Three Little Birds

It's been two weeks since Hurricane Dean left surprisingly little damage in Jamaica, a place filled with shoddily constructed housing and tenuous infrastructure. A few days after the storm, Paul Rockower wrote an essay for The Jerusalem Post about Jamaica's "small, vibrant Jewish community" of 250-300.

Despite the community's microscopic size--down from a one-time high of 5,000-6,000--Rockower reports that 20 people were at the island's only synagogue, Sha'are Shalom, on Shabbat when he visited. The sounds of the synagogue's pipe organ filled the room, and the floors were carpeted with white sand. The community's spiritual leader, Stephen Henriques told Rockower how intermarriage was common but that "nearly all children from those unions were raised as Jews."

I've always found it interesting how the Jewish establishment in the U.S. makes a stink about intermarriage, while far smaller Jewish communities--such as Jamaica and Nicaragua--accept it as a fact of life, and move on. Better to keep up the important business of living a rich Jewish life and building Jewish community, and whoever wants to participate does so. Even a few days before Hurricane Dean, when water was thigh-deep in the streets of Kingston, nearly 10 percent of Jamaica's Jewish population came out for services.

As Bob Marley sang, "Every little thing's gonna be alright."

Better Late Than Never

The few studies on the Jewish affiliation patterns of children of interfaith families have consistently shown that children of intermarriage have stronger Jewish identities as adults if they are bar or bat mitzvahed.

This article and video from The Charlotte Observer tells the story of Paloma Wiener, 16, and her brother, Brandon, 15, who are studying for their bat and bar mitzvah together. Their mother is Mexican and their father is Jewish, and they moved to Charlotte from California recently, so they got a late start on studying to become b'nai mitzvah. The fact that they are going through the process at a later age reaffirms their commitment to Judaism, and makes it highly likely their religious identity will remain with them throughout their lives.

The same principle applies to adult children of interfaith marriage as well. Robert Rosenbaum of San Francisco, 45, was the child of a non-religious Jewish father and non-Jewish mother in a very Christian part of Florida. He was turned off to religion from a young age; the only connection to the Jewish religion he had was his father's annual trek to synagogue for Robert's grandfather's yahrtzeit (annual memorial prayer). But after reconnecting to the Jewish side of his family in New York, he started a journey back to Judaism. First, he took an Intro to Judaism class; then, he converted; and two years ago, he had a bar mitzvah. That commemorating, culminating act likely insures that he will identify Jewishly for the rest of his life.

A bar or bat mitzvah can also serve to tie the non-Jewish member of an interfaith family closer to the Jewish community. In this wonderful column for the (Danbury) News Times, Brian Koonz relates how his son's bar mitzvah filled him with pride but also left him feeling "disconnected":

Despite belonging to the temple for over a decade, I often felt like I was attending services on a guest pass, albeit a guest pass with all the incredible warmth and privileges of full membership.

It was easy, almost convenient, to let other temple members volunteer for committees and projects. I was the Catholic spectator, after all, the reason Easter and Christmas were celebrated in our house.

I wasn't qualified to conduct temple business. At least, that's what I told myself.

But when his temple asked for volunteers to teach third-grade Hebrew school, Koonz felt he couldn't say no. It was his way of giving back to the temple.

It's easy to bemoan how the modern bar mitzvah has mutated into a garish display of conspicuous consumption, but the ceremony still retains a powerful, if not immediately apparent, impact on a child's future identity--and his family's relationship to Judaism.

High Holiday Tickets: High Prices, High Barriers to Involvement

Across the spectrum, including among the Orthodox, synagogues have done an admirable job in recent years making themselves more welcoming to the unaffiliated, the intermarried and the just plain timid. There's a long way to go, but between Chabad's outreach, the Reform movement's embrace of interfaith families and the Conservative movement's push for keruv, religious life is more welcoming and more accessible than it's ever been. Which makes it all the more unfortunate that the practice of charging non-members for High Holiday tickets--and in some cases, barring non-members from attending--persists.

