JOI Announces Outreach Coalition

At its oversubscribed conference in Washington, D.C., earlier this week, the Jewish Outreach Institute announced the creation of a national directory of Jewish organizations committed to reaching out to the unaffiliated, including the intermarried, gays and lesbians and converts. Called "The Big Tent Coalition," the online directory will list organizations that are friendly to the unaffiliated as well as provide a space for organizations to share resources, provide organizations with a "stamp of approval" from JOI and give individuals a place to find outreach-friendly organizations.

Much of this is similar to our own Connections in Your Area system, which also allows interfaith-friendly organizations to sign up and individuals to search for organizations. But the addition of JOI's coalition to the field is laudable nonetheless.

I unfortunately had to back out of the conference at the last minute because we are putting the finishing touches on a redesigned website that will launch on Thursday, Oct. 25. That's why I've been MIA from blogging the last few weeks, and why I will probably blog little again until the relaunch. There will be some exciting new features of the site as it rolls out, and I will keep you updated.

Embracing Intermarriage?

Noam Shpancer, the always controversial columnist for The (Columbus, Ohio) New Standard, an undiscovered gem of a Jewish newspaper, has written a new essay sure to stir up the paper's more traditional readers. It's titled Nu' Ma? Let's embrace intermarriage.

He is for welcoming interfaith families, but for a slightly different, and more radical, reason than typical outreach advocates. He notes that both sides of the intermarriage debate in the Jewish community "agree that protecting Judaism is the superseding goal." For Shpancer, the value of that goal deserves "critical scrutiny."

Promoting Judaism is not superior, as a value, to advancing the cause of humanity as a whole. Being a good person is more important then being a good Jew. And it’s hard to deny that intermarriages, with their tendency to foster the intimate knowledge and full humanization of the "other," embody a more promising future strategy for humanity than the bitter historical legacy of tribal separatism and animosity.

In Shpancer's eyes, outreach advocates' rationale is wrong even if their tactics are right. He sees the value of the continuity of any particular culture as ultimately contingent on its serving the greater purpose of bettering humanity. In Shpancer's view, intermarried couples should be embraced because they promote humanity, not just Judaism. Moreover, the very phenomenon of intermarriage itself--not just already intermarried couples--should be promoted as a way to improve humanity.

If you accept Shpancer's assumption that the ever-greater intermingling of races, religions and cultures will lead to greater peace and harmony, then his argument is rock-solid. But his universalist humanistic ethics are an ideal, not a reality.

While every religion or ideology may start out innocently as a system of universalist ethics, ultimately that belief system must gain cultural trappings to maintain group cohesion. And group cohesion is not merely a way of sustaining power and excluding the "other" to make insiders feel safe; group cohesion and discipline can help enforce sound moral codes. For all the faults of Islamist regimes, a widespread sense of moral responsibility (both self-enforced and state-enforced) keeps crime low. For whatever reason, humans have yet to be able to embrace a non-exclusive universalist system of ethics. We need cultural specificity and defined boundaries. To promote behaviors that don't recognize this reality is naive at best and irresponsible at worst.

The "Communal Welcome Mat"

Adam Bronfman, managing director of the Samuel Bronfman Foundation (one of our funders), has written an important essay for The Forward titled "Let's Put Out a Communal Welcome Mat."

Adam, grandson of Samuel, founder of the Seagram's liquor conglomerate, considers himself both an "insider" and an "outsider" in the Jewish world:

My Jewish education was limited as a child. I did not participate in communal or institutional Jewish life. The concept that I would need to marry-in to be accepted was never discussed.

I married the non-Jewish woman I fell in love with as a teenager, and we have raised four wonderful children. We have enjoyed an exclusively Jewish home for the better part of the last 18 years.

If not for my status as a “Bronfman,” my connection to the Jewish world would be much more tenuous. Where do I fit in? What is my place in the Jewish world and in my Jewish community?

Of course, as a member of a family that has given many millions to Jewish causes, his place in the Jewish world is secure. But there are hundreds of thousands like him, without his family's money, who are not feted wherever they go. In some synagogues and Jewish organizations, they are readily embraced; in others, they are met with suspicion. As Adam points out:

Many of the institutions that feel the warmest to those already on the inside are the chilliest to newcomers, without the insiders ever realizing. Yet each of those insiders has friends and relatives that are not connecting to the Jewish community.

Innovative Outreach Ideas

Our recent conference gathered 40 outreach professionals who are mostly doing the most established kinds of outreach: couples counseling and family education. But what are some new directions for outreach?

One idea comes from the Harold Grinspoon Foundation, which operates the "PJ Library," a project that mails a year's worth of free, age-appropriate Jewish children's books and CDs to less-affiliated families with children, most of whom are interfaith families.

The PJ Library operates in 35 communities across the country. A recent survey showed that most of the families owned virtually no Jewish books before joining the program and now 75% of them read the PJ Library books to their children once a week or more. To extend the successful program into more communities, the Grinspoon Foundation has offered to match up to $100,000 raised for the program in any community by June 30, 2007.

I've also recently been in touch with one of the actors in "Both Sides of the Family," a one-act play about intermarriage by Maryann Elder Goldstein that premiered in Cleveland in December. The play explores interfaith marriage through the lens of two characters: one, a divorced Jewish man remarried to a Christian woman who is raising his second family Christian, the other, a Christian woman raising her daughter Jewish with her Jewish husband. Well-written and well-acted, the play poignantly explores the challenges, both internal and social, that intermarried families face.

