The Forgotten 360,000

When Alex Schindler pioneered outreach in the early '80s, the focus was on interfaith couples. It was all about getting those who had intermarried to feel welcome in the Jewish community, and feel like the Jewish community was something they wanted to be part of.

But what about their children?

According to the National Jewish Population Survey 2000-01, there are 360,000 Jews aged 18 to 29 whose parents are Jewish and something else. While some of these children benefited from the outreach revolution of the '90s, most did not. Yet the Jewish community's outreach efforts remain mostly focused on interfaith couples.

The latest cover story for j, the Jewish news weekly of northern California, explores this untapped population of children of interfaith couples. It's a very diverse population, ranging from children who grew up with no religion, to children who grew up with too much religion, to children who were raised solidly in one faith.

One problem facing these adults--or really anyone without a preexisting connection to a synagogue--is the lukewarm welcoming newcomers get at most synagogues. While there are certainly exceptions--Chabad chief among them--congregants and clergy don't always make a point of setting newcomers at ease, whereas many churches, especially Evangelical ones, do. From the story:

[Madeline] Adkins [child of an atheistic interfaith upbringing] has noticed during her extensive “shul-shopping” that Jewish institutions are not always as welcoming as she’d like.

“I remember going to an Easter service once and being so welcomed. They really wanted me to join,” she said. “I’ve rarely had this experience with a Jewish congregation. There isn’t that, ‘Oh, yeah! Come join us!’”

This population is only going to grow, and it is vital for the Jewish community's health to figure out how to engage them.

The Rabbi Formerly Known as Half-Jewish

Not much time to blog today, but I need to mention these two great articles from The Jewish Week that are now a few days old:

Rabbi Beth Nichols, the daughter of a Jewish mother and a non-Jewish father, writes about her experience as an interfaith child in the rabbinical seminary. On Christmas day 2001, she was in Jerusalem at Hebrew Union College, attending a class on intermarriage:

I found it both ironic and disconcerting to be discussing intermarriage on Christmas Day. That morning I approached my professor to express my apprehension for the day’s class: “I know we’re talking about intermarriage, and, well, this is my first Christmas away from home.” Registering his look of surprise, I explained, “My Dad’s not Jewish, and Christmas was a really important time in his childhood, so it became an important time in my family. I’m Jewish, obviously, but Christmas has a lot of wonderful family memories attached to it.”

Standing there, I did not know whether I could handle having classmates share their opinions about intermarriage on a day when I, a woman confident in her Jewish identity, wanted nothing more than to be sitting in my pajamas around a 12-foot tree covered in ornaments.

Now, as assistant rabbi at Temple Israel of New Rochelle, N.Y., she has ambivalent feelings about how to interact with interfaith families at her synagogue. Responding to the question of "How can we be sensitive to the unique needs of children of interfaith families being raised as Jews in our synagogues?" she says:

I have learned from years of working with religious-school teachers that the most common answer to this question is that to help children of interfaith families one should assume that the child’s religious identity is confused and that they do nothing Jewish at home. Mentions of non-Jewish family celebrations should be ignored or giggled past, and low attendance or lack of attention should be forgiven due to their “family background.”

Ten years ago I would have fought tooth and nail against this assumption. But I have lost some of my innocence. My colleagues and I have taught students whose custody arrangements leave them believing in Jesus every other week, students whose parents naively let them choose mom or dad’s religion and students whose religious-school tuition is paid for by their grandparents because their parents don’t want to make a decision about religion. I now know that even in the interfaith families who become active in Jewish life, religious identity is a challenge for both parents and kids.

In the same issue, Julie Wiener writes about attending church for the funeral of her Catholic mother-in-law. It's a poignant piece, and touches on the complex ways that people perceive others' religiosity. She says, of her husband's family:

Plus, while Joe’s family certainly never seemed Jewish to me, I didn’t see a lot of their Catholic side. A wooden crucifix hung over Margaret’s bed, but most of the objects in her home were more secular: framed family photos, pewter knickknacks, the stuffed bears she collected. I knew she attended church every week, but I rarely heard about it — I did not meet her priest or see the inside of the gray stone church until the funeral.