It's one of the most shortsighted strategies in modern religion: during the small number of days that Jews actually want (or at least feel obligated) to go to synagogue, congregations charge them exorbitant prices to enter, either through one-off ticket prices or a requirement that the non-member pay dues to join the synagogue. Rather than use the holidays of Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah as an occasion to show non-members how welcoming they are, they use it as an occasion to show how restrictive--and expensive--they are.

For years, the excuse for such unwelcoming practices has always been financial. If we don't get non-members to join during the High Holidays, when we have something they want, when will we get them to join? But this rationale ignores the possibility that there may be many people--like myself when I was living in San Diego--who are so turned off by High Holiday ticket prices that they don't go to synagogue at all during the holidays. While congregations are responding to the market, and charging for a seemingly scarce resource when demand outstrips supply, they are also pricing out a portion of their potential market.

Thankfully, as Sue Fishkoff of JTA reports, there is a growing trend for "praying without paying" during the High Holidays. Inspired by Chabad, which holds free High Holiday services at most of its locations world-wide, synagogues in other movements are beginning to open their doors during the holidays to non-members, free of charge. The Conservative movement, for example, encourages synagogues to offer free tickets to a non-member for a year or two. In New York, the New York Metropolitan Conference of the Men of Reform Judaism sponsors free High Holiday services for students, young professionals and faculty members.

Meanwhile, Chabad continues to argue that not charging for the High Holidays contributes to long-term membership and who can argue? New Chabads pop up weekly in ever more obscure places, and continue to surprise local synagogues with the number of Jews they engage on a regular basis. Moreover, Chabad uses innovative fundraising techniques, from cultivating large regional donors (as opposed to congregational donors) to holding celebrity-studded telethons. It doesn't hurt that the slichim (emissaries) that start synagogues are young, driven couples who essentially work for free for several years as they get their Chabad centers off the ground.

But the rest of the Jewish world could learn a thing or two from Chabad's marketing and fundraising, starting with its strategy of not charging for people to hear the shofar blast.

That Thing We Do

I need an intervention. No matter how much I try to move away from writing about Noah Feldman's The Orthodox Paradox, I keep getting called back by the tantalizing aromas of fresh opinions. The way it makes me feel part of something bigger than myself, the way it makes my worries wash away, the way it builds my self-confidence... My name is Micah and I am an Orthodox-Paraholic.

But maybe one last taste?

Andrew Silow-Carroll, the ever-insightful editor of the New Jersey Jewish News, wrote a follow-up to his op-ed "The way we do the things we do." In that essay he argued that the Feldman essay--and a recent volley of intellectual fireworks between Jack Wertheimer, provost of the Conservative movement's rabbinical seminary, and Joey Kurtzman, editor of Jewcy--demonstrated the growing schism between the "particularists" and the "universalists." The particularists, like Wertheimer, see Judaism first and foremost as a culture and view Jewish strength in inverse relationship to Jewish assimilation. The universalists, like Kurtzman (and to a lesser extent, Feldman), see Judaism as a universally accessible philosophy that is compromised by the obsession over communal boundaries. Silow-Carroll is more sympathetic to the first position--indeed, he lives his life by the rules of the particularist--but in this new column, he wonders whether his "choices will ensure the survival of anything."

It's not that he thinks his decisions to live in a Jewish neighborhood, go to synagogue regularly and send his children to Jewish day school are misguided, but rather that he doesn't have complete confidence that his strategy, or any strategy for that matter, will guarantee Jewish continuity. Among most Jewish establishment thinkers, it's accepted wisdom that because the Orthodox are the fastest-growing portion of the American Jewish community, only a focus on religious ritual, Jewish education and segregated living will lead to continued Jewish strength. In the modern view, the assimilation and secularization of the Jewish mainstream over the last 70 years has been a failure for Judaism. But, says Silow-Carroll:

The problem with this analysis, as I wrote at the time, is that it presents the current Jewish era as the inevitable consequence of the history that preceded it as well as a predictor of the future that will follow it. To have performed the same exercise 100 years ago would have yielded the opposite conclusion: The Orthodox model would have been seen as the least successful model in Jewish history, in that 90 percent of its adherents abandoned its strictures for different lives in America and Palestine.

