How to Be a Good Jewish Grandparent

Julie Wiener's new column focuses on the Jewish Outreach Institute's new book, Twenty Things for Grandparents of Interfaith Grandchildren to Do (And Not to Do) to Nurture Jewish Identity in Their Grandchildren. One of the book's main points is that grandparents can be a powerful model of Jewish identity for their interfaith grandchildren, but they must respect their children's boundaries.

The book is an answer to the many people who call the Institute when an adult child intermarries, eager for future grandchildren to be raised Jewish yet nervous about appearing meddlesome. My friend “Leah” whose brother recently married a Buddhist woman, tells me that her mother feels so awkward that she frequently tries (to her daughter’s annoyance) to make Leah a go-between, asking her to “remind him that Rosh HaShanah is coming.”

“There’s a general sense of not knowing what to do and feeling paralyzed,” Rabbi Olitzky says, noting that the new book offers “optimism,” as well as concrete suggestions. Those include throwing “the best holiday parties ever”; fostering a positive relationship with your grandchild’s parents and, if possible, offering to help pay for things like Jewish summer camp or other Jewish activities.

Children--and their parents--will respond best to organic activities, ones that don't feel forced upon them. If you weren't Jewishly engaged before your intermarried child had children and then all of a sudden start nagging your kids about holidays and Hebrew school, you probably won't get anywhere. But if Judaism is an important part of your life, and people know it, your grandchildren are more likely to respond. Wiener says:

The book’s best advice, I think, is to “be the best Jew you can be.” You can’t share a passion you don’t actually have, and the more you immerse yourself in Jewish life — whether lighting Shabbat candles, studying Talmud or volunteering for the local federation — the more substantive and meaningful your Jewish identity is going to be. Plus, even if it doesn’t influence your grandchildren, it just might enrich your own life. I will never share my grandmother’s enthusiasm for Yiddish jokes or whitefish salad, but I’m glad she gets pleasure from them.

Laurel Snyder, author of Half/Life: Jew-ish Tales from Interfaith Homes, looks at the issue from a slightly different angle in a recent posting on her blog, Faithhacker. She points out how it's important for intermarried people to explain their boundaries to their parents:

Because (in the best cases of intermarriage) our generation may be creating new models for the Jewish family. We may be sitting in therapy, learning to communicate, and finding new expressions of shared ground to bridge the religious gap. We may be setting clear boundaries.

But our parents are... well, old. And they're used to things being done a certain way. And most of the time, they really do just want to help and support us... but they don't understand the lives we're constructing. And they don't want to "intrude" a lot of the time. But they don't know what crosses the line.

How can they, if we don't tell them?

I expect in the coming years that we'll see significant growth in outreach programming directed to the parents of intermarried children.

Transformation

The (Baltimore) Jewish Times recently printed a moving column from Haydee M. Rodriguez, who writes about his impending conversion to Judaism.

It reflects the tension that many converts feel between believing and feeling Jewish and not being Jewish. Unlike most American Jews, his connection to Judaism is religious, not cultural. He believes "in the tenets which have guided Judaism for more than 3,000 years," that "God spoke to Moses in an attempt to guide his people to righteousness and ethical living" and that he has a "responsibility to bring healing to the world." But, at the same time, his parents were not Jewish, and he has no connection to Jewish culture.

Even in interfaith marriages that don't end in conversion, the non-Jewish partner can feel a similar disconnect with Jewish culture. No amount of immersion into Jewish life will allow a convert to "claim a tradition of Yiddishkeit," as Rodriguez says. However, as Rodriguez also says:

While I cannot claim Jewish history as my own, I hope to learn it. And while I cannot claim Jewish culture and tradition, I hope to learn it, to cherish it, to preserve it.

While non-Jewish partners in interfaith marriages cannot claim Jewish history for themselves, they can claim it for their children.

Perspective

We occasionally get indignant over the way traditional Jewish leaders and organizations respond to intermarriage in their midst, but a recent headline put the civility of the debate in perspective: "Interfaith love sparks 23 deaths."