Perhaps she downplayed her Catholicism around me out of a desire to make me feel welcome. She never seemed to object to the fact that I was Jewish, or that mine and Joe’s children are. I used to joke that it was because Joe was her youngest, that by the time he got married she figured she already had plenty of Catholic grandkids and could thus donate a few to the Jews.

At the funeral, the Margaret the priest described — “a woman of faith,” he said, emphasizing her belief in Jesus — was different than the woman I remembered, who always seemed far more buoyed by her gardening and her grandchildren than by spirituality or dogma.

The Link Sink

I've been meaning to give a shout-out to our friends at Jew-ish.com for a while, but better late than never. Since February, they've had a blog on interfaith marriage called Half-Torah (clever title). It was originally written by a gay man named Brian who was converting to Judaism; since May, it's been written by a Jewish woman named Becca married to a non-Jewish "Jew-ish" man. I haven't read every post, but I believe "Jew-ish" means that he doesn't have any Jewish roots, but he's so involved in Jewish life that he's essentially an honorary MOT. Check it out. Becca puts up new posts more frequently than I do, and she's not even paid for it.

Here's the latest update on the polls we've conducted since July 10, the last time I updated you on our polls. Our July 10 poll asked "Can a person be half-Jewish?" and respondents were almost evenly split: 53% said "Yes, of course" and 47% said "No, you're either Jewish or you're not." The July 31 question also saw a fairly even split. In response to the question "Is divorce harder for an interfaith couple than an all-Jewish couple?", 55% said for an interfaith couple, 45% said for an inmarried couple. However, in response to our Aug. 14 question--"Is making your partner happy a sufficient reason to convert to Judaism?"--nearly all of the respondents (90%) said No. And most of you (60%) thought that children should not be allowed to decide their religion for themselves, according to our Aug. 28 poll.

In Broward County, Fla., a large Jewish cemetery, the 52-acre Star of David Cemetery and Funeral Home, is adding 31 acres and 10,000 plots for intermarried Jews and their families.

Adam Goldberg, son of a Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother, says he is tired of being typecast as a neurotic Jew.

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.

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.

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.

Making a Half- Whole

A good counterpoint to Sue Fishkoff's article on half-Jews is Deborah Sussman Susser's op-ed in the Jewish News of Greater Phoenix on her Jewish identity. It begins: "I didn't think of myself as half Jewish until I'd been told I wasn't [Jewish] at all."

This is the other side of the coin of those who define themselves as half-Jews while the Jewish community insists on defining them as Jews or non-Jews. Susser considers herself Jewish, while society in general considers her half-Jewish and the traditional parts of the Jewish community consider her not Jewish at all.

I knew I was Jewish enough that the other kids at school made jokes about picking up pennies and told me I was going to hell, Jewish enough that my first "boyfriend" at summer camp had broken up with me when I told him my religion. "I hate Jews," he'd said simply.

This sense of being both on the inside and outside of the Jewish community made affiliation difficult for her. In college, she worried that she would be "outed" at Hillel events. At synagogue, she cried. When she got engaged to a Jewish man, her Reform rabbi told them theirs was a mixed marriage. The amazing thing is, despite her bad experiences, she still identifies strongly as a Jew, lighting Shabbat candles and sending her daughter to Hebrew school.

Half-and-Half

Our current poll question for our Web Magazine issue on Growing Up in an Interfaith Family is "Can a person be half-Jewish?" Appropriately, a day before the issue went online, jacqueline-of-all-trades JTA reporter Sue Fishkoff wrote a story titled "'Half-Jews' fight for acceptance."

For years, people have been saying they were half-Jewish, but the Jewish establishment never gave the moniker any credence. The different denominations are divided on what makes someone Jewish--the Orthodox and Conservative say only a Jewish mother can have a Jewish child, the Reform and Reconstructionist movements say a Jewish father can have a Jewish child provided the child is raised Jewish--but they are united in their opposition to the notion of divided identity. You can't be half-Jewish. You either are Jewish, or you're not.

But a growing number of grass-roots efforts are looking to gain acceptance for those who identify themselves as half-Jewish:

Yet the "half" term is gaining currency, particularly among those with Jewish fathers and non-Jewish mothers. The phenomenon is encouraged by Web sites, books and groups that celebrate or support these self-proclaimed half-Jews, from www.halfjew.com launched to establish "an identity for HalfJews," to the short-lived student group at Brown University called "The Half-Jew Crew."

