Intermarriage: Helping Jews Find Their Hotel Since 1970

Ed Siegel, the Jewish intermarried former theater critic for The Boston Globe, has written an amusing piece for the Globe about interfaith couples. It begins:

I have a theory about intermarriage. I know some people think Judaism is going to die out if Jews keep marrying outside the religion, but if my circle of friends is any indication, there's a practical, perhaps even evolutionary, reason for Jews to be marrying gentiles. In every relationship I know of, the Jew has the worse sense of direction.

...It's the same in every relationship, male or female, gay or straight. The gentile looks at the map and says, "This way." The Jew says, "After you." Why is this? Did our forebears walk around the desert for 40 years because they couldn't find their way out? It couldn't have been that they liked the sights so much.

It's a funny essay, but its point is less about the distinction between Jews and gentiles--his portraits strike me as a little tongue-in-cheek--than about the way that partners in a couple should complement each others' strengths. In that way, intermarried partners can be a positive influence on each other because of their different cultural and religious backgrounds.

Interestingly, I think his theory is bogus. I've never noticed Jews having an exceptionally poor, or exceptionally good, sense of direction. But that's why I also think his essay is notable. Even when the stereotypes have no connection to reality, I don't mind seeing somebody put them in print. We should all be able to laugh out our foibles, whether real or imagined.

The Emerging Consensus

Shmuel Rosner, Ha'aretz's intrepid American correspondent, has started an ambitious series on American Judaism. The first article, Reaching Out to Interfaith Families, focuses on intermarriage through the microcosm of Boston. It's an appropriate starting point. We are based just outside Boston, in Newton, and the 2005 demographic study of Jewish Boston released last year showed that 60% of interfaith couples were raising their children Jewish. More recently, Noah Feldman, a Harvard law professor, rankled traditional Jews everywhere with his critique of Modern Orthodox attitudes toward intermarriage, The Orthodox Paradox.

While in Boston, Ed Case and I met with Rosner and we had a very interesting debate. Rosner argues that there is an "emerging consensus" on intermarriage in the American Jewish community. While many leaders remain uncomfortable with intermarriage, there is a widespread acceptance that "intermarriage must be accepted and interfaith couples embraced," according to Rosner. Ed didn't completely agree. I argued that the statement should be amended: in non-Orthodox Jewish communities (synagogues, JCCs, etc.), there is a near-unanimous acceptance and embrace of interfaith families, but the leadership is much more ambivalent. That ambivalence can be measured by the paltry sums given to outreach to interfaith families.

I think Rosner's new series is particularly significant for non-American, particularly Israeli, readers. Israelis often are willfully ignorant about the contours of the American Jewish community. They have a triumphalist attitude about the prevalence of assimilation and intermarriage in the States--without acknowledging their own privileged position as the only majority-Jewish country in the world. Other international Jewish communities, such as Britain and France, are way behind the United States in being welcoming to interfaith families. The British Jewish community especially is dominated by the minority of traditional Jews, who set a standard for religious involvement that few abide by. Everyone could learn from what Rosner refers to as "the great experiment" taking place in America.

Interfaith, Interracial, International

In a continuation of its series on religion in black America, NPR interviewed Dara and Oded Pinchas, a black-Jewish couple who are expecting twins. Dara is an African-American Baptist while Oded is an Israeli Jew affiliated with the Secular Humanistic Movement.

They avoided the officiation issue by getting married on a beach in Hawaii. Dara says her family embraced Oded, while for his family, "It's been a growing process... over time we've come to accept each other." His parents, basing their definition of Jewishness on the widely accepted Israeli standard of Jewish maternity, are concerned that his children won't be Jewish.

Interestingly, while their physical difference is more pronounced, Dara says that the interfaith issues were more difficult to overcome than the interracial ones. Part of that, she says, has to do with living in New York, where she often sees interracial couples.

When it comes to children, they're a bit naive. They currently take part in workshops through Interfaith Community, an interfaith group with several chapters around the country that allows couples to fully explore both their religious backgrounds. The problem comes in when children are involved. Dara says, "My responsibility is to expose them to what I believe and Oded feels the same way." It may not be immediately apparent to them, but this is a recipe for confusion and potentially, religious competition. Children have a hard time understanding one theological system, let alone two. And how will they reconcile Daddy's atheism with Mom's belief in God? As if to enforce their naivety on the issue, Oded says, "As long as we have the general agreement that we will embrace both identities, I don't see any problems."

I wish Dara and Oded the best of luck, but I think the road ahead will be bumpier than they foresee.

Noah More!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Does Noah Feldman Feed the Anti-Semites?

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

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

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

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

Cracking the Paradox

The "Orthodox Paradox" continues to provide fodder for bloggers and Jewish thinkers.

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach has written another insightful column on the issue, in response to the vociferous criticism he received for his first stab at defending Noah Feldman. The central problem, says Boteach, is that Jews must distinguish between "an immoral sin and an irreligious act":

Does driving on Shabbat make you a bad person, or a nonobservant one? Does failure to attend synagogue make you into an irreligious Jew or a flawed human being?...

The greatness of the Lubavitcher Rebbe was his genius in distinguishing between religious and moral sin. Before the Rebbe those who ate non-kosher were treated as though they themselves were unkosher.

The Rebbe understood that these were not bad people. They were simply irreligious people. And they had to be shown love and respect. Not just in order to bring them back to the fold, but because it was righteous and Jewish to do so. Why should those who marry out be treated any differently?

Further, Boteach argues:

Unlike Christianity, which is based on a single precept - faith in Christ - Judaism is based on 613 separate and autonomous commandments. Our umbilical cord with God consists of these 613 strands. To be sure, the more we keep, the stronger the connection. But the key is to remain connected with even a single strand, even a single mitzva...

It is disgraceful that men and women who marry out are not encouraged to keep the rest of the Torah's commandments. It is disgraceful that they are treated as if they consciously rebelled against the Jewish tradition when, in their minds, they simply followed the dictates of the heart.

Violating the taboo against intermarriage is violating one of those commandments--but then again, welcoming the stranger is another one of those commandments. Jew who reject people who violate the first commandment are themselves violating another commandment.

Esther Kustanowitz, who blogs and writes about Jewish single life from a fairly traditional perspective, raises another interesting point: where does Modern Orthodoxy's rejection of taboo lifestyles end?

One instinct clearly is to cut "problem children" like Feldman out of the picture. But as time goes on, other day-school graduates may emerge with different approaches to living Jewishly -- whether that means becoming radical environmentalists, secular Zionists, gay rabbis, actors and comedians, or staying single into your 30s. Who knows? Anything outside the ordinary and it's a problem.

Which raises the question: at what point do the once-clear distinctions between Modern Orthodoxy and haredi Orthodoxy blur and become meaningless? If Modern Orthodoxy becomes more conservative in its response to break-away factions, when does it lose the qualifier "Modern"?

Simon Jacobson, an Orthodox writer at Algemeiner.com, writes that nobody has come up with a worthwhile response to Feldman's dilemma. Either they reject Feldman entirely, reject Judaism entirely or are fuzzy-head reconcilers.

