Chelsea’s wedding raises questions about intermarriage
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Print | Marc Mezvinsky and Chelsea Clinton during their wedding ceremony on Saturday. Genevieve de Manio |
Is it possible that the first iconic Jewish picture of the decade is of an interfaith marriage?
Photographs taken Saturday show the Jewish groom wearing a yarmulke and a crumpled tallit staring into the eyes of his giddy bride under a traditional Jewish wedding canopy with a framed ketubah, a Jewish wedding contract, in the background.
The couple are Marc Mezvinsky, the banker son of two Jewish ex-members of Congress, and Chelsea Clinton, the daughter of the former U.S. president and current secretary of state.
The images and scant details of the tightly guarded wedding — dubbed by some the “wedding of the century” — have raised a number of questions about the significance of the union for American Jews and what it says about intermarriage in America.
We should “celebrate the full acceptance of Jews by the larger society that this marriage represents,” Hebrew Union College sociologist Steven Cohen told JTA via e-mail from Jerusalem.
At the same time, he noted, the fact that so few children of interfaith unions, particularly those between Jewish fathers and non-Jewish mothers, are raised solely as Jews raises the conundrum of our age: “How do we Jewishly engage and educate the intermarried, while at the same time maintaining our time-honored commitment to inmarriage?” Cohen asked.
“In short, we should celebrate the particular marriage of these two fine individuals, but we ought not celebrate the type of marriage it constitutes and represents.”
The wedding had more than just a Jewish flair.
It was officiated by a rabbi, James Ponet, head of the Joseph Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale University, along with a Methodist minister. The marriage took place under a chuppah. Friends of the couple recited the traditional “sheva brachot,” the seven traditional Jewish blessings given to the bride and groom. The groom broke a glass with his foot, according to tradition. And according to several reports, guests danced the hora and lifted the former president and the secretary of state, Bill and Hillary Clinton, in chairs during the dance.
Yet some of the more liberal streams of American Judaism, which accept intermarriage if the couple’s children are raised as Jews, chafed at the fact that the wedding took place on Saturday, before the Jewish Sabbath ended. The Reform movement frowns upon its rabbis conducting weddings on the Sabbath, the president of the Union for Reform Judaism, Rabbi Eric Yoffie, told JTA.
In 1973, the Reform movement decided officially that its rabbis would be allowed to perform intermarriages, though they would be discouraged from doing so, an edict that still stands today, he said.
“She has married in,” Paul Golin, the associate director of the Jewish Outreach Institute, a nondenominational group that reaches out to unaffiliated and intermarried families, said of Chelsea. “Some will say he married out, but if he was marrying out, there wouldn’t have been anything Jewish.
“The fact that they went to the effort to have a chuppah and have a rabbi and that he wore a tallis says a lot about their future direction. Otherwise, why bother?”
The marriage has pushed the internal Jewish community debate about intermarriage into the view of mainstream America.
In the days before the wedding, the Washington Post asked several rabbis in its “On Faith” column, “Is interfaith marriage good for American society? Is it good for religion? What is lost — and gained — when religious people intermarry?”
Rabbi Steven Wernick, the CEO of the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, said intermarriage is certainly “not ideal,” but that the Conservative movement in 2008 decided that it must welcome interfaith families and “help their spouses along their spiritual journeys.”
Rabbi Shmuley Hecht, who is Orthodox and the rabbinical adviser at Yale University’s Eliezer Jewish Society, said intermarriage can work only if the non-Jewish spouse converts to Judaism through an Orthodox conversion and genuinely changes religions. Otherwise, he said, the marriage is doomed to fail because down the road any self-aware Jews, “however defined, will feel the call of their people and have the fullness of their being disrupted by intermarriage.”
Rabbi Brad Hirschfield, also Orthodox and president of the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, said that when marriages break down it usually has little to do with religion. All religions should stop worrying about intermarriage and start worrying about how to help couples make their relationships work, he wrote.
Ed Case, the executive director of Interfaithfamily.com, said the Clinton wedding certainly had stirred interest in intermarriage, noting that traffic to his website was up 35 percent in July compared to the same month last year. Case said that accepting this marriage and welcoming this intermarried family into the Jewish fold could help pave the way for the Jewish community to be more accepting of others.
Golin said he is skeptical that the Clinton-Mezvinsky wedding does anything more than revive existing battle lines in the Jewish debate over intermarriage.