Many children of intermarriage say they simply cannot turn their backs on the non-Jewish half of their identity. Their rabbis may say they are Jewish, but in their hearts they are also whatever grandma and grandpa are.

This openness to multiple identities is particularly true among college students, according to Daniel Klein and Freke Vuijst, who interviewed hundreds of students for "The Half-Jewish Book" published in 2000.

Klein says those who call themselves half-Jewish "feel they are a combination, they are an amalgam, they are bicultural."

Half-Jews were raised in a variety of different environments: many were raised Jewish, but still celebrated some aspects of their non-Jewish heritage; others were raised in two religions; some were raised in none. They don't want to abandon the non-Jewish aspects of their family and childhood. But, as Robin Margolis, founder of the Half-Jewish Network, notes in Fishkoff's story, "A lot of these people have been greeted by [Jewish] organizations where the first demand is 'make a choice,' and if they don't, they're not welcome."

The traditional Jewish community rejects the notion of half-Jewish because it doesn't jibe with their defense of matrilineal descent and rejection of patrilineal descent. Both positions require a zero-sum approach to Jewish identity.

The progressive Jewish movements define Judaism a little differently. For the Reform and Reconstructionist movements, Jewish identity is more a function of belief and practice than lineage. But for them, the concept of half-Jewish smacks of syncretism. It suggests that those who identify themselves as half-Jewish partially believe in Judaism and partially believe in something else. But that's impossible, they say: you can't believe Jesus was the messiah and believe that the messiah hasn't yet come. Since the Reform and Reconstructionist movements have been fighting rearguard resistance to their positions on patrilineal descent for more than two decades, they're especially sensitive to the suggestion that their positions lead to the dilution of Jewish identity. Whatever your feelings on the notion of half-Jewish, it's hard to argue that it doesn't dilute Jewish identity to some extent.

While many in the established community may have trouble wrapping their heads around the whole concept, they better get a lot more comfortable soon, because an increasing number of people are defining themselves as half-Jewish. If the Jewish community doesn't find a space for them, you can be rest assured that other faith communities will be happy to have them.

Half-Jewish SF Seeks Ortho Jewish SM

A. Pinsker of the New York Press has written a moving, funny story about her relationship with a self-described "post-modern Orthodox Jew" and the way his spirituality ignited her--and his dogma made him reject her.

Pinsker's father is Jewish and her mother is not, but both share a distrust of religion. She'd never dated Jewish before--"it'd just be too close to home," she says--instead opting for a rainbow of races, religions and nationalities. Meanwhile, she says, "my mother married my New York Jewish dad most likely to spite her very old-school, anti-Semitic parents."

Despite of--or perhaps because of--the lack of religion in her home, she says, "secretly, there was nothing I liked more than celebrating the Sabbath at my Orthodox neighbor's home."

Dating this hip-hop-loving guy who lived in rabbinical students' quarters helped re-awaken that fondness for Orthodox practice, but eventually she runs into the brick wall facing all Jews with non-Jewish mothers: the traditional community's denial of their Jewishness.

I'd say more, but it's worth reading. The title alone should be enough to grab you: "A semi-shiksa lusts for her ultimate fetish: A cute Jew-boy."

Who is a Jew? Who Cares?

Julie Wiener, in typically brilliant fashion, has written a great piece on the "Who is a Jew?" debate as seen through the eyes of her 3 1/2-year-old daughter:

At 3 ½ years old, she knows nothing about matrilineal or patrilineal descent, nor has she any clue about what is recognized by the State of Israel — or for that matter, what exactly Israel is.

But newly cognizant of the fact that she is Jewish, and that Jewishness is not universal, she has become fascinated with categorizing everyone she knows, sorting them into “Jewish” and “Christian.”

She is Jewish. Her friends Owen and Stephanie are Christian. The other kids at Tot Shabbat are Jewish. Her babysitter Maria is Christian.

Those simple categories begin to break down, however, when talking about Julie's husband, her daughter's father. He's a lapsed Catholic who's raising his child Jewish, doesn't go to church, goes to temple and celebrates Shabbat. Despite his arguments to the contrary, his daughter refuses to believe he's not Jewish. Eventually Julie responds, "Well, he's sort of Jewish."