The recent attack in Iraq where Islamist fundamentalists stopped a bus, separated out members of a tiny religious sect called Yazidi and shot 23 of them was part of a cycle of revenge stemming from an interfaith marriage between a Muslim and a Yazidi. Four months ago, a Muslim woman eloped with a Yazidi man; Islamic fundamentalists responded by torching homes in the Yazidi man's village. Last week, a Yazidi woman eloped with a Muslim man and converted to Islam. In response, the woman's family stoned her to death.

We and other parts of the Jewish community may have vigorous disagreements, but our debates are ultimately conducted in an atmosphere of baseline respect and decency. As bad as it can occasionally seem for the intermarried in the Jewish community, if we lived in another place, in another time, things could be much, much worse.

What Does the Restructuring of the UJC Mean for the Intermarried?

The umbrella organization for North American Jewish federations is undergoing a massive reorganization, dropping a major policy initiative that was created in the wake of the surprisingly high intermarriage rates announced in the early '90s. What this will mean in practical terms is anybody's guess.

Since 1999, the United Jewish Communities, which links federations that have raised more than $4 billion in recent years, has been organized around four policy pillars. One is the Renewal and Renaissance pillar, which is focused on Jewish identity-building activities like summer camps and trips to Israel. While the abandonment of this pillar may make it sound like the UJC is discontinuing those efforts, that's highly unlikely. More likely is that UJC feels that those kind of efforts are better left to local federations than a national organization.

A more important piece of the UJC's restructuring is a proposal to create an office in Israel with the goal of raising money from wealthy Israeli and Russian Jewish philanthropists. While international donors have less interest in outreach to the intermarried--and probably are more unfriendly towards this issue than their North American counterparts--I don't know if their politics will have any impact on what federations in the U.S. are doing.

So is the restructuring of the most important Jewish organization in the Western Hemisphere good or bad news for the intermarried? We'll just have to wait and see...

A Jewish School Full of Muslims

Britain's The Independent has a truly astonishing article on a Jewish day school in Birmingham where half the students are Muslim--and everyone gets along. It's not about the kind of interfaith relationships we focus on, but it demonstrates the salutary effects that interfaith connections can have on people's worldviews. We're not naive enough to suggest that people of different faiths falling in love will have an impact on world conflict, but intimate encounters with other cultures and faiths--especially ones perceived to be in conflict--do make it a little less easy to villainize others.

A Jew and a Nazi Fall in Love...

Some random articles I've collected over the last week or two:

• Black Book, Paul Verhoeven's (Basic Instinct, Total Recall) new film about the Dutch Resistance during World War II, premieres today in limited release. An interfaith relationship is actually at the center of the story--although I doubt many readers would be able to relate to this particular romance between a tough-minded Jewish spy and a gentle Nazi officer. Judging from his previous films, that premise will probably come off as even more offensive on screen, which is to say, I am looking forward to seeing this movie. I don't expect, however, to be in the slightest bit enlightened about the dynamics of real interfaith relationships.
• The ongoing fracas over conversion standards in Israel continues, according to The (New York) Jewish Week. The latest development is that the main pluralist conversion school has stopped sending converts to the official Orthodox conversion courts as a protests against the courts' unreasonable standards. The head of the school, Benny Ish-Shalom, is calling for Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to change the conversion system, but I'm guessing he has other issues on his mind at that moment (and given his political vulnerability, I doubt he'd be willing to take on the Orthodox establishment that runs the conversion courts). The loser, as it always seems to be in these disputes, is not the courts or the school, but potential converts.
• ADL's national education director, Rabbi Gary Bretton-Granatoor, recently gave a very interesting talk at the St. Agnes Spiritual Life Center in San Francisco. He talked about Jesus' Jewish roots and how much of the Christian Bible is laced with details intended to resonate with Jews from the era, details that were lost on the rising Church, which was composed mostly of converted pagans. The rabbi even suggests that the notion of Jesus' divinity in the Christian Bible is overblown, pointing to the example of a story of a woman in the Christian Bible who was "hemorrhaging blood for 12 years." She stopped bleeding after touching the hem of Jesus' garment. Jesus tells her that her faith has healed her. Later scholars took the touching of Jesus' garment as a demonstration that Jesus saved her, but the rabbi suggests that the "hem" was actually Jesus' tzit-tzit. And the text does not say that Jesus saved her, but that "her faith" saved her, her faith, not in Jesus, but in the God of the Jewish tradition.


