Reaction to Rob Eshman's Column

Three weeks ago, Rob Eshman, editor-in-chief of The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles, wrote a provocative editorial arguing that the Jewish community should encourage single women in their 30s and 40s to interdate--better to intermarry and be happy than be Jewishly pure and miserable.

Predictably, it inspired a lot of response. Unpredictably, an equivalent number of the letters printed in the Jewish Journal supported his proposal as opposed it. One of the endorsements came from us:

I would like to applaud Rob Eshman for showing the courage to propose a controversial and novel solution to the problems faced by single Jewish women in their late 30s and 40s. The established Jewish community asks them to sacrifice their happiness and their last childbearing years at the altar of endogamy, as if their loneliness is worth the price of Jewish purity.

If the Jewish community were to value these women's needs more than its own self-imposed boundaries, we would very likely see an increase in the number of Jewish children in Los Angeles.

It's all the more remarkable, too, that you note the prevalence of this phenomenon in a city that is home to more than half a million Jews. What must these women's prospects be like in smaller communities?

One last point: The authors of the 1997 Jewish population survey of greater Los Angeles subtly foretold the future plight of these "Hindu widows." Ten years ago, they found that there were 3 percent more women than men in the 30-49 age group. These women, who are now in their 40s and 50s, are suffering from a demographic crunch that has been a long time in the making.

Micah Sachs

Online Managing Editor

InterfaithFamily.com

There was also a few letters from older men lamenting that they can't find any available Jewish women. Some may take those letters as an indication that either a) both older Jewish men and older Jewish women are setting their standards too high, b) someone just needs to connect these two groups of singles together and they'll all pair off or c) both groups are just looking for an excuse to interdate. I would argue for d) none of the above. Just because there are a handful of available Jewish singles of the opposite sex doesn't mean that you would want to be in a relationship with any of them. It's not as if you filled a room with 100 single Jewish men and 100 single Jewish women that all of them could or would find a potential partner (if that were the case, Jewish singles events wouldn't have the rather tattered reputation they have).

What Eshman was arguing above all else was putting individuals' needs for happiness above communal "needs" for continuity; the "Hindu widows" he addresses have tried dating Jewish men, but have yet to find a "bashert." Open up the pool of possible basherts by condoning their interfaith relationships, and these women may find the happiness that they--and everyone, Jewish or not--deserves.

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.

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.

The Appeal of the Other

Everyone who's dated--that is to say, everyone--knows that figuring out why you are attracted to someone is often the greatest mystery in your life. Are you interested because the other person is interested? Is it physical attraction? Does the person laugh at your jokes? Is there a chemistry that can't be explained?

One factor that is particularly difficult to untangle is the cultural factor. Are you attracted to someone because they come from a similar background--or because they come from a different one? In Elizabeth Rosner's "Everything I Know About Being Bad I Learned in Hebrew School," an excerpt from Bad Girls: 26 Writers Behave published in The Forward, a girl who grew up with a stringent Orthodox upbringing rebels against Judaism and dates every non-Jewish boy she can find:

When boys began showing up with increasing frequency on my radar screen, I realized keeping secrets could become a new form of resistance. My father forbade me from dating non-Jews, and naturally they were all I wanted. I sneaked out of the house to meet boys named Charlie and Matthew and Chris, kissed their Catholic lips and tried my first tastes of beer. I wanted to taste everything. I wanted to be free.

Her motivations for dating non-Jewish come from a complex mix of adolescent rebellion, proto-feminism in the face of non-egalitarian religious schooling and the conflicted way her parents practiced Judaism: while her father was observant in every way, her mother ate shrimp cocktails at restaurants and didn't go to synagogue. The irony is, once Rosner moved to the Phillipines to escape her parents, she found herself holding onto her Jewish identity tightly.

In an article in Tango magazine, Sarika Dani, an Indian-American woman, discusses her attraction to non-Indian men:

Growing up, I always assumed that I was missing the gene that made Indians of the opposite sex appealing to me. They seemed immature, unexciting and too close to home to be attractive. It was hard to understand how I could be connected to my culture, but disconnected from the guys who populated it. I now know that when it comes to dating, the desire for the novel and exotic -- for me, anyone who wasn't Indian -- can compete with the need for familiarity. But in the end, which impulse should win out?