In her personal and humorous fashion, Julie points out the ridiculousness of the whole Jewish obsession over who is a Jew while also pointing out the difficulties interfaith families face in defining themselves. Just because you're aware of the ridiculousness of society doesn't mean you can escape it.

A perhaps even more (unintentionally) comic look at the "Who is a Jew?" debate comes from JTA. This recent story details how the Nicaraguan Jewish community is split after "two people whom some consider non-Jews were elected to the board" of directors of the community. The catch? There are only 50 Jews in Nicaragua.

Beyond the ridiculousness of having an elected board of directors for a Jewish community smaller than an NFL roster--to each their own--can anyone in a community that small afford to question whether another member is Jewish, especially if they're committed enough to want to serve on a volunteer board? Not that the Orthodox are the ultimate arbiters of all questions of Jewish identity, but witness this quote from a previous board president, Max Najman, who heads one of two Orthodox households in the country:

"If in Israel they have not been able to define who is a Jew, we should not try to here," he told JTA by phone. "This is not as serious as some would think."

Jewish Identity in Anti-Semitic Lands

Russia and England provide interesting contrasts when it comes to anti-Semitism. Both have rather shameful histories of Jewish persecution--anti-Jewish pogroms were a common feature of 19th century Russian life, Jews were banned from England for more than 350 years from 1290-1656--and both retain legacies of anti-Semitism. In Russia, Jews are openly discriminated against and blamed for the ills of society, while in Britain, anti-Semitic statements are surprisingly commonplace.

Two recent stories illustrate how the particular cultures of these countries can affect people's sense of religious and cultural identity. The JTA tells the fascinating story of Bella Leidentel, the 73-year-old matriarch of a a small Jewish community in Russia's Far East. As a child she doesn't remember much anti-Semitism, but after World War II, she noticed that people began blaming Jews for the war. As a young woman, she found anti-Semitism so overt that she made a decision to turn her back on Judaism. She told people her Jewish-looking features were actually Armenian.

"I promised myself that there wouldn't be a single Jew in my family," she said... without even a whisper of regret. "So I married a Russian."

The only problem was, the Russian man she found was a Judeophile. When she wanted to get a nose job to remove her most distinctive Jewish feature, he told her he wouldn't allow her back in the house if she went through with it. "He read heavily about Jewish culture and history, and passed on the information to Leidental with pride," says the article. She ended up embracing her Judaism, and becoming a fixture in her local Jewish community. In a bizarre way, intermarriage was an antidote to anti-Semitism.

The story of Julian Anderson, a British composer, is quite different, according to the Hampstead and Highgate Express. His grandmother came to England after fleeing anti-Semitism in Lithuania.

Julian describes himself as a half-Jewish lapsed Anglican who is now attracted to the spirituality of Buddhism. "My father, though nominally a Litvak, was agnostic and I became an adherent of Anglicanism in my late 20s, though when it set out its doctrinal attitudes on certain issues that I felt strongly about and with which I could not accept, I moved away from the Church."

One wonders if English anti-Semitism didn't have something to do with his drifting away from Judaism. Ironically, despite having no religious attachment to Judaism, Peterson has made a name for himself with works inspired by Eastern European folk music. His most-performed work is the "Khorovod," which is greatly influenced by the hora. This is an interesting demonstration of the way Jewish culture has undergone a resurgence in modern-day Europe while Jewish religion continues to struggle.

Patrilineal Jew Seeks Conversion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Adult Children of the Intermarried: The "Forgotten"?

JTA just released a package of stories on the adult children of the intermarried, by Sue Fishkoff. It's an important and interesting series, although not without its flaws.

The centerpiece of the package is an article that looks at how little Jewish programming there is tailored to the needs of adult children of intermarried. Fishkoff calls this population "the forgotten piece of the outreach puzzle." It's true; Fishkoff doesn't say it, but there seems to be an attitude among Jewish policy-makers that this population is already "lost" and it's better to focus on young intermarried couples who haven't had children yet or whose children are young. There's no doubt that programming geared to young intermarried parents has the potential for greater impact, but that doesn't mean we have to ignore the 360,000 young adults with one Jewish parent. We know of, and Fishkoff shares, stories of a number of adults who chose Judaism as young adults.