Meanwhile, on the critical end of the spectrum, Ralph M. Lieberman wrote an essay for the American Thinker that argues unconvincingly that the New York Times' publication of Feldman's essay showed a lapse in journalistic standards. It's a first-person essay in the New York Times magazine and is never billed as a piece of impartial journalism. How does that violate any recognized journalistic standards?

A much more reasonable critique comes from Rabbi Avi Shafran, the eloquent director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America. I don't agree with a word he says--"intermarraige represents a deep betrayal" is one choice quote--but I wouldn't expect anything different. He is a deeply committed traditional Jew, speaking for an organization that doesn't even attempt to call itself "Modern Orthodox." Ultra-Orthodox Jews do not argue that Jews should reconcile modernity and Torah; in their eyes, modernity is only acceptable when it does not intrude on Torah. It would be absurd to engage in a debate with people who rely on this fundamental principle why they should make a compromise with modern reality.

The Orthodox vs. "Orthodox Paradox"

Noah Feldman's "Orthodox Paradox" may be influencing people, but it's not making him many friends.

In today's issue of The (New York) Jewish Week, Editor and Publisher Gary Rosenblatt, probably the most respected Jewish journalist in America, picks apart Feldman's essay with his typical mix of respectfulness and incisive logic. One of the things that I've found fascinating in Modern Orthodox readers' response to his essay is how much "pain" they see in his essay, which to me, seems a fairly rational, dispassionate look into some problematic aspects of the Modern Orthodox approach to the world. A Modern Orthodox person I work with said it was full of "pain," while Rosenblatt calls it "a long and bitter complaint."

Rosenblatt goes on to call Feldman's essay "intellectually dishonest" and calls Feldman "unfair" for "expecting to be lauded by a community whose values he has rejected." It's interesting that Rosenblatt reads into Feldman's essay a desire to be lauded; at no point does Feldman ask to be lauded, nor does he gloat over his truly impressive personal achievements. All he appears to be asking for is acknowledgment of the existence of his marriage and children. Getting a one-sentence mention in an alumni newsletter is a far cry from expecting community plaudits.

Rosenblatt is also disturbed by his discussion of Yitzhak Rabin's assassin Yaghil Amir and Baruch Goldstein, the American-born fanatic who massacred 29 Arabs in Hebron in 1994. As uncomfortable as this may make Rosenblatt, at no point does Rosenblatt refute any of his arguments for the complicity of Torah teachings on factual grounds; he's more disturbed by a perceived lack of balance, quoting a rabbi who calls Feldman's argument, "That's like judging the peacock by its feces." But, it is commonly accepted, especially in the Jewish world, to argue for a reform in Islam based on the violent and despicable actions of a tiny minority of Muslims. Why should we put Islam's feces under the microscope but not ours?

Nonetheless, Rosenblatt does see that Feldman's essay is a wake-up call for the Modern Orthodox community and its response to its ostracized intermarried members. My question is: will they be too busy pressing the snooze button to hear it?

Pork Rinds vs. Life Partners

The "Orthodox Paradox," Noah Feldman's thoughtful discussion of his intermarriage and the Modern Orthodox community's response to it, has clearly struck a nerve among Jewish bloggers, Orthodox and non-. Joey Kurtzman, the whip-smart senior editor of Jewcy, conducted a Q&A with Feldman, which, unsurprisingly, generated a flood of comments. (There's a broad cultural stereotype that Orthodox Jews are Luddites, but judging from their activity on blogs and discussion boards, that couldn't be further from the truth.)

Kurtzman's Q&A only briefly touches on intermarriage and gets more into the whole debate over Orthodoxy vs. modernity. But there is a nice line from Feldman. Kurtzman asks:

You were surprised when Maimonides—the yeshiva from which you graduated—airbrushed out you and your (non-Jewish) wife from a photo published in the alumni newsletter. Your surprise struck many readers as rather strange, since the community makes no secret of its rejection of intermarriage. It’s a bit like you’d pulled out a bag of pork rinds, devoured them with relish throughout the evening, and then expressed bewilderment when someone asked you if you'd set them aside until later. What are your critics missing here?

To which Feldman replies:

What is troubling about the view you describe—which I never sensed from my classmates—is its implication that somehow modern Orthodox people should be protected from my living my life as I choose. As if choice of life partner were as trivial as a snack... People who are comfortable with their own life choices don't get "offended" when others choose differently.

Feldman's response reminds me of something Rabbi Steven Greenberg, the only openly gay Orthodox rabbi in the world, once said in a speech I saw. Orthodox Jews often liken homosexuality to eating a cheeseburger--it's obviously prohibited by the Torah, so how could gays expect Orthodox Jewry to accept them? But, said Greenberg, nobody ever cried when their cheeseburger left them--or moved across the country to be with their cheeseburger.

Shalom in the Orthodox Home

Noah Feldman, a law professor at Harvard and graduate of a modern Orthodox day school in Massachusetts, wrote a remarkable article for the New York Times magazine about his day school's response to his marriage to a Korean-American woman. It's all the more remarkable for the response it has elicited: Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, the best-known Orthodox rabbi in America via his TLC show "Shalom in the Home," has written a column powerfully and truthfully titled, "Stop Ostracizing Those Who Marry Out."

In Feldman's article, titled "Orthodox Paradox," he relates how he and his then-girlfriend took part in an alumni group photo at his day school's 10-year reunion. But when the alumni newsletter came out, he and his girlfriend were nowhere to be found. He says:

So I called my oldest school friend, who appeared in the photo, and asked for her explanation. “You’re kidding, right?” she said. My fiancée was Korean-American. Her presence implied the prospect of something that from the standpoint of Orthodox Jewish law could not be recognized: marriage to someone who was not Jewish. That hint was reason enough to keep us out.

Since then, Feldman has sent news about his marriage and children to the alumni director for inclusion in the newsletter. "None of my reports made it into print," says Feldman.

The strange thing is that no one from the school publicly shuns him. "As best I know, no one, not even the rabbis at my old school who disapprove of my most important life decisions, would go so far as to refuse to shake my hand," he says. Rather, the modern Orthodox community of which the school is a vital part uses a more subtle, but no less effective technique to remind Feldman of the error in his ways: they pretend his intermarriage doesn't exist. And in a community defined in so many ways by marriage, it is very difficult for him to feel part of the modern Orthodox family.

But, at least in this piece, Feldman doesn't seem angry so much as sad, and curious. He finds his own experience with polite ostracization a telling instance of the way that modern Orthodoxy struggles to respond to the secular world.

Ultra-Orthodox Judaism addresses the boundary problem with methods like exclusionary group living and deciding business disputes through privately constituted Jewish-law tribunals. For modern Orthodox Jews, who embrace citizenship and participate in the larger political community, the relationship to the liberal state is more ambivalent. The solution adopted has been to insist on the coherence of the religious community as a social community, not a political community. It is defined not so much by what people believe or say they believe (it is much safer not to ask) as by what they do.... marriage becomes the sine qua non of social membership in the modern Orthodox community.