But, like Rosner, as Dani got older, the appeal of the exotic wore off. She is now dating an Indian-American man:

But this time, instead of my usual aversion to familiarity, I found something sexy about our sameness. Right away we had an unspoken trust and respect -- he didn't feel like a stranger for very long. Our common ground extended to our family values, our views on education and money and our professional goals. And so many of my family's habits no longer required explanation -- like my mom's practice of carrying Taco Bell sauce in her purse to spice up soups on the go, or my dad's lack of interest in football.

In the San Diego Jewish Journal, Tinamarie Bernard rages against "ShiksAppeal," that is, when Jewish men, or women, purposefully only date non-Jewish partners. Although in Bernard's case, the stereotypes that she attributes to Jewish men who won't date non-Jewish women are more than matched by the stereotypes she uses to argue that Jewish men should date Jewish women.

Sometimes the attraction to the other can be more than curiosity and excitement over the power of mystery, it can manifest in a desire to actually become what the other person is. In the case of a previous boyfriend of Paula Tavrow, he wanted to become Jewish, like her. What she couldn't figure out was whether he was interested in her "as a woman, or as a Jew?"

Finally, Beliefnet has an amusing story about how Jewish moms are pushing JDate on their children, and sometimes getting the hoped-for result: a Jewish marriage.

Love in the Time of War

Joshua Gross, a public affairs consultant in Washington, D.C., wrote a poignant story in last week's Forward about how his relationship with a Lebanese woman was threatened by last summer's war between Israel and Lebanon.

As is the case with many Arab-Jewish or Muslim-Jewish relationships, politics was a topic typically avoided in their relationship:

Together, Helen and I had tried to create a tidy little universe with a population of two. In this universe, it didn’t matter that I was a Jew and Helen was an Arab. We were beyond the politics.

As the war progressed, there was incredible strain on their relationship--although Joshua never says that the two of them discussed the war in-depth. He seemed to subscribe to a strategy of avoidance.

I was afraid that if we talked, we would discover that we just could not be together. I was afraid of discovering that love had failed to elevate us to a place beyond politics. “Please,” I begged, “give me some time.”

Interestingly, their relationship became a source of inspiration for some of their friends, who framed their relationship as a "microcosm of the peace process itself." "You can't give up! You owe it to humanity to make it work!" said one friend.

Joshua has a healthy skepticism toward such attitudes, although the piece suggests he also saw the allure of such idealism. I won't reveal the ending, but I bet you will be touched--and maybe a bit frustrated--by his tale.

The S-Word: A Response to More Than a Succubus

A response to More Than a Succubus: Confessions of a Shiksa, published in our Web Magazine on Feb. 13, by Ellen Jaffe-Gill:

I had taken a stand on the Yiddish word shiksa long before the afternoon I visited my husband’s Hebrew class. Having learned, while researching a book on intermarriage, that it (and its male form, shaygetz, and the plural shkotzim) derived from a Hebrew word meaning “abomination,” I was already gently correcting people who used it, asking them questions like “An abomination — is that really how you think of your daughter-in-law?”

Then one day I celebrated the meeting of a major deadline with a day off, a nice lunch, and a little text study at the University of Judaism in Los Angeles, where my husband had been enriching his life studying classical Hebrew on Wednesday afternoons. The class was looking at I Kings, chapter 11, in which Solomon wrong-headedly builds altars to pagan gods for his foreign wives.

Most Hebrew vocabulary is organized into families of three-letter roots, and I recognized the Hebrew root shin-kof-tzadi spelling the word shikutz before I looked at the translation.

“Hey, there’s the root for shiksa,” I said. “Is ‘abomination’ an accurate translation of shikutz?” I asked the teacher, a native Israeli.

“Yes,” she said. “Literally, it means a slimy, crawly thing.” In modern Hebrew, I found out later, depending on the dictionary you look in, shin-kof-tzadi is still the root for words whose meanings range from “loathe, abominate” to “unclean insects.”

That’s when a program of gentle reminders became a crusade. I began e-mailing copy editors whenever I saw the s-word used outside of direct quotation. My response to anyone who tells me, “Oh, I don’t mean it in a nasty way,” is “Would it be okay for her to call you a kike if she didn’t mean it in a nasty way?”

Yiddish and Hebrew are wonderful languages, full of metaphor and color, but they aren’t particularly polite. The Hebrew word for “female,” after all, is the same as the word for “hole,” and the literal meaning of the Yiddish word “bupkes,” generally used as a synonym for “nothing,” is actually “goat dung.”

