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.

April Aggravation? The Spring Situation?

Sue Fishkoff calls it "April aggravation." We call it the "spring situation." Whatever you call it, there's something to it. It's the annual conflict between Easter and Passover in interfaith families, and the JTA's Fishkoff has written a story about our survey of interfaith families juggling the two holidays.

The survey specifically looked at interfaith families raising their children exclusively in Judaism, and we found results both familiar and surprising. Generally, they negotiated the holidays in the same way they negotiated the December holidays: they celebrated more Jewish rituals, kept the holidays separate and saw the Jewish holiday as more religious than the Christian one. But once we started slicing up the population, we found some interesting results. There was no difference in Passover behaviors between families where the woman is Jewish vs. families where the woman isn't Jewish, but there were significant differences in the Easter behaviors, especially "secular" rituals like decorating Easter eggs and participating in an Easter egg hunt. There were also significant differences between Jewish and Christian respondents on their level of comfort with, and anticipation of, Easter.

"Jewish parent + Christian parent = Jewish kids"

Amy Klein has a terrific article in the current edition of the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles that features InterfaithFamily.com and some of our writers. The title, "Jewish parent + Christian parent = Jewish kids," expresses our organization's mission better than we've been able to do ourselves! Along with Julie Wiener's (New York) Jewish Week article we mentioned in our last entry, yesterday was a big press celebration of InterfaithFamily.com's fifth anniversary and 200th Web Magazine issue.

Our Big Fat Anniversary

On Tuesday of next week, we're publishing the 200th issue of our Web Magazine. It also happens to coincide almost exactly with our fifth anniversary as an independent non-profit. For a history of the organization--and an explanation of the differences between the anniversaries--here's the article we're going to run next week on our history and accomplishments.

The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles published this brief today about the 200th issue, and Julie Wiener at The Jewish Week plans on running a story about the milestone next week.

I've only been here for a small part of InterfaithFamily.com's history, but even in that time I've seen us grow and expand our influence and impact. Here's a little recap/preview of some new features we've recently added or are going to add soon:

Chabad on Intermarriage, etc.

Chabad has a story on its website arguing that despite the recent studies showing the American Jewish population has grown, Steven Cohen's recent study on intermarriage demonstrates that Jews should do everything they can to prevent intermarriage.

While many people in the organized Jewish community are suspicious of Chabad, I am quite sympathetic to their approach, if not their aims. Decades before federations and synagogues got wise to the power of outreach, they were actively seeking out and welcoming unaffiliated Jews. But there has always been a tension between their methods and their goals: on the one hand, they'll welcome anyone into their Chabad centers, including secular Jews, intermarried Jews and children of intermarriage; on the other hand, they are firmly against intermarriage and abide by the strictest definition of Jewish identity, so that children of Jewish fathers and non-Jewish mothers are not considered Jewish. I wouldn't argue that a deeply religious movement with a powerful reverence for the Torah should change its stripes, but I just wonder how much stronger a Jewish community we could have if there were a national movement that combined Chabad's zeal for outreach with the Reform movement's tolerance and open-mindedness?

In other news, our letter to the editor regarding their story on Conservative day schools liberalizing their admission policies toward the children of non-Jewish mothers was printed in The Jewish Chronicle (Pittsburgh) as well as the (New Jersey) Jewish Standard.

And there's a nice piece in the j. about a new opera based on the Book of Ruth written by Steve Richards, a retired cantor, and performed last summer by the Israel Philharmonic:

The Book of Ruth, like Richard’s opera, is a plea for welcoming the convert into the Jewish fold.

“The book was a protest against the edict against intermarriage,” says Richards. “It was written after the Babylonian exile, when the Persians permitted the Jews to go back to Israel. A lot of intermarriage had gone on, because the Jews were in Babylon 75 years, so some of the prophets and priests put out these edicts. This book was written to show not only that intermarriage was a good thing, but that Ruth was the great-grandmother of King David.”

The December Holidays Survey in the News

For the first time in the three-year history of doing our December holidays survey, JTA has done an entire story about the survey! Frankly, I can't say enough about what a terrific piece of reporting Sue Fishkoff did. It presents the survey results in a balanced, nuanced, contextual light, and is clear about the survey's limits and its strengths. Fishkoff was also careful to make clear that we don't encourage interfaith families to have Christmas trees, but we do say that the simple existence of a Christmas tree in a house does not prevent children from being raised Jewish.