Jewish "particularism" would have been a social disaster even 50 years ago, when anti-Semitism was still a barrier in so many ways. No one can say which strategies will be demanded — and will make demands on us — 10, 20, or 30 years from now. Each generation calls forth its own corrective. If followers of the "Orthodox model" — and I include myself among them — think we've reached the end of Jewish history and that our children and grandchildren will come out as our clones in the Jewish choices they make, then we are very likely in for a shock.

Silow-Caroll's op-eds and Kurtzman's and Feldman's essays make me wonder if perhaps the future of Judaism won't be found in particularism or universalism, but perhaps in some yet-unforeseen synthesis of the two. Or perhaps a third way altogether. About the only lesson we can draw from Jewish history is that those who care about their Judaism in some way will also find some way to perpetuate it.

Ay, There's the Snub

Leave it to Julie Wiener of The Jewish Week to come up with an original take on Noah Feldman's The Orthodox Paradox.

Rather than use her column as an opportunity to critique or praise Feldman, she ponders the value of the snub--both Maimonides School's snub of Feldman and Feldman's snub of the school and the Modern Orthodox community. Does the snub work? Does it lead to a desired change in behavior, or does it just piss people off?

Wiener certainly leans toward the latter option. Feldman's case provides a double dose of evidence that the snub doesn't work: Feldman intermarried and was unashamed of his life decisions despite his exclusion from the announcement section of his day school's alumni newsletter while the Modern Orthodox community has responded to Feldman's essay not by reconsidering some of its policies but by counterattacking Feldman with often virulent force.

Wiener relates the "the snub factor" to the question of officiation at intermarriages, which we have taken a big interest in lately:

By refusing to officiate, are rabbis discouraging intermarriage and defending the integrity of Judaism, which has traditionally viewed intermarriage as damaging? Or are they simply pushing people away?

Wiener also lays responsibility on the snubbed as well as the snubber:

Bob Levy, the Reform rabbi who performed my Ann Arbor, Mich., wedding back in 1998, says he doesn’t accept the argument that refusing to officiate will discourage Jews from marrying non-Jews — but he also objects to “the idea that if I don’t marry someone then I’m dooming them to a life of never feeling welcome in a synagogue.”

“It’s my job to create avenues of openness that people can take,” he explains. “But it’s the responsibility of the individual to find his or her own place in life.”

Levy's philosophy is very close to our own Rabbi Lev Baesh's. He humbly feels that he is neither gatekeeper nor savior of Judaism. He'll help anyone explore Judaism, but he's under no illusion that all, or most, of the people he helps will become Talmud-quoting synagogue-goers.

Wiener's article also points out a worrying trend of snubbing among younger rabbis. She relates the story of how a couple found that younger rabbis were less receptive to officiating at an intermarriage than older ones. A 2004 Jewish Outreach Institute survey found that younger rabbis were generally more traditional and conservative in their outlook than their older colleagues.

None of us--not InterfaithFamily.com, not JOI, not Julie Wiener, not Rabbi Bob Levy--can say with certainty that welcoming any particular intermarried family will lead them to greater Jewish engagement, but we have plenty of proof that not welcoming them will lead to greater alienation.

Three Stories

I've got three interesting stories today about the quirks of interdating and growing up in an interfaith family. I tried to come up with a clever way to link the three, but I'm at a loss. Here they are:

• On Jewcy, Jordie Gerson complains that Jewish men have a hard time seeing her as a sexual being after they find out she's a rabbinical student. She finds she can only have flings with non-Jewish men:
  

  ...the non-Jews, they knew better. They knew that in my world they were not welcome, at least not for long. Well, by me, maybe, they’d be welcome. But not by the places I was going, and in the communities I would someday lead. Non-Jewish men assumed our relationship couldn’t become serious—and after the Jewish men who put me in the serious category automatically, this was an enormous relief.