As Fishkoff documents, however, there seems to be a growing awareness of this forgotten population. So far the major movement to engage this population is happening on the periphery of the Jewish world, with things like Robin Margolis' Half-Jewish Network and Laurel Snyder's collection of essays Half-Life: Jew-ish Tales from Interfaith Homes. But things are brewing in the mainstream Jewish community: the Jewish Outreach Institute is working with Hillel to create outreach programs on four pilot campuses, JConnect and Jewish Family Services in Seattle held a discussion class on the issue and three years ago, Congregation Adas Israel in Washington, D.C. launched "Open Door," a workshop for adults with "mixed or non-Jewish ancestry."

There are numerous challenges to reaching this population: their affiliation to Judaism is much more cultural than religious, meaning they tend not to belong to Jewish organizations; they can be wary of the organized Jewish community, which often isn't welcoming to the children of non-Jewish mothers; and they don't like being singled out. Reaching them is less a matter of creating programming focused around the issue of coming from an interfaith home than it is a matter of creating programming that speaks to their sense of Jewish identity and avoids potentially sensitive issues, like matrilineal descent.

The other major piece in the package is a little more problematic. Titled "For kids of intermarriage, choices are complex," it discusses the variety of religious choices that children from interfaith homes might make. Fishkoff admits that "experts stress the importance of giving such children a good Jewish education, as research shows that this makes them much likelier to become committed Jewish adults," but spends most of the article making the case that anything can happen. She doesn't rely on research for this notion, but anecdotes. And each of these anecdotes has a serious flaw.

Take Robin Margolis and her family. She is now a committed Jewish adult and her brothers are all Christians--one is even a minister. But they were raised as Christians and didn't even know their mother was Jewish until Robin was in her 30s.

Or the children of Jill and Tom Docking. They were raised Jewish. Today, one child identifies as Jewish while the other is more equivocal. "If people ask, I say I was raised Jewish and I leave it at that," he says. But there's no indication either child has adopted another religion. And it's not like it's uncommon for an unmarried 27-year-old child of two Jewish parents to be equivocal about his religious background as well.

Another example is the children of Marty Wasserman and her former husband. One child chose the Judaism of her mother, the other child chose the Catholicism of his father. But Marty converted to Judaism after the divorce, after the children were already born. Further, both children went to Catholic high school. Their experience is hardly typical.

The final example is of a couple where the mother raised one child Jewish while the father raised the other child Catholic.

In the podcast associated with the package, Fishkoff says, "Although giving them a Jewish upbringing reduces the chance that they will look elsewhere, it's not a guarantee at all." This suggests that Fishkoff believes that personal choice has as much an impact on how adults identify as does upbringing. But in each example she points to, it's clear that upbringing was a more powerful factor in the interfaith child's identity as an adult than personal choice. Yes, there are no guarantees, but if you raise your child exclusively in one religion, it is much more likely they will end up identifying with--or practicing--that religion as an adult than not.

I liked the individual stories quite a bit more because they make no claim to offer a holistic portrait of children from intermarried homes. They're just interesting stories: Jeff Fry, who was raised a Unitarian by his Jewish mother and Congregationalist father but became engaged with Judaism in college; Rachel Crossley, who grew up in a dual-faith home but got into Judaism in Hebrew school and is now a rabbinical student; and Ephraim Rosenbaum, who, despite his very Jewish-sounding name, doesn't favor either his father's Judaism or his mother's Catholicism.

A Politician Who Chose Judaism; A Seattle Outreach Program Shutters

Some links of note:

• The Arizona Daily Star has a story about Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D), a Jewish woman who was born to an interfaith home. What makes it particularly interesting is that her parents--her dad is Jewish and her mother is Christian Scientist--didn't push her to adopt any particular religion.

  
  

  "We were kind of neutral," Spencer Gifford said. "We let them decide for themselves. That's what Gabby did."

  
  But as a state senator in 2001, she went on a trip to Israel with the American Jewish Committee that the article says was "life-changing."

  
  

  "It just cemented the fact that I wanted to spend more time with my own personal, spiritual growth. I felt very committed to Judaism," she said. "Religion means different things to different people. It provides me with grounding, a better understanding of who I came from."