In addition to Julie Wiener's discussion of the survey in her column last week, there have been stories on the survey in the Tulsa World and the Portland Press-Herald and the Detroit Free Press article was reprinted in the News-Democrat (Belleville, Ill.), the Reading Eagle (Penn.), Providence Journal, the Florida Ledger (Lakeland), the Chattanooga Times Free Press (Tenn.), the Centre Daily Times (Pa.), the Bradenton Herald (Fla.) and the Monterey County Herald. And there may be more press coming in Philadelphia and Atlanta.

In addition, President and Publisher Ed Case was recently interviewed for "Your Morning" on CN8, the Comcast Network, and "Busted Halo with Father Dave Dwyer" on Sirius Radio. We also got a nice shout-out from Miss Conduct in her column in the Boston Sunday Globe Magazine. (She called InterfaithFamily.com a "terrific site"--thanks, Miss C.!)

Responding to the Critics

As we had hoped, the authors of the 2005 Greater Boston Jewish Community Study responded to the op-ed by Steven Cohen, Jack Ukeles and Ron Miller questioning the findings of the Boston study. Their letter in today's Forward is short and sweet but makes an essential point: unlike the demographic studies of Ukeles and Miller, which ask about children's "identification," the Boston study asked only about children's religion--which is actually "a more stringent criterion for Jewish identification."

In the same issue, Bethamie Horowitz, research director for the Mandel Foundation, a Jewish foundation that trains leaders in the non-profit world, has an interesting piece charting the evolution of the sociology of intermarriage from the 1940s to today. Titled "Are We More Than Just a Category?", the piece not only looks at why intermarriage has increased (a familiar subject) but why intermarrieds today are open to making Jewish choices (a less familiar subject). Here's her explanation--and conclusion--on the second issue:

The second major change that makes intermarriage today very different is that the credit rating of Jews as a group in American society has radically improved in comparison to its valuation half a century ago. Many people with previously hidden or partial Jewish backgrounds are now open to, and even seek out, their Jewishness. They have become truly interested in Judaism, indicating that there is no longer a unidirectional pull away from Jewish life.

In this context, intermarriage does not in and of itself rule out a serious Jewish life; that depends on social climate as well as the individual’s and family’s commitments. It’s time to realize that intermarriage isn’t the major threat. Rather, it is indifference — viewing one’s heritage as simply a fact of one’s background, without a sense of its power or potential as a guiding force — that is the more fundamental problem. The irony of our hyper-focus on intermarriage is that it has kept us focused on the boundaries, and distracted us from the more important issues of meaning.

In other news, Julie Wiener is at it again, writing another terrific column, this one on balancing Christmas and Hanukkah, with a nice shout-out to our recent December Holidays Survey.

And another friend of IFF, Laurel Snyder, who compiled and edited Half/Life: Jewish-ish Tales from Interfaith Homes, has started another blog called faithhacker, on Jewcy.com. For those keeping score at home, that's her third website, alongside jewishyirishy.com (also a blog) and Killing the Buddha (a web mag).

Also, the Detroit Free Press article on interfaith families that quotes us was picked up by the Ft. Wayne News-Sentinel.

Assuming there isn't more news on the Boston study front, tomorrow I'm going to do a round-up of stories on the December dilemma from the secular press. (And it won't be the last one, I assure you...)

Israel, Philadelphia, Detroit

The Nativity Story, about the events leading up to Jesus' birth, is coming out on Friday. We're doing something new with this movie and hopefully others with religious content. We are sending an interfaith couple to see the movie to record their impressions of the movie, in the hope of illuminating how pop culture can mean different things to people of different religious and cultural backgrounds. Look for the review in our web magazine next week.

Our Op-Ed in the Forward

An editorial co-authored by our president and publisher, Ed Case, will be in tomorrow's issue of the Forward and is now available online.

Co-authored by Kathy Kahn, director of the Union for Reform Judaism's Department of Outreach and Synagogue Community, "Engaging the Intermarried" offers a blueprint to other communities who are looking to engage intermarried families and encourage them to raise their children Jewish. It's not noted in the editorial, but the previous demographic study of Boston's Jewish community, done in 1995, showed that 33 percent of the area's interfaith households were raising their children Jewish; only 10 years later, that percentage had nearly doubled, to 60 percent.

