Looking Back, Moving Forward: Dovetail's First Ten Years
by Joan Hawxhurst

Ten years ago this month, I mailed the first issue of Dovetail to about 200 charter subscribers. It was thinner and less pleasing to the eye than the issue you hold in your hand today, but just as full of spirit and conviction. As I stuck on that original set of mailing labels and breathed in the distinctive smell of printers’ ink for the first time, I felt like a midwife helping a new life be born. 

This baby has grown and developed along with my two biological children, now 8 and 4, and like them has been nurtured by many wonderful and committed souls along the way. Like my kids, it is much less dependent on me than it was in its infancy, and I am grateful for the village—editorial board members, subscribers, donors, and behind-the-scenes supporters—that is raising this child. Dovetail was conceived during my first year of marriage. Steve had been raised in a Conservative Jewish home, and I came from a long line of professional Protestants (missionaries, pastors, and deacons). As we planned our wedding and talked about children, I searched in vain for open-minded resources and networks of other families, and began to believe that there was a gaping hole in the literature. I found a handful of books, some helpful and some didactic, and a few isolated local interfaith groups. After talking it over with my husband and with other interfaith couples, I decided to do a fact-finding mission to see what people in the field thought about the need for a new kind of publication.

I remember having tea in a fancy midtown restaurant with Lee Gruzen, author of Raising Your Jewish/Christian Child* (which had a profound influence on me), and being struck by her passion and the playful sparkle in her eye. I remember sitting nervously in Egon Mayer’s office at the Jewish Outreach Institute, being very aware of the weighty importance of his sociological studies, until I realized that he was respectful of my idea, and could see with me the gap in services for unaffiliated interfaith couples.

I spent a night with Susan Gertz, author of Hanukkah and Christmas at My House,* the first independently published children’s book for interfaith kids. Her children, for whom she wrote the story, were confident and articulate, modeling for me the possibility of secure and well-adjusted interfaith kids. I visited with Leslie Goodman-Malamuth, coauthor of Between Two Worlds, and was deeply moved by her stories of growing up in an interfaith family and eventually founding a national organization for “parevehs” (those neither milk nor meat): adult children of interfaith
families.

I met with the authors of Happily Intermarried: Rabbi Roy Rosenberg, Father Peter Meehan, and Reverend John Payne (NY: MacMillan, 1989), and enjoyed their sparring banter as they recounted their experiences in the intermarriage debate. I was welcomed by two interfaith communities in Connecticut, one independent and one synagogue-based, and saw firsthand the strength that couples felt when they were buoyed by the support of others.

The idea for an independent and non-judgmental periodical that would include a wide range of experiences and opinions about interfaith family life was born of my own experience in a synagogue interfaith couples’ group, where all participants were steered firmly, if surreptitiously, toward the decision to create a Jewish home and raise Jewish children. Every time I tried to ask about other options, or to talk about a resource with a different perspective (such as Lee Gruzen’s book), the facilitator changed the subject. As the Christian partner, I felt excluded and faintly disrespected.

A beautiful irony of my journey with Dovetail is that, a decade later, my husband and I are in fact raising Jewish children in a Jewish home. Within the supportive Dovetail community, we were able to explore the possibilities, talk about the tough issues, and come to our own mutually acceptable solution. To me, that is the essence of Dovetail: Our mission is not to decide right or wrong, not to steer couples toward any particular decision, but to provide couples with the tools and information they need to make their own best choice. The absence of an across-the-board, clear-cut right choice makes for a messy, emotional process, but when couples take the time to ask themselves the hard questions and struggle through the challenging emotions, they emerge confident in their decision and ready to help their children develop healthy spiritual lives.

As I reflect on the roots of Dovetail, I realize that many of the people who inspired and supported our organization in its early years have moved on, turning their attention and their passion in other directions now that their own interfaith choices have been made. That’s how it is with Dovetail—our network ebbs and flows with the changing tide of each couple’s life cycle. Our services are needed desperately at times, then less urgently as couples set their own course and navigate through waters that have been charted but not fully explored. Sometimes a couple needs a life raft, sometimes a compass or a tugboat, sometimes a wave of the hand when they reach the shore—Dovetail has been all of these things for thousands of interfaith couples over the years.

Now, it is with a midwife’s mixture of pride and humility that I watch an exuberant, confident Dovetail enter adolescence under its competent and energetic current editor, Mary Rosenbaum, who is fond of saying (with regard to burgeoning support for the Dovetail Institute), “A rising tide lifts all boats.” So, as we prepare (as I write) to gather on the shore of Lake Michigan, I envision our third national conference as one final water metaphor, that of an

effervescent spring from which we can all drink for refreshment and fill our vessels for the journey ahead. May Dovetail help you on the way for at least another decade!