• Chris Schwarz, a photographer who opened a museum to honor the heritage of the thriving Polish Jewish community destroyed by the Holocaust, died a few weeks ago. Despite his devotion to Jewish history and remembrance, he was buried in a municipal cemetery in Krakow because his mother was not Jewish. He once said, "I am Jewish enough for the camps, but not for the rabbis."


• Also on Jewcy, the daughter of a Korean woman adopted by a Jewish family tells her story: how her mother rebelled against religion and didn't raise her Jewish, how her grandmother "was always pushing" Judaism, how she went on a birthright israel trip because it was free, how she dated an Israeli soldier who was killed by terrorists. Now, she's a firefighter in Israel.

How Jesus Made Jeremy a Better Jew

Jeremy Greenberg, a stand-up comic, has written an amusing, albeit perplexing, essay on "How Jesus Made Me a Better Jew" for American Jewish Life magazine. "Jesus first came to me in sixth grade through my friend's older sister's breasts," he says.

Breasts aside, I was a prime candidate for receiving a Christendectomy. As a kid, being a Jew meant going to Sunday school instead of playing with my friends. It meant missing football practice and games during Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Until I graduated high school, Judaism was a religion based on separating me from my friends — me from who I wanted to be.

Additionally, I was part of a statistical reality only now becoming well known: Meshugener-ass Yid parents are the number-one cause of Christianity among Jews. Forget Tay-Sachs; we should be screened for parents who check your teeth for ham particles after having Christmas dinner at Scott Carlson’s house.

As he grew older, some combination of adolescent rebellion and personal role models who were Christian led him to baptize himself and email his parents, "I am Christian."

But it didn't take. "For months I felt 'off' both personally and professionally," he says. Eventually, for reasons that aren't remotely clear from his essay, he sets aside Jesus and reembraces his Jewish identity. How he does that is also not explained.

Maybe he found some Jewish body parts worth worshipping.

It's Raining Men... As If

Rob Eshman, editor-in-chief of The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles, has written an op-ed that is sure to generate controversy. In "Hindu Widows," he argues that the Jewish community should encourage single women in their 30s and 40s to interdate. Why, his article ask, should Jewish women sacrifice their happiness and their child-bearing years at the altar of endogamy?

I talked with four of these women over the space of three days last week, all wondering if I had come across any single Jewish men. I mentioned a name. Here's what happened: They had already dated the guy. I mentioned another name. Already dated him, too: At 41, he was not quite ready to settle down. A straight, eligible Jewish man in his 40s gets around this town faster than the weekend box office numbers.

Yes, this is a problem for non-Jewish women, as well, but if your requirements for potential dates includes "must be Jewish," you suddenly rule out 94 percent of potential males. There aren't enough marriageable Jewish men out there. Period. It's a game of musical chairs, and someone is going to get left out.

The remarkable thing is that Eshman isn't the editor of a paper based in a Jewish backwater. Greater Los Angeles is home to significantly more than 500,000 Jews--the second-largest concentration of Jews in the country, after New York. In 1997, there were more than 100,000 Jewish men and women between the ages of 30 and 44 in the area covered by the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles' population survey, an area that doesn't even include Orange County, Long Beach or Pasadena. At the time the survey was conducted, the authors noted the phenomenon of "gender mismatch" in the L.A. area. There were 3 percent more women aged 30-49 than there were men, which explains some of the problems facing women now in their 40s.

One of the biggest problems I have with the way that some in the Jewish community look at intermarriage is how they ignore the human aspect. For the vast majority of people who interdate or intermarry, their decision isn't about harming the Jewish people or rebelling against their parents, it's about numbers and matters of the heart. In a country where Jews are a small minority, even in as Jewish a place as New York City, most eligible partners are bound to be non-Jewish. The "Hindu widows" that Eshman identifies have declined entering this pool of potential partners--with disastrous personal results.

