JTA picked up my Jewish Week article from last week, which looked at the relative happiness of Orthodox marriages in comparison to secular unions. And it’s currently on their homepage!

Orthodox marriages are happier but still have stresses, study reports

By Sharon Udasin · January 25, 2010

NEW YORK (New York Jewish Week) — Orthodox marriages may be happier than their secular counterparts, but religious unions are rocky enough to concern a team of researchers and rabbis who presented the results of their recent study on marital satisfaction at the Orthodox Union.

“Traditional family values and religious values tend to overlap,” Eliezer Schnall, an assistant professor of psychology at Yeshiva University who was responsible for analyzing the data, said here last week. “But there are also those in this community who are not as happy with their marriages.”  Continue reading…

The State Of The Union

by Sharon Udasin
Staff Writer

Orthodox marriages may be happier than their secular counterparts. But religious unions are rocky enough to concern a team of researchers and rabbis who presented the results of their recent study on marital satisfaction at the Orthodox Union here last week.

“Traditional family values and religious values tend to overlap,” said Eliezer Schnall, an assistant professor of psychology at Yeshiva University, who was responsible for analyzing the data. “But there are also those in this community who are not as happy with their marriages.”

Results showed that 72 percent of men surveyed and 74 percent of women rated their marriages as “very good” or “excellent,” whereas, the overall U.S. population has a much lower satisfaction rate of 63 and 60 percent respectively, according to a 2009 General Social Survey conducted by the National Opinion. Only 13 percent of Orthodox couples rated their marriages as “fair” or “poor.”

Aside from a few subjects from the United Kingdom and Israel, the 3,670 respondents were predominantly North Americans, who had been recruited through Internet promotions and outreach efforts in New York and Los Angeles synagogues.

Among the most divisive issues for unhappy respondents were infertility, at-risk youth, children with disabilities and use of birth control, according to Deborah Fox, the study’s pioneer and program director of the Aleinu Family Resource Center at Jewish Family Services of Los Angeles.  Continue reading…

Working The Land Of Israel

Participants in the joint Yeshiva University-JNF Alternative Winter Break program working in Chalutza, the new community for Gaza evacuees being built in the Negev. Courtesy of YU, JNF

by Sharon Udasin
Staff Writer

For Yeshiva University sophomore Josh Zimmerman, one of the highlights of his winter break was a day of harvesting peppers, plucking up tangled vegetable roots, picking up garbage from the sand and repairing a decrepit greenhouse for a community of Jewish refugees — all with 11 of his peers in Israel’s Negev Desert.

“We literally worked the land ourselves,” said Zimmerman, a 20-year-old psychology major. “We wer e making a difference from all aspects — hands-on, literally working the land itself, and verbally, by promoting the cause and fundraising for the community.”

Zimmerman and his peers were visiting the region of Chalutza that day, helping to develop a community for Jews who were evacuated from their homes in Gaza’s Gush Katif in 2005. The students headed to Israel with Marc Spear, who is leadership-training director for Yeshiva University’s Center for the Jewish Future, which sponsors the Quest Leadership Training Fellowship. Quest is a two-semester, non-credit program offered to both male and female undergraduates.

After a year of intense leadership training and raising $20,000 for an Israeli cause of their choice — in their case, the Chalutza communities for Gaza evacuees in the western Negev — the students traveled to Israel through a first-ever collaboration between YU and the Jewish National Fund, to visit these very communities they had worked so hard to support.
“The trip is the culmination of the semester,” Spear said. “They see the power of volunteering; they see the fact that they can make a bigger difference in the world.”
Though the Quest Program meets weekly like an ordinary course, students do not receive credit for participation and must be willing to commit to the work-intensive syllabus despite their intense dual curriculum at YU.

“We can’t just be another club,” Spear said. “We are going to invest in their future, but they need to invest in us.”  Continue reading…