August 2024 News from the Center

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Attitudes, Advocacy, and Change

I had coffee this month with a very experienced foundation professional, very supportive of interfaith family engagement, who I understood to say that advocacy for inclusion was no longer necessary or important. They felt that young people are already inclusive, and they only rarely hear conversion promoted.

When I founded InterfaithFamily (now 18Doors) as a non-profit back in 2001, one main goal was to counter the then-prevalent Jewish intellectual leadership’s persistent vocal negativity about interfaith marriage. It’s true that that has largely disappeared.

It’s also not the first time I’ve heard the need for advocacy questioned. In the first decade of the 2000s the president of one of the largest Jewish foundations told me they wouldn’t fund interfaith family engagement because the issue would go away by itself – again, young people were inclusive, and institutions that weren’t welcoming would wither. In the second decade Len Saxe of the Cohen Center declared that we had largely succeeded in welcoming interfaith families (I said that was premature).

With that background, the biggest news this month was the release by Jewish Silicon Valley of The 2024 Santa Clara County Jewish Community Study conducted by Rosov Consulting. The J’s report highlights that “people in interfaith relationships or with mixed-heritage backgrounds are often deterred because they do not feel ‘Jewish enough’ within Jewish spheres.”

The study found that only just over half of interfaith respondents reported they feel comfortable in most Jewish organizational spaces in the county, and only about half said that Jewish communities in Santa Clara County are welcoming to them. The study concludes that “building a culture of welcoming to diverse identity groups is both a major challenge and an opportunity for the Santa Clara County Jewish community.”

I believe that these findings affirm the ongoing need for the Center’s advocacy work. It is striking that even in the San Francisco Bay Area, regarded as one of the most liberal and intermarried communities in the country, significant numbers of interfaith respondents don’t feel comfortable or welcomed in Jewish spaces and communities.

We are still dealing with expressions of very negative attitudes about interfaith marriage. The most prominent interfaith couple today is of course Kamala Harris and Doug Emhoff. Most comment has been positive, including this nice story about how the relationship inspires her Black Jewish interfaith family, and an essay in The Christian Century about how Harris’s interfaith identity could help her win the election and how her open engagement with the religious traditions in her family “models a healthy way to build coalitions for social justice.”

But in another article about how Harris inspired Emhoff’s Jewish engagement, I was shocked to read this screed from Josh Hammer, senior editor-at-large at Newsweek: “Every Jewish man marrying a non-Jewish woman gives Hitler a victory from the grave. Emhoff is no different.”

Not shocking, because it comes from the right-wing Israeli news publication Arutz Sheva, but still deplorable, was this: “A sad finale to a sad presidency. The world inheriting the intermarried Kamala Harris is the sad ending to Joe Biden’s career.”

It’s important that statements like these not go unchallenged.

Attitudes and policies are changing, as evidenced most recently by the HUC decision to admit students in interfaith relationships, which was the subject of a nice NPR segment by Deena Prichep featuring Samira Mehta, Lex Rofeberg and Andrew Rehfeld. I’d like to believe that advocacy from many corners contributed to that long overdue decision.

I don’t agree that we should just sit around and wait patiently for change to happen. The HUC decision was also the subject this month of a Judaism Unbound podcast which questioned whether HUC, and Hebrew College, and the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, should all do teshuvah for the pain caused by their previous restrictive policies. They pointed out that the policies didn’t just harm the people who were barred from applying to their schools; by implicitly declaring interfaith relationships to be sub-optimal, the policies harmed all interfaith couples. That went on for way too long.

Lessons from Other Contexts

This month there were three interesting pieces that were not about interfaith family inclusion but with thinking that could be applicable to it and promote positive change.

First, the Forward published a powerful, both inspiring and sad, essay about a gay Orthodox rabbi, Shua Brick, who holds a leadership position in a Modern Orthodox community – that’s the inspiring part – apparently so long as he does not date and is celibate – that’s the sad part, to me.

It caught my eye when, after saying that same-sex marriage is incompatible with halacha, Rabbi Brick says that the “follow up” is that “if you love them you’re going to do their wedding, and if you won’t do their wedding, you don’t love them.” This reminded me of Noah Feldman saying in his book that some Orthodox rabbis are officiating at weddings of same-sex couples and wanting to adapt halacha in recognition of the importance of romantic love.

Second, Rabba Yaffa Epstein, senior scholar and educator in residence at The Jewish Education Project, wrote “Instead of red lines, let’s draw 12 paths.” Concerned about divisions and polarization among Jewish people, she says “I understand that red lines will be drawn, and clear boundaries are necessary for a people to understand itself and its values,” but that “the Jewish people have never done well when we adopt an us vs. them attitude.” She describes a powerful image of the twelve tribes walking separately through the Red Sea “being able to see one another, to experience it together, while still maintaining their individuality.”

