Ideas in Jewish Education and Engagement

I’m Sad as Hell and I’m Not Going to Take This Anymore

How do we begin to process the tragedy and terror that flood news websites and our inboxes almost daily? How do we manage the pain, the anger? How do we embrace and connect to our community during these challenging times? In this post, Rabbi Brad Hirschfield, president of Clal: The National …

Global Day of Jewish Learning in Your Community

The Global Day of Jewish Learning unites over 500 communities in 43 countries through study of Jewish texts. Drawing participants from every point on the religious, communal and ethnic spectrum, its organizing partners include Federation's partner the American Jewish Joint Distribution Comm…

Return Torah to its Place of Glory

What drives us—what sits at our core? And what differentiates us? Rabbi Elie Kaunfer, executive director of Mechon Hadar, suggests that it’s Torah—and he encourages us to understand its role in our mission and to make it ours. He adapted this post from a speech he delivered in 2011 to …

Why Every Community Needs an Interfaith Concierge

What have we done to welcome, include and support interfaith families? Nearly three years after the Pew Research Center’s “Portrait of Jewish Americans” cited astounding statistics, 80% of Reform Jews married between 2000 and 2013 married people of other faiths and backgrounds, Rabbi M…

Does “Interfaith” Still Matter?

For 15 years InterfaithFamily has focused on empowering interfaith families to engage in Jewish life and encouraging Jewish communities to welcome them. Once relying only on web-based resources that now attract more than one million unique visitors a year, and starting in 2011 deploying loca…