The small company that put on the play is looking to turn it into a roadshow in different Jewish communities. It could spark some very interesting conversations.

Our First Ever Conference of Outreach Professionals

Last week was blog-free because I was at InterfaithFamily.com's first-ever conference, a retreat for outreach professionals called "Nurturing Outreach: Embracing the Other, Taking Care of Ourselves." Taking place at the Capital Camps and Retreat Center in Waynesboro, Pa., it was the first-ever national conference for professionals working exclusively in outreach to interfaith families.

More than 50 people attended, including:

• every regional director of outreach for the Reform movement;


• the national director of outreach for the Reform movement, Kathy Kahn;


• Rabbi Chuck Simon, the head of the Federation of Jewish Men's Clubs, who has been doing pioneering outreach work in the Conservative movement for years;


• Rabbi Samuel Gordon, the founding rabbi of Congregation Sukkat Shalom in Illinois, a congregation that caters to the needs of interfaith families;


• Rosanne Levitt, the creator of Interfaith Connection at the JCC of San Francisco, one of the first outreach programs in the country (1986);


• Rabbi Gary Schoenberg and Rabbi Laurie Rutenberg, the creators of Gesher, an innovative 17-year-old outreach program in Portland, Ore., that immerses unaffiliated Jews in home-based Jewish celebrations;


• and other longtime veterans of the field, like Debbie Antonoff, Dawn Kepler, Karen Kushner and Lynn Wolfe.

Among the highlights were a Biblical text study of midrash relating to intermarriage, led by Rabbi Brian Field; a session on research on outreach and intermarriage, led by Dr. Sherry Israel of Brandeis University; and a model outreach program visioning session. One of the most exciting developments was the broad-based support--the hunger, really--for a national organization of outreach professionals. Many of the people who work in outreach work in isolation, with little professional respect and for not much pay, and an organization could help them connect and share information in a way they haven't done before. It could also potentially advocate for them, and the field of outreach in general, among major Jewish funders. As Eve Coulson, former assistant director of the Jewish Outreach Institute and IFF board member, said at the conference, we need to make outreach a fixture in Federation funding, like day schools, camps and Israel.

Judaism Your Way, and "Seventh Heaven"

The Intermountain Jewish News has a great article on Rabbi Brian Field, who leads Judaism Your Way, an innovative "synagogue without walls" based in Denver, Colo.

Judaism Your Way targets unaffiliated Jews, but it's clear that Field's passion is engaging the intermarried. He officiates at interfaith weddings without making any demands that the non-Jewish partner convert. It's not a radical stance, but it is in opposition to the position of the local rabbinical association. Judaism Your Way's services include wedding ceremonies between Jews and non-Jews, baby namings, Bar and Bat Mitzvahs or “alternative coming of age celebrations,” Shabbat services, regular holiday observances, and High Holiday services.

Judaism Your Way functions as an entryway toward Jewish practice, learning and community — if that’s what participants desire.

“One of the things we like to say is that wherever you are along your Jewish journey, we’ll meet you there and help you figure out the next step,” Rabbi Field says.

It’s an accommodating philosophy that sounds eerily similar to the approach used by Chabad.

But Rabbi Field stresses that unlike Chabad or other Jewish outreach groups, Judaism Your Way does not have a Jewish agenda that pulls participants toward more traditional forms of Judaism.

“We have a mutually referring relationship with other synagogues and organizations,” he says. “Congregations refer people to us if the programming members want is unavailable. Similarly, if someone in our group is looking for a deeper sense of community, I refer them to different synagogues, rabbis and Jewish organizations. I’m happy to do that.

“But we’re also aware that there’s a lot more that needs to be done Jewishly to engage all the folks out there. Is there another way of teaching Judaism, studying Torah, praying, and celebrating the holidays and Shabbat that can engage those people whose needs are not being met in existing models?”

I like Rabbi Field's approach a lot. He knows that synagogues aren't reaching some Jews but also recognizes that they offer a sense of community that no alternative community or outreach organization can provide on its own. Contrary to the opinions of some critics, synagogues are not hopeless, but they just need a little help from bridge organizations, like Judaism Your Way and InterfaithFamily.com.

On a random note: in the article, Rabbi Field talks about why he doesn't push the non-Jewish partner to convert. His opinion is that it's a major personal decision and no one should be pressured into it. His explanation echoed a rerun episode of "Seventh Heaven" I happened to catch while I was at the gym last night (which is really my snobby way of pointing out that I don't watch the show regularly).

In this episode, the son of Eric Camden (Stephen Collins), a Christian pastor and the star of the show, is set to marry a Jewish woman who is the daughter of a rabbi played by Richard Lewis. Apparently, the son has been attending synagogue with his Jewish fiance for several months and has been taking a conversion class. In an attempt to sabotage the wedding, Lewis' rabbi suggests that the boy convert immediately prior to the wedding--knowing full well that he'll be scared and Pastor Camden will be pissed. When his son tells him that he plans to convert, Camden gets so upset that he cancels the wedding, arguing that conversion should be a matter of "personal conviction" not parental pressure. The episode is actually a pretty interesting dissection of the whole issue of conversion before intermarriage. It points out one of the pitfalls of pushing conversion. While for Jews, being Jewish often has much more to do with cultural identity than religious belief, for people raised in Christian households, religion is solely a matter of belief. Asking someone to convert who doesn't truly believe--or fully understand--the faith they're adopting is hypocritical at best. Conversion is a powerful, life-changing choice and should never be undertaken lightly, or with a conflicted heart.

