Children of the "half" Torah

Halfjew.com is a New York-based Internet forum for the half-Jewish people of an increasingly assimilated world to explore their identity — and for others who angrily claim there's no such thing.

By JOSHUA TANZER
www.offoffoff.com

The mayor has considered taking Governors Island and turning it into a casino or an amusement park. Wendy Marston has a different idea: Let's use it as a homeland for that last oppressed, stateless minority, the half-Jews.

HALFJEW.COM

Web site devoted to issues related to half-Jewish people.
Founded by Wendy Marston.
At halfjew.com

Okay, maybe this idea is offered tongue-in-cheek, but there's nothing frivolous about Marston's new web site Halfjew.com and the idea it champions: that, after a couple generations of assimilation and intermarriage, there's a whole community of helf-Jewish people out there with its own emerging identity and its own serious issues.

Wendy Marston

Marston — who came to New York as a college student from a small Christian town in Colorado, where her family was the only even half-Jewish one for miles around — started Halfjew.com as her previous employer was going bust in the Internet collapse. She had high ambitions but little idea what form the project would ultimately take.

"I thought I should get together all of my half-Jewish friends and form a kind of Andersen Consulting Group, consulting on how to raise your kids in an interfaith family," she recalls. The 2000 election spurred her to go ahead with the idea — or something like it. "I thought, 'Damn, we have a vice presidential candidate who's a Jew. It's time!' So I went out and registered the domain name."

As it turned out, the half-Jewish world was ready for a place to discuss mixed identity, mixed heritage, how to raise half-Jewish children and what to do at Christmastime. The full-Jewish world, however, was not entirely ready. Particularly those assimilation-phobic Orthodox Jews who have a stake in the argument about who really gets to be recognized as Jewish. They write in to the site's message boards to inform participants that there's no such thing as a half-Jew and if their mother wasn't Jewish or they weren't converted by an Orthodox rabbi, they simply aren't Jewish.

"They think I'm a cult," says Marston, more disturbed than amused by the hostility level that the site sometimes generates. "They think I'm a slick, well-funded front for Jews For Jesus."

In fact, Halfjew.com is an open (though lightly moderated) forum for all kinds of discussions about a community of people whose existence is only beginning to be recognized, whose members seem to have been longing for just this kind of chance to understand their relationship to Jews, non-Jews and one another. It's a work in progress, a learning experience for everyone involved, including Marston.

Besides Halfjew.com, several recent books have also begun to explore the phenomenon of the hyphenated Jew. There's the personal memoir "Half-Jew: A Daughter's Search for Her Family's Buried Past" by Susan Jacoby. And there's "The Half-Jewish Book: A Celebration," which came out shortly before Halfjew.com and whose authors, Daniel M. Klein and Freke Vuijst, attended the site's launch party.

Still, the half-Jewish consciousness is in its infancy, and, Marston notes, the latter book is actually geared toward mixed parents raising their half-Jewish children. Sizing up these efforts, Marston says, "This is sort of the beginning of it — but the real book is going to have to come from the kids."

APRIL 23, 2001
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