Why? Because more so than any other community, with the possible exception of San Francisco, Boston has made outreach to interfaith families a priority, both in terms of attitude and financial support. As the editorial says:

The community has put its money where its mouth is. [Combined Jewish Philanthropies, Boston's federation] has a dedicated line item in its budget expressly for “Services to the Intermarried.” CJP’s funding for this area — just over $300,000 for the current year — is the highest in the country, yet it represents just 1% of CJP’s total annual allocations. Nationally, even as the Jewish community federations spend $800 million a year and Jewish family foundations spend $2.5 billion a year; the amount spent on programs of outreach to interfaith families is below $3 million — only one-tenth of 1%. By spending just 1% of its allocations — a relatively small investment by any measure — CJP has achieved dramatic results.

As the op-ed explains, it's also about an overarching approach that focuses on good programming (Boston has a rich variety), working through the religious movements (the CJP directly funds the Reform and Conservative movements), use of welcoming language (which is incorporated into invitations for every CJP event), marketing (especially online) and evaluation.

Both the Forward and the New York Jewish Week did stories about the news. The Forward article, by Nathaniel Popper, followed a similar tenor as the JTA article, connecting the results to Boston's outreach efforts, and makes the important point: "The findings from Boston could fuel and shift the long-standing national debates over Jewish demographic trends, a seemingly obscure but perennially divisive topic in Jewish philanthropic and religious circles."

The New York Jewish Week article, however, focuses on critiques from opponents of outreach:

But sociologist Steven Cohen said his understanding of the study leads him to conclude that its results were not so unusual.

“The real issue is how you define a Jewish child,” he said. “There are narrow definitions and broad definitions; both are valid. The Boston study chose to use a broad definition, thereby including children who have no religion and … whose families undertake Jewish behavior. … The National Jewish Population Survey got pretty much the same numbers [when using the same definition].”

[Study author Leonard] Saxe disputed that, saying the study found that 30 percent of the children were raised with no religion but that about 60 percent were being raised as Jews.

“When we asked [intermarried parents] what they were doing to raise their kids as Jews, we found that just as many were getting a Hebrew school education as the inmarried families,” Saxe said.

But Steven Bayme, national director of the Contemporary Jewish Life Department at the American Jewish Committee, said he would like to know the seriousness of the children of intermarried couples regarding their “Jewish connection” and whether that connection is “sustainable and will last them in terms of molding a Jewish identity.”

“I’m concerned that the success of outreach activities to ensure Jewish grandchildren can only be measured over time,” he said. “We have to see what happens to them as adults.”

If those complaints aren't weak enough, in the Forward article, Cohen, pointing to the study's finding that Jewish women in intermarriages raise their children Jewish much more often than their male counterparts, says: "For those who believe that welcoming has made the difference, they have to answer why Jewish women feel much more welcomed than Jewish men ... If there is a difference, it’s probably attributable to Boston’s superb efforts in Jewish culture." For a sociologist, he should know better: women almost always take the lead role in child-rearing, so of course they're going to more often dictate their child's religious upbringing. But the fact that they make a Jewish choice isn't a given; that choice can be encouraged by the local Jewish community through outreach programs.

Meanwhile, the authors of the Boston study, Leonard Saxe, Charles Kadushin and Benjamin Phillips, wrote an op-ed for the Forward that discusses the 60 percent news, but from a slightly different angle. They focus more on the "the broad range of Jewish insitutions that serve religious, cultural and educational needs."

JTA on the News Out of Boston

On late Friday, JTA, the Jewish newswire, did its story on the extraordinary news out of Boston: 60% of intermarried families there are raising their children Jewish.

Unlike the Boston Globe story, the JTA story, by Sue Fishkoff, more explicitly makes the connection between outreach and intermarried families raising their children Jewish, starting with the title "Investment in outreach is paying dividends in Boston, study suggests":

“CJP is the only federation that has made a serious commitment for over 10 years to fund [outreach to interfaith families],” said Paula Brody, outreach director of the Northeast Council of the Union for Reform Judaism, whose organization receives $140,000 a year from the Combined Jewish Philanthropies for a wide variety of adult-education seminars and workshops aimed at interfaith couples and individuals considering conversion. “We offered these programs before the CJP funding, but it has enabled us to expand our offerings and advertise them in the secular press, so we can reach the unaffiliated.”

Our own Ed Case is quoted in the article, also arguing the case for the connection between outreach and interfaith families making Jewish choices.

The JTA story goes into detail how San Francisco, another city with a well-funded, well-organized collection of outreach programs, has also had higher-than-average rates of intermarried families raising their children Jewish:

San Francisco’s Jewish federation experienced similar results, according to planning director Karen Bluestone. That federation was one of the first in the nation to fund interfaith programming, she notes, following a 1986 Jewish communal study that revealed large numbers of intermarried families.

