TruthBook Religious News Blog

Everybody’s A Little Bit Jew-ish

by Joshua Hammerman
Special To The Jewish Week

For ages we’ve been obsessed with the question, “Who is a Jew?” Perhaps we need to be asking instead, “Who isn’t?”

A team of geneticists has uncovered explicit evidence of mass conversions of Sephardic Jews to Catholicism in 15th- and 16th-century Spain and Portugal. The study, based on an analysis of Y-chromosomes and reported first in the American Journal of Human Genetics, indicates that 20 percent of the population of the Iberian Peninsula has Sephardic Jewish ancestry. That’s about 10 million people. While anti-Semitism remains pervasive and the Jewish population microscopic, there is a deep fascination with all things Jewish. “We’ve gone from a period of pillaging the Jews and then suppressing and ignoring their patrimony to a period of rising
curiosity and fascination [about them],” said Anna Maria Lopez, the director of Toledo’s Sephardic Museum in a New York Times interview.

So while there are almost no Jews left in Spain, a residue remains, literally in their DNA. Everyone’s a little bit Jew-ish, even if almost no one is a Jew.

The suffix “ish,” indicating approximation, is increasingly popular among today’s youth, according to the language forum, “Wordreference.com.” Kids are constantly tossing it about: A movie is “creepish,” he looks “Europeanish,” the dress is “greenish” and the meeting begins at “five-ish.” In an age where fluidity is the norm, and everything, from the national debt to Arlen Specter’s party affiliation, is a moving target, we all need to learn how to go with the flow. Fortunately, we Jews are uniquely prepared to do just that: We already have “ish” in our name.

The Pew Foundation’s latest survey on the American religious landscape, called, “Faith in Flux: Changes in Religious Affiliation in the U.S.,” notes that Americans change religions almost as often as they change their underwear, with over half abandoning their childhood faith-group, usually before the age of 24.
Meanwhile, Synagogue 3000’s latest survey indicates that American Jews are foregoing secular and ethnic identification in favor of a more “spiritually oriented” — and therefore more fluid — self-definition. The survey notes that the presence of Christian, or formerly Christian, members in many Jewish households has led to a greater comfort level with spiritual ideas and language. While there are some forms of spirituality that are innately Jewish, the category lends itself to a blurring of boundaries between faiths. In the S3K report, Rabbi Rachel Cowan states that spirituality “helps me see that I’m not the whole story here, that I’m just part of something much bigger.” Bigger even than Jewish peoplehood.

Please click "external source" for this entire, very interesting article.

Labels: genetics, Jewish, Joshua Hammerman, pew Religious Landscape Survey

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Thursday, December 25, 2008

Across Differing Faiths, Shared Holidays

Nadav Neuhaus for The New York Times

This is page one of a two-page article. Please click on "external link" for the complete article.

PAM GAWLEY is Jewish, her husband, Steven, is Catholic, and from the time they started dating, they celebrated each other’s holidays together. Christmas and Easter, they went to his parents’ home; Rosh Hashana, Hanukkah and Passover, to her parents’.

“Everything was very equal,” said Mr. Gawley, a music executive. They were married by a judge in a civil ceremony 18 years ago, and each December, their home in Port Washington, N.Y., is decorated for both holidays. “We started with a small Christmas tree and a menorah with electric bulbs,” Mr. Gawley said. “And then the tree got bigger, and we got Hanukkah pillows...”

“Mixing the holidays was always very easy, we didn’t really give it much thought,” Ms. Gawley said.

Until nine years ago, when their firstborn, Michaela, was 3. As usual, Mr. Gawley was working long hours, so Ms. Gawley, a stay-at-home mom, put up the Christmas tree, with the help of her brother and her dad.

When Mr. Gawley came home from the office, everyone was admiring the tree, and little Michaela asked, “Why do we celebrate Christmas?”

“Because Christmas is God’s birthday,” Mr. Gawley said.

“I didn’t say a word,” Ms. Gawley said. “I just said, ‘Can you come into the bedroom with me?’ ”

“She wasn’t happy,” Mr. Gawley said.

