Julie Wiener's blog

I have a confession to make.

For a long time, I’ve been unfairly dismissive of the “Everything’s Relative” comic strip that appears in this paper.

Too kitschy, too Borscht Belt, too Orthodox, I felt. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but the majority of American Jews are not, in fact, Orthodox.)

I know I’m supposed to focus on intermarriage here, but sometimes I just need to vent on another topic.

And today that topic is, why are so many speakers’ panels at Jewish conferences composed almost entirely of men? I’m not talking about the fervently Orthodox Agudath Israel of America, although I did go to one of its dinners many years ago and there was not one woman on the dais. Which was striking, but not surprising. (If I remember correctly, the table assignments for the meal were also gender-segregated.)

Perhaps because blogging, Facebook and Twitter more than satisfy my own need for exhibitionism and fame, I don’t quite understand why anyone would want to be on a reality show.

Apologies for the infrequent attendance here in blogland. I was on a reporting trip in Florida last week, and am still catching up on things. Plus, I managed to get drafted (OK, I recklessly volunteered) to chair my temple’s Purim carnival, which, as you can imagine, consumes just a fair amount of time.

Speaking of Purim, I believe The Book of Esther is the only Bible story in which a) a Jewish woman intermarries and b) the intermarriage actually directly benefits the larger Jewish community, since Esther is able to use her standing with the king to rescue her people.

In her groundbreaking “The Feminine Mystique,” Betty Friedan famously referred to “the problem that has no name.”

A few weeks ago I took on the mom that has no name: the fact that we have no pithy and consistent way of identifying non-Jewish women raising Jewish children.

InterfaithFamily.com graciously put out a call on Twitter and on its blog seeking suggestions.

I’m traveling to South Florida next week for work (and sun exposure), so I was excited to check out a new study of Florida's Jewish demographics.

I’m still looking for good names for gentile women raising Jewish kids. Perhaps someone like the Jewish Outreach Institute or InterfaithFamily.com should sponsor a contest, hint hint.

Hopefully they’d come up with something better than JOI Associate Executive Director Paul Golin’s (joking I hope) suggestion to me, via Facebook, that we call them MORBs: mothers of other religious backgrounds. A bit too close to “morbid” for my taste.