<p>Just my2cents–What a wonderful post. Thank you so much for sharing. I personally don’t care about keeping Kosher, Shomre Shabbos, and the rest of it. I do care about raising decent children with moral backbones and their meeting and marrying like minded people. Still, I can’t help but feel “Jewish.”
Shawbridge-I admire your mom for having the courage to change a value that she certainly held dear for a very long time. That must have been a difficult admission for her to make.</p>
<p>What a beautiful and moving conversation this is. You all remind me of how many ways there are to embrace Judaism. And really - this is all I want for my boys - to have these sentiments - in part or whole - and to find spouses who feel the same.</p>
<p>gerbilmom: I have great news for you. I live close to you! We can have that cosmo in person!!! (I’m on the south shore of Suffolk Country - where are you?)</p>
<p>There’s so much here on this thread today, but the one thing you posted that I want to latch on to is that your daughter is 21 years old. What is their rush to get married? Did you say (pages back) that they already have a date and booked the hall? I have so lost track. (Just perused your last post and I see that it is all on hold.) Just so much I want to say about this that I can’t post online. But perhaps if she held on for a few years, she might understand your concerns. Just don’t push hard because then you are only pushing her away (and towards the other family). Also, my parents took me to meet with a Holocaust survivor in NYC. Please don’t do that. Bad idea.</p>
<p>I think you are going to have a hard time finding a rabbi, even a reform rabbi, to perform the marriage. My sister finally had to get a “rent a rabbi” who she found online (from Westchester, I believe) and she and her husband wrote the service (this was in 2005). Not sure what he was affiliated with, but he did the ceremony and my parents were satisfied (my sister’s husband’s parents had already both passed away - but his huge family was there - they didn’t seem bothered by it - they were psyched for the typical Long Island wedding as they are from the midwest).</p>
<p>I really just want to give you a virtual <<hug>> as I can feel your pain through your posts. Especially since I have gone through so much in this area with my family.</hug></p>
<p>I hope we are providing some support here. It must be so hard. You have found kindred spirits. Feel free to PM me if you want. I’m always online :)</p>
<p>We just finished our dinner @7pm EST and I started posing serious questions to my boys about what Judiasm means to them, and the whole dating/marrying subject. They looked at me and groaned and said, “Is this what they’re talking about on college confidential now”? Smart kids! :rolleyes:</p>
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<p>ccc - LOL! Smart kids indeed!</p>
<p>^^yea, I get that alot also whenever I bring up a topic at the dinner table…I have learned that I may as well come clean beforehand…</p>
<p>So if we do a "meet-up, I vote for Philly so that all of our Maryland group can meet us halfway?? (and kathiep, dwhite and all of the “honorary” members can join us too!!); maybe we can do it when the westcoasters are here?</p>
<p>
when I first became addicted to CC and quoted it all the time, one of my Ds referred to it as “College Confessional”! not far off the mark actually, some days ;)</p>
<p>I’m having trouble keeping up with all the great, insightful as well as troubled, posts. To justmy2cents, thank you for a great post, especially the thought that we parents may have more to worry about if our kids marry non-observant Jews, than if they marry non-Jews who embrace our traditions.</p>
<p>And to gerbilmom, just {{{hugs}}}. your pain is palpable. collectively I hope we can provide some guidance and perhaps more importantly, some comfort.</p>
<p>with enough advance notice and a cheap ticket (and good weather) I’d be tempted to travel from Ohio to join all of you in Philly :)</p>
<p>Philly works for me! I can visit my DD at UD while I’m down there.</p>
<p>gerbilmom, my former Jewish Day School D has been going out with an Irish Catholic boy she met at school for a few years now. He’s very different from your daughter’s guy, lovely, good to and for her and in general hard not to like, but still I sympathize. Unfortunately a recent post on another thread has made me promise not to talk about her. Maybe it’s Long Island?</p>
<p>James Madison University</p>
<p>We’d heard a lot of good things about James Madison and since D had already been accepted there we both hoped and wanted to like it. Unfortunately we did not.</p>
<p>I’d already known before coming that JMU straddles I- 81, but knowing that did not prepare us for the sight and sounds of 18 wheelers barreling along at high speed so close to and above the campus. Granted kids don’t have to gain their education in an ivory tower , but does it really have to be a truck stop? The highway made JMU feel like an educational warehouse by the side of the road: industrial, noisy and busy. I might even have gotten past that impression by sticking to the other side of the campus, but about half way through the tour a long multi-car Southern and Norfolk freight train came lumbering right through campus blaring its warning horns and drowning out our tour guides. Then it kept us from crossing over the tracks to the other side of campus for a few minutes while we all waited. (the tour guides told us that the train blocking the road sometimes serves as an effective excuse for being late to class). Doesn’t this school have any clout with anyone? And if they weren’t able to acquire more land on the same side to the west of the highway and railroad tracks, didn’t anyone stop and think, maybe we ought not to expand?</p>