• A strange new play about a romance between a terminally ill Jewish businesswoman and a black televangelist is playing at Urban Stages in Manhattan through May 6. Apostasy explores the differing Jewish and Christian conceptions of the afterlife as well as the potentially suspicious motives of the televangelist: Is he in love with the woman? Is he just trying to get her to give her money to his church? It also deals with the charismatic (read: sexual) power of true believers like the televangelist.

Intermarriage Around the World

As much as intermarried couples face a struggle for acceptance from some U.S. Jews, the American Jewish community is easily the most enlightened in the world when it comes to responding constructively to intermarriage. Depending on what country you're comparing the U.S. to, we either have a low rate of intermarriage--Russia and other former Eastern Bloc countries have intermarriage rates far north of 50%--or a high one--countries where the Jewish community is dominated by the Orthodox, like Canada, South Africa and Turkey, have very low rates of intermarriage.

An article in the San Jose Mercury News (free login required) talks about how Reform worship is beginning to appear in Poland. It begins with the story of a woman who "was discouraged from joining Warsaw's Orthodox Jewish community by one member because her husband isn't Jewish." The story continues to talk about intermarried Jews and children of intermarriage who don't feel welcomed by the country's Orthodox Jewish community, which is the only one officially recognized by the state.

The fact that the Orthodox Jewish community is the only officially recognized community is a problem throughout Europe. With less division between church and state than in the U.S., some Jewish communities in Europe actually receive funding from the state, which makes it that much harder for more progressive options, like Reform, Reconstructionist or Conservative Judaism, to gain a foothold. And without progressive options, intermarried couples have no place to go.

The former Soviet Union is a particularly complicated case. The large Jewish population (345,000, good for fifth-largest in the world behind the U.S., Israel, France and Canada, respectively) has made it a prime target of Chabad as well as the Reform movement's international outreach. All of these organizations face an uphill battle in a country where religion was rigorously suppressed under communism and where anti-Semitism is rife. In some areas, Jews are intermarried at a rate of 90%. Moreover, many of the "best and the brightest" Jews decamped for Israel and the U.S. after the fall of communism. As this article in the Jerusalem Post states, "the communities are now gathering together the pieces, putting them back together as well as they can, and moving ahead with the age-old tasks of building communal institutions and educating the young."

Unlike in the States, where many intermarried families feel the relatively equal tug between one partner's Jewish heritage and the other partner's Christian heritage, in the former Soviet Union, there is no Jewish family tradition that Jewish partners can draw from. Quite the reverse, in fact. While Jews were as atheistic and irreligious as everyone else under communism, they were still identified as Jewish on their identity cards and are now subject to anti-Semitism because of their Jewish identity. Even though they know little of Jewish culture or religion, the greater society regularly reminds them of their difference as Jews. So far, this kind of negative identity formation has helped strengthen some Jewish communities--nothing breeds brotherhood like a shared enemy--but it has also sapped the country of many of its wealthiest and best-educated Jews. How it will all turn out is anyone's guess.

A wonderful first-person piece in the San Diego Jewish Journal has a slightly different take on intermarriage outside the U.S. It's written by a young Jewish-Chinese man from the U.S. and records his experience on his first trip to Israel as part of the free birthright israel program.