“I went bananas,” Ms. Gawley said. “Here my dad, my brother and I had just put up this Christmas tree — three Jews. I said to him, ‘You can’t say that.’ At that moment I knew we had to figure out how to handle this.”

Kids change everything. For Ms. Gawley, her daughter’s question started her on a search for a more systematic way to provide their children (the couple have three, now ages 12, 8 and 3) with a balanced religious upbringing in a mixed marriage.

The Gawleys have lots of company. In 1970, 13 percent of married American Jews were in mixed marriages; by 2001, 31 percent were, according to the National Jewish Population Survey done by United Jewish Communities. And that rate has risen steadily; between 1996 and 2001 (the last time the survey was conducted), nearly half the Jews who married — 47 percent — married outside their faith.

While most mixed families find their own way through the holidays, a small but growing number like the Gawleys, mainly in urban areas, have joined interfaith groups. In New York there is Interfaith Community, which started in the late 1980s with a handful of parents whose children attended the Trinity School in Manhattan, was formally incorporated in 2003 and now has 120 families, with chapters on Long Island, in Westchester and Connecticut, along with a chapter that combines Orange and Rockland Counties in New York and Bergen County in New Jersey.

Most who join have young children, find comfort in prayer, have a belief in God and are trying to expose their youngsters to both parents’ religions with the idea that later in life the children will make their own choices. “We couldn’t ignore this until they were 17, and tell them to go look around. They’d have no grounding,” said Fred Engel of Larchmont, who has two girls, 9 and 12.

During the holidays, Mr. Engel, an investment banker, and his wife, Ruby, a psychologist, take their daughters to an Episcopal church, a Reform temple and Interfaith services.

At one point, the Gawleys tried a Unitarian church as a compromise between her Judaism and his Catholicism, but both felt out of place. “It was too new to both of us,” said Ms. Gawley. “We weren’t looking to merge traditions, we were looking to hold on to our traditions.”

Interfaith Sunday school classes are taught both by Jewish and either Catholic or Protestant educators. Each holiday gets its due (“Hanukkah-mas” bushes are not the goal here), with some chapters holding separate interfaith Christmas and Hanukkah celebrations.

“We don’t want to smoosh them together,” said Joanne Sirotkin of Harrison, N.Y.

No smooshing is central to the Interfaith ethos. Linda and Tom Woodward of Westwood, N.J., the parents of two children, 8 and 9, keep the Hanukkah menorah downstairs in the playroom, the Christmas tree in the living room. Soraya and Don Meyers of Highland Mills, N.Y., who have three girls, put the Christmas tree in the study and light the menorah in the family room.

While Interfaith provides detailed guides to each religion, families often puzzle out the trappings, like the holiday decorations, themselves.

Labels: Catholic, Christmas, Hanukkah, Jewish, Nadav Neuhaus

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Friday, November 21, 2008

Trying to measure faith, health link

Some scientific studies show religion and spirituality offers benefits

By JANUARY W. PAYNE
THE WASHINGTON POST

Published: Saturday, November 15, 2008

An integral part of many people's lives, religion defines patterns of worship and socialization, but its impact, if any, on health is unclear. Some studies show a benefit to religious practice, while others -- including much of the research into prayer -- fail to prove its health value.

The question of the role something as unquantifiable as religious belief might play in health troubles some scientists in an age when mainstream medicine is turning ever more toward epidemiological science to define research protocols and to determine the validity of treatments.

That said, it's not hard to understand why being religious might be good for the body, experts say. Religious people often attend regular services; this puts them in a socially supportive environment, which has widely acknowledged health advantages. And some religions promote healthful diets and discourage unhealthy behaviors such as drinking alcohol and smoking

Among that research is some evidence that religion and spirituality offer health benefits and even longer life spans. A national survey conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ...found that people who did not attend religious services were 1.87 times more likely to have died during an eight-year period than those who attended services more than weekly.

The life expectancy for infrequent attendees was age 75, and it was 83 for those who attended frequently.

