Welcome!

Hello, friends, and welcome to my new multifaith blog, Christmas and Kreplach! I have had a lot of thought-provoking experiences with religion over my four years in college, and I wanted to talk about my life through the lens of interfaith relations in a more public space to encourage discussion about how we can all come together to create a stronger world.

For those who do not know me, my name is Allyson. I was born and raised on Long Island, New York, left to attend college at William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia back in 2009 (Tribe Pride!), and have lived in Florence, Cardiff, and Manhattan at various points throughout my undergraduate career. I ascribe most closely to the theology the Reform Jewish movement, and was raised in a synagogue that was very accepting of interfaith families like mine. My father's family is primarily Ashkenazi Jewish (which would describe the majority of Jews in the United States, it means with ancestral roots in Eastern Europe) and my mother's family is Puerto Rican Catholic.

Leaving the welcoming atmosphere of my part of Long Island and heading to a very Christian part of southern Virginia affected my interpretation of religion very strongly. I also participated in an excellent Jewish internship program in New York city called CLIP (the Collegiate Leadership Internship Program) in the summer of 2012, which, interestingly enough, ended up being an even more challenging religious experience than going away to college had been.

I named this blog Christmas and Kreplach (pronounced crep-lock, a type of traditional Jewish meat dumpling) simply because of my own religious experiences with Judaism and Christianity, but this blog will be a place to look at the interactions of all religions. Please feel free to comment on any posts as you feel appropriate, but this is meant to be a space of respectful discussion and sensitive language (something I will talk about in a later blog post as it relates to CLIP) and I will delete any comments I feel are extremely hateful or offensive. The first two posts will be entries I have already written for other blogs on similar topics.

I hope you enjoy. Now go out and love one another.

<3,
Allyson