IFF in New York Times

I was going to write about some other things today--namely, a new JTA article on the conversion of patrilineal Jews--but when your organization gets mentioned in the New York Times, everything else becomes a second priority.

Sam Freedman, author of Jew vs. Jew, wrote a column about an interfaith couple where both partners are committed to their religion, and the difficulties they face during Passover and Easter. Freedman argues, not entirely convincingly, that for religious couples, the Passover-Easter conflict is greater than the "December Dilemma":

The religious aspects of Christmas and Hanukkah were long ago buried under commercialism and seasonal festivity. Passover and Easter remain deeply theological in ways that underscore both the nearness and distance between Judaism and Christianity.

On the one hand, Jesus came into Jerusalem for Passover, and the Last Supper with the disciples was a seder; the wafer in communion harks back to the Jewish holiday’s matzo. On the other hand, beyond celebrating Jesus’ divinity, Easter has historically been the occasion for anti-Semitic passion plays and pogroms, motivated by the belief that the Jews killed Jesus.

It's a good theory, but I have a hard time imagining any more than a few interfaith couples find the Passover-Easter conflict more significant than the Christmas-Hanukkah conflict. Easter may be more religiously significant than Christmas, but Christmas is still the second most important day on the Christian calendar. Hanukkah may not be a major Jewish holiday, but religious Jews celebrate it just as much as secular Jews. Moreover, religious Jews are more acutely aware of the real message of Hanukkah, which celebrates a small band of ideologues who rejected the assimilation of their Jewish countrymen. Passover, at least, provides a more welcoming space for the non-Jewish guest. And religious or not, no couple can get around the month-long onslaught of Christmas-related media that comes out in December. There is no comparable "season" surrounding Passover and Easter. Nonetheless, Passover and Easter can prove a time for conflict and negotiation, as our recent survey revealed.

Shmuel on Saxe

Shmuel Rosner, Ha'aretz's American correspondent, continues his ongoing series of interviews with American experts on Jewish demography and intermarriage with the start of a Q&A with Len Saxe, the co-author of the 2005 Greater Boston Jewish Community Study and the just-published "Reconsidering the Size and Characteristics of the American Jewish Population." Saxe's appearance on Rosner's blog follows interviews over the last year with our president, Ed Case, Steven Cohen, Sylvia Barack Fishman and Ira Sheskin.

As discussed in this space before, the "Reconsidering" study synthesizes the results of 37 population studies to determine the size of the American Jewish population and concludes that there are more than 6 million Jews in the U.S.--nearly a million more than the National Jewish Population Survey 2000-01 estimated. Over the years, Saxe has used demographic data to demonstrate that the intermarried are a vital and growing part of the American Jewish community.

It's interesting that Rosner discusses intermarriage so much in his blog. In a recent The (Pittsburgh) Jewish Chronicle article, he says that Israeli and American Jewish interests are drifting apart; where Israelis are worried about the existential threat of a nuclear Iran, American Jews are worried about the perceived assimilationist threat of interamrriage.

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.

Are We Growing or Shrinking?

The National Jewish Population Survey 2000-01 may have undercounted the American Jewish population by more than 1 million, says a new study just released by Brandeis University's Steinhardt Social Research Institute. A preliminary picture of the study's results had been reported more than a month ago, but the new figures are in: the "core Jewish" population is 6 to 6.4 million--as compared to the NJPS's estimate of 5.2 million.

Why the huge disparity? Before the NJPS was even released, the architects of that study admitted there were numerous flaws that would tend toward undercounting the population. The authors of the new study, Leonard Saxe, Elizabeth Tighe, Benjamin Phillips and Charles Kadushin, ignored the NJPS and based their findings on a synthesis of results of 37 government and independent surveys that addressed religious identification. Their general conclusion was that the NJPS significantly undercounted the non-Orthodox and the young.

This may seem like mere mental calisthenics, but there are important ramifications from the Brandeis survey. For one, if the American Jewish population increased, not decreased, since 1990 (as the NJPS 2000-01 would have us believe), then the American Jewish community is not quite in the kind of trouble that allows advocates of aliyah to argue that assimilation and intermarriage have "ravaged" American Jewry. Secondly, if there are larger numbers of non-Orthodox Jews than previously thought, the argument that Orthodox Judaism provides the only guarantor of Jewish continuity is also diminished. Further, as the authors note, the underestimation of the population may have led to an overestimation of the success of programs--and a misunderstanding of what populations they should reach.