The Link Sink

I know you're supposed to clean house before Passover, but here are some interesting links that have piled up in the last week or two:

• Tamara Podemski is an unknown in the U.S. but she's starred on a handful of Canadian TV shows and recorded three albums. Her father is Israeli and her mother is Ojibwa (a native Canadian tribe). She proudly refers to herself as a "fully functional half-breed," and appears to take great pride in her mixed heritage--which, incidentally, produced a gorgeous woman. For more on here, read this profile in the Canadian Jewish News.
• An educational publisher agreed to withdraw and destroy the remaining copies of a reference book on Israel after a major Orthodox organization objected to the book's characterization of Orthodox Jews, according to The (New York) Jewish Week. Agudath Israel of America was upset over a passage in the book that said that "some ultra-Orthodox Jews" want to limit Israel's Law of Return to exclude Reform and Conservative Jews because "they are not really at all because they are not strict in their observance of all the religious laws." There's no question the passage is wrong, but it contains a kernel of truth. It is not uncommon for ultra-Orthodox Jews to ridicule and denigrate more progressive streams of Judaism, especially Reform, because they doesn't fit their strict definitions of what Judaism is. It also taps into the larger issue over conversions and the fact that Israel's acceptance of converted Jews is hamstrung by bureaucracy, corruption and political subservience to the Orthodox.
• Building Jewish Bridges, one of the country's best outreach programs, located in San Francisco's East Bay, recently started a blog. Keep up the good work.


• After they vigorously clean their house of all chametz--non-kosher-for-Passover food, meaning bread, pasta and the like--traditional households "sell" their chametz to a non-Jew and then buy it back after Passover is over. The tradition requires that the buyer be a non-Jew. The Jerusalem Post has an interesting article about the issue, and what happens if you sell your hametz to a non-Jew who is actually Jewish by traditional definitions? The article notes that it is preferable to sell hametz to Arabs in Israel because there has been so little Arab-Jewish intermarriage that one can feel quite secure that the buyer is not "actually" Jewish. It's not remotely the writer's intent, but I found that the piece highlights the silliness of basing Jewish definition on descent rather than practice or self-identification. Under traditional rules, it would be OK to sell hametz to a committed Reform Jew whose mother wasn't Jewish but not OK to sell it to an evangelical Christian whose mother's maternal grandmother was Jewish! Oy.

The Top 50 Rabbis, The Resurgence of Reform Ritual

About two months ago, the Jewish Outreach Institute presented the findings of its "outreach scan" to Jewish professionals in Morris County, New Jersey. To conduct the "outreach scan," JOI cold calls and emails, and checks out the websites of, institutions in a particular area. The goal is to determine how welcoming--or unwelcoming--an area's institutions are to unaffiliated Jews, including the intermarried.

I mention it now because JOI's executive director, our friend, Rabbi Kerry Olitzky, was recently named one of the top 50 rabbis in America by a very unscientific three-man poll published in Newsweek. He ranked 27th, putting him behind such famous rabbis as Harold Kushner and Shmuley Boteach but ahead of such luminaries as Elliot Dorff and Avi Weiss. Rabbis have already started scoffing at the list, but I'm guessing it will draw more attention to the work of many of these rabbis than they've ever had before. A few, like Kushner, Boteach and Michael Lerner, already have a well-established presence in the secular non-Jewish world, but many others are names known only to Jewish community insiders. And while the selection process was bizarre (since when do three Hollywood media barons know so much about rabbis?) and the ranking is biased towards the West Coast, all the names that should be on a list like this are on there.

In any case, Olitzky's presence on the list is not only testament to the valuable work that JOI does, but it also validates the importance that outreach to the intermarried and unaffiliated has assumed in the Jewish community. That's a welcome development.

Sticking with the rabbi theme, at the Central Conference of American Rabbis convention in Atlanta earlier this month, one of the four all-day study sessions focused on increasing ritual observance among Reform Jews. The session, led by Rabbi Richard Levy, the director of the School of Rabinic Studies at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion's Los Angeles campus, focused specifically on mikveh (ritual bath), mezuzahs and the laws of kashrut. The mostly female attendees spoke a lot about mikveh, which has seen an explosion of use among non-Orthodox women (and to some extent, non-Orthdox men) in recent years for uses beyond the ritual monthly immersion following menstruation. The practice of kashrut has also seen more widespread use, often tinged with more progressive values, like a focus on organic and "fair trade" ingredients. These developments show that people can live an observant, ritually rich life within a movement that is very welcoming to the intermarried. Reform Judaism is not simply a "watered down" version of Judaism that is defined primarily by its lack of standards; it can be a proactive, progressive movement full of activities that carry great meaning to its adherents.

The Debate is Over

Shaul Kelner, a Jewish studies professor at Vanderbilt University, takes Steven Cohen--and outreach advocates like ourselves, as well--down a notch with his wonderfully sensible op-ed for The Forward.

Essentially, he argues that debating over the value of outreach to the intermarried is misguided because in a pluralist Jewish world, there are spaces where outreach is promoted and there are spaces where it is shunned:

...one would and should expect that the Reform, Conservative and Orthodox movements will each adopt policies tailored to their particular constituencies and ideologies. The same goes for the federations, Jewish community centers and other agencies.