“The horse is so far out of the barn on this one,” Golin said, noting that as an intermarried person himself, he is turned off by much of the debate over intermarriage as a problem. “The folks who are fearful that my kind of Judaism is going to destroy Judaism are still going to be fearful. The folks who are fully embracing of interfaith families are going to be embracing. I don’t see a whole lot of movement.”
Approached by JTA, the Orthodox Union declined to comment on the wedding. Separately, the head of its kashrut division, Rabbi Menachem Genack of Englewood, a longtime Clinton friend and political supporter, declined to comment.
The Mezvinsky-Clinton wedding is affirmation both of the success of the Jewish community and that American Jewry must learn how to deal with intermarried families and figure out how to bring them into the Jewish fold, the Reform movement’s Yoffie said.
“The price of our reaffirmation in American society is a high rate of intermarriage,” he said. “We can’t be embraced and not expect that our young people won’t be marrying with their young people. Unless we are prepared to withdraw into a ghetto, there is no solution.”
“I look at the couple and my response is, ‘I hope they will make a choice to raise their children in a single religion and tradition and second, as a Jew and rabbi, I hope it will be Judaism.’ I don’t know if they have had that conversation.”
JTA
Flag CommentDear “Chosen” Activists and the media:
Who doesn’t like a good wedding? I wish the happy couple all the success of a joycous marriage.
However, this particular marriage may have the ‘honeymoon’ over before it’s begun.
I’m not concerned with whether Chelsea converts to being Jewish.
I am concerned that her mother’s anti-semitic politics, that has been a disaster against Israel and the Jewish faith and nation, will be excused under the heading: “How can I be an anti-semite, when my daughter married a Jewish man, while I run for President”?
Having started Hillarynow.com and promoting Hillary in Aug. 2003, 3 years before Hillary became a candidate, I went to 110 cities and did over 1000 news interviews on her behalf, and gave her 5 years of my life and I know what a lousy campaign she ran out of Wash., D.C. which cost her the election.
I also know how she wasted $100million on this foolish effort with an incompetent campaign and I also know that when she was both a U.S. Senator and Presidential candidate she was supportive of a ‘United Jerusalem’, which is the only reason I supported her to begin with.
As a lifelong Democrat, I saw Obama switch in one day from a ‘United Jerusalem’ to a ‘divided Jerusalem’, when he addressed AIPAC in D.C.,in 2008 and I was outside with my protest sign: “Obama is Bad For America and Israel” and had to put up with a ton of abuse from those going to the meeting.
For the first time in my life I voted for a Republican. I knew Obama was trouble but I never knew he would be this ruthless and evil. Obama and Hillary won because Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz in Dist. 20, Obama’s #1, told the Jewish community we could ‘trust’ Obama on Israel, which we know today is a huge lie as illustrated below with many more grievances to mention. The Jewish vote in S. Fla. gave Obama the victory, which went national and he was elected with the Jewish vote and Hillary is in her position as a result. Schultz’s betrayal and siding with Obama/Hillary on each of the issues below is why I’m running against her for Congress, as an ‘independent’ in the Nov. general election, as a national referendum against Obama/Hillary/Schultz etc. playing these disastrous and dangerous games.(see: www.kunstforcongress.com).
Anyway, back to Hillary, I also had to put up with 5 yrs. of abusive attacks upon myself for even supporting Hillary.
Many told me of Hillary hugging Arafat’s wife who lied about Israel using chemical weapons to kill Arabs. How would Hillary betray Israel and the Jews?
Tragically, since joining Obama’s appeasement of everything Muslim, she has gone out of her way to abuse…. time and again… the Jewish nation, the Jewish faith, our 5000 yr. “Covenant with G-d”, and to demand that ‘no natural births’ in our ‘holyland’, she and Obama want to give to the very Islamic Nazis who backed Hitler and danced in the streets after ‘9/11’.
Imagine telling the Jews that East Jerusalem belongs to the very people who keep screaming “Death to Israel” and “Death to America”?
Imagine ignoring that Jerusalem has been Jewish for 3000 years and millions of Jews have been murdered for their faith and Jerusalem, they pray to 3 times daily, while the Muslims pray to Mecca and turn their backs on Jerusalem? Jerusalem is in our Bible over 700 times and not once in the Koran. But don’t let this stop Obama and Hillary from attacking our faith, they would never do to the Muslims.