The authors of the study also feel that the NJPS undercounted children of intermarriage who identify as Jewish. They point to demographer Bruce Phillips' studies that say that the NJPS identified more than 1 million children of interfaith couples who should be counted as Jewish but were not. "Including these individuals would bring our estimate to between 7 and 7.4 million individuals," say the new study's authors. "More broadly, the present static analysis does not take account of the dynamic impact of intermarriage. One needs to understand the cumulative effect of intermarriage, as well as to track changes in the Jewish engagement of intermarried families.There is increasing evidence, for example, that more intermarried families are choosing to raise children Jewishly. If that trend continues, it portends an increase in the Jewish population."

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.

Does Fear of Intermarriage Equal Xenophobia?

Shmuel Rosner, the correspondent for Ha'aretz who covers the American Jewish community, continues his ongoing series of discussions relating to intermarriage in America. Previously, he's interviewed our own Ed Case and Double or Nothing: Jewish Families and Mixed Marriage author Sylvia Barack Fishman and written about Steven Cohen's study Two Jewries: The Inconvenient Truth for American Jews.

His newest correspondence is with Ira Sheskin, a University of Miami professor and one of the most prolific demographers in the American Jewish world. He and Arnie Dashevsky recently authored an essay in the 2006 American Jewish Year Book debunking the widespread notion that the American Jewish population was only 5.2 million; according to their survey of nearly 600 local demographic studies, the actual number is more like 6 million.

Whenever Jews talk about demographics, intermarriage is bound to come up. True to form, one of Rosner's readers submits the following question to Professor Sheskin:

I often come across articles addressing the "problem" of Jewish intermarriage. On one hand I understand why there is concern over intermarriage rates. On the other hand I find it repugnant. I know "Jewish" is both an ethnicity and a religion. I think most people (maybe I'm naďve) would agree that worrying about intermarriage between ethnic groups and/or races is distasteful. For some reason it isn't seen as nauseous to worry about intermarriage between religious groups. Why do religious concerns get a free pass here? Isn't it just plain old out-group hostility and xenophobia?

Best, Rich

Here is Professor Sheskin's response:

The purpose of my "interview" is not to examine American Jewish attitudes toward intermarriage. What we do in our demographic studies is to measure the extent to which intermarriage has occurred and the extent to which it affects the Jewish community.

Certainly, American Jewish attitudes toward intermarriage have changed, as it is the rare family that has not had an intermarriage and it is rare that someone does not have close friends who have intermarried.

I am unabashedly in favor of having a strong American Jewish community. I feel this way for two reasons. First, as a Jew, I believe that for those people who are Jewish, their identity serves them in many positive ways, providing (for those who need it) a source of spiritual guidance, a feeling of being part of a group, and, perhaps most importantly a set of shared ethical values. Second, as an American, I want a strong American Jewish community because, through a combination of factors, American Jews have contributed so much to America. I want America to be strong and to be a leader in the world and having a strong Jewish community, I believe, adds to the greatness of America.

Every individual Jew is going to meet and marry (if that is what they want!) someone. That person, in an open society, may be Jewish or non-Jewish. I would hope that the Jewish identity of people would be strong enough that finding a mate who can share in that identity is important. In fact, in looking at data on the types of singles programs attended by Jews age 18-64, we find that the vast majority who attend singles programs are attending Jewish singles programs. So, to many, they want to find a Jewish mate with whom the can share the Jewish part of their lives. The same way that a baseball fan might want to find a mate that shares that interest.

The problem for the Jewish community is that whether there are 5.2 million of us, or 6.4 million of us, we are few in number. Maintaining the Jewish community in many smaller communities in particular, relies on our ability to maintain our institutions. This requires things like membership, attendance, and donations. Unfortunately all of our studies show that intermarried couples are significantly less likely to join, attend, and give. While some intermarried couples do participate in the community, and I believe that the community should be welcoming to those who do, the plain fact of the matter is that most do not and most do not raise their children as Jews.

I do not think that concern about intermarriage is racist or nauseous, or any other word of that nature. We should applaud whenever two people fall in love to the extent that they want to spend their lives together. But the overall effect on the community of a high intermarriage rate is not good for the Jews. And it is not, in the long run, good for America.

It is interesting that Professor Sheskin doesn't explain why fear over intermarriage isn't "plain old out-group hostility and xenophobia." He simply says that it isn't.

This illustrates, I think, one of the reasons why the American Jewish establishment is so unpersuasive in its arguments against intermarriage. For the less-affiliated, more secular kind of people who are more likely to intermarry, diatribes against intermarriage are often going to sound like "out-group hostility and xenophobia." If the Jewish community wants these people not to intermarry, or to raise Jewish children after they've intermarried, then the language needs to be positive, not negative. It needs to argue for the value of living a Jewish life, of observing Jewish rituals, of affiliating with a Jewish community. Look at the most successful religious movements in modern America, the evangelical Christian movements. Evangelicals don't attract followers because they tell them the evangelical community is shrinking, they attract followers because they persuasively argue the value of becoming evangelical.