One size does not fit all. In practice, this is precisely what has been happening. Why, then, isn’t it reflected in the debates that play out in the press?

Ever since the so-called “continuity crisis” was declared in the early 1990s, intermarriage has been treated rhetorically as the hot-button boundary issue portending the demographic decline of American Jewry. Intermarriage has since become a normal part of most American Jews’ friendship and family networks, but the conceptual frameworks that policymakers and expert observers offer seem strangely frozen in time, as if the experience of the past 17 years has meant nothing.

It's a valid point, one made by author Anita Diamant in an interview we did with her for the 200th issue of our Web Magazine. She said opposition to intermarriage is a rearguard action. In Reform synagogues and even many, if not most, Conservative synagogues, intermarriage is an accepted part of life, and non-Jewish partners are an accepted part of the community.

Kelner also makes the good point that prophets of doom and gloom have been predicting the decline of the American Jewish community for years and it still hasn't happened:

In 1990, many read the famous, but exaggerated, 52% intermarriage rate as evidence that the community was collapsing. Instead of decline, the 1990s brought massive institutional growth: day schools, university Jewish studies programs, and even many of the family foundations whose investments of billions into Jewish life are helping set the communal agenda today. The Reform movement, the denomination where intermarriage is most common, did not face institutional decline but rather saw a 13% growth to 896 synagogues in 2007 from 790 in 1985.

And, he could also note, that the Reform movement grew in numbers from 1990 to 2000, as demographer Len Saxe argues in his latest study.

The (New York) Jewish Week Editor Gary Rosenblatt plants another flag for pluralism in his latest column on people who ask to cancel their subscription. One of the most common reasons people cancel is Julie Wiener's monthly column on intermarriage. "Just about every time 'In the Mix,' Julie's column, appears, a few subscribers cancel," he says.

But that doesn't change his resolve to keep publishing the column, he says, because "the way we see it, we simply are recognizing that intermarriage is here to stay--affecting the majority of Jewish families indirectly if not directly--and that our job is to report on the community as it is, not just as we would like it to be."

A Wedding Celebration

Religious differences are of little concern to many interfaith couples until they're planning a wedding. All of a sudden a relationship that thrived with little to no religious content must face the question of whether the wedding will be in a church, who will officiate and how much--if any--religious content the ceremony will have. In a sense, it's when couples with partners from two different religious backgrounds become interfaith couples.

Many outreach organizations, including ourselves, attempt to reach these couples during the beautiful but stressful time that precedes the wedding. A terrific example of outreach for these couples is "A Jewish Wedding Fair," happening next Sunday, Feb. 25, at the Albert L. Schultz Jewish Community Center in Palo Alto, Calif.

Much like typical wedding fairs, it will showcase caterers and bands and include a fashion show, but it will be from a Jewish bent. The bands will be Jewish wedding bands, the artists will be Judaic artists (designers of ketubahs and the like), and organizations from the Jewish community will share information. The fair will also include workshops, many of which are tailored to interfaith couples, including "What Makes a Wedding Jewish?", "Two Faiths, One Ceremony: A Guide to Interfaith Ceremonies," and "Finding Your Perfect Fit... in a Rabbi."

The event is co-sponsored by Project Welcome, the Union for Reform Judaism and the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism. If the high demand for our rabbinic officiation referral service is any indication, interfaith couples are starved for information about how to include Judaism in the wedding.

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 Disney Star and a Samoan Fighter

While many critics doubt whether the children of intermarriage will identify as Jewish over the long term, at IFF we constantly run into examples of children from mixed marriages who identify as Jewish.

Two interesting recent examples include:

In other news, our friend Kathy Kahn, the national director of outreach and membership for the Union of Reform Judaism, will be the scholar-in-residence this weekend (Jan. 19-21) at Suburban Temple - Kol Ami, a Reform synagogue in Beachwood, Ohio. This article in the Cleveland Jewish News details her thoughts on the importance of reaching out to the intermarried.

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.

Responding to the Critics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Critics Respond to the Boston Survey

Steven M. Cohen, one of the leading critics of outreach, has an op-ed on the results of the recent demographic study of Boston's Jewish community in the current issue of the Forward, co-signed by demographers Jack Ukeles and Ron Miller.

Cohen et al first question whether the 60% figure for interfaith families raising their children as Jews reported in the 2005 Greater Boston Jewish Community Study is accurate, based on the way that the question was asked. They acknowledge that the Boston survey was conducted by "distinguished social scientists" who are "first-rate researchers." We have to leave the technical aspects of the survey's accuracy to the its authors, Leonard Saxe and his colleagues, but we are confident they are fully prepared to defend their methodology.

Cohen et al next challenge the survey author's assertion that the 60% rate is "exceptional," citing studies of six other cities, including Cleveland, St. Louis, Miami, Baltimore, Bergen County, N.J., and Hartford, as finding rates of between 59% and 66% of interfaith families raising their children as Jews.

It is a statistical fact that if more than 50% of interfaith families raise their children as Jews, then the Jewish community will increase in size, not decrease. The Boston survey authors emphasized that contrary to the general presumption that intermarriage decreases the size of the Jewish community, in Boston it appeared to be increasing its size.