For Rabbi Boteach to defend Feldman is both remarkable--and completely in character for Boteach. It is remarkable because it so rare for any public Orthodox person to denounce the community's response to intermarriage; it is in character because Boteach is profoundly interested in selling the values of Judaism to the widest possible audience.

Unfortunately, for all of Boteach's traditional practice, he is not held in high esteem in the Orthodox community. He was raised modern Orthodox but joined Chabad as a young man. However, Chabad's leadership rejected him as his mainstream acceptance grew (and especially when he invited Yitzhak Rabin, the architect of the Oslo accords, to speak in New York). Now he might best be considered a Hasidic man with modern Orthodox inclinations using Chabad techniques to reach a largely non-Jewish audience.

Nonetheless, it is no less powerful when he says about Feldman, who he became friendly with when they were both at Oxford:

Of course I wanted Noah to marry Jewish, and I took pride in the fact that I had helped to sustain his observance in his two years at Oxford. But the choice of whom he would marry was not mine to make. Before he got married I wrote him a note that said, in essence, that we are friends and that my affection for him would never change. I told him that he was a prince of the Jewish nation, that his obligations to his people were eternal and unchanging, that whether or not his wife, or indeed his children were Jewish would never change his own personal status as a Jew and that, as a scholar of world standing, I knew he would do great things with his life and that he would should always put the needs of the Jewish people first.

There is an important distinction here, one that in its way, is even more progressive than the typical Reform response to intermarriage. He is saying that the Jewish community should not only be kind and welcoming to intermarried couples, it should do so whether or not the couple decides to raise their children Jewish. Boteach is saying that one can still live a Jewish life and identify as a Jew even if the rest of one's family is not. Our concern should not only be with their children, but with the intermarried Jews themselves, and their value as people. That's an important point that even those of us immersed in outreach often forget. The Jewish present is just as important as the Jewish future.

My guess is that as eloquent as both of their pieces are, they will have little impact on any part of the Orthodox community. As progressive as the modern Orthodox community is relative to the ultra-Orthodox, they are still highly orthodox (small o) when it comes to defining their boundaries. Feldman is already discredited because of his intermarriage, while Boteach is discounted by virtue of his combination of secular popularity, his desire to universalize Judaism (always a no-no among the Orthodox) and his perceived lack of seriousness--he's a host of a TV show, for goodness sake.

But from the progressive Jewish community, or at least from InterfaithFamily.com, I say "Shalom!" to both Feldman and Boteach. They're welcome in our home anytime.

Cassandra vs. Nero?

Jewcy is making a quite a name for itself with its readiness to wrestle sacred cows. It helps when the staff is made up of some of the most talented, eloquent, innovative young Jews around.

This week, Senior Editor Joey Kurtzman goes toe to toe with Jack Wertheimer, provost of the Jewish Theological Seminary, the Conservative movement's rabbinical school. Wertheimer has written extensively about the unwelcome demise of ethnocentric Judaism, a Judaism that is focused on Israel, internal socialization and helping other Jews, while Kurtzman, the product of intermarriage, is a proud defender of a catholic perspective that sees the suffering of Africans in Darfur as no less a tragedy than the suffering of Jews. And the notion of socializing with, or dating, only Jews? Both impractical and nearly "laughable," he says.

Kurtzman launches the opening salvo by arguing that "American life has annihilated Jewish peoplehood.":

Modern American life is the most corrosive acid ever to hit the ghetto walls. Young American Jews are whoring after Moab so fervently that the boundaries between Israel and Moab are being washed away. We‘re not merely influenced by the non-Jewish world—we‘re inseparable from it. Judaism and Jewishness have never had so limited a claim on the identity of young Jews.

Given that plain truth, he says, "It seems to me that if Jewish-American leaders wish for Judaism to survive, they‘ll have to acknowledge that the era of peoplehood has ended, and help reinvent Judaism for modern life."

But, Wertheimer argues, this notion of "reinvention" is a farce, a code for the obliteration of Judaism through "religious syncretism." Of course, he can't argue this without taking a shot at what he calls the "outreach industry":

The extended outreach industry based in synagogues, JCCs, and federations has downplayed the damage, pretending that everything will turn out all right. Christmas trees are really not religious symbols; Easter dinner is really not about Christ. It’s all just a way to be respectful of the Gentile side of the family. What your letter demonstrates is that “Jewish-American mongrels,” as you call them, took these celebrations seriously and are trying desperately to reconcile the irreconcilable components within their own identity.

It seems to me that Wertheimer is misreading Kurtzman's message. Kurtzman doesn't argue that Judaism should be reinvented to incorporate Christianity or Buddhism, but that it should be reinvented to thrive in a pluralistic, secular American culture--and a larger world that is even more energetically pluralistic and secular. To pretend that Judaism hasn't done this before is absurd; American synagogue architecture has always taken its cues from church architecture, the Jewish revivalist movement in the late 1800s followed a Christian one, Zionism was an outgrowth of a larger international movement towards nationalist identities. The largest Jewish movements in the country, Reform and Conservative, both are the creations of Jews who felt Judaism needed "reinventing." But somehow, for Wertheimer, today's demands for reinvention are akin to worshipping a Golden Calf. Kurtzman says Wertheimer has been called a "Cassandra"--one who predicts the future but is not listened to--but he should more appropriately be considered an ostrich.

The dialogue includes many more salient points--on both sides, I may add--and should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand the way modern American Jewish youth sees itself, and the way the previous generation sees Jewish youth.

Intermarriage in Less Religious Countries

It's widely known that the United States is the most religious of the major industrialized countries. Weekly church attendance may be as high as 40% and the great majority of people believe in God. Even the most liberal of politicians feel obligated to affirm their faith on the campaign trail.

I'm not quite sure what the connection between intermarriage and our high level of religiosity is, but it's interesting to notice the contrasts between the U.S. and other industrialized countries. Great Britain and Canada have significantly lower levels of church attendance and yet in both, the Jewish community is much more cohesive and insular--leading to much lower rates of intermarriage than in the U.S.

Diane Flacks, author of Bear With Me, writes in the (Toronto) Globe and Mail about raising children in her intermarriage. She's Jewish, her partner is not. "Is there a more polarizing issue than the place of religion in parenting?" she asks. I would bet no American writer would ask that question. In the U.S., it's a given that religion will take a significant role in parenting.

As she goes on to discuss how she and her partner navigate between her Judaism and her partner's Christianity, she comes to a somewhat conflicting conclusion. She says letting her children "choose" their religion "doesn't sit well with me." She says, "when they're young--when they're looking to us for security--I want to give them something to feel proud of, to feel clear about." And what is that something? "Love," she says. Nothing wrong with that, but it seems a rather vague cop-out when you suggest that parents should dictate a religion for their children. I wonder if it has something to do with a particularly Canadian discomfort with openly declaring your loyalty to one faith.

Meanwhile, the European Jewish Press has a a story on a recent study on Jews in Britain with data taken from the 2001 Census. While intermarriage is quite low in Britain, there are suggestions that it may be inching up soon:

Although the Census did not report an intermarriage rate, the analysis did reveal that 72% of married or cohabiting Jews had a Jewish partner; 19% had a non-Jewish partner.