But this phenomenon isn't exclusive to the Jewish community. A recent article on CNN.com talks about a similar thing happening in the black community:

Black women around the country also are reconsidering deep-seated reservations toward interracial relationships, reservations rooted in America's history of slavery and segregation.

..."I'm not saying that white men are the answer to all our problems," [Toinetta] Jones [a 37-year-old divorcee] said. "I'm just saying that they offer a different solution."

She reflects many black women frustrated as the field of marriageable black men narrows: They're nearly seven times more likely to be incarcerated than white men and more than twice as likely to be unemployed.

Regardless of your racial or religious background, if you're a single women in her late child-bearing years, personal happiness should always trump ethnic solidarity.

Noah More!

As I was reading the latest batch of think-pieces on Noah Feldman's essay on intermarriage and Modern Orthodoxy in the New York Times, I couldn't help but think of a book I'm reading, Rabbi Arthur Blecher's The New American Judaism, which will be published by St. Martin's Press in October.

Blecher's central premise is that modern mainstream American Judaism relies on a set of myths and misguided motives to justify its current form. One of the myths is that intermarriage is decreasing the size of the American Jewish population. One of the misguided motives is that the most important reason to be Jewish is so that Judaism continues to survive. The former, Blecher argues, is factually incorrect; the latter is simply uninspiring, playing on Jews' fears rather than their hopes.

While at first I was a bit skeptical of Blecher's argument, it gains persuasive force as he marshalls more evidence for his theory. Indeed, the American Jewish community's obsession with survival for survival's sake becomes almost comical when seen through Blecher's eyes. Among the more absurd manifestations of the American obsession with survival is the romanticization of the shtetl as an Old World Eden of Jewish learning, community and identity--a delusion that ignores the fact that millions of Jews willingly left those communities to come to the United States.

Blecher's slightly bemused take on American Jewry's fear-inspired survivalism allowed me to laugh when reading Rebbetzin Esther Jungreis' take on Feldman's essay--rather than cringe at her typically folksy, intolerant vitriol, characterized by statements like "intermarriage was even more devastating to the Jewish people than a physical Holocaust."

It's interesting to see the central place that Jewish self-preservation plays in Orthodox Rabbi Levi Brackman's arguments on why Jews should be more welcoming to the intermarried. Brackman agrees that intermarriage "is an existential threat to the Jewish people," but says "we are now at a stage of damage control." As much theological distaste he may have for welcoming the intermarried, it's only practical--otherwise, he argues, "we run the risk of losing colossal amount of additional Jewish children born into those mixed marriages."

Andrew Silow-Carroll, editor of the New Jersey Jewish News, sees Feldman's essay as part of a larger debate over Jewish particularism vs. universalism. Silow-Caroll wisely sees both sides of the coin, how exalting Judaism as philosophy at the expense of Judaism as community risks communal dissolution, while trumpeting community at the expense of philosophy risks moral and theological bankruptcy. His most sensible suggestion is that the Jewish community needs both.

Intriguingly, "Between a Hug and a Snub," the Forward's article about the Jewish community's response to the intermarried, doesn't set up a dichotomy between the "we-don't-want-to-encourage-it" argument and the "damage control" thesis. Reporter Adam Marks quotes Rabbi Hirschi Zarchi of the Harvard University Chabad, who says he would welcome Noah Feldman regardless of its practical implications:

“Look,” said Rabbi Zarchi, “why do you love your brother or your child? Is it only because of what they do? There is a level of love that is beyond ‘because.’ When a child rejects his home, but the parents continue to show love to that child, that love might bring the child home. But that’s not why a parent loves. A mother or father loves because we can’t help ourselves. But that love doesn’t diminish the pain we feel or the beliefs we have.”

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach seems to be cut from the same cloth as Rabbi Blecher, asking "Since when do fear and censure have the power to motivate?" In his latest column on Feldman's essay, he argues that the Jewish community needs to be more welcoming to its "best and brightest" since so many of them, like Feldman, are intermarried.