If studies of single cities--and, by the way, most Jews live in urban areas--are showing that more than a majority of interfaith families are raising their children as Jews, that is great news. It knocks out one of the major underpinnings of the opponents of intermarriage and outreach, that intermarriage decreases the size of the community. Sadly, Cohen et al don't make that point in their essay.

Cohen et al next acknowlege that while not "exceptional," the Boston rate is "unusually high," "indeed in the high range." But they say that this can not be attributed "primarily to targeting intermarried families." Instead, they contend that Boston's Jewish community is "special" with impressive institutions and "exciting opportunities for engagement" including in Jewish education of all sorts. They conclude that the Boston survey "makes no instrumental case for outreach."

We are extraordinarily disappointed that Cohen et al are unwilling to include Boston's targeting of intermarried families as even partially responsible for the 60% figure. It is a simple, undeniable fact that Boston relative to every other city in the country has the most coordinated, extensive and well-funded programs of outreach to interfaith families, and that the Boston federation, CJP, has made outreach to the intermarried a priority more than any other local federation, to the extent of saying so on every invitation to every CJP event. We believe that is what makes Boston special--or certainly at least part of what makes Boston special.

Cohen et al note that the most recent survey of New York city found that only 30% of interfaith families there were raising their children as Jews. Certainly New York city is "special" with impressive institutions and opportunities for education and other engagement. What New York city lacks is any coordinated, extensive and well-funded programs of outreach.

What really matters in all of this is the response of Jewish leaders who are in a position to make funding decisions--the lay and professional leadership of the federations, and the principals and staff of Jewish family foundations. I was frustrated recently when a leading federation executive, when I urged him to try to reach a 60% level of interfaith families raising their children as Jews in his community, said, "if only we knew what to do." I was frustrated recently when the executive director of a major foundation said "we like to fund programs that work" with the unmistakeable implication that he did not belive that outreach programs do. I was frustrated on two separate occasions recently when staff of a major federation and a major foundation said they wanted to do research before funding any outreach programming.

Research is fine. Every study of the impact of outreach programs has shown that a significant increase in Jewish engagement after participation in the programs. We are confident additional evaluations of outreach programs would show the same result, and welcome them. But in the meantime, while waiting for more research, the Boston survey results should be regarded as compelling evidence justifying an investment in the same kind of outreach programs that CJP has funded. We say to Jewish funders: what are you waiting for?

Conservative day schools to admit children of non-Jewish mothers?

There's some exciting news from Florida today. According to a JTA story by Sue Fishkoff, the Conservative movement's Solomon Schechter day schools are considering changing their rules to admit the children of non-Jewish mothers.

It's not a full sea change in thinking; the schools won't accept all patrilineals, only those who convert by Bar/Bat Mitzvah age. That's not the same as the Reform and community day school policy, which accepts children of non-Jewish mothers and Jewish fathers without any conversion conditions.

But it is a very positive development, nonetheless, showing there's some substance behind United Synagogue Executive Vice President Jerome Epstein's speech last year announcing a movement-wide initiative to welcome and engage intermarried families.

In Jonathan Tobin's recent column on the debate over outreach, he set up a dichotomy between inreach and outreach, which is a common tactic of outreach opponents and skeptics. But a development like this collapses the categories; it shows that an exalted form of inreach, the Jewish day school, can also be a form of outreach. It simultaneously socializes Jewish kids together while giving the children of intermarried parents a strong Jewish identity.

We will keep you updated on the progress of this story, because it's not set in stone that the Solomon Schechter schools will decide on the issue. In March, the former head of the Jewish Theological Seminary, Rabbi Ismar Schorsch, urged the movement's summer camps to change their policy on patrilineals but no action has been taken.

Sue Fishkoff also wrote a sidebar on how this potential decision would affect Reform and community day schools. The general conclusion? Not much.

What price outreach?

Jonathan Tobin, the editor of Philadelphia's Jewish Exponent, has written a thoughtful but flawed column on the debate over intermarriage and outreach funding for the Jerusalem Post.

I don't have a lot of time to respond to his arguments--which are well-thought out and well-argued, as all of Tobin's writing is--but the essential point seems to be that he fears that all the talk of outreach to intermarried families will overshadow the importance of programs that seek to socialize Jews (such as day schools, Jewish summer camps and birthright israel trips), and the Jewish community will suffer. To his credit, he isn't against outreach and he feels that the recent survey results from Boston suggest that outreach may be successful. The problem is, he seems to see the message of outreach--and its primary purveyors, like InterfaithFamily.com--as an exclusive one, a message that seeks to denigrate efforts to encourage inmarriage.

For the record, IFF has never denigrated inmarriage, encouraged intermarriage or criticized inreach programs like he discusses. Neither have the Reform movement, the Reconstructionist movement or the Jewish Outreach Institute, which Tobin presumable would include in the "outreach lobby" he refers to.

But more important than any of our words are the Jewish community's actions. The funding for Jewish day schools, Jewish camping or birthright israel all dwarf the Jewish community's funding for outreach to the intermarried. No more than $3 million a year of the Jewish community's money is spent on dedicated programming for intermarried families; birthright israel alone has a $40 million+ annual budget. Numerous cities in recent years have seen donations greater than $3 million to subsidize Jewish day schools. While Tobin may fear a shift in the Jewish community's priorities, we are a long way away--and millions of dollars short--from outreach overtaking inreach on the Jewish community's agenda.

In other news, New Jersey's Jewish Standard has a nice article about Temple Emeth, a Reform synagogue in Teaneck that is doing a series of programs for interfaith couples.