However, for those who were cohabiting, 68% of all Jewish individuals had a partner who was either not Jewish or had no religion. (Those cohabiting were a tenth of those who were married.)

David Graham, one of the authors and research consultant to the Board of Deputies of British Jews, commented: “Overall, intermarriage, more accurately Jew-to-non-Jew partnerships, is still relatively uncommon. But certain groups, especially cohabitees, show clear signs that strongly suggest change is on the way.”

This may be a function of another piece of information that comes from the report. According to the Census, Jews are more geographically spread-out in Britain than previously thought. Perhaps, as in America, geographical dilution of the community is a cause of higher rates of interfaith relationships. If there are fewer Jews around to potentially partner with, then it's more likely you'll fall in love with somebody who's not Jewish.

The Link Sink

I need to unclog the drains of some links that have been piling up over the last two weeks:

• In what can be categorized as the least surprising news of the last two weeks, the purported "agreement" between the Rabbinical Council of America and Israel's chief rabbinate on conversion standards has hit a snag. Even more unsurprising is that the Israeli rabbinate appears to be to blame, demanding that U.S. rabbis who have never served in a rabbinical court must travel to Israel where they must pass an examination. As the two sides battle it out, sincere future Jews languish in limbo.
• In a much more positive sign of intra-Jewish cooperation, the Conservative and Reform rabbinical seminaries recently announced that a few rabbinical students from each school will train and learn together as part of a pilot program. Beginning in 2008, four students each from the Reform Hebrew Union College and the Conservative Jewish Theological Seminary will take part in joint classes on outreach to interfaith families, outreach to LGBT Jews, leadership development, fundraising and marketing. The Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation will be funding the project.
• In late March, Robert Leiter, a fine writer for The (Philadelphia) Jewish Exponent, wrote an offensive article praising two books titled Why Marry Jewish? and Dear Rabbi, Why Can't I Marry Her? We made our thoughts known in a letter to the editor of the Exponent. It garnered this response from Rabbi Eliezer Shemtov, author of Dear Rabbi.
• The Kansas City Star has the haunting story of a half-Jewish, half-Catholic woman who once stood an arm's length away from Adolf Hitler when she was a child:

  “He had this tremendous look and charisma about him, and he looked right into our eyes,” she said. “I saw his eyes. They seemed like they were violet to me. They had a dark, purplish appearance.”

Posted by Micahs at 10:44 AM | Comments (1)

Intermarriage as a Form of Outreach?

We often speak of Jewish outreach to intermarried families, where progressive organizations and programs can serve as a bridge between the intermarried and the Jewish community. But it works both ways. The intermarried can serve as a bridge between the Jewish community and the non-Jewish community. Intermarriage can actually be a form of outreach to the general secular world.

Rabbi Kerry Olitzky elaborates on this notion in an op-ed for the New Jersey Jewish News:

Numerous Jewish community relations councils (throughout the country and in cities of all sizes) have worked tirelessly to nurture tolerance among various segments of the non-Jewish population. Some of their efforts have been technically defensive but most of the time they have followed the notion that education through familiarity is the key to promoting tolerance. So they make sure that people in the community learn about the rhythms and idiosyncrasies of Jewish life, beginning with simple things such as the rituals surrounding Shabbat, kosher dietary laws, and the timing of the Jewish holidays. All of this is a sincere effort to make members of the Jewish community seem less like "others" or "outsiders" by actively sharing our rites and beliefs with people from other religious backgrounds.

In an effort to find friends in the community to make their work easier, we are missing the proverbial answer that is right in front of us: all of the non-Jewish relatives of those who have intermarried. These relatives can seamlessly be incorporated into Jewish celebrations and life-cycle events, and we know we can count on them to support us. In an era when anti-Semitic events seem to be increasing, we should be able to use all of the resources at our disposal. Why not seek out interfaith families and their extended family members when facing a community crisis or even when there is a need to communicate basic information, including the back story in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict?

In a well-done segment on intermarriage for PBS's "Religion & Ethics Newsweekly" (available in both video and transcript format), Saul Gonzalez interviews voices on all sides of the debate in the Jewish community, including Rabbi Steven Carr Reuben, author of Making Intermarriage Work. Reuben seems to share a similar perspective on the possibilities of intermarriage to open people's eyes to the "other":

It is the natural outgrowth of having a society that is open and free and accepting, where there aren't the same barriers that shut down communities and make people live in ghettos and make people live only with their own religion, or their own race, or their own culture, or their own kind, whatever that might be. Every interfaith relationship is like a pebble in the pond. There are ripples that go out that touch many more people than that couple and their kids.

Engaging the relatives of non-Jewish members of intermarried couples may be the next frontier in outreach. By befriending the extended families of non-Jewish partners, the Jewish community just may find the bigger project--raising Jewish children--to be a little easier than it was before.

Will Intermarriage Lead to a Schism in the Jewish World?

Tahl Raz, the talented editor of Jewcy, a web magazine/group blog for young Jews, recently was interviewed by Shmuel Rosner, Ha'aretz's U.S. correspondent. One of Rosner's favorite subjects is intermarriage--in the past, he's interviewed our own Ed Case, Steven Cohen and Sylvia Barack Fishman--and so he asked Raz about the issue.

Rosner asks Raz for his perspective on six broad themes in the Jewish world today: Jewish peoplehood, Tikkun Olam, intermarriage, Jewish organizations, Jewish renaissance and Hebrew. Raz responds point by point. Here's his perceptive take on intermarriage:

3. Intermarriage:

Significant in that it's crucial that we figure out how to overcome this anachronistic tribal obsession with endogamy. If Judaism and Jewishness are of value in the modern world, they will survive. If not, they won't. Intermarriage will ultimately have little to do with it. In any case, it's a natural feature of modern life, just as endogamy was a natural feature of shtetl life. People who think otherwise are tilting at windmills.

Then, as is typical with Rosner's Q&As, Rosner opened up the questioning to his readers, two of whom ask about his dismissal of the concern over intermarriage as an "anachronistic tribal obsession." His response? He doesn't find opposition to intermarriage "morally distasteful, just hopelessly ineffectual." "In a free and open society," he says, "where we're pitted against the American assimilationist machine, intermarriage is inevitable." He doesn't quite know what the Jewish community's response should be, but he is encouraged by the Jewish community's response to troublesome issues in the past--schisms over assimilation led to Zionism, Reform Judaism and Conservative Judaism.

Intermarriage Around the World

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All Julie Wiener, All the Time

Julie Wiener, our prolific friend at The (New York) Jewish Week, has a new column in today's paper that marks her 10-year anniversary in the Jewish media.

One of the interesting points she tackles is whether or not her column promotes intermarriage? We receive that question--and that criticism--regularly as well, and the answer is complex. Wiener answers it ably:

Does my column, as some have complained, promote intermarriage? That is not my intention. I have no regrets about my own choice of husband (other than wishing he worked fewer hours and was a little handier around the house), but I am hardly out to get new recruits for some interfaith families’ lobby. All other things being equal, I have no doubt that it is easier to live a Jewish life and raise Jewish children if one has a Jewish partner. But I don’t think that means intermarriage is a disaster or, as one sociologist recently claimed, “the single greatest threat to Jewish continuity.”