  
  The article also includes information on each of the other Arizona congressperson's faiths and it's a pretty diverse list. There's one Jew, two Episcopalians, four Catholics, one Presbyterian, one Baptist and one Mormon.

• If you can believe it, JTA has another op-ed on Steven Cohen's study of intermarriage, A Tale of Two Jewries. It's by Cole Krawitz, editor of JVoices.com. For those counting at home, this is the fourth op-ed on the topic.

  
  This one, like our op-ed and Gary Tobin's, argues that the notion of two Jewries is a harmful one: "The language of who is worth engaging should raise serious warning flags, for as Jews we all have known what it means to be on the outside."

  
  But it also connects Cohen's study to the recent Brandeis study that shows the American Jewish population is increasing.

• Seattle is losing a small but valuable outreach program that made a point of doing programming outside of traditional Jewish institutions. Called Panim Hadashot--"New Faces" in Hebrew--the organization is shuttering because of a nearly $100,000 deficit in fundraising for 2007.

  
  I hadn't heard of this group before, but its programs all focus on the notion of meeting unaffiliated Jews "where they are." Rabbi Dov Gartenberg, the founder and prime organizer, led Shabbat gatherings in private homes, hosted seders for different holidays and had a booth at a Whole Foods supermarket where he would talk to anyone interested in Judaism. While many of these are outreach techniques pioneered by Chabad, the JTnews article says the organization promoted a pluralistic vision of Judaism.

The Good and the Bad

Some good news and bad news today.

First, the bad: Our favorite quasi-famous child of an interfaith home with an unsightly tendency to pick his nose, Mr. Boston, has been booted off "I Love New York." He was one of the final six contestants for the love of New York, ne Tiffany Patterson, formerly the runner-up for the love of deranged rapper Flavor Flav in "Flavor of Love." But don't worry, Mr. Boston fans, apparently your favorite uncoordinated CPA may be in line for his own show.

(And if you didn't understand any of the last paragraph, you probably live a fulfilling, meaningful life.)

As for the good news: the folks at the JTNews, Seattle's Jewish newspaper, have launched a new site, www.jew-ish.com. Designed in the vein of other hip Jewish sites like Jewsweek and Jewlicious, it's intended to provide a forum for Jewish content for 20- and 30-something Jewish Seattle-ites. While there are numerous sites like it on a national level, it's the first example of an attempt at creating a hip Jewish communal website on a community level that I know of outside New York.

One of the first posts on the site is from Neal Schindler, who explains how his interest in Jewish culture came from his non-Jewish girlfriend:

The culture you were raised in comes and finds you, as it turns out, in the oddest of ways. For over a year I’ve been dating a woman raised Protestant — the daughter of a minister, in fact — and her passion for Jewish politics and culture, more than that of anyone else I’ve met here, has compelled me to go to Shabbat services, celebrate Tu B’Shevat with Jewish friends, and, yes, become a writer for Jew-ish.com.

A Center for Afro-Jewish Studies; 100 Years of Intermarriage

File under: The Rising Consciousness of Black Jews.

An African-American Jewish professor of religion has started a center on Afro-Jewish studies at Temple University in Philadelphia. Dr. Lewis Gordon, the son of a Jamaican Jewish mother and a non-Jewish afro-Chinese father, has already presented research at a Jewish studies conference and created an undergraduate course on Afro-Judaism, but in the future he'd like to create a Torah commentary for Africana Jews, do a demographic study of Philadelphia's black Jewish community and eventually do archaeological digs into African-Jewish history in Africa.

While many of us think of intermarriage as a phenomenon of the last few decades, according to an excerpt from The Forward from 1907 reprinted in a recent issue, mixed marriages are "nothing new.":

Mixed marriages are all the rage nowadays. We’ve recently received numerous letters from Jewish men and women who have married non-Jews and live their lives quite happily. There’s no point in getting agitated either for or against the phenomenon; the masses always do what they want. They can scream about it all they want in the synagogues and study houses that the Jews will disappear. But is this true? Absolutely not. Throughout their history, Jews have married non-Jews. Even if you go back to the beginning, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob all had gentile wives. So there’s nothing new here.