A 1996 study looked at the association of Jewish religious observance with mortality by comparing secular and religious kibbutzim in Israel. Belonging to a religious group appeared to prolong life, and the lower mortality rates seen in the religious group were consistent for all causes of death, the authors wrote. And a 2003 study published in Psychosomatic Medicine found that meditation might alter brain and immune function in positive ways, an effect similarly seen in research involving Buddhist monks.

It's hard to show conclusively whether or how a belief system affects one's health; other life experiences might provide benefits to health so similar to religion and spirituality that it's hard to differentiate.

Despite the lack of scientific evidence, some common religious practices are widely thought to enhance health.

Power of prayer

It's not unusual for people to pray for their own health and for that of others. In a 2004 survey of more than 31,000 people, 45 percent said they'd prayed for health reasons, 43 percent prayed for their own health, and 25 percent reported that others had prayed for them. About 10 percent said they'd participated in a prayer group for their health, according to the results, released by the National Center for Health Statistics and the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine.

But science says that prayer might not help a person who is ill. A 2003 update to an earlier systemic review of clinical trials on distant healing found that intercessory prayer, which involves someone praying for the healing of a person located elsewhere, with or without that person's knowledge, probably doesn't offer specific therapeutic healing effects.

Any benefit seen from prayer might come from the fact that "knowing that your friends and family are praying for you is part of social support, ... and (that is) probably really helpful to people, independent of if there is a higher being that answers those prayers," said David Schlundt, an associate professor of psychology at Vanderbilt University, who has researched the connection between faith and health.

Although religion might provide social support, purpose, a belief system, a moral code -- and even happiness -- these benefits can also come from other sources, notes a 2007 study by Eckersley published in the Medical Journal of Australia. Future examination of the health benefits of religion and spirituality should be done in a broader context, he said, especially with regard to how cultural influences affect faith and health.

Cultural context

That cultural context could be key to understanding how people's beliefs factor into their health outcomes, experts note, because religion and spirituality don't seem to produce a uniform effect on everyone. Differences are apparent between groups of varying socioeconomic and racial and ethnic backgrounds.

A dangerous aspect of the purported faith-health connection is fatalism, the belief that health is predetermined and is not within a person's control. Research shows that people who hold such beliefs are less likely than others to participate in health promotion programs and to seek health care.

Research shows that African Americans are more likely to endorse fatalism than whites. A 2007 study published in the American Journal of Health Behavior reported that such beliefs could be a reaction to chronic illness or poor health rather than something that inhibits beneficial health behavior from the outset.

FAITH HEALING

Research suggests that religion offers health benefits, including longer life spans. Is that because of the healing benefits of prayer or because people of faith enjoy supportive, healthful lifestyles? Some statistics:

83: The life expectancy of people who frequently attended religious services; for infrequent attendees, the estimate was 75.

70 percent: The percentage of churches that provide health-care services to their communities, according to a survey of 6,000 congregations.

40 to 60 percent: The percentage of hospital patients who want their doctors to pray with them. But fewer than 5 percent of doctors say they do so.

2,500: Number of Maryland kindergartners exempted from vaccine mandates on religious grounds, up from 1,300 in 2004.

Labels: belief, Buddhists, culture, faith healing, health, January W. Payne, Jewish, prayer, religion, spirituality

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Wednesday, June 25, 2008

God, Up Close And Personal

by Steve Lipman

The idea that God is a “person with whom people can have a relationship” seems right out of Evangelical Christianity.

Yet a new study of religion in America finds that a full quarter of Jews believe in such a personal relationship.

Is that figure high or low, and is it good for the Jews?

It’s lower than the percentage of such believers in the country’s other major faith groups, according to a major survey of religious beliefs released this week. But it’s probably on the rise, and it’s good if Jews with such a personal belief become active in synagogues and other Jewish organizations, says a spokesman for a prominent outreach organization.

It may be bad, however, if personal piety comes at the expense of connections with the wider Jewish community, says a representative for another national Jewish organization.

The release of the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life holds few surprises about American Jewry, showing the American Jewish community on the liberal — nearly secular — end of the spectrum on such issues as the importance of religion in one’s life, frequency of attending religious services and divine authorship of Scripture. (Pew interviewed some 36,000 people nationwide during the spring and summer of 2007. The Jewish sample was 682.)