She goes on to say that she's surprised she hasn't received more hate mail than she has. She credits that to a community where intermarriage has become a fact of life, and not a time of mourning. "Even the staunchest opponents of intermarriage," she says, "now acknowledge that most Jews who marry out are not doing so to rebel against Judaism, but are instead simply choosing to share their lives with a loved one."

What I like most about her piece reflecting on her experience in the Jewish media and her shorter experience as a columnist on intermarriage is that it doesn't play the role of the righteous victim. She points out ways in which the Jewish community could be more welcoming to interfaith families, but also acknowledges when it's doing a good job. That seems like a pretty fair approach to me.

The Link Sink

Julie Wiener, author of the column "In the Mix" for The (New York) Jewish Week, is probably the most widely read regular writer on intermarriage. It doesn't hurt that she's also a terrific writer with an eye for interesting takes on the subject (and she's intermarried to boot). She just started a website to catalogue her columns.

The cover story of the new issue of the j., the Jewish news weekly of northern California, is about interfaith burials. It combines the JTA article from January with original reporting, including the encouraging news that a new cemetery has opened in San Francisco's East Bay that will primarily cater to intermarried couples.

A couple weeks ago, The (Pittsburgh) Jewish Chronicle ran a good-sized story on Scott Shay's flawed book How To Get Our Groove Back, which is based on flawed assumptions about Jewish demographic strength and includes useless policy recommendations like suggesting the Reform movement dump patrilineal descent. The Pittsburgh article covers a number of criticisms of the book.

The j. also has an intriguing article about "identity envy" as well as a cover story from a couple weeks ago about converts who choose Judaism for themselves, not for a Jewish partner.

Steven Cohen Talks

The coverage of Steven Cohen's A Tale of Two Jewries continues, with an audio interview with Cohen by JTA editor Lisa Hostein and an op-ed on outreach and intermarriage from Gary Tobin, president of the Institute for Jewish and Community Research.

Responding to a question about what the most "frightening impact" of intermarriage is, Cohen says, "The most frightening impact is that we haven't yet figured out a way to keep the children... and grandchildren of intermarriage Jewish." He says the communal response to the problem should have two prongs: persuading Jews to marry Jews, and persuading intermarried couples to raise their children exclusively Jewish. He says he has a mixed opinion on outreach. Some outreach, he says, is great because it brings intermarried couples closer to Judaism, but some he says, "advocates a type of lifestyle that blends Judaism and Christianity." But he also says, "It's hard to attribute anything, for well or for good, to outreach." He says there is no evidence that outreach has helped bring intermarried couples closer to Judaism.

Finally, when asked what's new about his recommendations, he says he's advocating for three new ideas: one, getting Jews who are already receiving Jewish education to receive more (which he characterizes as different than getting unaffiliated Jews who receive no Jewish education to receive some); two, financially supporting young adults who are pioneering creative expressions of Judaism in culture, spirituality and social justice, specifically suggesting the creation of a World Jewish Peace Corps; and three, experimenting with community-funded rabbis whose sole job is to respond to the "pent-up demand" for people who want to convert.

It's important to be clear that there is much in what he says that is positive. None of his three specific recommendations for strengthening the Jewish community are in conflict with our goals. All would contribute positively to the inclusion of more intermarried families in Judaism.

With respect to conversion, Cohen, like Gary Tobin in his op-ed, wants the Jewish community to reconsider its traditional resistance to conversion and be much friendlier to anyone who expresses even some interest in converting. I don't disagree. In modern America, where religion is just one more lifestyle choice in a consumer marketplace, the most successful religions are those that market themselves, and make themselves readily available to new adherents (think Scientology and evangelical Christianity). Judaism needs to follow suit. I'm not sure there really is "pent-up demand" for conversion among intermarried couples, and I'm not opposed to having community-based rabbinic counselors available to work with prospective converts--although I think it would be more effective to have those counselors available to work with and be welcoming to interfaith couples whether or not the non-Jewish partner is interested in converting.

However, Cohen's characterization of outreach is way off-base. Contrary to his statement, no Jewish-oriented outreach group advocates the blending of religions. Moreover, his statement that there isn't "any evidence" that outreach is effective disregards every one of the handful of evaluations that have been done of outreach programs that target interfaith families, all of which show significantly increased Jewish behaviors and attitudes after program participation; and it disregards the fact that in Boston, a city with the best-funded, best-organized collection of outreach programs in the country, 60% of intermarried couples are raising their children Jewish. While the preliminiary findings of the 2005 Boston Jewish Community Survey did not make a direct connection between outreach programs and intermarried couples raising their children Jewish, there is potential for that data to be extracted from the study.

I do agree with Cohen's statement that outreach initiatives have been "miniscule" making it hard to attribute impact to them. But the worst thing about the interview is his statement that "we haven't figured out ways to get the intermarried to raise their children as Jews." Cohen takes a "heads I win, tails you lose" approach to outreach that targets interfaith families. He takes false pot-shots at it as advocating blending of religions; admits that outreach initiatives have been "miniscule," but says there is no indication that outreach works; and concludes that outreach programs that target interfaith families are not worth supporting. That approach amounts to a self-fulfilling prophecy that the intermarried will not be encouraged to raise their children as Jews.

Finally, Cohen's tone in A Tale of Two Jewries. One sure way to NOT encourage intermarried families to raise their children as Jews is to talk about intermarriage as the "single greatest threat to Jewish continuity" and to measure the success of Jewish education programs by the number of percentage points they reduce the likelihood of intermarriage. As we've said elsewhere, people won't join a group that they feel demeans them.

A Tale that Wags Are Talking About

A study that says the Jewish community is divided between the inmarried and the intermarried, authored by sociologist Steven Cohen, is finally getting some significant press--more than a month after it was first available.

We blogged about the study in early January. Titled A Tale of Two Jewries: The "Inconvenient Truth" for American Jews, the study argues that the Jewish behaviors of the inmarried are much higher than the Jewish behaviors of the intermarried, and the gap is growing. It says that the Jewish community should partially judge the success of Jewish youth activities by how much they lower the participants' potential for intermarriage. Our criticisms, which are many, with his approach and message, are catalogues in the previous blog post and may also be in a forthcoming JTA op-ed.

In the meantime, Cohen himself has written an op-ed defending and explaining his study in the Jerusalem Post as a response to Jewish Outreach Institute Assistant Director Paul Golin's op-ed criticizing the study. One interesting critique Golin brings up that we didn't mention is Cohen's own admission that zip code may be a more powerful factor in determining Jewish behavior than intermarriage; that is, living near other Jews may be a greater determinant of Jewish behavior than whether you're married to a non-Jew. If that's the case, Cohen's entire argument is baseless. Rather than separating the Jewish population between the intermarried and the inmarried, it should be separated between those who live in Newton, Mass., Brooklyn and Cherry Hill, N.J., and those who don't.

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.

What happens after the divorce?

The Cleveland Jewish News has a fascinating story on interfaith divorce titled "After divorce: will the children still be raised Jewish?"

