"[...] #AllegraGoodman — a #Cambridge-based #writer who has published eleven #books and regularly contributes #fiction to #TheNewYorker. Her new #book, This Is Not About Us, focuses on a #fictional #Jewish-#American family, the Rubinsteins, who reside in #Boston, #Providence, and other northeastern locales. In short, they are our neighbors. And, perhaps predictably, their struggles are markedly different from those of their forebears.

This disjunction has much to do with how many of today’s Jewish #Americans pursue “#Jewishcontinuity,” a term widely promoted in the religious community. It encourages a strong Jewish connection through education, group identity, and an engaged Jewish life."

https://artsfuse.org/324876/book-review-losing-the-flavor-allegra-goodman-and-the-new-jewish-american-family/

"#BretStephens, in his “State of World #Jewry” address at the 92nd Street Y on Feb. 1, was right about something fundamental: #Jewish strength begins with #Jewishidentity. A people that does not know who it is cannot endure. Identity anchors continuity, belonging and resilience, and strengthening Jewish knowledge, pride and peoplehood is indispensable work.

But where his argument becomes incomplete is in treating internal fortification as a sufficient response to modern #antisemitism. It is not. #Jewishcontinuity depends not only on internal strength, but also on how #Jews are perceived in the societies in which they live. Ignoring that second dimension is not principled restraint — it is strategic exposure.

The consequences are not abstract. When moral legitimacy erodes, the effects surface in daily life and geopolitical reality."

https://ejewishphilanthropy.com/identity-is-essential-but-ignoring-reputation-repair-is-an-existential-risk/

"What is being modeled [by this influencer] is not #Jewish learning within a tradition, guided by teachers, texts and inherited norms. It is #Judaism as content: iterative, audience-validated and perpetually under construction. That approach aligns perfectly with #influencer culture. It is also corrosive to #Jewishcontinuity.

Context matters here. This influence did not arise accidentally, but was built through deliberate and willful exposure—of private life, children, home, holidays—within a #monetized, #algorithm-driven ecosystem. That choice brought visibility and reward. It also brought responsibility.

This is not a critique of one family’s private decisions, which would be theirs alone to make. But these decisions made by this influencer are not private. They are performed, monetized and modeled for hundreds of thousands of followers, many of whom, by the influencer’s own account, rely on her as their primary reference point for Jewish life." 🔥

https://jewishjournal.com/commentary/opinion/386583/when-social-media-rewrites-jewish-identity/

"I did not begin studying #Jewish #demography to produce #statistics. I began because I love my people deeply—and I felt, in my bones, how close we have come to vanishing.

So I calculated—not as a cold #demographer or #historian pronouncing closure, but as a #Jew unwilling to let our survival go unmeasured, uncontemplated, unhonored. Those calculations live in #JewishContinuity Against the Numbers. They are mine, offered humbly: not as final truth, but as an act of love, memory, and responsibility. They place our endurance in honest proportion to the forces that have tried, again and again, to erase us.

The numbers revealed awe. Had we been allowed to grow undisturbed by centuries of #murder, #expulsion, #forcedconversion, and #annihilation, we might number approximately 165 million today. Instead, we are roughly 15.7 million—not by chance, but by survival against relentless hostility.

Now a subtler danger threatens: the murder of #memory."

https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/a-letter-of-love-to-the-jewish-people/

Woah... unexpected.

"The #Conservativemovement, one of the major #Jewish denominations, is formally apologizing for decades of discouraging #intermarriage and committing itself to a new approach centered on engagement.

The shift marks a significant change in tone for a movement that long treated intermarriage as a threat to #Jewishcontinuity, even as its longstanding ban on clergy officiating at such weddings remains in place.

Leaders of the movement announced the shift in a report released Thursday by a working group representing the denomination’s three main arms: the United #Synagogue of Conservative #Judaism, the #Rabbinical Assembly and the #Cantors Assembly."

https://forward.com/fast-forward/791836/judaisms-conservative-movement-apologizes-for-decades-of-discouraging-intermarriage-signals-new-approach/