Twenty-five percent of Jews in the Pew study said they believe in a personal God; 50 percent said God is “an impersonal force.” The Protestant figure for a personal God was 72 percent; Catholic, 60; Muslim, 41.

People who develop a sense of personal spirituality, in any faith, often tend to disassociate from communal life ...

Rabbi Yitzchak Rosenbaum, associate director of the National Jewish Outreach Program, says he does not share those fears. “I don’t think the broader Jewish community will suffer if Jews develop a personal relationship with God. It brings them closer — they need a community.”

And, the rabbi says, the concept of a personal relationship with God has roots in the Torah. “It was a Jewish idea before it was a Christian idea. We believe that every Jew prays directly to God.”

Labels: Christianity, God, Jewish, Jews, personality, prayer, Steve Lipman

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Thursday, October 04, 2007

Fear Of Religious Litmus Test Rising

McCain’s ‘Christian nation’ comments spark new concern about growing role of religion in the ’08 campaign.

James D. Besser - Washington Correspondent

The prospects for deep religious polarization in the 2008 election took a quantum leap this week in the wake of comments by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) that the Constitution created America as a “Christian” nation — and the rousing defense of his comments by some Christian groups.

McCain’s comments, which produced sharp rebukes from several major Jewish groups, echoed views expressed in a recent survey conducted by the First Amendment Center, in which 65 percent of respondents said the nation’s founders intended the U.S. to be a Christian nation — and 55 percent said that view was enshrined in the Constitution.

The upping of the religious ante in the 2008 campaign also includes a growing rebellion by prominent Christian conservatives against GOP frontrunner Rudolph Giuliani and their threat to back a third-party candidate who meets their religious standards.

And it comes amid continuing questions about whether former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney’s Mormon faith will be a deal-breaker with many Evangelical voters, and as questions persist about the “Christian nation” views of former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, the emerging dark horse in the Republican ranks. It also comes as anxious Democrats ramp up their own religious campaigns, with more detailed discussions of the role of faith in their own lives.

All of that, some Jewish leaders worry, is pushing the nation toward the de facto establishment of a religious test for high office.

Earlier in the interview, he stressed his view that the “No. 1 issue people should make [in selecting a president] is, ‘will this person carry on in the Judeo-Christian principled tradition that has made this nation the greatest experiment in the history of mankind?’”

But his unambiguous agreement that the Constitution established a Christian nation stirred the most debate.

But some Christian groups praised McCain’s original comments – and said they could help in a presidential campaign that has been met with skepticism by evangelical voters and leaders.

But a leading Jewish Republican and McCain supporter said it was all a matter of interpretation.

The Republican Jewish Coalition offered only the faintest criticism of McCain’s comments.

Political analysts were divided on whether McCain’s comments were a verbal misfire or part of a conscious political strategy meant to revive his once-front running campaign. But many speculated that the upcoming South Carolina primary has a lot to do with it.

The 2008 presidential race took on even more of a religious charge this week with reports that leading Christian conservatives, including Focus on the Family leader James Dobson, met over the weekend and discussed the possibility of supporting a third-party candidacy because of their dissatisfaction with the current GOP field, and Giuliani in particular.

But Giuliani, according to recent polls, is running strongly among Evangelical voters despite his three marriages and his relatively moderate positions on gay rights and abortion — a trend political experts attribute to his strong image on terrorism and security.

The likeliest recipients of support from the angry Evangelical leaders, he said, is Huckabee, a Southern Baptist preacher, or Romney, who continues to work to combat the view among many Evangelicals that his Mormonism is a dangerous sect.

Labels: Christian, First Amendment Center, James D. Besser, Jewish, John McCain, Mitt Romney, Mormonism, religion, Rudolph Giuliani

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Monday, August 20, 2007

Amanpour's `God's Warriors' airs on CNN

By David Bauder, AP Television Writer
Mon Aug 20, 8:47 AM ET

NEW YORK - Christiane Amanpour's work on the documentary series "God's Warriors" took her directly to intersections of extreme religious and secular thinking.

She watched, fascinated, as demonstrators in San Francisco accused teenagers in the fundamentalist Christian group BattleCry of intolerance in a clash of two cultures that will probably never understand each other.