In the 20 years since, the Jewish population has more than doubled in the San Francisco Bay Area and intermarriage has increased, but increasing numbers of those interfaith households are identifying with the Jewish community.

A 2004 communal study showed that 40 percent of the children in interfaith households are receiving formal Jewish education, and 40 percent of the adults indicated that their interest in Judaism has increased in the past five years. The numbers are about the same for Jews and non-Jews, she said.

While Bluestone admits that “there’s no causality in the data,” she said she sees a correlation between increased outreach and increased Jewish identification.

“Due to the investments we’ve made since 1986 in outreach and training to be more welcoming to interfaith families, we’ve seen a rise in the number of interfaith families identifying as Jews and raising their children Jewishly,” Bluestone said.

Brody also makes the important point how there is beginning to be a change in mindset. In the past, the Jewish community viewed those who intermarried as marrying out of the community; but, as Brody says of interfaith families making Jewish choices, "What’s remarkable is that these families see themselves not as where the Jewish partner has married out, but where the Christian partner has married in."

60% of Interfaith Families in Boston are Raising Children Jewish

There is extraordinary news this morning: according to a demographic study of Boston's Jewish community released today, 60 percent of intermarried households are raising their children Jewish.

Michaal Paulson of the Boston Globe did a front-page story on this remarkable development this morning, and the news is clearly striking a chord. As of 9:20 a.m. EST, "Jewish population in region rises" was the most e-mailed story on Boston.com--and rising.

The news is extraordinary for two reasons:
1) As our publisher and president, Ed Case, says in the article, "Boston has the most extensive and most well-funded and most well-organized outreach to interfaith families in the country." This development shows that for a relatively small investment--only 1 percent of Boston's Combined Jewish Philanthropies' annual allocations--outreach can produce tangible, measurable, powerful results.

2) For years leading voices in the Jewish community have been referring to intermarriage as a "threat." This shows it can be an opportunity, an opportunity to expand and enrich the Jewish community. Why is that? Because 50 intermarried Jews create 50 households, while 50 inmarried Jews form 25 households. If only 25 of the 50 intermarried households--50 percent, that is--raise their children Jewish, they are raising the same number of children as the 25 Jewish households. If more than 50 percent of intermarried households raise their children Jewish--as they are doing in Boston--they contribute to a net increase in the Jewish population, which is what Boston has seen in the last 10 years.

We will keep you regularly updated on press about this extraordinary development.

The Promise

Another month, another casually great column from Julie Wiener at The Jewish Week.

In this month's column on intermarried life, Wiener talks about "The Promise," that vague commitment to raise the kids Jewish that non-Jewish partners often make to their Jewish spouses-to-be. (I had a conversation with my fiance on this very issue two weeks ago.)

Ah, the ill-defined Promise. I remember clearly the day almost 13 years ago that I extracted it, saying, “Before things get serious, I need you to promise that if we ever have kids together we’ll raise them as Jews.”

...Joe promised, saying he thought it was good for kids to have a religious upbringing, and he had no special loyalty to Catholicism. But just what did Joe commit to with The Promise? Does he have to cheerfully accompany the kids and me to services whenever I request it, or is it OK if he just refrains from hanging crucifixes in the house? (Not that this was his decorating preference anyway.)

Making Joe’s vague mandate even vaguer is the fact that I haven’t settled on exactly how Jewish I myself want to be. Joe loves to point out that I’m constantly changing the rules, and his theory is that while I sometimes complain about the fact that he isn’t Jewish, I actually enjoy being our family’s Jewish Boss. One year, I decided to make our apartment chametz-free for Passover, forcing Joe to go to a diner all week for his morning oatmeal. Another year, I ate bread all week.

But even if I had my whole Jewish identity figured out, it would not be so easy determining Joe’s role. How exactly does one go about being the family gentile?

Julie brings up a great point about "The Promise," which is that it's rarely well-defined. For many Jews dating non-Jews, they're not entirely sure what level of Jewish commitment they want, and that's especially so during the years that most future spouses meet (the 20s and early 30s). So asking a partner to raise theoretical kids Jewishly at some point in the future could mean anything from sending the kids to Jewish day school and not cutting their payis until their third birthday to lighting the menorah in the kitchen with a Christmas tree in the living room. If the Jewish partner doesn't even know what raising the kids as Jews will mean, how is the non-Jewish partner supposed to know? Perhaps that's why Wiener calls them the "Righteous Gentile Spouses" and Rabbi Eric Yoffie, head of the Reform movement, calls them "heroes."