<p>Bizzarely, the tour ended up in the most beautiful area of campus where stately bluestone buildings were arranged around an ample quad. And it really was was beautiful and impressive. Why didn’t they start there? By then we had already trekked past so many crowded, non-descript red brick buildings that our impression of the campus had already been firmly set. This was also where the two otherwise helpful tour guides, after pointing out the President’s office and the Kissing Rock, left us with just a vague wave of the hand to show where on the other side of the campus the admissions building and our cars were. Eight of us tracked back stopping to ask for directions and getting lost twice. One parent and daughter got separated and lost.</p>
<p>This was also the first and only time after many, many campus tours (with three kids) that I was led past but not actually taken into a school library. (the couches we were told are great for sleeping). Nor did we get to go into any classrooms, labs or other facilities, just the outsides of building after building and the basement of the student union (whose couches are also good for sleeping). Was there something they didn’t want us to see?</p>
<p>Similarly, the info session was the first I’ve ever been to where a school didn’t talk about or tout their faculty to student ratio or class size. We were told that JMU had one of the highest 5 year graduation rates “in it’s classification” Hunh? Also only 1000 of the 17,000 or so undergrads went abroad last year. Some programs and destinations, we learned, are limited to students in certain pre-professional areas. I could go on, but I think you get the idea. Also JMU seems a lot more Virginia based than Miami seemed Ohio or Midwest based.</p>
<p>And JMU seems to have an alcohol abuse problem. I don’t mean just the students. Two successive issues of the school paper featured articles about professors being fired, one for a second DWI conviction (she’s now serving 2 years in prison) and a professor who was fired after teaching a seminar drunk. Next year JMU is instituting a program whereby any undergrad caught for any, even minor, alcohol related offense will be reported to their parents. Penalties rapidly escalate for a second or third offense. Aside from the alcohol stories, the paper seemed to report about as many theft and assault type incidents and arrests per issue as the N.Y. Post.</p>
<p>As for Jewish life, I wrote twice over the past month to the designated individuals listed in the Hillel site to set up a tour or meeting with a student member. Neither e-mail was ever answered. On the tour we passed a tack board with notices for all the campus religious and faith based student groups. The Hillel placard was upside down and the only one I saw with no flyer underneath. Granted the JMU Hillel is totally student run (which fact may in itself be significant) but the contrast to the outreach and enthusiasm at Miami and Elon was telling.</p>
<p>Overall, we were not favorably impressed and very dissappointed. D has no interest in attending.</p>
<p>p.s.- I did ask about the psych dept classes being closed or cut but didn’t really get more than a general answer about the number of people being interested in a class sometimes means a class is hard to get into or limited.</p>
<p>I am stunned by most of the posts I am reading. I am so grateful my parents never told me I had to marry a Jew. My parents couldn’t have asked for a better son in law than my lapsed Catholic husband (nor I a better husband and father.) The Jewish son-in-law just upped and walked out on my sister after 20 yrs of marriage and walked out on his two daughters, too (16 and 18 at the time.) </p>
<p>In the beginning the girls tried to reach out but he made it perfectly clear he wanted nothing to do with them. He even told the oldest daughter that she was no more than his “birth daughter” to him! It’s been 10 years and my niece is married (step dad walked her down the aisle) and living in Brooklyn. She was on the train one day and saw her father (a CFO of an Wall St. investment bank) and she went up to him, said hello and asked him if he wanted to maybe have coffee someday. He said no. </p>
<p>The only way my nieces know anything about his life is by googling him. The grandparents cut off contact with them, too, along with the aunts, uncles and their 1st cousin after he walked out. My mom was so upset the girls grandparents could do that to their own grandchildren that she called and in tears begged them to reconsider but to no avail. </p>
<p>One day last year my youngest niece googled him and an obit in the NYTimes showed up. Apparently, he had remarried the year before but the new wife had a re-occurrence of melanoma and died. Karma’s a *****. </p>
<p>My very Catholic and very Italian in-laws are lovely people and there has never been any conflict between them, my parents, or DH & I. At our wedding (at the country club not our temple or a church) we got married under a chuppah by a Jewish Justice of the Peace, sipped from the family wine glass and DH smashed the glass at the end. </p>