Accordingly, sometimes we Americans need to depend on the richness of English to label and describe without insult, unwitting or not. I will prevail on anyone who will listen to consider the s-words to be as inappropriate as any other ethnic or racial pejorative, especially when they’re referring to people who are, after all, members of their families.

Around our house, we don’t consider that political correctness. We believe that not referring to people with pejorative labels comes under the heading of something our parents taught us: good manners.

Cantor Ellen Jaffe-Gill is author of Embracing the Stranger: Intermarriage and the Future of the American Jewish Community (BasicBooks) and editor of The Jewish Woman’s Book of Wisdom (Citadel Press).

"Keeping the Faith"

Yesterday's Boston Sunday Globe magazine "Coupling" column by Alison Lobron provides an illuminating perspective on how young adult Jews think about interdating and intermarriage.

Alison describes herself as a "not-very-active Jew" who had no Bat Mitzvah, no Hebrew lessons, and no family tradition of Jewish holidays. After a two-year relationship with a "not-very-active Protestant" on which religion had little impact broke up, friends suggested Alison enter Boston's lively Jewish social scene.

She relates how the first time she went to services at a synagogue known as a young-adult mixing spot, she felt that she "barely counted as Jewish," "spent most of the evening searching the prayer book for a nonexistent English translation," felt lonely when two people assumed she was an out-of-town, non-Jewish guest of someone, and felt that she didn't have much in common with "people with whom I was supposed to share a culture."

Alison writes that in dating, people "must figure out how much we care about" ethnic, religious and family affiliations, and concludes that just as she wouldn't limit her friendship circle to Jews, she wouldn't limit her dating pool, either. However, "a funny thing happened during my adventures in Jewish dating... I did become attracted to aspects of Judaism itself, like the ritual of Friday night dinners with family as a peaceful door to the weekend... I do see [cultural identity] as a part of myself that will need to be reconciled and sorted out with any future Prince Charming. Still,... that prince can come from any number of tribes."

Those of us who are interested in encouraging Jewish choices among young adults who are interdating or likely to interdate can draw many lessons about effective programmatic responses from Alison's short account:
* Jewish cultural identity has a strong attraction even among Jews with little Jewish upbringing
* Jews--let alone non-Jews--feel unwelcomed when prayer books don't have English translations and when people make thoughtless comments about whether they are or aren't Jewish
* Shabbat ritual can be a very attractive aspect of Judaism

The organized Jewish community should capitalize on the opportunity presented by young adult Jews like Alison Lobron, who are not willing to restrict their dating to Jews and expect that their intended one can come from "any number of tribes," but see their Jewish identity as something that to reconcile and sort out with that partner.

The Link Sink

Some links for y'all:

The Pull of the Holocaust

This week's Sunday New York Times had a beautifully written piece in its Style section by a secular Jewish woman who is in love with an atheist non-Jewish Irishman. Called "When a Relationship Carries the Weight of History," it's about a very particular, very common kind of modern Jew who is unsure about the existence of God--and therefore uncomfortable with religious ritual--but is certain about the importance of the Holocaust. Lauren Fox, the author, says:

I was raised Jewish, but in some fundamental way, it didn’t take. I wanted it to. I tried. When I lived in Minneapolis during my 20’s, I attended High Holy Day services at practically every synagogue in the area, hoping to find one that would speak to my heart, but I always left feeling empty, more confused than before I had gone.

All the talk of God bothered me. I was not sure if I believed, but even in the most liberal of synagogues, even on the weirdest left-wing fringe of Judaism, where you met in a basement and sang songs about ending world hunger, it seemed as if you couldn’t get around God if you wanted to be Jewish. God is everywhere! So I tried to uncover a latent faith in a higher power, but all I have ever found, deep down, at my spiritual core, is a well-developed sense of guilt and a craving for Ho Hos.

I suppose this is, in some part, how I ended up with an irreverent Irish atheist for a boyfriend.

Granted, she's a tad ignorant; there's a whole movement of Judaism called Secular Humanism that proudly downplays the importance of God to the Jewish tradition.

Despite her ignorance and disavowal of the Jewish religion, there is one piece of Jewish identity that has a powerful hold over her: the Holocaust. As if history itself were tapping her on the back to remind her of her roots, right around the same time her relationship started, she discovered a box of letters. Dated from 1938 to 1941, they were letters that her great-grandmother in Germany sent her grandmother in America.

Her devotion to understanding the letters turns into a weekly pilgrimage to a university professor to translate the German into English. And this absorption into her history leads to a painful conclusion:

I would need to find a Jewish husband, raise a Jewish family, to defy genocide in this small but significant way.