In Israel, the Supreme Court ruled last week that "intermarriage ceremonies performed abroad would be considered valid vis-a-vis inheritance laws" but shot down a district court decision that had "deemed intermarriages legitimate for all purposes," according to Ha'aretz.

Israel, Philadelphia, Detroit

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

A Leaky Tent

If you read The Jewish Week, you've seen Marvin Schick's ads before. Tucked towards the back, they occupy a horizontal half-page and are all-text (small type) editorials on matters of import in the Jewish community. I rarely read them, but his ad from last week--which is also online on his blog--caught my attention.

Titled "As We Continue to Widen My Tent," it is a simultaneous attack on the intermarried and non-traditional notions of Jewish identity. It begins with a lament over the intermarriage statistics first revealed by the 1990 National Jewish Population Survey. He actually is a bit charitable to the intermarried, saying "a great number continued to be involved in a Jewish life," but he cleverly damns the intermarried by guilt of association:

The forces that compelled the acceptance of intermarriage could not escape the impact of changes in American society or Jewish life, changes that impelled most American Jews further away from the moorings of Jewish tradition. An additional pull away from what had been our sense of Jewishness resulted from Jewish identity being determined less by communal norms than by what can be referred to as self-definition.

This he calls "anything goes Judaism," which essentially means practices that don't fit his definition of what "authentic" Judaism is. As an example, he uses the most extreme, bizarre case of an event involving cross-dressers, haiku and booze titled "Golem Gets Married."

Further guilty by association are "some demographers [who] have been hard at work expanding the boundaries of Jewish identity to include persons who do not regard themselves as Jewish, the goal being to increase our numbers and also to promote the legitimacy of ultra-secular experiences that are somehow labeled Jewish." I'm not sure any demographer would agree with him, but then again, they are subject to the same mysterious "forces that compelled the acceptance of intermarriage" that he discussed earlier.

He goes on:

The anything goes mindset is not the final leg in the journey away from even a minimalistic sense of traditional Jewish identity. The pervasiveness of social change and the maintenance of a critical mass who are comfortable with a definition of Jewishness that conforms to their life-style mandates a further enlargement of the tent. Intermarriage is now welcomed in certain quarters and there is the corollary urging that communal resources be directed at those who are most distant, including at persons who are not Jewish.

He then makes the completely bogus claim that "we are told that efforts to promote Jewish continuity should not favor day school education or conventional religious activity," and that "we are told" that the spiritual needs of "at-risk Jews" should be be ignored and that "we should concentrate on those who are distant and unlikely to pay attention to our messages." I'm not sure who the "we" is, nor who it is doing the telling, and the best he can say is "this argument was made at a recent conference on the future of North American Jewry."

The question of funding outreach has never been an either/or proposition. As it is, less than one-tenth of one percent of all Jewish communal funding goes to outreach to the intermarried--does he really think that upping that, even ten-fold, would exclude day school education or the spiritual needs of at-risk Jews? If anything, recent events have shown that support for day school education among big funders is thriving--a whole series of communities have seen massive donations come in in an attempt to subsidize Jewish day school education.

In his final two paragraphs, Schick makes clear what his real game is: deligitimizing the results of the 2005 Boston Jewish Community Study.

Advocates of outreach to non-Jews who are married to Jews have just gotten a boost, perhaps inadvertent, from a report out of Boston claiming that such activity by the local Federation has resulted in sixty percent of the children of intermarried couples being raised as Jews, a figure that is about twice as high as that indicated by NJPS and research in other communities. In all likelihood, the Boston statistic is exaggerated because of the inability of researchers to survey the intermarried who are not involved in Jewish life and/or those who do not have recognizable Jewish names. An added factor that points in the same direction is that Jews who no longer regard themselves as Jewish invariably do not respond to our demographers.

It sounds persuasive... if there were a speck of truth to anything he says.

First, advocates of outreach are not only looking to engage "non-Jews who are married to Jews," they're looking to engage Jews married to non-Jews. But his clever switching of the targets makes it seem like Jewish organizations are spending their time trying to reach people who aren't even Jewish at all and have no interest in Judaism (who he earlier refers to as "peoples who are entirely bereft of a scintilla of Jewish identity.")

Second, he claims that the report from Boston claims outreach activity by the local Federation has resulted in the 60 percent figure. Nowhere does the report make such a claim; as the various articles make clear, this is an explanation that various observers--such as our president, Ed Case--have offered.

Third, his charge that the demographers were unable to survey intermarried who are not involved in Jewish life is baseless. The survey is based on a combination of interviews with 1,400 people from a compilation of lists from Jewish organizations in Boston and 400 people identified from a random digit dialing of 3,000 households in the Boston area. The first group was weighted against the second so as not to provide a disproportionate picture of Jewish behaviors. The random dialing had nothing to do with recognizably Jewish names and in no way favored intermarried people who are involved in Jewish life. Indeed, as the survey showed, the overwhelming majority of Jewish women in intermarriages with non-Jewish men were raising their children Jewish--how many of these women does he think had recognizably Jewish surnames?