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.

U.S. Jewish Population Growing?

It's been accepted wisdom that the American Jewish community is shrinking ever since the initial findings of the National Jewish Population Survey 2000-01 revealed that the Jewish population in the U.S. was 5.2 million--a 300,000-person drop from the 1990 NJPS.

This has had important ramifications for the debate on intermarriage, as many--if not most--observers have blamed assimilation and intermarriage as the twin evils behind the assumed population decline. (Meanwhile, few have noted that the Jewish birthrate is below replacement-level. But why blame our educated men and women who choose to have few children when we can so easily blame those "bad" Jews who go off and intermarry?)

The population decrease has also been fodder for some Israeli pols, who have increasingly been talking about the doomed American Jewish pouplation, "ravaged" by intermarriage and assimilation. That's allowed them to hold up their own country as the ultimate model of Jewish continuity (although one might argue that massive Russian immigration has more to do with Israel's population growth than any kind of intrinsic strength).

Despite the widespread use of the 5.2 million number, the NJPS was attacked by a host of demographers before its results were even released. All suspected that the NJPS's methodology may have severely undercounted the American Jewish population.

Now, four years after the preliminary results of the NJPS were released, two separate groups of demographers are coming out with estimates of the American Jewish population at over 6 million. In the just-released 2006 American Jewish Yearbook, demographers Ira Sheskin and Arnold Dashefsky say there are 6.4 million Jews, while Leonard Saxe is soon to release a study that shows there are between 6 and 8 million Jews.

As the Forward article indicates, these are not estimates from the fringes of the demographer community:

“The buzz among social scientists — on the e-mails and over the coffee tables — has been, ‘We all know the number is higher,’” said sociologist Steven M. Cohen, who helped oversee the release of the 2001 National Jewish Population Survey. “We just don’t know exactly how much higher. This is the first post-NJPS effort to come out.”

And apparently, only one prominent demographer still has confidence in the 5.2 million number: Sergio Della Pergola, Israel's most esteemed demographer. I know nothing about him, but the Forward article suggests there may be some political value for him sticking to the older figure since he has personally organized several conferences to discuss the "crisis" of declining American Jewry. Plus, there's no doubt that Israelis like having the bragging rights of having the largest Jewish population in the world.

Regardless of the Israel-Diaspora politics involved, these new numbers should have significant ramifications for the intermarriage debate. No longer will folks like Samuel Klagsbrun be able to talk about "the problem of a shrinking Jewish community," as he did in yesterday's anti-outreach op-ed for the Jewish Week or be able to say that "shrinking is the norm" in other American Jewish communities besides Boston.

I am not claiming that intermarried families raising their children Jewish are responsible for the population increase, but I think the revelation of these new numbers greatly weakens the conclusion that rising intermarriage leads to decreasing Jewish population. I have no doubt, however, that the staunchest critics of intermarriage will still find clever ways to blame intermarriage for all the community's ills.

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?

Boston University Hillel head on the Boston study

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Bloggers on the News from Boston

We're not the only bloggers who have picked up on the implications of the news from Boston that 60 percent of intermarried families there are raising their children Jewish:

As more note-worthy posts come up, we'll keep you, eh, posted.

Our Op-Ed in the Forward

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JTA on the News Out of Boston

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

60% of Interfaith Families in Boston are Raising Children Jewish

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

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

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

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

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

One-Quarter of American Jewish Youth are Orthodox, Says Study

There are more young Orthodox Jews than either young Reform or young Conservative Jews, says a study coming out this week, according to a Nathaniel Popper article in the Forward. Says the article:

While the Reform and Conservative religious movements have long jockeyed for the title of the largest Jewish denomination in America, a new study finds that when it comes to the next generation, the Orthodox movement has the most children affiliated with its synagogues, setting the stage for a future shift in the balance of American Jewish power.

...The new report puts particular emphasis on the figures relating to Jewish children. While only 43% of adults are affiliated with a synagogue, the number is 68% when it comes to Jews under the age of 18, according to Cohen’s computations. Of those young affiliated Jews, 37%, or 224,000, are with Orthodox synagogues. The number is 195,000 for the Reform and 147,000 for the Conservatives.

The article goes on to explain the demographic picture in the Reform and Conservative movements. The Reform movement, it says, "is made up mostly of middle-aged parents with children, while the Conservative movement is dominated by an aging population with fewer children."