Imagine, ‘judenrein’ politics of a ‘Jew free’ area, from Hillary to attack the Jewish holyland and all in it and to repeat the disaster in Gaza, which allowed Hamas to take control. This ‘Jew free’ policy of the Nazis to rid the Jews in Europe, Hillary and Obama are pushing now means that another 630,000 Jews will have to leave Judea and Samaria and East Jerusalem, which will never happen without another war. With the 10,000 Jews forced to leave Gush Katif in Gaza and not resettled, does anyone with a brain think the rest of the Jews will follow suit in this outrageous betrayal?
Meanwhile, Hamas takes over in Gaza and is voted in with 85% vote to keep warring with Israel and killing more Jews. For this the Gazans are to be rewarded with Obama and Hillary supporting them instead of atacking them for attacking Israel with 15,000 plus missiles including 300 more since the ‘ceasefire’ last year.
Where is the morality, principles, credibility of Obama and Hillary with their sins on the backs of Chelsea and her Jewish husband having to deal with all of this outrageous anti-semitism from Obama and Hillary?
Meanwhile, Hillary goes a few weeks ago to Auschwitz, the world’s largest Jewish cemetery where millions of Jews were exterminated, to offer $15millions for repair, while Hillary herself is pushing the very same policies that the Nazis used that allowed an Auschwitz, to take place as part of the mass murder of nearly 7 millions Jews in the Holocaust, the Arabs cowardly deny, but want to finish the job Hitler started and Hillary and Obama are pushing and siding with. Why is Auschwitz in the hands of the Poles who put crosses and a disco there, when this belongs to the Jews and other victims and should be shown proper respect?
Didn’t Obama dump on the Poles with his missile withdrawal to satisfy the Russians? Didn’t Obama even ignore going to the Polish Embassy to sign a condolense book when the Polish President was killed in a plane crash?
Meanwhile, Obama and Hillary are supporting the German Insurance Corporations who don’t want to compensate the Holocaust survivors claims and this too happened in July of 2010. Even Bill Clinton wasn’t this evil and did support the survivors.
Obama in Cairo in 2009, equates the “Holocaust” with “Muslim Humiliation”, while cowardly ignoring 5 Arab wars and 2 Intifadas to kill all Jews and ignored 900,000 Jews thrown out of Arab countries and everything stolen from them, when Israel became a state. Where’s Hillary in this outrage?
Yet, Obama and Hillary constantly say that Israel’s ‘security’ will be maintained, but they’ve allowed, with the most aweful politics and wasting two years, the world didn’t have, to allow Iran, which denies the Holocaust, to build its nukes it will use against Israel and America, while supporting the Islamic Nazi Hamas and Hezbollah.
What ‘security’ is there if Israel is to give up everything Jewish, holy and our 5000 yrs. of ‘occupation’ that G-d gave to us, we bought and paid for many times over, and the League of Nations also gave to us, but Obama and Hillary could care less about justice for the Jews, while in bed with the Islamic Nazis that want us all dead.
Obama tells Israel that protecting the burial place of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and their wives, is a ‘provacation’ to the Muslims, while Abraham, the first Jew, bought this property, 3000 yrs. before there was Islam. Hillary allows this outrage and smear against the Jewish faith to go unchallenged.
Obama is behind Turkey, England, the EU and UN against Israel and mum about Hamas’ 15,000 missiles against Israel, while supporting efforts to stop the ‘Gaza blockade’, to prevent Hamas from getting any more weapons. Hillary supports this attack against Israel as well, while rewarding those supporting Hamas.
All of this is in violation of Title 18, of U.S. Code which prevents giving any ‘material support to terrorists’ and both Obama and Hillary cold be impeached for doing this travesty of justice of supporting the very killers of Jews, Christians, Hindus, Kurds, Bhuddists, other Muslims and everyone the Jihadists see as ‘infidels’.
This is the tip of the scandal of Obama and Hillary against Israel as much as they are slapping America in the face, by allowing a mosque to be built at ‘Ground Zero’ in NYC, where 3000 were murdered there on ‘9/11’and by the same people who side with those who did this mass murder. This isn’t religious tolerance. This is taking over this sacred ground as they want to do with Jerusalem. Why not just put a Nazi flag there, as well as Arlington Cemetery, and give up America to ‘Shariah law’?
Obama’s evil politics is why he is at 40% with 60% of the nation against him. Even Bill Clinton, who accused Obama of being a ‘Chicago thug’ and previously said the only way whe would support Obama, is to ‘kiss my ass’, is at 61% to Obama’s 52% in the Gallop poll of 7/22/10.
