Jewish Gentile Couples

Drew is a church director of youth and family ministry. Alex is a trained clinical counselor and child welfare social worker. She is Jewish and both identify as followers of Jesus. They are parents of one small child. What can happen if two spiritually mature, emotionally healthy people hit a cross-cultural snag after one makes a remark, they intended for humor, but deeply wounds a loved one. We all can learn valuable insight from their candor and gained understanding.

Marisa and Andrew are a Jewish-Gentile couple in Johannesburg, South Africa. Their eyes are wide open to the wonderful cross-cultural richness of their country, home and marriage. It's natural for Marisa to be Ashkenazi Jewish and fluent in Zulu. Andrew is comfortable almost anywhere having grown up as a Scotsman in Zimbabwe and South Africa. Now he is discovering the Jewishness of faith in the Old and New Testaments!

The journey to find spiritual harmony can feel as distant as east is from the west. Dave and Jennifer Goldstein made it and found one true God. His parents were Jewish academics living as Buddhists in Japan. Hers were middle American evangelicals in Indiana. Theirs is a story of finding a mutually satisfying spirituality and a soulmate.

Aaron is from Israel and England. Becky is from German-speaking Switzerland. They speak to one another in different languages but that doesn't keep them from relating with deep appreciation and mutual respect. They also share the intimacy of a spiritual harmony as well. Theirs is a fascinating story of cross cultural communication and love.

Martin Goldsmith's family endured anti-Semitism in Germany, America and England. His wife, Elizabeth endured the hardship of a Communist Chinese internment camp for children. Yet both of them found purpose and joy in life together as cross-cultural ambassadors to various countries of S E Asia serving the God and Messiah of Israel.

Simone and Mark are a couple of Millennials, now happily married. Their wedding was a filled with the typical cross-cultural challenges and interesting ways to navigate them. That's their story. You might also appreciate Simone's blog about what shaped he identity from an interfaith family. Enjoy.

Sahar is an Israeli Sabra and Maria is his thoughtful and gracious wife from Sweden. These two Millennials couldn't be from more different cultural worlds. However, they've found joy in daily discovery and the challenges of a complex cross-cultural relationship. Enjoy the story of our current front page faces at www.JewishGentileCouples.com

The story of Mike and Victoria Stele has a little Rom-Com, adventure and spiritual grounding to it. How do a Jewish guy and a Latina/Filipina Christian girl come together through a complex of cross-cultural religious challenges? Mike and Victoria are a Southern California couple that met in a water park, married in a rush and today are together and solid as a rock. How'd they do that? Give a listen. They'll make you think.

D'vora and Teddy are a mixed ethnicity couple from Ethiopia. He was raised through separation and hardship by his grandparents and reunited to his mother in Canada at age 12. D'vora's family are Ethiopian Jews who were airlifted to Israel during Project Solomon. Their love story will lift your heart in how they found unity and spiritual harmony.

Irina is Jewish and raised in Ukraine where the Jewish intermarriage rate was above 70%. She followed her passion for things cross-cultural to become a world class performer within a Ukrainian Irish Step Dance troupe and a professional translator. As a teenager in Minnesota, Tim began playing the electric guitar in garage rock bands. These two Gen-Xers met in an unlikely, but perhaps providential, way. Their love story is one of hope and healing.

Ephraim Radner and Annette Brownlee are an intermarried couple and scholars serving at Wycliffe College, an evangelical graduate school of theology at the University of Toronto. Jewish identity, the biblical history of Israel and deep faith in Jesus are important to both partners in this thoughtful Jewish-Gentile couple.

How do two people from different parts of Asia, one Jewish and the other Korean find spiritual harmony? Karl and Kristen deSouza came a long way geographically and spiritually to find oneness in their marriage. They share what guided them to one another and keeps them on solid ground together.

Lucy and Jesse are from California and Illinois - West Coast and Mid-West meet in their lives. Woven throughout their cross-cultural conversations are the biblical backgrounds, meaning in rituals and different festival celebrations. They love each other, learn from one another and grow into new understandings together. Enjoy hearing how they do that.

He's a Black Christian and she's a traditional Jewish woman. They're both from St. Louis. They both experienced ethnic prejudice before and after they were married to one another. They also found spiritual strength and joy together through their mutual faith in the Messiah of Israel, who they call Yeshua (Jesus). Ron and Liessa love God, love one another and they love other people as they are loved.

He is a Gentile "none" raised with some exposure to Catholic traditions and culture. Her parents lived and practiced traditional Judaism in a near north suburb above New York City. They met while attending college, fell in love and then discovered each faced serious and unique cross-cultural challenges. Mike and Sarah are Millennials who were married just two years at the time of this interview. Give a listen to their honest description of how they resolved those challenges enough to find spiritual harmony.

Isaac Brickner interviews Tuvya Zaretsky about the background for the Jewish-Gentile couples podcasts. What is happening within global Jewry that makes this formerly ignored topic so relevant today? Why would anybody start asking Jews and Gentiles to describe the challenges they experience in their relationships? Since Jewish intermarriage is common today, does hope exist for a mutually satisfying spiritual harmony with a gentile that doesn't violate someone's conscience or identity?

Finding spiritual harmony requires giving mutual respect within two different cultures. Ethnicity is an important and unchangeable feature of ancestry. It is sort of our "brand," like the different hardware models of laptop computers. Culture is like the software that enables us to operate, interacting socially. Different elements of our culture may change, some more easily than others. Listen as Daryl and Stacy McKillian describe how being true to their unique cultures, while also respecting and loving one another, brought about culture change in both of them as they found spiritual harmony together.

Susan Wilder is all about Jewish New Jersey! Her husband Christian is a professor of theology and Old testament. They found life and spirituality together through common faith and very different cultural backgrounds. This is their story.