Livre d'Or

Heh, I'm not actually that angry with the Christian guy, honestly. I am much more angry about the klezmer festival which I thought was so cute when I first heard of it. The boorish Christian obviously meant well and was oblivious to how disruptive he was being. I think what got to me is the way that the tolerance of the group, which is a value that's extremely central to me, was being used against us.

I like your idea of concentric circles, yeah. I am not sure that would have helped in this particular situation though. You're right, he's not a community member yet, but there were plenty of other attendees in the process of conversion who are extremely valuable members of the community and I would not want to take any steps to make them feel less welcome. Nobody ever explicitly said, this is a conference only for Progressive Jews, it was just advertised through Progressive circles and assumed not to be interesting to anyone who wasn't part of that culture. But he's sufficiently involved in Progressive life that he thought he was among the target audience.

Apparently at some similar events they get a bunch of Orthodox people, and although the organizers don't have a problem with Orthodox people joining their Progressive activities, they don't really want to have to keep justifying the way we keep shabbat, or the fact that we have women rabbis. So they were deliberately selective in how they advertised this conference.