How come Hillary and Obama don’t go to the Muslims and demand that they divide Mecca for a phantom ‘peace’? Only yesterday, Abbas of Fatah, who is ready for another war with Israel and couldn’t fight his way out of a paper bag with Hamas in Gaza, and who Obama and Hillary are backing, said that he will not negotiate unless he gets in advance and in writing… Judea, Samaria and East Jerusalem, handed to him on a silver platter.
This is the same Abbas behind the Massacre in Munich in 1972 of 11 Isaeli athletes. This is the same Abbas who is behind the Intifadas. This is the same Abbas who wants Israel to go back to 1948 borders. This is the same Abbas who in Bethlehem on 8/9/09 said he wanted all of Jerusalem, not just East Jerusalem.
This is the same killer Obama and Hillary are supporting.
This by you is ‘negotiating’ or the next war?
Curse Israel and you are cursed and bless Israel and you are blessed. Obama and Hillary have cursed Israel a hundred times in the last 18 months and America is suffering from the consequenses of this disastrous foreign policy which has driven U.S. credibility and trust and confidence, down to a new low.
This weakness is an invitation to more Islamic Nazi attacks.
Obama and Hillary scapegoat Israel and Jews, that the only reason U.S. troops in Afghanistan and Iraq are being killed, is because Israel won’t give in to the Arabs in Gaza and West Bank?
Obama and Hillary blackmail Israel that if they give it all up, they’ll allow Israel to attack Iran to stop from being nuked.
Obama and Hillary say nothing about the racism, anti-semitism and constant attacks from the Arabs upon Jews, let alone wanting to continue the Holocaust and only two weeks ago Abbas was telling Hamas to keep killing Jews.
So Obama and Hillary keep insisting you can make peace with those who want to kill you, as much as Neville Chamberlain in 1939, offered ‘land for peace’ with Hitler and gave up the Sudentenland and Czechoslovakia and flashed ‘peace in our time’ with that paper that meant nothing.
The tragic results of this stupidity and weakness and groveling, was WWII and the loss of 60 million lives and the Holocaust of nearly 7 million Jewish men, women and children (1 1/2 million Jewish children murdered) and with an alliance by the the very Arabs/Muslims with Hitler, that Obama and Hillary are alligned with now, and are playing the very same stupid and dangerous game Chamberlain did then, we are all facing a new catastrophe.
Saudi Arabia, responsible for ‘9/11’ and 15,000+ Islamic Nazi attacks since, but has the oil, dictates to Obama and Hillary and much of that oil money goes to Bill Clinton’s library, as it goes to Jimmy Carter’s library, who started his anti-semitic campaign with Israel being an ‘apartheid’ nation and pushed the flotillas issue. He is also subject to Title 18 violations.
Target Stores was selling globes that had ‘Palestine’ on it and not Israel, which is no different from the maps from Fatah and Hamas, Hezbollah ad nauseum and nothing from Obama or Hillary about this outrageous attack from Target participating with Hamas etc.
The U.S State Dept. has been anti-Jewish since before the Holocaust and now Hillary and Obama have made it even worse. Our allies see how Obama and Hillary are beating up on America’s #1 ally, Israel and have lost trust for their own issues. Our enemis see the U.S. as weak and stupid and want to take advantage of us, since no one from Pakistan to N. Korea, Iran to Venezuela and Cuba among the very many dictatorships Obama and Hillary keep catering to, have wanted to work to stop their threats against us.
Turkey and Brazil side with Iran on nukes, while Hamas and Hezbollah are moving through Latin and Central America with Iran and Chavez and Castro. Then last year, 45,000, non-hispanic were caught at the Mexican border, from countries trying to do us harm, but only ‘racist’ attacks come from Obama, Hillary and even Bill saying that any resistance to Obama’s policies are ‘Timothy McVeigh Wannabees’.....and the real issues and threats are ignored.
You understand now why I’m running for Congress. I’m also President of Shalom International, (www.defendjerusalem.net), which has done 319 rallies/events and 1214 news interviews from Oct. 2007 to July 28,2010 to “Keep Jerusalem United” and to “Fight the Jihadists”. We’ve had 17 rallies at the White House, G-20 Summits in Toronto and Pittsburg, At the Vatican in Rome, the Zion Square in Jerusalem during the Pope’s visit, the Durbin II anti-semetic attacks from UN in Geneva, the Dem. and Gop Conventions, Ground Zero in NYC, at the Holocaust Memorial in Miami with 2000, at the “Annapolis Summit” and we do four weekly rallies in S.Fla among so many of our efforts.