<p>At the end of the evening we did a very traditional thing and carried plates of Italian cookies around to all the tables.</p>
<p>DH & I do all the holidays but it’s mainly about the food, no XMAS tree or decorations but we do presents and stockings, Xmas Eve dinner and a nice dinner on Xmas day. </p>
<p>In my extended family of 40 or so (1st cousins and their kids, their spouses) we are now about half & half though all the kids from the mixed marriages are raised Jewish whether the mother or father is the Jew.) It isn’t because any of us are very religious, either, though some of my cousins who married non jews are Conservative, but culturally we are very Jewish. </p>
<p>We have even had special fish dinners served to my cousin’s husband’s mom and sister when Passover started on Good Friday one year!</p>
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<p>Emilybee: Its nice to hear how blended families can work so well. I would guess that more than half of our temple families are blended. How sad about your sister’s family</p>
<p>Mhc: Thank you for the detailed report on JMU. This is a school we considered looking at if S was going to look OOS. It really doesn’t sound like what we are looking for from many fronts.</p>
<p>Justmy2cents: As others have said what a lovely post. Among my Jewish friends I think that my friend who is a converted Jew is probably the most observant.</p>
<p>Gerbelmom: Its good that the wedding is on hold. With needing money for the wedding and to pay back loans your daughter is likely to grow up in many ways. The things in life that look good change when you have responsibilities. I hope things work out for her.</p>
<p>Tonight I got a reminder about what is really important in life. S2 who just got his drivers license got in a wreck, broadsided on highway with a 65 mph speed limit. Basically an accident that could have resulted in serious injuries and fatalities but everyone walked away. It was S’s fault but he did stop at the median and looked for cars, the other driver saw him stop, but S somehow didn’t see the car coming until he was hit. I don’t know when he will drive again but I know this was a lesson that we couldn’t teach. We do our best to teach our kids and then we have to let them go. They are inexperienced and make mistakes. This one was costly but thankfully only in dollars. Hug your kids often, that is what I keep thinking tonight.</p>
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<p>MHC48 - thanks for the JMU report! </p>
<p>We need more detailed reports like this. I appreciate the honesty, perspectives, highlights and disappointment. Sometimes you need two chef’s in the kitchen :)</p>
<p>Oh dear spectrum. Every parent’s nightmare. I’m so glad your S was not hurt. {{hugs}}</p>
<p>spectrum-so glad your son is okay!</p>
<p>spectrum2: OMG. I am so glad he is ok. Definitely a parent’s worst nightmare. Yes, there will be lots of hugs around here today (if they let me).</p>
<p>Spectrum- so glad your son is not hurt. I would suggest getting him back to driving ASAP! You don’t want fear and trepidation in driving.</p>
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<p>Spectrum: I’m so glad that your son is okay. What a scary experience. I still worry when my daughters get behind the wheel.</p>
<p>Emilybee: Thanks for sharing your story. You make a very good point about how there are more important factors than a spouse’s religion.</p>
<p>MHC: Thanks for the detailed report on JMU. My D1 had a similar impression when she visited for a gymnastics meet, but I thought she was just being a snob. She also hated the way the highway runs right through the campus. I’m sorry that your daughter was disapointed, but that’s why it’s so important to make the visits. </p>
<p>I’m in for a meet-up in Philly. My family calls all of you my “imaginary friends.” If we meet in person, you’ll be real.</p>
<p>MHC, Please, please cut and paste your very thoughtful JMU review and post it here [James</a> Madison University - Videos, Photos, and Visit Reports](<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/vibe/james-madison-university/]James”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/vibe/james-madison-university/) The last review was done in 2009.</p>
<p>Spectrum - I’m so glad your son is okay, sounds like he was lucky it wasn’t worse. My daughter had a small fender-bender the week after she got her permit and swore that she would never drive again. Fortunately, she saw her accident for what it was and has been driving accident free for 8 years.</p>
<p>Spectrum - so glad he is ok - what a scary experience.</p>
<p>mhc - thank you for the very detailed JMU report. I was also very disappointed by the campus being bisected by both Rt 81 and the train tracks. The Bluestone area was beautiful - I think that is the original area of the school - back when it was an all girls college many years ago. The thing that puzzled me with JMU is that the kids there seem to love it - good ratings for both student satisfaction and the retention and graduation rates are good. Personally, I am more concerned with issues surrounding class size and being able to get the classes you need that some of the physical oddities of the campus - which did not seem to bother S2 at all. But I really appreciate your points - particularly the lack of response from Hillel. Very telling.</p>