids, Christmas and Chanuka, chazzer and Shabbes are mutually exclusive things, and they always will be.

As I occasionally like to say, “At least I can admit to my mixed background.”

Cheers.

Everything DK writes leads me to believe that he would have assented to Antiochus gladly, since I have never heard him say one positive thing about the Jewish religion.

But you know him and I don’t so I’ll take your word for it.

Eva Moon

After all, who were the Greeks but the original enlightened pagans who thought all of that “one invisible G-d” stuff and all of those pesky mitzvot were a crock that got in the way of everybody accepting the obviously superior Hellenistic culture? As far as I can tell, DK thinks Judaism pretty much sucks and that Jews would be better off without it.

So there.

The Renaissance German Lutheran composer Michael Praetorius composed the most beautiful Christmas music in the world.

If someone could compose Hebrew lyrics to his hymns, such as the following, I would be happy.

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I suppose it’s just as well that I don’t understand German; all I can hear is “eine kleine kinder” blah blah, blah. But the music is just too beautiful for words. It’s even better when the voices are accompanied by the correct Renaissance instruments like sackbutts, krummhorns and cornetto. The ultimate expression of “dulcet tones”.

And for plain old nostalgia, “O Tennenbaum” can’t be beat.

Parumpumpumpum, my ass.