No place like home
An Editorial from the Jewish Advocate website.
By Mark
Sokoll - Thursday April 3 2008
I took the train to New York City last weekend to visit my daughter and feast on a buffet of Broadway shows. Have you
seen Wicked? It is a spectacularly told story of a
multiracial family living just outside of Oz that has more
similarities to the Boston Jewish community than you can
imagine.
One daughter is green. She grows up to be an animal and
human rights activist and eventually the Wicked Witch of the
West. Her sister, who has special needs, eventually becomes
governor before becoming the Good Witch of the East, who
alas was standing in the wrong spot when Dorothy’s house
crash landed all the way from Kansas. Fiction no doubt, but
so much fun.
Families are fascinating and very complicated, whether they
be in the fictitious land of Oz or in our own Boston. In
fact, ever since the drama and tension, love and jealousy of
Abraham, Sarah and Haggar, Ishmael and Isaac we Jews have
found family stories most intriguing and a window to the
Zeitgeist.
On the train home, catching up on important reading, I read
the CJP 2005 Community Study report on Intermarried Families
and Their Children. The major revelation of the study is
that 60 percent of the children of intermarried families in
Greater Boston are being raised as Jews with Judaism as
their only religion.