The Link Sink

A little catch-up on some relevant stories from the last two weeks or so:

The Power of Letters

One of the small but important ways IFF advocates for making the Jewish community more welcoming is by writing letters to the editor of papers that run stories on intermarriage. Sometimes we are able to congratulate newspapers and writers for shedding light on important issues and talking about them in a fair, sensitive manner. Other times we're forced to set the record straight.

Our letter to the editor of the Washington Jewish Week in response to their biased review of Jim Keen's Inside Intermarriage that we told you about a few weeks ago was recently published.

We also just wrote a letter to the Boston Jewish Advocate regarding its article on the Lappin Foundation and its funding of trips to Israel for Jewish educators and teens. The Lappin Foundation, founded by Robert Lappin, funds several wonderful programs for interfaith families, mostly in Boston's northern suburbs. But when discussing the reasons for offering these programs, Lappin and his spokespeople consistently denigrate intermarriage, which we think is counter-productive. The article says:

[Lappin Foundation spokeswoman Amy] Powell said that the foundation is serious about funding free trips to Israel because research has shown that the three things that prevent intermarriage and assimilation are Jewish day school, Jewish summer camp and a peer trip to Israel.

In response, we sent this letter to the editor of the Jewish Advocate:

Robert Lappin does wonderful work through his Lappin Foundation (“Foundation funds trips for teachers,” October 4). Sending teenagers and educators on free trips to Israel can only be commended. But he and his foundation make a terrible mistake in the way they consistently demean intermarriage. The article reports Amy Powell, a foundation spokesperson, as equating intermarriage and assimilation. Mr. Lappin and his staff know well that many intermarried families are actively engaging in Jewish life; indeed, they sponsor excellent programs that support their doing so. The article also reports Ms. Powell as promoting the teen trips because they supposedly prevent intermarriage. Teen Israel trips doubtless are a strong factor motivating trip graduates to stay Jewishly involved--but the reality is that many of them will nevertheless intermarry. It would be so easy to promote these programs because they lead to positive Jewish engagement. I cannot understand why Mr. Lappin insists on speaking about intermarriage in a negative way that can only serve to alienate so many of the people that his otherwise positive programs serve.

Edmund Case
President & Publisher, InterfaithFamily.com
Newton, MA

In other news, a new Statistics Canada report came out on Tuesday that showed intermarriage in the general Canadian population is on the rise. The report says 19 percent of all partners in 2001 were intermarried with someone of another religion, compared to 15 percent in 1981. That's a tad lower than the overall American rate--22 percent--and significantly lower than the Jewish intermarriage rate--31 percent or 27 percent, depending on your source.

The Vancouver Sun did a piece on the report that prominently features a Jewish/non-Jewish intermarried couple who are raising their children as Jews. We were quoted in the online version of the article.

Interdating

Susan Jacobs has an article on interdating in today's issue of the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle. She treats the issue sensitively, although the general impression left by the article, that it is possible for parents to effectively discourage their children from interdating (and intermarrying), is not realistic, in my view.

I've explained my own views on this subject in How to Talk to Your Kids about Interfaith Dating: For Those Married to Jews or in Interfaith Marriages.

Because the Pittsburgh article did not express my views fully, I wrote the following letter to the editor:

Susan Jacobs treated the issue of parents talking to their children about interdating with great sensitivity ("Parents face challenges in urging kids to date Jewish," September 27). I would like to clarify several points on which she quotes me.

InterfaithFamily.com was formed to encourage interfaith couples to raise their children as Jews. We are a resource for couples who have already made that decision, and we also try to reach and attract those who are "on the fence," or would otherwise "do both" or give their children no religion.

The way that parents talk about interdating is very important. Contratry to the implication in the article, I would never say to a young adult, "you will have a greater chance of finding meaning and fulfillment if you marry Jewish." I recommend that parents say the following to their children: "We find participating in Jewish life to be a source of meaning and fulfillment in our lives. We hope you will want to have a Jewish life yourself for that reason. You will have a much greater chance of having a Jewish life if you marry someone who is Jewish. Just as a matter of statistics, only a third of interfaith couples raise their children as Jews."