Bringing things back to Noah Feldman himself, two recent articles point out some valid criticisms of his essay. The first, and most serious, is that it turns out that Feldman and his girlfriend were not cropped out of the alumni newsletter photo because Feldman was interdating. Along with several other couples, they were cropped out simply because there was no room to show everyone. Worse, Feldman knew this fact before the New York Times essay went to print. His defense is bogus: "It's not as if [the photo] was an outlying event," he tells The (New York) Jewish Week. "It fit right in with the other things. It was a memoir of my experience." The Jewish Week also subtly points out a hypocritical fact about Feldman: while he used his personal experience as the grounds to open a critique of Modern Orthodoxy, he refuses to share details about the rest of his personal life, like what his Jewish practice is at home, whether he is raising his children Jewish and what his wife's current relationship to Judaism is.

In The Forward, Allan Nadler castigates Feldman less for his hypocrisy than for his lack of spine, his desire to be accepted by the very community he criticizes. Nadler bristles at Feldman's comparison of himself to Baruch Spinoza, the most famous dissident in modern Jewish history:

There was a time when heretics were strong and brave men and women who nobly accepted the arrows and wounds of their Orthodox tormenters, even wearing them as a badge of anguished honor. When Jews began in the 18th century to break in significant numbers with Orthodoxy, they advocated a variety of new paths, ranging from developing secular Jewish identities and more liberal denominations of the faith, to cultural assimilation, even conversion to Christianity. The one thing these dissidents shared was the absence of any claim, or apparent desire, to be honored by the very religious institutions and authorities they had willfully defied. These rebels understood that it would both cheapen the importance of their dissent from the tradition, and at the same time undermine the integrity of that tradition’s norms, were their break to carry no agonizing consequences.

...Spinoza’s anguished break with Judaism was the result of weighty struggle with ideas, whereas Feldman’s is — by his own account — a fight for personal acceptance.

Indeed, this is the very problem: Today’s “non-conformists” exhibit an insatiable need for personal approval by the communities they have betrayed — the surest sign that they have not engaged in any serious intellectual or theological struggle with the tradition. Their “breaks” are motivated not by the search for transcendent truth, but one for practical comfort in their lifestyle.

As off-putting as Nadler's tough-mindedness may seem, I can't argue with its logical consistency. Perhaps he and Blecher should talk.

The Bratz Pack

BRATZ's movie debut last week was no match for the Transformers--it made $4.2 million in its opening weekend vs. $155.4 million for Transformers--but when it comes to toy sales, it's no contest. BRATZ has generated more than $2 billion in revenue, and its sales are closing the gap on the most successful girl's toy in history, Barbie.

So what--or who--are Bratz? They're the anti-Barbie, large-headed, wide-eyed, multiethnic dolls who wear skimpy clothes and are supposed to be teenagers, unlike the mature, demure 20-something Barbie. Like Barbie, they were created by a Jewish entrepreneur and like Barbie, they reflect the ethos of the time. When Barbie debuted in 1959, the ideal of feminine happiness was white, blonde, rich and monogamous; in 2007, the ideal is younger, more racially diverse, sassier and independent.

In the new movie, many of the Bratz come from interracial and interreligious homes. One, Yasmin, is half-Jewish and half-Latina and calls her grandmother "Bubbe," even though they sing "La Cucaracha" together. (The actress who plays Yasmin, Nathalia Ramos, is the daughter of a Spanish father and an Australian Jewish mother.)

This proud display of the character's multi-ethnic roots is reflective of the increasing acceptability, and frankly, coolness, of having roots in different cultures. More and more of the country's most popular celebrities--Jessica Alba, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, Alicia Keys, to name a few--hail from diverse backgrounds, and tweener and kids' shows are littered with multiethnic characters.

I'll leave it to others to bemoan the apocalyptic consequences of overly sexualized children's dolls. Most guys I knew with played with G.I. Joe and He-Man as kids and haven't become violent steroid-raging alpha-males.