I’ve always felt I was mediocre at being Jewish, reform even by reform standards, so I was pleasantly surprised that the thirty-one others were mostly on Birthright for the same reason I was: at 26 years old, we were the cut-off age for the trip, and we would have felt like idiots missing out on ten free days in Israel. The fact we were Jewish was a footnote to our identities, kind of like your college major that had nothing to do with your career.

El Al had an open bar policy and within two hours of our flight, we crowded the aisles, chugged Israeli merlot, and high-fived over everything and nothing. When we arrived in Tel Aviv, though, my merlot buzz evaporated after I saw fifty-plus soldiers wielding machine guns. This was followed by security checks, metal detectors, and bombed-out homes. Maybe it was my laid-back SoCal upbringing, but this was not somewhere I wanted to live.

Like other children of intermarriage, his attitude towards Israel is ambivalent, even in some cases bordering on hostile. Since his Judaism is not a central part of his identity, he has a hard time understanding why young people would stay in a country surrounded by enemies and subject to a universal draft. But seeing the way the country is bonded by tragedy helps him understand a little better what makes Israelis so tied to their country. Like Russia, nothing breeds brotherhood like a shared enemy.

Judaism Your Way, and "Seventh Heaven"

The Intermountain Jewish News has a great article on Rabbi Brian Field, who leads Judaism Your Way, an innovative "synagogue without walls" based in Denver, Colo.

Judaism Your Way targets unaffiliated Jews, but it's clear that Field's passion is engaging the intermarried. He officiates at interfaith weddings without making any demands that the non-Jewish partner convert. It's not a radical stance, but it is in opposition to the position of the local rabbinical association. Judaism Your Way's services include wedding ceremonies between Jews and non-Jews, baby namings, Bar and Bat Mitzvahs or “alternative coming of age celebrations,” Shabbat services, regular holiday observances, and High Holiday services.

Judaism Your Way functions as an entryway toward Jewish practice, learning and community — if that’s what participants desire.

“One of the things we like to say is that wherever you are along your Jewish journey, we’ll meet you there and help you figure out the next step,” Rabbi Field says.

It’s an accommodating philosophy that sounds eerily similar to the approach used by Chabad.

But Rabbi Field stresses that unlike Chabad or other Jewish outreach groups, Judaism Your Way does not have a Jewish agenda that pulls participants toward more traditional forms of Judaism.

“We have a mutually referring relationship with other synagogues and organizations,” he says. “Congregations refer people to us if the programming members want is unavailable. Similarly, if someone in our group is looking for a deeper sense of community, I refer them to different synagogues, rabbis and Jewish organizations. I’m happy to do that.

“But we’re also aware that there’s a lot more that needs to be done Jewishly to engage all the folks out there. Is there another way of teaching Judaism, studying Torah, praying, and celebrating the holidays and Shabbat that can engage those people whose needs are not being met in existing models?”

I like Rabbi Field's approach a lot. He knows that synagogues aren't reaching some Jews but also recognizes that they offer a sense of community that no alternative community or outreach organization can provide on its own. Contrary to the opinions of some critics, synagogues are not hopeless, but they just need a little help from bridge organizations, like Judaism Your Way and InterfaithFamily.com.

On a random note: in the article, Rabbi Field talks about why he doesn't push the non-Jewish partner to convert. His opinion is that it's a major personal decision and no one should be pressured into it. His explanation echoed a rerun episode of "Seventh Heaven" I happened to catch while I was at the gym last night (which is really my snobby way of pointing out that I don't watch the show regularly).