The article looks at three former "interfaith" couples who are now divorced; I use "interfaith" in quotes because two of the couples are conversionary, that is, the non-Jewish partner converted for the sake of the Jewish partner.

In all three cases, an understanding during marriage to raise the children exclusively Jewish appears to have been complicated by the non-Jewish partners' religious decisions after the divorce. In the two conversionary couples, the converted spouse decided after the divorce to re-adopt Christianity:

"Benjamin" is concerned because he doesn’t know what the mother has been telling the girl about Christmas or Christianity. How will he raise a Jewish child when she spends half her time in a home with no Jewish content and perhaps Christian icons and content? Will his ex agree to take the child to Hebrew school? Will she start taking the child to church?

And here's the story of "Jared," also a Jewish man whose wife converted for their marriage:

“The minute we got divorced, my ex-wife got a christmas tree. I learned all these things (strong feelings about her Catholicism) she had been holding inside for years that really bothered her,” he said. She started going to church as well. Fortunately, Jared had been proactive: His divorce agreement includes a statement to the effect that “the mother acknowledges the children will be raised Jewishly.”

“She stuck to the idea that we had brought them into the world as Jewish kids, and she agreed to raise them Jewishly,” Jared said. However, as often happens in these situations, professionals say, it became solely Jared’s responsibility to arrange for and drive the children to religious school, synagogue, or bar and bat mitzvah tutoring.

Moreover, in addition to their formal Jewish education, Jared’s ex told him that she would, on occasion, expose the children to her church as well as something she didn’t see as contradictory to her agreeing to raise them as Jews.

For me, both of these anecdotes attest to the pitfalls of cosmetic conversion. At InterfaithFamily.com, we support people who make the choice to convert, but we don't push it; when partners convert solely for the sake of their partner, the simmering resentment can lead to more stress, not less, as appears to be the case with Jared and his wife. Or it can provide an illusion of joint religious commitment that's not really there, as in the case of Benjamin and his wife.

Better for two interfaith partners to be honest with themselves and their partners about their religious attachments, and then make the difficult, but clear-eyed, decision on how they'll raise the children. In both cases, if the non-Jewish partner had never converted, the couples would have had to have been proactive and come to an agreement how the children would be raised. It's possible the couples would have never gotten married if both partners were honest about their needs, and it's possible both couples would have stayed married if they were more honest going into the marriage. Even if they still had gotten married and divorced, there would be fewer questions after divorce about how the child would be raised. Benjamin wouldn't worry about what impact celebrating Christmas would have on his child because their pre-divorce family would have probably celebrated Christmas in some way.

At the same time, the writer, Ellen Schur Brown, acknowledges that most divorced Jews-by-choice stay Jewish:

“In the clear majority of cases after divorce, the Jewish-by-choice spouse remains involved in synagogue life or Hebrew school and wouldn’t consider anything different,” insists Rabbi [Joshua] Skoff. Rabbi [Eddie] Sukol of Congregation Bethaynu (Conservative) likewise knows of very few Jews-by-choice who leave Judaism when they divorce.

It is a fact that interfaith marriages end in divorce more frequently than inmarriages, but in the same way that religious issues can be tackled and overcome in interfaith marriages, religious issues can be tackled and overcome in interfaith divorces.

The Link Sink

A few links that have been collecting dust on my desktop:

In j, the Jewish news weekly of northern California, Eliyahu Stern, a graduate student in Judaic studies, wonders "Where have all the intellectuals gone?" It's an elegy for the great rabbinical mind of years past, like Soloveitchik, Kaplan and Heschel--and an indictment of the modern Jewish world, which he feels hasn't produced minds of a similar caliber and appeal. Even without a deep knowledge of the intellectual scene in each of the movements, I can point to a few names, that love them or hate them, always have provocative ideas and make people think: Dennis Prager, Rabbi Michael Lerner, Rabbi Harold Kushner, Rabbi Elliot Dorff. Like the forebears he mentions in his article, these four all are deeply concerned with the theology, philosophy and practice of Judaism, and each of the four has been in the public spotlight. No doubt there are numerous other names, especially among the Orthodox, that I don't know. I think Stern is a bit guilty of the "golden days syndrome" where the men of the past always look better, smarter, more honorable than the men of the present. Only time will tell if any of contemporary intellectuals will leave a legacy as powerful as Martin Buber.

The (Pittsburgh) Jewish Chronicle has trained its focus recently on issues facing interfaith families. Yesterday I told you about an article they did on interfaith burial options. Here's a link to a story on interfaith families sending their children to Jewish day schools. And a while back, they did a story on teenage interdating.

A nice little piece from the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel got lost in the shuffle among the blizzard of December dilemma pieces toward the end of last year. Called "How Should We Approach Interfaith Marriage?" this Q&A with a rabbi and a minister from the United Church of Christ has some useful nuggets of advice for people who are intermarrying.

Interfaith Issues Around the Country

Many Jewish papers have picked up on JTA's story on burial options for interfaith families; several have done their own localized version of the story. The (Pittsburgh) Jewish Chronicle's story, which unfortunately is not on-line, takes a somewhat rosier view of the available options than the JTA story; several cemeteries in the Pittsburgh area allow interfaith burials, although it's not entirely clear how many or which ones. The Jewish News of Greater Phoenix article focuses on the fact that there are numerous options for interfaith burials in the Phoenix area, including a number that allow for side-by-side burials. And a reporter from the New Jersey Jewish News recently contacted us with interest in doing an article on interfaith burial options in his area.

In southeastern Virginia, the local federation has stopped offering an outreach program for interfaith families. The Community Interfaith Program had only been around since 2005, but the United Jewish Federation of Tidewater's executive vice president, Harry Graber, said the program lost steam "because of staffing changes and restructuring by local Jewish organizations," according to The Virginian-Pilot.

Further north, in northeastern Pennsylvania, the local federation has started an intermarriage task force that gives interfaith couples a chance to meet and talk once a month. It's being chaired by Carol Weiss Rubel, the child of an interfaith family who has written for us in the past.

The Good News

We were asked a few weeks ago by the j, the Jewish news weekly of northern California, to write a response to this misguided column on the state of American Jewry by Michael Freund.

Our response is here, and also reprinted below, in its entirety:

Latest surveys are responsible for good news, not bad

by Micah Sachs

It’s amazing how difficult it is for some Jews to accept good news.

In November, the 2005 Greater Boston Jewish Community Survey was released. It showed an exceptionally high rate of intermarried families in the Boston area—60 percent—were raising their children Jewish, which was nearly double the rate from 1995. The authors of the study, who are some of the most respected demographers of Jewish life in the world, pointed out that these families contributed to a rise in Boston’s Jewish population.

Since then, it has come to light that several other cities with significant Jewish populations, including Miami, Baltimore and St. Louis, have intermarried populations where the majority are raising their children Jewish. Taken together, these nuggets of positive evidence should have led to a sea change in thinking about intermarriage: What once was perceived as a threat to the size of the Jewish population is now an opportunity.

Coming almost immediately on the heels of that good news was another happy revelation: Two new studies of the American Jewish population have shown that the National Jewish Population Survey 2000-01 undercounted the American Jewish population by at least a million—which means the American Jewish community actually grew between 1990 and 2000.

