Israeli press and NGO's make State Dept.'s work easier

The US State Department's annual International Religious Freedom Report on Israel came out this week. Read it in its entirety here.

Why would the US State Department go into so much detail about one brochure used by a marriage counselor? In a report on the infringement of religious rights in the Middle East it seems hardly worth mentioning the fact that some Israeli couples have the bad luck of being exposed to a little chauvinism.

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Does Eli Yishai understand American Jews?

This is my first blog for "Faith Matters," and I figure the best way of describing what I would like to do is by simply jumping right into the water.

Thursday evening, Shas Chairman Eli Yishai was booed at the president's "Facing Tomorrow Conference" in Jerusalem for attacking Reform Jews' high intermarriage rates in the US (see the JPost story here)

The Reform Movement in Israel issued a response to Yishai's comments that went something like this:

"The boos that Minister Yishai received at the president's conference were a fitting response to his comments, which are totally baseless," the head of the Reform Movement in Israel, Rabbi Gilad Kariv, said in a press release. "For the past 200 years the Reform Movement has been at the forefront of the fight for Jewish continuity, and if not for the Reform Movement's thousands of communities, assimilation in the US would be even higher."

Now it's possible to see both sides of the argument. Yishai's perspective is that of a Jew who has never known what it's like to live as a minority in a non-Jewish country. Obviously the ideal situation, if one's main concern is Jewish continuity, is to maintain a strict adherence to Orthodoxy, something which the vast majority of Jews have failed to do in the US. He probably does not fully understand the dynamics of living in a place like the US where there are endless possibilities for self-expression and self-identity. He probably does not appreciate the fact that in a situation where most Jews are not only totally alienated from an Orthodox way of life, they're also totally unfamiliar with many of its basic demands.

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