In this episode, the son of Eric Camden (Stephen Collins), a Christian pastor and the star of the show, is set to marry a Jewish woman who is the daughter of a rabbi played by Richard Lewis. Apparently, the son has been attending synagogue with his Jewish fiance for several months and has been taking a conversion class. In an attempt to sabotage the wedding, Lewis' rabbi suggests that the boy convert immediately prior to the wedding--knowing full well that he'll be scared and Pastor Camden will be pissed. When his son tells him that he plans to convert, Camden gets so upset that he cancels the wedding, arguing that conversion should be a matter of "personal conviction" not parental pressure. The episode is actually a pretty interesting dissection of the whole issue of conversion before intermarriage. It points out one of the pitfalls of pushing conversion. While for Jews, being Jewish often has much more to do with cultural identity than religious belief, for people raised in Christian households, religion is solely a matter of belief. Asking someone to convert who doesn't truly believe--or fully understand--the faith they're adopting is hypocritical at best. Conversion is a powerful, life-changing choice and should never be undertaken lightly, or with a conflicted heart.

Patrilineal Jew Seeks Conversion

While IFF ascribes to the Reform notion that behavior, not being born of a Jewish mother, is the most important signifier of Jewish identity, we understand that large sections of the Jewish community don't agree. Sue Fishkoff of JTA wrote two stories last week about patrilineal Jews--that is, Jewish-identifying people with a Jewish father and non-Jewish mother--who seek to "convert" under Conservative auspices so that nobody questions their Jewishness.

Judging from the article, many Conservative rabbis are quite sympathetic to these people and refer to their ritual immersion in a mikvah not as a "conversion," but as an "affirmation" or "completion."

Rabbi Joel Meyers, executive vice president of the Rabbinical Assembly, the rabbinic arm of the Conservative movement, says they are most often people who "grew up very involved with Judaism and the Jewish people, who think of themselves as Jewish."

As a result, he says, "we try very hard, with great sensitivity and compassion, to work with them."

Each conversion candidate meets with a sponsoring rabbi, Meyers explains, who ascertains the candidate's Jewish knowledge, observance level and commitment to the Jewish people. Those with strong enough Jewish backgrounds may not have to study much, if at all. For them, the conversion "is more of a technicality," one Conservative rabbi explained.

At the same time, some of these patrilineal Jews resent the fact that they have to get a "stamp of approval" for years of Jewish behavior and identification. Fishkoff points to the example of a 31-year-old woman who spent a year in Israel on a student program and kept getting asked whether she planned to convert:

"It was a weight I had to carry during the entire program," Goldstein says. "I felt the burden of having to prove myself more than people 'born Jewish,' " she says.

Goldstein converted while she was pregnant -- not because she wanted to, but to spare her child what she went through.

"I didn't want my daughter to have to face that duality," she says. "I converted, but resented that I had to do it."

One clever approach some Conservative rabbis have taken is to require all their b'nai mitzvah students to immerse in a mikvah. That way, the children of non-Jewish mothers can convert without being singled out.

Of course when you get down to it, there is little historical or halachic justification for recognizing only the children of Jewish mothers as Jewish, but that's neither here nor there. Conservative rabbis who deal with the issue sensitively should be commended for their work.

IFF in New York Times

I was going to write about some other things today--namely, a new JTA article on the conversion of patrilineal Jews--but when your organization gets mentioned in the New York Times, everything else becomes a second priority.

Sam Freedman, author of Jew vs. Jew, wrote a column about an interfaith couple where both partners are committed to their religion, and the difficulties they face during Passover and Easter. Freedman argues, not entirely convincingly, that for religious couples, the Passover-Easter conflict is greater than the "December Dilemma":

The religious aspects of Christmas and Hanukkah were long ago buried under commercialism and seasonal festivity. Passover and Easter remain deeply theological in ways that underscore both the nearness and distance between Judaism and Christianity.

On the one hand, Jesus came into Jerusalem for Passover, and the Last Supper with the disciples was a seder; the wafer in communion harks back to the Jewish holiday’s matzo. On the other hand, beyond celebrating Jesus’ divinity, Easter has historically been the occasion for anti-Semitic passion plays and pogroms, motivated by the belief that the Jews killed Jesus.