Following the trend started by JTA, the Jewish Journal North of Boston just published an article on interfaith burial options in Boston's North Shore. Here's an interesting quote from the piece:

[David] McKenna, who maintains 21 North Shore cemeteries, said an article in the Jan. 12 edition of the Journal "Intermarried Struggle with Burial Options" left people with "the distinct impression that the only interfaith burial option for North Shore families was to make the long drive out to the Beit Olam Cemetery in Wayland." But the options are not so limited.

That suggests to me that the impetus for some of these interfaith burial stories might have been local cemeteries who wanted to make clear that there are more burial options for interfaith families than the original JTA article suggested.

Also in the (Philadelphia) Jewish Exponent: a story about an interfaith group who watched the documentary Mixed Blessings.

Black or Jewish?

Two interesting articles on black Jews recently caught my attention: one, in American Jewish Life magazine (formerly Atlanta Jewish Life), tells the story of Lacey Schwartz, the daughter of two white Jewish New Yorkers who discovered in college that she was the product of an affair between her mother and a black man; the other, in the New York Times, excerpts a passage from a new book by David Matthews, the child of a Jewish mother he barely knew and a black nationalist father.

They are two very different people: Lacey appears to have grown up in a stable, privileged home, and didn't even know of her multiracial background until she was an adult, while Matthews says he "was used to some measure of instability--various apartments, sundry stepmothers and girlfriends" and grappled with his identity from a very young age:

Nothing prepared me for walking into that public-school classroom, already three weeks into fourth grade. I had never felt so utterly on my own.

Mrs. Eberhard, my new homeroom teacher, made an introduction of sorts, and every student turned around to study me. The black kids, who made up more than 80 percent of the school’s population, ranged in shades from butterscotch to Belgian chocolate, but none had my sallow complexion, nor my fine, limp hair. And the white kids, a salting of red and alabaster faces, had noses that were tapered and blunted, free of the slightly equine flare of my own, and lips that unobtrusively parted their mouths, in contrast to the thickened slabs I sucked between my teeth.

In the hallway, on the way to class, black and white kids alike herded around me. Then the question came: “What are you?”

Lacey, meanwhile, lived in relatively ignorant bliss until she went to Georgetown University, which classified her a "black/Hispanic origins" student. After returning home from her first year at college, she asked her mother "Do you ever wonder why I look the way I do?" Two weeks later, her mother told her the truth. She went onto explore her black identity, joining the black theater group and student association, hanging out with other black students and dating black and biracial men.

But as outwardly different as the two are, both of their stories demonstrate the way, in American society, racial identity trumps religious identity. Despite having no background in black culture--indeed she was raised in the lily-white town of Woodstock, N.Y.--Lacey Schwartz still felt drawn to other black students and black-centric activities at Georgetown, a fairly racially segregated school (I know from experience; I graduated from Georgetown a year after Lacey). Harris, meanwhile, chooses to sit at the white kids' cafeteria table but feels a deep sense of inadequacy over his inability to be as "alive and cool" as the black kids: "The black kids reminded me of home, but the white kids reminded me of myself, the me I saw staring back in the mirror. On that day, I came to believe that if I had said I was black, I would have had to spend the rest of my life convincing my own people."

In the same way that the majority of children from intermarried homes assimilate into secular and Christian culture because it's easier than practicing Judaism, children from biracial homes often identify as black because it's easier than identifying as white. People will tend to gravitate to social circles where it's easier to blend in.

(Incidentally, the two share something else: each has a new creative exploration of their life coming out. Schwartz is working on a documentary on black Jews called Outside of the Box; Harris's autobiographical book Ace of Spades: A Memoir is coming out in February.)

Black and Jewish; Love for IFF

The Washington Jewish Week has a lovely article about black Jews in the Washington, D.C. area. It shares anecdotes from a series of black Jews, most of whom are converts. Like the terrific piece we published this summer, Waiting Outside the Promised Land, by Lesley Williams, the article illustrates the subtle racism that black Jews sometimes encounter at synagogues.

Entering a synagogue can sometimes lead to questions such as "Are you lost?" or directions to the church across the street, says [Shelliyah] Iyomahan, the daughter of parents from Trinidad and Tobago. She was raised as a Sabbatarian one who worships the Sabbath on Saturday before discovering she was halachically Jewish.