The Jewish Cardinal

Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger died on Sunday.

Cardinal Lustiger was a key figure in the Catholic-Jewish dialogue that Pope John Paul II so valued. He was the Pope's representative at the commemoration ceremonies for the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz in 2005 and served as a middle man between Jews and the Church on sensitive issues like Catholic anti-Semitism. He was uniquely fitted for these responsibilities because he was actually born a Jew--a fact that made many Jewish figures who worked with him uncomfortable.

He was born in Paris to secular Polish-Jewish emigres in 1926. Following the German invasion of France in 1940, he and his sister were sent for their own protection to live with a Catholic woman. At 13, he was baptized. Despite his conversion, he considered himself Jewish: "I was born Jewish, and so I remain, even if that is unacceptable for many," he once said. And, in a way, he had the most unassailable Jewish credentials: his mother died as a Jew in Auschwitz.

Further complicating matters, he considered himself "a fulfilled Jew," implying that Christianity was a higher step on the path to religious enlightment than Judaism.

His life raises all sorts of interesting questions: Can a devout Catholic still be Jewish? How should the Jewish community consider such a person? Are converted Jews actually a good thing for the Jewish community (because of their connection between two faiths)? Is it OK to convert out of Judaism, but not to consider your new religion superior to your old one? Did Cardinal Lustiger betray his born religion by converting--or was he actually a righteous gentile for the work he did in the Church?

The complexities of his life are fascinating, and difficult to resolve, even for the late Cardinal. In the 1970s, 30+ years after converted, he considered making aliyah.

Breaking Down Walls

Part of a growing trend around the country, a new "synagogue without walls" is opening in Cleveland, according to the Cleveland Jewish News. Called simply "The Shul," it will cater to unaffiliated and interfaith families, especially baby boomers.

The rabbi of this new congregation, Edward Sukol, has clearly done his research. He's not centering the congregation's spiritual life around Shabbat attendance. He is getting rid of Sunday school and doing family education instead, where the whole family learns about Judaism together (an approach that Stepping Stones in Colorado has perfected over the years). Bar mitzvah and bat mitzvah services will be tailored to family's needs. And one of his most radical ideas will see Sukol and a local minister running a joint study session for interfaith families:

“We will talk about the similarities and differences of shared symbols within Judaism and Christianity such as wine, water and bread,” he says. “We will discuss the ethical and moral differences of these two religions and let interfaith families articulate for themselves how they want to express their religious identities in their homes.”

This approach touches the third rail of the Jewish community's response to intermarriage: letting families decide for themselves how to raise their children. As tolerant and sensitive as outreach organizations try to be, most of us have a not-so-hidden-agenda: we want interfaith families to make Jewish choices. It's exceedingly rare to see a rabbi, especially one trained in the Conservative tradition, willing to share information about other religions with interfaith families.

We wish him the best of luck.

Does Noah Feldman Feed the Anti-Semites?

Norman Lamm, the highly respected former president of Yeshiva University--the flagship of the Modern Orthodox movement--stoops to a surprising low in his critique of Noah Feldman's essay on intermarriage and Modern Orthodoxy, on the Forward's website. He says that Feldman "succeeded in supplying via the New York Times article enough anti-Jewish material to last a few good years." It's the oldest trick in the book, and it's been used to quell honest criticism of Israeli policies for years: don't air our dirty laundry because it just gives the anti-Semites fodder for their hate.

But this argument rests on a false and cowardly premise. The "dirty laundry" argument assumes, ridiculously, that if only there weren't negative information about Jews, Judaism or Israel, anti-Semites would realize that Jews really aren't so bad. It also assumes that authentic critiques of Judaism are any more valuable to anti-Semites than the stuff they make up, like the Jewish blood libel and the Elders of Zion. But worse, crying anti-Semitism prioritizes the prejudices of idiots over the value of honest dialogue between intelligent Jews. And effectively, it doesn't really matter. Anti-Semites are some of the most active and savviest users of the Internet. Don't you think, Rabbi Lamm, that they can find all the anti-Jewish material they need (whether from Jews or non-Jews) on the World Wide Web?