More important, parents can encourage their children to date other Jews without demeaning intermarriage. It is unnecessary, and counter-productive, for parents to say "you should only date Jews, because you should only marry a Jew, because intermarriage is wrong and bad." Counter-productive, because the reality is that half of the children are likely to intermarry despite what their parents say, and if that half absorbs a message from the Jewish community that their marriage is wrong and bad, they are unlikely to want to enage in Jewish life.

In my opinion, the critically important goal, given the reality of intermarriage, is to maximize the number of interfaith couples who raise their children as Jews. I try to assess any issue -- how to talk about interdating, conversion, rabbinic officiation -- by that standard. Ms. Jacobs quotes me as saying that it's possible but not easy to raise Jewish children in an interfaith household. It's much more than just possible -- it happens very successfully, in many, many instances, and the Jewish community needs to do what it can to have it occur more often.

Conversion again

As the Jewish New Year starts, the issue of promoting conversion is prominent once again. As we noted in last Friday's post, Rachel Zoll, an excellent AP religion writer, wrote a problematic article about Jews encouraging conversion.

I've spent a lot of time over the last two days writing letters to the editor of every newspaper that I think published Rachel's article. It's an eclectic list, ranging from major papers in major media markets like the Washington Times, the Miami Herald, the New York Post, and the Chicago Sun-Times, to much smaller cities, like Jackson Hole WY, Lincoln NE, Daytona Beach, El Paso, Portsmouth NH, and many in between.

Why bother? Because I'm very concerned about the reactions interfaith couples will have to the story.

Late last year, when the secular press publicized new efforts by the Reform and Conservative movements to encourage conversion, we heard about several couples that were very upset to think they would be pressured to convert. In one instance, the non-Jewish spouse was approached at work by her non-Jewish boss, who said to her, "I hear the the synagogues want people like you to convert." The instances we heard about involved couples that had thoughtfully and carefully worked out that they would raise their future children as Jews. Anticipating pressure to convert was a setback to their plans. What are they going to think when they see another article -- right before Rosh Hashanah, to boot -- with a title like "Jews embrace conversion"?

So my letters to the editor are part of InterfaithFamily.com's advocacy efforts to move the Jewish community to be more welcoming to interfaith families. I know that letters to the editor aren't nearly as effective as the original articles, but they are the least we can do to try to get a message to those interfaith couples we're concerned about that there are significant parts of the Jewish community that are much more interested in welcoming them as they are, and much less interested in pushing conversion.

I don't know yet whether the letters have been published, except this one, which appeared in the Washington Times:

Rachel Zoll’s article (“Jews encourage conversion,” September 23) overstates Jewish leaders’ advocacy for conversion. At the same time that Rabbi Eric Yoffie, head of the Reform movement, said that Reform synagogues should not shy away for inviting non-Jewish spouses to convert, he launched an initiative to express gratitude for non-Jewish parents who raise their children as Jews, calling them “heroes of Jewish life.”

Encouraging more interfaith couples to raise their children as Jews is critically important to ensuring Jewish continuity. Rabbi Yoffie’s balanced approach recognizes that that that will happen far more often if the non-Jewish partner is genuinely welcomed and accepted, than if conversion is promoted too aggressively.

Zoll cites a “major” new study by the American Jewish Committee finding that “advocating for conversion works.” But that study, which included interviews of only 37 converts, cited research that focused on young interfaith couples – the most important demographic – and found that they "would be 'turned off to Judaism' if they were approached about conversion by clergy or even family friends."

Conversion to Judaism is a wonderful personal choice. But the Jewish community will shoot itself in the foot if it takes anything other than an unpressured approach toward conversion.

I need to say one other thing about conversion. A few months ago I was at a confernence and ran into an excellent reporter for the New York Jewish Week. She greeted me with, "Why are you so against conversion?" She was referring to our most recent essay on the subject, Enough is Enough. I asked her, "didn't you see in that article where we said that conversion was a wonderful personal choice?" She said "yes, but ... why are you so against conversion?"

The issue of how the Jewish community should approach conversion of non-Jewish spouses and partners is a very nuanced one. Unfortunately it is very hard to convey a nuanced message in sound bites. We have always, consistently said, and say again: we are not against conversion. Conversion is a wonderful personal choice. We are delighted is any of the resources provided by InterfaithFamily.com help anyone along the path to conversion. But our number 1 goal is to maximize the number of children who are raised as Jews in interfaith families. We are convinced that that will happen more if interfaith couples and families are welcomed as they are, than if conversion is promoted too aggressively.

Of Shofars, Slingshots and Secrets

There are a couple of great links today: