About/Our Leaders

Now, here is a little information about our leaders —

LEADERSHIP OF THE HALF-JEWISH NETWORK

The Half-Jewish Network has leadership whose varied backgrounds reflect the diversity of our members’ identities. Some of us identify as Jews, some of us identify as Christians, and we expect to eventually welcome half-Jewish people to our leadership from other cultures as well.

OUR COORDINATOR

Robin Margolis is the daughter of an Orthodox Jewish Polish mother and an Episcopalian WASP father. She was brought up as an Episcopalian.

As an adult, Robin affiliated with Judaism. She identified as a matrilineal Jew with a culturally “Christian half,” reflecting her strong emotional ties to her Christian family and their rich Scots-English-Dutch Protestant heritage.

Robin’s Jewish activities included teaching Kabbalah (Jewish mysticism) classes, co-founding and co-leading a Jewish Renewal women’s havurah (prayer and study group), enrolling in a rabbinic program at the Rabbinical Seminary International, writing a blog on half-Jewish issues for http://www.jewcy.com, and founding the Inclusivist Judaism Coalition.

In the early 1990s, Robin co-authored the first book on adult children and grandchildren of intermarriage.

Robin decided, after many years of living as a Jew, that she was theologically more comfortable with Christianity and returned to the Episcopal Church.  She continues to work with and advocate for half-Jewish people within Jewish, Christian and other faith-based and secular cultures.

Robin currently lives in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area.  To contact her, please email her at:

binarystar [at] aol [dot] com

OUR BOARD

Sarah Buxbaum is a patrilineal Jew. She spent her childhood as a member of the Humanistic Jewish congregation in Deerfield, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. As a teenager and young adult, she was a member of the Jewish Secular Society of Cleveland, Ohio. She has also been a member of several Reconstructionist and Reform synagogues. She and her family currently attend a Reform synagogue.

She has a nice husband and an extremely active child.