Moreover, I should clarify that the authors of the 2005 Boston Jewish Community Study did not engage in any kind of hanky-panky involving the definition of Jewish. In their own words, they say "Jewish adults (ages 18 and above) were defined as individuals who identified as Jews (religious, ethically, or culturally) or who were raised as Jews and did not identify with any religion" and "Jewish children (ages 0 to 17) were defined as such if a parent reported that they were being raised as Jews." This definition is not particularly different from the National Jewish Population Survey 2000-01, which defined Jews as "a person whose religion is Jewish, or whose religion is Jewish and something else, or who has no religion and has at least one Jewish parent or a Jewish upbringing, or who has a a non-monotheistic religion, and has at least one Jewish parent or a Jewish upbringing."

Indeed, the reason for the debate over intermarriage rates that he alludes to early on in his essay is that the authors of the 1990 NJPS deliberately used a more expansive definition of Jewish when calculating intermarriage rates than when authoring the rest of the 1990 report. The intermarriage rate initially reported for the 1990 report was 52 percent because it included as Jewish people with one Jewish parent who were raised in a non-Jewish upbringing. If anything, the demographers were guilty of exaggerating the intermarriage rate in an attempt to demonstrate there was a crisis, rather than the other way around, as Schick suggests.

Here's Schick's conclusion:

We are not now capable of preventing our tent from being enlarged, albeit bogusly, nor can we prevent critical resources from being diverted to meaningless pursuits. We must, however, insist that that which is authentic be supported.

Nowhere in his essay does he prove or even suggest how outreach is a "meaningless pursuit." The best he can do is make totally bogus claims about why the best proof of their success--the recent Boston Jewish Community Study--is producing exaggerated results. If this is the best opponents of outreach to the intermarried can do, then Paul Golin is right: the battle over intermarriage is over.

Trigger-Happy?

We recently received a video from the Robert I. Lappin Charitable Foundation, based in Boston's North Shore. We've talked about the Lappin Foundation before; they fund and manage some great programs for interfaith families, but their spokespeople never miss an opportunity to denigrate intermarriage. This new video is no different. Called "Journey of Faith," it's meant to be a "trigger for discussion" on intermarriage and conversion to Judaism. It's being distributed for free, and intended for "conversion classes, interfaith outreach programs, Introduction to Judaism courses, adult education courses, teen dialogue about dating, marriage and family, pre-marital counseling and training for clergy and Jewish communal workers."

A little more than 10 minutes long, "Journey of Faith" features Doug and Jodi Smith of Marblehead, Mass. Doug was born Catholic and Jodi was born Jewish, but after almost 10 years of marriage, Doug decided to convert to Judaism in 2005. His reason for converting is pretty simple: he wanted to feel a "full" member of his family's Conservative synagogue. He says he was especially struck at the 2005 High Holidays, when he saw his daughter on the bima and knew he couldn't join her.

The video works admirably as a "trigger" to discuss the challenges facing an intermarried couple or an interfaith couple contemplating intermarriage. Before Jodi and Doug were engaged, they agreed to raise the children Jewish. Jodi asked Doug to take a conversion course, which he said was very helpful in understanding what raising children Jewish means (it's not clear whether Jodi was trying to push Doug to convert then or not). He says conversion wasn't the "right thing for me at the time." They went into the business of parenting clear-eyed, anticipating the "bumps" ahead, and decided to raise their children in one religion before they got engaged. They compare that to several of their intermarried friends who have avoided the issue altogether. They are quite persuasive in arguing for the importance of deciding how one will raise the children early-on.

But as a "trigger" to discuss the value of conversion, the video is a failure. While the discussion questions that accompany the video speak of "the tensions that arise from inter-dating and intermarriage" and how being in an interfaith family "wasn't working for Douglas anymore," the Smiths themselves give little indication that there were any problems being an intermarried family raising Jewish children. The only two challenges they mention are Jodi's parents--who didn't originally approve of a non-Jewish mate--and what Doug calls the "biggest challenge," telling his parents about his plans to convert.

So let's get this straight: this video is about the "tensions" of intermarriage and the appeal of conversion, and the only challenges the couple faced were from their parents? If the "biggest challenge" for Doug was telling his parents about his conversion plans, isn't the video then arguing that conversion is a bigger problem than intermarriage? If anything, Doug is getting at one of the major reasons why many non-Jewish partners in intermarriages choose not to convert: they don't want to upset their parents.

While the Lappin Foundation explicitly endorses Jews marrying Jews and non-Jewish partners in intermarriages converting, the video makes living in an intermarriage seem like no big deal. Once the Smiths decided how to raise the children, they didn't suffer through any major tensions or crises. They don't discuss conflicts arising from differing cultural traditions, value systems or politics, or any of the other practical reasons some Jews offer as proof that intermarriages don't work. If anything, "Journey to Faith" proves that intermarriage can work--and conversion is not a necessary step to family peace and happiness.

Outreach, from Reform to Orthodox

There seems to be a real uptick in attention to outreach programs lately.

Last week's issue of the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles had a story from Adam Wills about a community scan that the Jewish Outreach Institute did in the West San Fernando and Conejo Valleys. A community scan works like this: workers from the New York-based JOI anonymously call and email synagogues and community agencies in a particular area pretending they're unaffiliated and Jewishly unknowledgeable to determine how welcoming a particular community is. They also look at websites of local community institutions and interview local Jewish communal professionals. According to the Jewish Journal story, the West Valley/Conejo Valley area was the second most-welcoming community JOI has scanned, with a 77 percent favorable response rate.