Black Jews can also face some discrimination from other people of color. Ronni Davis, of Silver Spring, says that at a previous job, other African-Americans didn't socialize with him after learning about his conversion.

One of the interesting and lesser-known aspects of black Jewish life is that many of the black Jews come from similar backgrounds as the Conversos. Several people interviewed for the story share how their non-Jewish families still had some Jewish traditions. One family burnt chametz every year during spring cleaning; another grew up celebrating Saturday as the Sabbath. For more on black Jews and relationships between African-Americans and Jews, see our issue on Multicultural Relationships from this summer.

In other news, Julie Wiener of The (New York) Jewish Week did a wonderful article on InterfaithFamily.com's fifth anniversary and 200th issue, which serves as a nice companion piece to our most recent issue.

Boston University Hillel head on the Boston study

The 2005 Boston Jewish Community Study continues to have legs, showing up in a Dec. 4 story in Boston University's school newspaper, The Daily Free Press. In it, the reporter, Shari Rabin, quotes and paraphrases quotes from the head of BU's Hillel House that are so noxious and wrong-headed that I wonder if they're true. Given that the story claims that Jews make up "one-fifth of the world's" population, I'm not sure how seriously I should take the following passage:

Rabbi Joseph Polak, the executive director of Boston University's Hillel House, was skeptical of the survey's view of Jewish demographics.

"The Jewish community in America is hemorrhaging beyond your wildest imagination," he said. "We are 50 percent of the number we were in 1960."

Polak said the population increase includes many Jews whose commitment to the faith is questionable, including the children of Jews and their non-Jewish and converted spouses.

Although he said it is impressive that converts want to join the Jewish community, Polak said he is unsure about how serious they are about passing on the faith.

Although he said it is impressive that converts want to join the Jewish community, Polak said he is unsure about how serious they are about passing on the faith.

"I don't question anyone's sincerity," he said, "but unless you are prepared to tell your kids that you can't drive a car on [the Sabbath] as the Torah says, it doesn't mean a whole lot. You're not going to get a second generation of committed Jews."

If--and it's a big if--Polak was quoted correctly, he's sending an awful message to the 50 percent of Jewish college students who come from interfaith households. College is a time of sometimes dramatic identity formation, and to question the religious commitment of students before they walk in the door of Hillel, simply based on their parentage, is not a way to encourage interfaith children to identify Jewish. And the notion that children of conversionary couples have a "questionable" commitment to their faith is just absurd (indeed, studies have shown conversionary families are often more Jewishly dedicated than born-Jewish couples).

Further, when he suggests that those who won't tell their children that they can't drive a car on Sabbath won't produce a second generation of committed Jews, he essentially is saying that the vast majority of the world's Jews are unlikely to produce Jewishly committed offspring. He's saying that unless you are prepared to adopt a fully Orthodox lifestyle, you will not have Jewish children. Beyond that being a pessimistic and intolerant message, it's simply not true; many thousands, if not millions, of committed Jews drive to synagogue on Shabbat every week, including such noted Jewish figures as Dennis Prager, and they are highly likely to produce Jewishly committed offspring. Which would Polak rather have: families showing their commitment to Judaism by driving to a synagogue that is miles away, or not going to synagogue at all because that's what "the Torah says"?

While I understand that Rabbi Polak is quite traditional, I still wonder whether it's possible he would utter statements so alienating and hurtful to such a large portion of his potential audience at BU.

Families are much more than just "interfaith"

Reading an obituary of the controversial theater critic Richard Gilman, I found myself pondering a quote of Gilman’s that was referred to in the article. He had said, “I don’t think of myself as a critic or teacher either, but simply — and at the obvious risk of disingenuousness — as someone who teaches, writes drama criticism (and other things) and feels that the American compulsion to take your identity from your profession, with its corollary of only one trade to a practitioner, may be a convenience to society but is burdensome and constricting to yourself.”

Thinking about the quote, I realized that the same thing is true in a different way for interfaith families: The identity as an interfaith family is usually one small part of a family's overall identity, not something they want to be reminded of all the time--they may be a family with two young daughters, a mom who does x and a dad who does y, close with their friends, family, etc… and also interfaith.

Ronnie F