On Dec. 30, 2008, 300 Muslims screamed “Jews into the Ovens” at the Fed. Bldg. in Ft. Laud., and we have been opposing them ever since.
Last Fri. we were in Atlanta, calling for a boycott of Turkey for their act of war with the ‘Gaza Flotilla.’
You can see our huge successes on our web site.
So the real questions here are that Obama’s and Hillary’s anti-Israel and anti-semitic politics have resulted in a massive increase in anti-semitism across the planet, and that their one-sided attacks on Israel have only encouraged more attacks from the enemies of Israel and America,and that all of the above, means that Chelsea and her Jewish husband have to contend with the sins of the mother-in-law and father-in-law as well.
What kind of Jew is Marc Mezvinsky, who can turn a blind eye to all of the above?
The issue of who is a Jew is to be our ‘brother’s keeper’ and to honor our special relationship with G-d and why we are still here after 5000 yrs. and to ‘do unto others, as we would do unto ourselves’ and our passing to the world of the ‘Ten Commandments’ given to us by G-d, who has kept us to this moment and we are still struggling to survive and also to give charity and help humankind which we do all the time.
We are the world’s scapegoats, but also the world’s ‘conscience’.
Our enemies don’t trust Obama and Hillary either.
This includes 11 major attack from Muslim Jihadists in the U.S. in 2009.
Obama and Hillary, only last week allowed the PLO terrorist group, responsible for thousands of Jewish deaths in Israel, to fly its flag in Wash., D.C. and give it recognition, when this Islamic Nazi group should be thrown out of the U.S. altogether.
Why isn’t Obama and Hillary, moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem and federating West Bank with Jordan and Gaza with Egypt, if they wanted real peace? But ‘no’, Saudi Arabia, Obama bows down to, rules here, so they keep fitting a squre peg in a round hole going no-where but attacking the Jews, Israel, Judiasm, etc.
Why did the Pan Am 103 bomber, who killed 270, get released to Libya with BP support, and our government’s(Obama’s/Hillary’s) approval, while BP of Gulf Oil catastrophe, paid Obama $1million, and Obama responded with a ‘too little, too late’ reaction, and BP has a relationship also with Iran, and Congress is also on the oil dole and is impotent to protect America or anyone except Big Oil, which plays a key role in ‘Middle East’ politics?
So when Obama and Hillary offer $900millions to Gaza and Hamas and another $400millions to Gaza and Hamas and even $20millions to bring them here to the U.S., this alone is an act of treason and violation of Title 18 and ‘impeachment’.
What kind of Jew would turn a blind eye to this madness? Especially from a ‘mother-in’law’, playing such dirty politics against Israel and the Jewish people?
Will Marc Mezvinsky stand up to Hillary, his mother-in-law? His father, Ed Mezvinsky of Iowa, was a former Representative,in the U.S. House, who served 5 years in prison, convicted of fraud, and released in 2008.
Will the son stand up for the Jewish people and America or sell out to Hillary and Bill?
Will Chelsea stand up for the Jewish people and America or keep selling out to Hillary and Bill?
These are not idle issues, as the dangers keep building with these politics, no one can escape from especially from this family.
A real Jew and Christian would react and oppose Obama and Hillary on these issues.
Not a dilemma for a real Jew. Responsibility and accountability is what we must all be about and why our Shalom International efforts are constant reminders of who we are and what we must do and all the support we do get from the grassroots of America who also get it and why they oppose Obama’s and Hillary’s politics against Israel that is also against America.
Hillary’s Presidential aspirations have taken a nose dive because of all of the above and more. Still, she is ahead of Obama in the polls.
Obama lies, Hillary lies, Schultz lies, and the question is whether the children will be any different?
I wish Chelsea and Marc well, but this family has much blood on its hands. Bill hasn’t done his job well in Haiti with 300,000 dead in that earthquake that Obama promised $1billion for and didn’t deliver, except for more photo ops, as in the Gulf oil spill.
If Chelsea and Marc have a conscience they must oppose their parents and in-law politics and policies, or suffer the consequences of being tainted with the same brush.
No one gets out of these issues. We will all survive or sink with them.
Yours in Shalom,
Bob Kunst
President, Shalom International
305-864-5110
www.defendjerusalem.net
www.kunstforcongress.com