That growth discredits the numerous commentators in the United States and Israel who used the notion of American Jewish population decline as circumstantial proof of intermarriage’s deleterious effects.

But even with all this wonderful news that suggests our Kiddush cup is three-quarters full, the naysayers continue to point to the one-quarter that’s empty.

First, in the Forward, sociologist Steven Cohen and demographers Jack Ukeles and Ron Miller tried to discredit the Boston survey’s key finding on methodological grounds. Then, in the Jewish Week, Samuel Klagsbrun, a lay leader of the American Jewish Committee, expressed his deep skepticism over the Boston news because of his suspicion that intermarried Jews aren’t good enough Jews.

Now Michael Freund, the founder and chairman of an organization that seeks to help “lost” Jews, is bemoaning the impact of intermarriage based on his reading of the “unofficial scorecard for American Jewry,” the Sunday New York Times’ wedding announcements page.

While Cohen, Ukeles and Miller base their critique on a researched examination of the issues, it’s amazing that community leaders like Klagsbrun and Freund would rather rely on hunches and dubious anecdotal proof than facts. Instead of relying on “an unofficial scorecard,” why not rely on an official one, like a demographic study of a major Jewish community done by demographers with impeccable credentials? Or two completely independent studies that show the American Jewish population is much bigger than previously thought?

Faced with clear-cut evidence that the American Jewish population is rising — and being unable to link increasing intermarriage with a declining population — critics have retreated to saying it’s the “quality,” not the “quantity” of Jews that’s important.

But noted Jewish demographers Benjamin Phillips and Fern Chertok showed in a 2004 paper that the differences in “quality” of Jewish behaviors between intermarried families raising their children Jewish and in-married Jewish families are not so large. It’s also particularly interesting that much of the discussion of the “quality” of American Jews comes from Israel, which has admitted hundreds of thousands of Russians of questionable Jewish descent in an attempt to fight flattening birthrates.

Rather than relying on hunches and intuition, let’s look at facts. Here they are:

In one of the largest Jewish communities in the country, in the city with the best-funded, best-organized collection of outreach programs, 60 percent of intermarried families are raising their children Jewish. (And in San Francisco, a city with an equally robust outreach presence, the percentage of intermarried families raising their children Jewish is higher than the national average.)

If more than half of intermarried families in a given community are raising their children Jewish, then they are actually raising more Jewish children than their inmarried counterparts.

For reasons not fully analyzed, the American Jewish population grew by more than a million—nearly 20 percent or more—between 1990 and 2000.

To be sure, the battle against assimilation has not been won. The majority of children of intermarriage nationally are still not raised as Jews. There is still much work to do. Intermarried newlyweds could benefit from the “Honeymoon Israel” trip Freund suggests as much as, if not more than, inmarried newlyweds.

But with the persistent threats in Lebanon and the West Bank and Gaza and the emerging threat in Iran, the worldwide Jewish community has more than its share of bad news. When good news comes along, let’s celebrate it.

We can go back to hand-wringing next week.

Micah Sachs is online managing editor of InterfaithFamily.com.

The Orthodox on Intermarriage, Continued

Yeshivas cannot admit the children of Jewish mothers and non-Jewish fathers unless the mother has properly repented, according to a rabbinical ruling quoted on My Jewish Learning's blog "The Mixed Multitudes."

While the Orthodox consider the children of Jewish mothers Jewish even if the father isn't, Rabbi Moshe Feinstein determined that yeshivas should not accept these children and synagogues should not bar mitzvah these children because those actions "may easily be misconstrued as implicit approval of his parents’ lifestyle." Amazing that the Orthodox are so antagonistic to intermarriage that they'd punish a child who's fully Jewish by their rules because the child's mother did something they disagree with.

In other news, the United Jewish Communities and the Jewish Outreach Institute recently partnered to create an online quiz that will help organizations determine how friendly they are to the unaffiliated and intermarried.

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.”

Is This the Truth?

Steven M. Cohen has written another provocative paper, A Tale of Two Jewries: The “Inconvenient Truth” for American Jews, published by the Jewish Life Network/Steinhardt Foundation.

As he has in the past, Cohen compares Jewish behaviors and attitudes--holiday observance, synagogue membership and attendance, having Jewish social networks, providing Jewish education to children, feeling attachment to the Jewish people and to Israel--of in-married Jews with intermarried Jews, looking at data from the National Jewish Population Survey of 2000-01. The first conclusion of Cohen’s paper is this:

The gaps between the in-married and intermarried are so large and persistent that it seems that we are developing into two distinct populations: the in-married and the intermarried…. The identity chasm between in-married and intermarried is wide and gaping, suggesting the imagery of ‘Two Jewries.’... [I]ntermarriage does indeed constitute the greatest single threat to Jewish continuity today.

The fundamental problem with Cohen’s argument is that comparing the Jewish behaviors and attitudes of in-married couples with all intermarried families is uninformative and unhelpful. We know that probably one-third of intermarried families, sadly from a Jewish perspective, are raising their children as Christians (or in the other religion in the home). Obviously the lack of Jewish behaviors and attitudes of that segment of intermarried families skew the overall results. How is it helpful to set up a straw man of all intermarried families that can so easily be knocked down?

What is interesting and helpful is to compare the Jewish behaviors and attitudes of in-married couples with intermarried couples who are raising their children as Jews. In Jewish Identity among the Adult Children of Intermarriage: Event Horizon or Navigable Horizon? (2004), Benjamin Phillips and Fern Chertok of the Cohen Center at Brandeis do just that, and find that the gaps in outcomes are greatly reduced. The Jewish identity of a child of intermarried parents is determined not simply by the fact that the parents are intermarried, but largely by the environment the family creates. They conclude that treating intermarriage as a black hole for Jewish identity is a mistake.

What are the implications of this research? By failing to control for the environment in which intermarried children are raised, the outcomes of intermarriage truly appear to be an event horizon for Jewish identity, a place from which no recovery is possible... But this is not the case--intermarried households are diverse, and those raising their children exclusively as Jews are far from a lost cause... Tarring all intermarriages with the same brush will make the event horizon a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Why does any of this matter? Cohen acknowledges that the purpose of his paper is to influence policy-makers. The logical conclusion for a policy maker to draw from information that there is a wide chasm in Jewish engagement between in-married and intermarrieds is to write off the intermarried and focus on increasing the Jewish engagement of the in-married. In contrast, the logical conclusion from information that intermarried families raising their children as Jews are closer in Jewish engagement to in-married families is to ask, “what can we do to encourage more interfaith families to raise their children as Jews?”

To the extent that the way that Cohen talks about intermarriage is widely disseminated, it will influence not just policy makers, but interfaith couples as well. After describing intermarriage as the great threat to Jewish continuity, Cohen’s second conclusion is that Jewish education “works”--and he ranks just how effectively day and supplemental schools, camps, youth groups and teen Israel travel work by how much they reduce intermarriage. Thus day school attendance reduces intermarriage by 14%; supplemental school attendance, 2%; camps, youth groups, Israel travel, 4% each.