When it comes to the numbers of Orthodox children, there's no getting around the fact that that is unfortunate news for champions of outreach to interfaith families. Orthodox Judaism is openly hostile to intermarriage, and the stronger the Orthodox presence in the organized Jewish community, the harder it will be to argue for engagement of interfaith families.

However, I wonder if the the study's approach may have resulted in an overestimation of the Orthodox population. Unlike previous population studies, which only looked at respondents' self-identification as Reform, Conservative, Orthodox, etc., this study, authored by Steven M. Cohen of Hebrew Union College-Institute of Relgion, looked directly at synagogue membership rolls. As Gary Tobin, president of the Institute for Jewish and Community Research, says in the article, "You're better off comparing what people do than what they say."

I agree with Tobin's statement, but the article makes no mention of the curious case of Chabad. While Chabad houses are Orthodox, they make a point of inviting and engaging Jews of all backgrounds. So while Chabad houses promote and encourage Orthodox Jewish practice, many--if not most--of their members are not Orthodox. We haven't seen the study yet, so I don't have any way of knowing whether this is a legitimate issue or not.

I also think the picture the study paints of the Reform movement is encouraging. There was a time when the Conservative movement was the largest Jewish movement in the U.S., but Reform has been larger than Conservative for a number of years. Most observers agree that Reform's growth is in a large part due to the movement's proactive welcoming and engagement of interfaith families. This study provides further substance to the argument that interfaith families can contribute to the vibrancy and growth of the Jewish community. And it may also help prod the Conservative movement to liberalizing its stance towards the intermarried (for example, the Conservative movement currently forbids rabbis from officiating at intermarriages, does not allow non-Jewish spouses to take leadership roles in synagogues and has all kinds of restrictions on the participation of non-Jewish spouses in worship).

When the study comes out this week, we will take a look at it and let you know our thoughts.

Attitudes vs. Facts

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

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

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

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

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

Fuzzy Math

According to a Baylor University study of Americans’ religious attitudes released today, more Jews believe Jesus is the son of God than attend weekly religious services.

At first glance, that’s a distressing and embarrassing result for the Jewish community: on the one hand, nearly 10 percent of Jews believe something that is utterly antithetical to basic Jewish doctrine; on the other, we’re so areligious that few of us attend weekly religious services, despite Shabbat’s centrality to Judaism. But a little bit of basic math quickly casts the numbers in a suspicious light.

One thousand seven hundred and twenty-one Americans filled out the survey that formed the basis of the study’s results. Of those 1,721, 2.5 percent identified as Jewish. That’s 41 respondents.

Of those 41, 9.6 percent said they believe Jesus is the son of God and 7.3 percent said they attend weekly religious services. Translated, four Jews said they believe Jesus is the son of God and three said they attend weekly religious services. I’m not a statistician, but I imagine that neither three nor four nor 41 is a sufficient enough sample size from which one can draw large-scale conclusions.

At the RNA sessions where the authors of the study announced the results, they admitted that the sample size for minority faiths like Judaism, Islam and the Mormons were so small as to not be particularly useful. But at the same time, they published these potentially inflammatory results with no disclaimer or translations from percentages to hard numbers.

Those numbers become even more dubious when you consider that the margin of error for the entire study is plus or minus 4 percent. Four percent of 1,721 is 69. In other words, the margin of error is larger than the entire number of Jews surveyed!

So, according to the survey’s margin of errors, Jews could comprise anywhere from zero to 6.5 percent of the American population, and the number of Jews that believe Jesus is the son of God could be zero—or 100 percent.

The more you break down the numbers, the more the numbers break down.

The God Squad on intermarriage

In their recent column, advice columnists "The God Squad" were asked a question by the Jewish parents of a woman who was marrying a religious Catholic man. The God Squad makes a great recommendation--make a definite choice in how you'll raise the children--but they base this recommendation on some very gloomy-sounding statistics about the future of children raised in Jewish/Christian intermarriages. According to The God Squad:

In Jewish/Christian intermarriages, roughly four out of 10 kids are raised as nothing. Four out of 10 are raised as Christians, and two out of 10 as Jews. Among the grandchildren of intermarriages, about 95 out of a 100 are lost to Judaism, with slightly less lost to Christianity.

The best national statistic we're aware of is that 33 percent of children raised by interfaith couples with one Jewish partner are raised Jewish (which is more like 3 in 10 than 2 in 10). As for how the other 7 of 10 children are raised, there's no clear national statistic. We emailed The God Squad to find out their source.

Stay tuned.