It's a good theory, but I have a hard time imagining any more than a few interfaith couples find the Passover-Easter conflict more significant than the Christmas-Hanukkah conflict. Easter may be more religiously significant than Christmas, but Christmas is still the second most important day on the Christian calendar. Hanukkah may not be a major Jewish holiday, but religious Jews celebrate it just as much as secular Jews. Moreover, religious Jews are more acutely aware of the real message of Hanukkah, which celebrates a small band of ideologues who rejected the assimilation of their Jewish countrymen. Passover, at least, provides a more welcoming space for the non-Jewish guest. And religious or not, no couple can get around the month-long onslaught of Christmas-related media that comes out in December. There is no comparable "season" surrounding Passover and Easter. Nonetheless, Passover and Easter can prove a time for conflict and negotiation, as our recent survey revealed.

The Link Sink

I know you're supposed to clean house before Passover, but here are some interesting links that have piled up in the last week or two:

• Tamara Podemski is an unknown in the U.S. but she's starred on a handful of Canadian TV shows and recorded three albums. Her father is Israeli and her mother is Ojibwa (a native Canadian tribe). She proudly refers to herself as a "fully functional half-breed," and appears to take great pride in her mixed heritage--which, incidentally, produced a gorgeous woman. For more on here, read this profile in the Canadian Jewish News.
• An educational publisher agreed to withdraw and destroy the remaining copies of a reference book on Israel after a major Orthodox organization objected to the book's characterization of Orthodox Jews, according to The (New York) Jewish Week. Agudath Israel of America was upset over a passage in the book that said that "some ultra-Orthodox Jews" want to limit Israel's Law of Return to exclude Reform and Conservative Jews because "they are not really at all because they are not strict in their observance of all the religious laws." There's no question the passage is wrong, but it contains a kernel of truth. It is not uncommon for ultra-Orthodox Jews to ridicule and denigrate more progressive streams of Judaism, especially Reform, because they doesn't fit their strict definitions of what Judaism is. It also taps into the larger issue over conversions and the fact that Israel's acceptance of converted Jews is hamstrung by bureaucracy, corruption and political subservience to the Orthodox.
• Building Jewish Bridges, one of the country's best outreach programs, located in San Francisco's East Bay, recently started a blog. Keep up the good work.


• After they vigorously clean their house of all chametz--non-kosher-for-Passover food, meaning bread, pasta and the like--traditional households "sell" their chametz to a non-Jew and then buy it back after Passover is over. The tradition requires that the buyer be a non-Jew. The Jerusalem Post has an interesting article about the issue, and what happens if you sell your hametz to a non-Jew who is actually Jewish by traditional definitions? The article notes that it is preferable to sell hametz to Arabs in Israel because there has been so little Arab-Jewish intermarriage that one can feel quite secure that the buyer is not "actually" Jewish. It's not remotely the writer's intent, but I found that the piece highlights the silliness of basing Jewish definition on descent rather than practice or self-identification. Under traditional rules, it would be OK to sell hametz to a committed Reform Jew whose mother wasn't Jewish but not OK to sell it to an evangelical Christian whose mother's maternal grandmother was Jewish! Oy.

The Orthodox on Intermarriage

No one expects the Orthodox to be particularly friendly towards interfaith families or intermarriage. Their approach to intermarriage can range from the insulting to the downright vindictive. But every so often a little bit of sense shines through, as in the case of this smart piece from the Canadian Jewish News detailing the religious justification for inviting non-Jewish guests to the seder.

Nowhere in Jewish liturgy are non-Jews barred from attending the seder, and Rabbi Maurice Lamm, an Orthodox rabbi, promotes inviting non-Jews, especially if their family members, because excluding them "will create rancor, even enmity," according to Rabbi Wayne Allen, a Conservative rabbi in Ontario (In Canada, Conservative is often closer to Modern Orthodox than American Conservative). Plus, says Allen, opening doors to non-Jewish guests is a way of debunking the medieval claims that Jews ate matzah made out of Christian blood.

From our standpoint, Passover may be the best opportunity to involve non-Jews in Jewish life because the seder is by its nature adaptable, and the home is a much less intimidating religious space than the synagogue.