Interestingly, Cohen acknowledges that Jewish education, camps, youth groups and Israel trips “exert salutary effects even in the event of intermarriage…. [E]ven in the event of initial intermarriage, accumulated Jewish education serves to further chances of Jewish continuity, either by increasing the likelihood of conversion… or by increasing the likelihood that the mixed married couple will raise its children exclusively in Judaism.”

If one believes this, then one’s goal should be to get more children of intermarrieds into accumulated Jewish education experiences. But one has to talk about intermarriage differently to attract those children. Cohen knows that the “true challenge to policy-makers is in the area of recruitment” and that how a message is communicated is important: “Clearly the Jewish community has a strong interest in promoting the use of Jewish education. The question is how to do that.” Simply put, you cannot “sell” intermarried parents on the virtues of day schools, or camps, or anything, on the basis that the experience will reduce the chances that their child will intermarry--especially if you talk about intermarriage as the greatest single threat to Jewish continuity.

Focusing on how many children of intermarried parents themselves intermarry is the wrong question; why not focus on the rate they raise their own children as Jews? Cohen says that a majority do not--but that is not the case in Boston, where the recently released 2005 Boston Jewish Community Survey found that 60% of interfaith families there are raising their children as Jews, and thereby increasing the size of the Jewish community. Moreover, Cohen’s analysis focuses on children of intermarried parents who were themselves raising children in 2000-01. Most of the survey respondents were probably raised before 1990, at a time when there wasn’t a resurgence of Jewish educational opportunities, or outreach programs. Phillips and Chertok, commenting on a Hillel study of college students in 2004, note that “this cohort has grown up in a very different environment, one in which children of intermarriage are the norm, particularly in Reform congregational schools, and where just about everyone has a relative who is either not Jewish or is married to someone who isn’t Jewish.” It is too early to tell whether previous rates of engagement will continue.

My hope is that Steven Cohen can be persuaded to promote Jewish education experiences not on the basis of how much they reduce intermarriage, but rather on the basis of how much they increase the chances that the next generation of children will be raised exclusively as Jews. There are comments in his own paper that would support him doing so. He acknowledges that “The decision to raise one’s child as Jewish … affects whether one joins a congregation, observes Jewish holidays, … and a host of other resultant behaviors and decisions.” He says that “The aim, then, is to increase the cultural, spiritual and social capital of today’s Jewish children, so that they will marry other Jews and raise their own Jewish children when they mature,” suggesting that the end goal is not in-marriage for itself, but the raising of Jewish children.

Cohen makes some interesting comments about conversion. The final comment in his paper is that “only conversion substantially improves the chances that today’s intermarried couples will have Jewish children in two generations,” but the statement appears to come out of the blue and is not supported by any discussion. More interesting are these comments:

no statistical evidence supports speculation that the Reform movement’s acceptance of patrilineal descent in 1983 diminished the frequency of conversion; there has been a long-term decline in conversion rates with no particular drop after 1983

people don’t convert in order to have their children accepted as Jews by rabbis; they convert in part out of genuine religious conviction, in part out of concerns for providing a religiously harmonious household and out of a willingness to accommodate the preferences of their Jewish spouses.

people are converting after years of marriage; Cohen says that it’s too early to tell whether the current rate of conversion--15% of non-Jews married to Jews between 1996 and 2001--will increase.

Most interesting, though, is Cohen’s comment that suggests that some number of non-Jewish spouses “switch their identities without the benefit of a formal conversion” and thereby have “conversionary marriages” that “report rates of Jewish involvement that approach those of in-marriages between born-Jews.” That is a comment worth exploring. What Cohen appears to welcome as a “conversionary marriage” may well overlap in significant part with what I would call an interfaith couples raising its children as Jews.

The most tantalizing comment in Cohen’s paper is this: “For the intermarried, outreach efforts may improve engagement of the current generation….” In his op-ed in the Forward commenting on the Boston survey, Cohen questioned whether Boston’s 60% rate of interfaith families raising their children as Jews could be attributed “primarily to targeting interfaith families.” (emphasis added) That “primarily” is pregnant with the possibility that Cohen would attribute Boston’s success in part to its targeting of interfaith families.

So in addition to my hope that Steven Cohen will promote Jewish education experiences not because they reduce intermarriage but because they increase the likelihood of future Jewish children, I also hope that he will come out explicitly in favor of programs of outreach to interfaith families.

From Birth to Death And All Points in Between

There was a great editorial in the Forward a week and a half ago about the two new studies that are showing the American Jewish population has risen since 1990--not fallen, as commonly believed. The editorial makes an important point about why the 5.2 million number, although viewed with widespread skepticism by almost all demographers of the Jewish community, had such traction:

Virtually every scholar of American Jewish population studies understood that the number was wrong, but none of them wanted to descend to the level of polemics. Consequently, the doomsayers and triumphalists had the field to themselves. Maybe now, as the scholarly field begins to speak out, the hysteria can be laid to rest.

Nonetheless, critics of intermarriage have now found a new tactic to denigrate the intermarried: dismiss these important new reports on the American Jewish population as irrelevant, because quantity isn't as important as quality--which is kind of odd, given the worldwide Jewish obsession over the absolute number of Jews.

Meanwhile, the JTA continues its impressive run of stories on the intermarried in the Jewish community with a story by Sue Fishkoff on interfaith couples searching for Jewish cemeteries where both members can be laid to rest. It's one of the less-discussed issues for interfaith families, mainly because intermarriage rates were low when people who are currently in their 70s and 80s were marrying. But in the next few decades, it's going to become a much more significant issue. Luckily, Jewish funeral directors seem ahead of the curve on this issue. The story mentions interfaith-friendly cemeteries in Massachusetts and San Francisco's East Bay that have opened in recent years--and we've recently started listing cemeteries and funeral homes on our Connections in Your Area system. However, as we've learned recently, making a Jewish cemetery more inclusive isn't as simple as just rewriting the cemetery's policies; some are bound by covenants written decades ago that explicitly bar non-Jewish spouses from being buried.

On the opposite end of the life cycle spectrum, Jacob Berkman of the JTA did a story early last month about Jewish institutions engaging families immediately after a new child is born. One such program is called Shalom Baby, which sends gift baskets with information on the Jewish community to parents of newborns. As Rabbi Kerry Olitzky of the Jewish Outreach Institute points out in the story, this is also a great opportunity to engage interfaith families with newborns.

To complete the lifecycle trifecta, JTA also included a story from campusj.com on the way that Facebook.com is changing the way Jews on campus interact with each other, and is especially helpful as a social forum for Jews of mixed descent.

Finally, our op-ed on marketing community day schools to interfaith families is now online.

New Study on Intermarriage from Steven Cohen

I wasn't planning on posting this week, but we recently learned from Shmuel Rosner, the American correspondent for Ha'aretz, that sociologist Steven Cohen is coming out with a new study that calls intermarriage the "greatest single threat to Jewish continuity."

Titled "Two Jewries," the study makes a claim that there are two distinct populations in the Jewish community: the in-married and the intermarried. According to Rosner, Cohen says the in-married are religiou