Free Republic

The recent pardon of the late world heavy weight champion Jack Johnson by our president was a gracious act long overdue. A previous motion had passed the House but died in the Senate in 2008. Johnson’s racially motivated conviction for violating the Mann Act after he had married a white woman resulted in his beginning a year term in Leavenworth prison in 1920. It was not a salutary place; I buried one of its inmates who had done much more than a year there. Johnson skipped bail and spent several years in Europe via Canada. In Barcelona, much in need...

If you are American and over 50, then you were born in a country where, in some states, it was still illegal to marry someone of another race. The 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court ruling that struck down those bans, Loving v Virginia, falls in 2017. Though there will undoubtedly be many news stories lamenting racial bias in areas of American life from policing and employment to housing, the rise of interracial marriage over the past half-century tells a different story. In the coming year, calculates William Frey of the Brookings Institution, a think-tank, nearly a fifth of all...

EW YORK (JTA) – Conservative Rabbi Seymour Rosenbloom has been expelled from the Rabbinical Assembly, the movement’s rabbis’ association, for performing interfaith weddings. An ordained Conservative rabbi for 44 years, Rosenbloom was expelled by unanimous vote last month after a hearing of the R.A.’s Executive Council. Since 1972, the Conservative movement has prohibited its rabbis from officiating at or even attending intermarriages. Rosenbloom told JTA the council offered to retain his membership in exchange for a promise not to perform any more intermarriages. Rosenbloom declined the offer.

Massive inbreeding within the Muslim culture during the last 1.400 years may have done catastrophic damage to their gene pool. The consequences of intermarriage between first cousins often have serious impact on the offspring’s intelligence, sanity, health and on their surroundings The most famous example of inbreeding is in ancient Egypt, where several Pharaonic dynasties collapsed after a couple of hundred years. In order to keep wealth and power within the family, the Pharaohs often married their own sister or half-sister and after a handful of generations the offspring were mentally and physically unfit to rule. Another historical example is...

THE Israeli government has withdrawn an ad campaign after a rare backlash from major US Jewish groups for appearing to urge expatriates not to marry American Jews or raise children in the United States. The ads struck a nerve in a community that has long debated the nature of the Jewish identity and struggled with issues of assimilation, intermarriage and tensions between religious and secular Jews. The first ad showed a young Israeli woman wincing after her American boyfriend mistakes candles and music marking Israel's solemn memorial day for a romantic night in. A narrator intoned: "They will always remain...

First Lady Michelle Obama was booed in Florida today as she made the traditional "Gentlemen, start your engines!" call at the final NASCAR race of the season.

The Israeli government has launched a television and internet advertising campaign urging Israelis to inform on Jewish friends and relatives abroad who may be in danger of marrying non-Jews. The advertisements, employing what the Israeli media described as “scare tactics”, are designed to stop assimilation through intermarriage among young diaspora Jews by encouraging them to move to Israel. The campaign, which cost US$800,000 (Dh2.9 million), was created in response to reports that half of all Jews outside Israel marry non-Jews. It is just one of several initiatives by the

Jewish leaders in the UK are warning that British Jewry may die out if more is not done to try to combat intermarriage. Studies show between 30% and 50% of young British Jews now marry outside the religion. Britain's Jewish population is in serious decline. The last census for Britain showed that 266,000 people said they were Jewish - 0.5% of the population. Dwindling numbers But 50 years ago figures show there were at least double that number, with about 500,000 British Jews. "Intermarriage and assimilation are the biggest threat to British Jewry right now," says Rabbi Yitchak Schochet, adviser...

In this age of potpourri spirituality, Anique Olivier-Mason, 25, classifies herself generally as a Christian: she grew up Catholic and often attends a Presbyterian church near her home. But on a recent Friday night, she was attending Sabbath services at Larchmont Temple. Mrs. Olivier-Mason's husband, Joshua, is Jewish, and the couple became members of the synagogue, in Westchester County, last summer, committing to immersing themselves in the 800-family congregation. On this night, she stood by gamely as her husband, 25, bobbed, swayed and sang in enthusiastic Hebrew with others in the temple. With intermarriage so common, Reform synagogues like Larchmont...

It doesn’t get much more peaceful than the simple life among the Amish in rural Ohio. They have no cars, no electricity, no televisions. But their children have medical conditions so rare, doctors don’t have names for them yet, reports correspondent Vicki Mabrey. The Amish make up only about 10 percent of the population in Geagua County in Ohio, but they’re half of the special needs cases. Three of the five Miller children, for example, have a mysterious crippling disease that has no name and no known cure. Their father, Bob Miller, says he realizes there is a crisis in...

Writing in The New York Times, Forward editor J. J. Goldberg accused the organized Jewish community of setting off two "false alarms" with the massive Jewish population surveys issued in 1990 and 2000. The first survey shocked American Jews by finding an intermarriage rate of 52 percent, now revised down to 43 percent. The second, according to Goldberg, scared the community into thinking that it is shrinking, from 5.5 million then to 5.2 million now. Goldberg says the United Jewish Communities (UJC) knows better and "owes it to itself and its public to step forward and state plainly what it...

Intermarriage: The Problem To relate to the Jewish community in a positive way, you need to understand something about intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews; why it is a problem; and what you, as a non-Jew, can do about it. Jews are prohibited both in written Torah and in oral Torah from marrying non-Jews. Period. No exceptions. There is not a bit of fuzziness about the rule. In one story from Bemidbar (Numbers), Pinchas, grandson of Aaron, responds to a flagrant violation of the rule by spearing the offending Israelite and his non-Jewish bride through the stomach. Pinchas is held up...

Study: Intermarriage still rising Homes of intermarried American Jews soon will outnumber purely Jewish households if high intermarriage rates keep pace, a new report suggests. A study out this week by the New York-based Jewish Outreach Institute says that intermarriages have climbed above 33 percent since the mid-1960s, meaning that the ratio of intermarried households to Jewish households is rising. With intermarriage estimates since 1990 ranging between 40 percent and 52 percent, the report says, the ratio of intermarried homes to in-married homes runs between 4:3 and 2:1. The institute, which promotes outreach to unaffiliated and intermarried Jews, says...