Understanding is what Amanpour is trying to promote in "God's Warriors," which takes up six prime-time hours on CNN this week. The series on religious fundamentalism among Christians, Muslims and Jews airs in three parts, 9 p.m. EDT Tuesday through Thursday.

"I'm not interested in drumming up false fears, or falsely allaying fears," CNN's chief international correspondent told The Associated Press by phone from France, where she added last-minute touches to the series. "I just want people to know what's going on."

Amanpour traveled extensively over eight months to work on the series. The trips to Amanpour's native Iran are most fascinating. She explored the ancient roots of the conflict between Shiites and Sunnis, and talked with one of the country's most accomplished female politicians about how Muslim women are treated.

Another segment tried to explain why so many devout Muslims are willing to give their lives to a cause.

"To the West, martyrdom has a really bad connotation because of suicide bombers who call themselves martyrs," she said. "Really, martyrdom is actually something that historically was quite noble, because it was about standing up and rejecting tyranny, rejecting injustice and rejecting oppression and, if necessary, dying for that."

Finishing the project didn't leave her with a sense of fear over the implications of stronger fundamentalist movements.

"I did come away with a sense that we — or those people who don't want to see religion in politics and culture — if we don't look into it and see what is going on, we're in danger of missing it and not be able to react to it properly," she said.

Amanpour was one of the last reporters to talk to the Rev. Jerry Falwell. She interviewed him a week before he died about the legacy of the Moral Majority, the organization that thrust evangelical Christians onto the political stage.

The segment on Christians explores BattleCry in some depth, digging at the roots of an organization that fights against some of the cruder elements of popular culture and urges teenagers to be chaste. In noting how girls at some BattleCry events are encouraged to wear long dresses, Amanpour asks the group's leader how it is different from the Taliban.

In a nonjudgmental way, she visits a family that is home-schooling its children and explores the influence of Evangelicals on the courts.

"There is so much nuance, so much information, so much to talk about, by no means were we able to talk about it all," she said, "and by no means do I claim this is the definitive project. It is one of the fullest, one of the most ambitious and one of the most complete."

Amanpour, 49, is no longer CNN's most visible reporter, as she was when skipping from one war zone to another. She received a lot of attention for her documentary "In the Footsteps of bin Laden" last year, and said she's enjoying the opportunity to put day-to-day news in greater perspective.

She's frequently criticized American television networks, including her own, for not spending enough time on international news.

Amanpour was recently named a Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II. She's leaving her home base of London to move to New York with her husband, former U.S. State Department spokesman James Rubin.

"This is really a personal move for my husband,who has lived eight years out of his own country and wants to come back," she said.

Labels: "God's Warriors", BattleCry, Christiane Amanpour, Christianity, David Bauder, fundamentalism, Jewish, Muslims, politics, religion

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Tuesday, June 19, 2007

Religious leaders urge action on warming

Mon May 21, 5:02 PM ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -

Christian, Jewish and Muslim leaders are urging President George W. Bush and Congress to take action against global warming, declaring that the changing climate is a "moral and spiritual issue."

In an open letter to be published on Tuesday, more than 20 religious groups urged U.S. leaders to limit greenhouse gas emissions and invest in renewable energy sources.

"Global warming is real, it is human-induced and we have the responsibility to act," says the letter, which will run in Roll Call and the Politico, two Capitol Hill newspapers.

"We are mobilizing a religious force that will persuade our legislators to take immediate action to curb greenhouse gases," it says.

The letter is signed by top officials of the National Council of Churches, the Islamic Society of North America and the political arm of the Reform branch of Judaism.

Top officials from several mainline Christian denominations, including the Episcopal Church, United Methodist Church, Presbyterian Church, African Methodist Episcopal Church and Alliance of Baptists also signed the letter, along with leaders of regional organizations and individual churches.

Rev. Joel Hunter, a board member of the National Association of Evangelicals, also signed the letter, though that group has not officially taken a stance on global warming due to opposition from some of its more conservative members.

Labels: Christian, church, global warming, Islamic, Jewish, responsibility