This heartbreaking decision is so interesting because I think it speaks to a common affliction of many modern Jews who simultaneously feel distant from the Jewish religion and powerfully connected to their Jewish heritage.

But she soon comes to another conclusion as well:

My mother used to tell me, jokingly but also, I suspected, kind of seriously: “It’s as easy to fall in love with a rich man as a poor one.” But it’s not easy to fall in love at all. And now that I had, I didn’t want to give it up, even to the hungry mouth of History.

The statement "it's not easy to fall in love at all" spoke to me deeply on both a personal and professional level. It speaks to the raison d'etre for InterfaithFamily.com.

We're not promoting intermarriage, but we are saying that intermarriage is an inevitable result of being a minority in America. And sure, any interdating Jew could break up with their non-Jewish partner if they wanted, but soulmates don't come around every couple of dates--and they don't always come from the same religious tradition. If Jews who were dating non-Jews all broke up with their partners in a quest to find a Jewish match, we would have fewer Jews intermarried--but we would also have fewer married Jews. Once you find love, it's hard, and often foolish, to give it up.

The Link Sink

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

Interfaith Dating, Take Two (or is it 10...)

How's this for a coincidence: a writer named Susan Jacobs has written an article on "The allure of interfaith dating" for the Jewish Journal Boston North barely a week after a different writer, also named Susan Jacobs, wrote an article on interfaith dating for the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle. Like the first article, this piece on interfaith dating is good overall but flawed in spots.

The intro to the article very sensibly discusses why Jews date non-Jews:

In today's society, where Jews are no longer confined to ghettos and the ratio of non-Jews is far greater than Jews, inter-dating is inevitable.

But the Jacobs isn't happy to leave it at that. Instead, she posits the existence of something called "shiksappeal":

Although some Jews simply stumble into relationships with non-Jews, others make a conscious effort to connect with partners from another faith. What is the allure of dating a non-Jew? Is it the mystery of the unknown, or a way to rebel against one's parents or society?

That kind of statement would have been out-of-date in the '50s let alone the '00s. Even the most Jewishly involved people in today's world end up spending a significant amount of time around non-Jews. Very few of them end up dating non-Jews because they represent "the mystery of the unknown." If anything, there's no mystery at all to non-Jews because Jews see them so frequently.

The article goes on to include quotes from Jewish men and women who actively sought out non-Jews as partners, for a variety of reasons, from a 5-foot-11 women who wants to date similarly tall men to a 32-year-old man who is put off by Jewish women's desire for a financially successful mate.

Overall, the idea that some Jews choose to date non-Jews over Jews is worth exploring. There are certainly some people who are turned on by "shiksappeal." (For literary evidence, read Portnoy's Complaint; for cinematic evidence, watch Annie Hall.)

But to write a story about these people without recognizing that they make up a small portion of Jews in interfaith relationships is just irresponsible. It also tends to villainize Jews in interfaith relationships as shallow, or self-hating, or bigoted when most are just like Jews in intrafaith relationships: regular people who are looking for love in a world that has a very small number of Jews.

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.

Attitudes vs. Facts

While more than 50 percent of teenage Conservative Jews say they want to marry a Jewish partner, only 18 percent date Jews exclusively.

This very interesting fact was relayed to IFF by Ariela Keysar, a noted demographer at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. This was one of the findings of a study she co-authored for the Conservative movement called The Next Generation: Jewish Children and Adolescents.

Keysar spoke with IFF and our Professionals Advisory Circle--essentially, a network of outreach providers--earlier this week about the rise of secularism and its implication for outreach to the intermarried. She is also the co-author of an important new book called Religion in a Free Market: Religious and Non-Religious Americans, Who, What, Why, Where, which is based on the 2001 American Religious Identification Survey and includes some very interesting statistics on intermarriage in the American community at large (which I'll address in a future post...).

But back to the original reason I wrote this post. I found her testimony about Conservative Jewish teens quite revealing because I think these stats are reflective of a larger, unreported trend: the disconnect between people's attitudes and actions on intermarriage.

While it's easy to say you want to marry a Jewish partner some time in the future, the available dating pool often minimizes that possibility, especially if you live in an area with a small Jewish population and/or don't have many Jewish friends. That's why intermarriage is a fact of American Jewish life that isn't going away, and that's why the Jewish community needs to do a better job of working with the intermarried.