To blame Noah Feldman for the fact that non-Jews are asking Orthodox Jews critical questions about their faith is a cheap shot. And, due to their substantial Jewish education, aren't Orthodox Jews the best-equipped to respond to these questions in an intelligent and informed way? Indeed, one of the premises of Modern Orthodoxy is that one can be Orthodox and involved in the secular world; inevitably, this means responding to non-Jews' ignorance about the faith. Feldman's essay didn't start this phenomenon any more than Michael Lerner gave birth to anti-Semitism.

Anti-Semites hate Jews, regardless of the facts. Non-Jews who encounter Modern Orthodox Jews know little about Judaism, and will continue to do so. Rabbi Lamm should rethink who we should spend more time educating.

The Link Sink

Catching up on some notable articles from the last few weeks:

• Adam Wills, a fine writer at the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles, has written a singles piece unlike anything you've seen before in a Jewish paper. He's been giving his brother dating advice since his divorce, the only difference is that while Adam is a devoted Jew, his brother converted to Catholicism--but is slowly crawling his way back to Judaism.
• I'm interviewed as part of a story on a Jewish dating service in The (Charleston, S.C.) Post and Courier. For a piece written by a (presumably) non-Jewish reporter on an issue that I doubt he had much prior knowledge of, it's quite well-done, sensitively handling those who promote Jewish in-dating and those who are friendly to interfaith couples.
• The Forward recently reported on the push by a small group of activists to take circumcision out of the bris ritual. The article itself is interesting enough, but check out the comments--in print form, there are more than 60 pages worth of comments.
• Rabbi Benjamin Blech, author of The Complete Idiot's Guide to Understanding Judaism, has added his two shekels on the great Noah Feldman debate.


• The United Jewish Communities conducted a National Jewish Population Survey in 1990 and 2000-01. As useful as the data from those surveys are, the experience has been, to put it kindly, troubled. Following the 1990 survey, the UJC reported an inflated intermarriage figure--52%--for the Jewish community that they were then forced to go back and explain really was 43%. Then, following the 2000-01 survey, it came out that the UJC had irretrievably lost a whole mess of data and that the survey almost certainly undercounted the American Jewish population. Now, to add insult to inaccuracy, the UJC has trademarked the National Jewish Population Survey--despite the fact that the UJC has said it will not be conducting another one in 2010. So now if any other organization wanted to step up to the plate and do a legitimate national Jewish population survey--minus the UJC's bungles, hopefully--they would have to call it something else. And for all its faults, the NJPS has name recognition that no other Jewish demographic endeavor has. In a recent op-ed in The Forward, three of the country's most esteemed Jewish demographers, Leonard Saxe, Charles Kadushin and Benjamin Phillips, beseech the UJC to "Let Our Population Data Go."
• Tom Tugend, one of the revered elders of Jewish journalism (no offense, Tom), has written a nice little feature on Milos Forman, director of the forthcoming film Goya's Ghosts. The film stars Natalie Portman as a woman who is jailed during the Inquisition for being a "Judaizer" because she refuses pork at a public inn. Forman, who also directed One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and The People vs. Larry Flynt, is not Jewish, but his biological father was--and the Protestant parents who raised him were both murdered by the Nazis.


• The Rev. Susanna Stefanachi Macomb, a non-Jewish interfaith minister and author of Joining Hands and Hearts, gives NPR her input on how to make an interfaith wedding truly "interfaith."
  
• In the Baltimore Jewish Times, a Catholic married to a Jewish man gives her take on the controversial revival of the Latin Mass, which may include a call for the conversion of the Jews in its Good Friday edition. In a country where most Catholics are lapsed Catholics, it's both insightful--and a tad uncomfortable--to read the perspective of a real believer.