Meanwhile, the Jewish Standard, one of the most Orthodox-leaning mainstream Jewish pubs in the country, recently had an article on the formation of a program for non-Jewish mothers raising Jewish children at Temple Emeth in Teaneck, New Jersey. The program is called Mother's Circle, and it's one of numerous new Mother's Circle programs popping up around the country.

The chair of the outreach committee at Temple Emeth, David Zatz, grew up in an Orthodox synagogue but nonetheless married a Presbyterian woman 15 years ago.

"Rejection has not stemmed intermarriage," noted Zatz, expressing support for the Reform movement's commitment to outreach to the intermarried as a way to draw in such families "so that we don't lose as many as we used to [by rejecting them]."

Speaking of the Orthodox, Eternal Jewish Family is sponsoring a conference in Boston Oct. 29-31 on "adopting standards for universally accepted conversion in intermarriage." The conference will include discussions by numerous noted rabbis, including, according to the ads, the Chief Rabbi of Tel Aviv and the Head of the Yeshiva at Yeshiva University.

I don't expect the Orthodox will ever come around to IFF's way of thinking on intermarriage, but it's encouraging that the Orthodox are creaking open the door just a little bit to the intermarried.

In the past Orthodox rabbis wouldn't convert non-Jewish spouses married to Jews because they didn't consider accomodating one's partner as a serious enough reason to convert to Judaism. But in the last year or so, Eternal Jewish Family has been holding events in the Orthodox community that are aimed at finding some small opening for intermarried families. To get into that opening, the non-Jewish spouse has to be willing to undergo a rigorous Orthodox conversion and show a commitment to living a religious Orthodox lifestyle, but it's better than nothing.

Open House?

There was a fascinating story two weeks ago by Sue Fishkoff about a new project called Moishe House, a network of subsidized homes for Jews in their 20s who are committed to building a Jewish community with their peers. In exchange for hosting eight to 12 events a month, making weekly reports and maintaining a website, three or four Jews receive a rent subsidy of up to $2,500 for a month, plus $500 for programming. Funding comes from The Forest Foundation, a Santa Barbara, Calif.-based philanthropy run by a 25-year-old executive director, David Cygielman.

While they all host regular Shabbat meals, the houses aren't restricted to hosting only Jewish-themed events. The houses in Seattle, Los Angeles and San Francisco, for example, host a lot of poker parties and film nights, while the Boston house focuses more on social action.

"I won't tell them what's a wrong or a right program," Cygielman says. "I don't care, so long as they're building community and lots of people are coming."

As anyone who's been involved in Jewish communal life for even a short period of time knows, the 20-something demographic is the toughest etrog to crack. They're not under their parents' roof, like kids and teenagers, they're not clustered in high-density locations, like college students, and they don't require services like preschool or Hebrew school, like young parents. Not only are they hard to find, it's hard to determine what concrete benefits they will receive from engaging in the Jewish community.

But one need that every 20-something has--one that I certainly had not that long ago--was making social connections. Post-college life is a dramatic change from college living; you go from spending 20 hours a week in class and socializing every day and night with roommates, classmates and friends to spending 50 hours a week working, and seeing friends only on the weekends (and that's if you're lucky enough to end up in a city where you know some people). People in their 20s hunger for social opportunities, and the Moishe House model is a way of providing them with that.

As the article suggests, the Moishe Houses are in some ways a recreation of Hillel houses, Chabad houses and Jewish frats in a post-campus environment. The difference is, where those organizations had to compete with dozens of other interest-oriented social clubs and communal homes, the Moishe Houses have the field of communal post-collegiate housing almost to themselves. That's an opportunity.

So how does this relate to interfaith families?

While the culture of Hillel houses differs significantly from one campus to another, we have heard numerous stories of children of interfaith families--especially students whose mothers weren't Jewish--getting the cold shoulder at Hillel houses. And certainly Chabad houses have their own strict traditional agenda. So while college is such a formative time in young adults' identities, some interfaith kids leave college feeling rejected by the most visible organs of Jewish community they know.

The Moishe Houses could be a golden opportunity to engage or re-engage these interfaith kids at a time in their lives when they may not see any visible signs of Jewish community. I don't know what the Moishe Houses' policies are on interfaith kids, and I emailed them yesterday. Stay tuned.

Let's hope that they're not missing the opportunity to remind children of interfaith families how the Jewish community can be warm, spiritually rewarding and yes, even fun.

The Link Sink

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

Attitudinal Shifts in Favor of Outreach

Our friends at STAR (Synagogues: Transformation and Renewal) issued an interesting press release today on their new survey of rabbis' attitudes. Over 100 rabbis who are participating in STAR's programs responded to questions about their goals and views of the future as the Jewish New Year begins.

Of particular interest to us:

"The vast majority [of the rabbis surveyed] (90%) also point to a need within their community to reach out to segments that have historically been less involved, such as gays and lesbians, interfaith couples, single parents, and singles.

'These findings demonstrate openness to community diversity,' says Rabbi [Hayyim] Herring [STAR's executive director]. 'The ground is fertile for these attitudinal shifts to be reinforced in programs and policies.'"

Attitudinal shifts in favor of reaching out to interfaith couples, reinforced in programs and policies--there's a great New Year's resolution!

STAR promotes Jewish renewal through congregational innovation and leadership development and is a philanthropic partnership of the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation, Jewish Life Network/Steinhardt Foundation and The Samuel Bronfman Foundation.

Interfaith Couples During the High Holidays and More

A lot of relevant articles today: