Editorial & Opinion

For many years after she married John, Ilana’s parents refused to speak to her. 

Over the past few weeks, my daughters and I have been spending a lot of time in front of the Christmas tree.
 

All month I’ve been debating whether or not to jump into the Noah Feldman frenzy.
 
Feldman, for those of you who have spent the past month under a rock, is the bete noire of Modern Orthodoxy: a yeshiva day school grad who recently published a New York Times Magazine article about how his alma mater has ostracized him for intermarrying.

The picture [of the chasid seated between two women on the subway] accompanying Steve Lipman’s article on the PBS documentary about Jewish Americans (“The Power Of A Hyphen,” Jan. 4), reminds me of a joke I often tell to my Jewish friends:

 I found Steve Lipman’s front-page article about the hyphen in Jewish-American and American-Jew very interesting (“The Power Of A Hyphen,” Jan. 4). In a similar light, somebody in the audience at a Jewish event once objected to being called “Jewish.” The audience was shocked.

Joelle Asaro Berman was born to an Italian-American mother and a Jewish father in 1983, the very same year that Reform rabbis voted to recognize as Jewish the children of such unions, provided they made “appropriate and timely public and formal acts of identification with the Jewish faith and people.”

As Rabbi Steven Wernick presided over his first United Synagogue Conservative Judaism biennial, held earlier this month, there was a sense of an unprecedented opportunity to discuss the history and future of Conservative Judaism.  

 Steve Lipman’s article, “A Boot Against Apartheid” (Dec. 11), is ludicrous. The focus is on Joel Stransky, of the South African rugby team of 1995, recapturing some of his fame from his portrayal in “Invictus.” 
Nowhere in the film is there a reference to Stransky or that the person who made the winning kick was Stransky, or that Stransky was the only Jew on the team, or that there was a Jewish player on the team.
Shame.
 

The issue of Text/Context, “The December Issue,” is too Christmas-oriented. One such article would have been sufficient on the subject. After all, this is a Jewish publication.  
I grew up and lived many years in the Midwest, and I have never experienced “tree lust.” There are Jews out there who actually want to know about Judaism. Who is your target audience?