Rabba Epstein does not explicitly say what kind of boundaries she is talking about, but it must be about Zionism and attitudes towards Israel. Yet the language seemed to me to be very applicable to boundaries around interfaith couples and partners from different faith backgrounds. Like this: “It is the time to move forward, together — united, but not uniform. Unity allows us to tap into our roots as a family, work together and become stronger as a people through our diverse perspectives. We do not need to walk the same path, nor do we need to demonize one another’s paths.” And this: “[S]o much focus, so much energy and so much of the discourse revolves around identifying the ways in which we differ, feeding distrust and highlighting reasons to discount one another. What if we began instead with the reasons why it is imperative for us to find common ground and the windows to see into each other’s worlds? Establishing red lines can come second (or, if we do this work right, they might not even be needed).”

Third, a report in eJewishPhilanthropy about a new program that involves JCCs combatting antisemitism notes that “there are 172 JCCs serving over 1.5 million people every week, a third of whom are not Jewish. The Jews who are members are often not connected to other Jewish organizations or temples.” JCCs have “an incredible opportunity to humanize … Judaism … to a group of individuals who may not interact with the Jewish community in any other way.” It’s not an exact parallel, but I’ve always felt that JCCs have not sufficiently taken advantage of their being very well-positioned to encourage Jewish engagement by interfaith families whose only connection is through JCCs.

Also in the News

  • Hiddush, an Israeli organization that promotes freedom of religion, run by Rabbi Uri Regev, released a survey that half of Israeli Jews would prefer to marry in Israel in non-Orthodox wedding ceremonies. Currently, interfaith couples, same-sex couples, and people who don’t qualify as Jewish by the standards of the Orthodox Rabbinate, cannot legally marry in Israel.
  • I loved the story in the J. that Mark Zuckerberg sings the mi shebeirach – not a traditional bedtime song or prayer – to his daughters. The J. reported that his wife practiced Buddhism, but an item on the People magazine website says she converted to Judaism.
  • In an unexpected TV episode discussion this month, covered in the Forward and Hey Alma, contestant Jeremy Simon tells Bachelorette Jen that it’s important for him that his future children have Jewish identity; Jen says she’s open to it, and has celebrated Shabbat with Jewish friends, but wants children to know her Buddhist traditions; Jeremy says he’s open to that. Unfortunately, Jeremy didn’t make the final three.
  • Kveller had a nice story, “What It Means To Be Jewish-Adjacent.” I’ve never loved the term “Jewish adjacent,” and agree with this author that “all labels have associated downsides and of course won’t feel right for everyone.” But I also can’t disagree that the term “currently meets [her] where [she’s] at.”
  • An interfaith relationship was featured in a rom-com musical, “Sabbath Girl,” in New York City this month.
  • A somewhat unusual essay by a UK demographer notes that the “amidst the sense of crisis about intermarriage in the 1990s, no organisation thought to commission research on Jewish love, sexuality and sexual attraction… Jews are sexual beings and … ‘love’ is an unruly emotion… [T]hose of us who count Jews [are reminded] that behind every demographic statistic, the erotic lurks and will not be tamed.” I understand this as recognition that liberal Jews are motivated by romantic love – hardly a surprise? – and my take away is that of course we need to be inclusive of the couples that result.

May 2024 News from the Center

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After October 7

The JTA Teen Fellowship produced an excellent article, “For teens in interfaith families, the war in Gaza can be a stress test of their Jewish identities,” that describes the experiences of three Jewish teens from interfaith families. Fern Chertok, a leading researcher on interfaith families, said “[b]eing able to learn from different viewpoints is often a dividend for teens from interfaith families… They are the natural bridge builders.” Rabbi Jessica Lowenthal, who works with teens from interfaith families as director of her congregation’s religious school, made the most important point – she “doesn’t see a difference between how interfaith families or other Jewish families relate to Israel, given the disagreements and diverse upbringings among Jews.”

The JFNA staff responsible for a new JFNA survey described in eJP “newfound interest in Jewish life” after October 7, describing a “Surge” of people showing up who previously were not very engaged and who are “craving community.” The authors say this “explosive increase in interest and engagement … is an opportunity and responsibility of historic proportions;” a key response is to “increase belonging,” more training in relational engagement for staff and volunteers, more notice and welcome of everyone. So far, no data has been released on whether the Jewish engagement of Jewish respondents was affected by how their partners who are not Jewish feel in Jewish settings.

New York Community Study

The UJA-Federation of New York federation released the New York 2023 Jewish Community Study, discussed in the New York Jewish Week and in eJP.  

The JTA story only noted that “The rate of intermarriage is lower in New York than among Jews in the rest of the country.” While the overall percent of New York married couples who are intermarried is 37%, it is 46% of all non-Orthodox couples, and 57% of non-Orthodox couples who are 30-49 years old (compared to 34% of those who are 65+).

The eJP report quotes Ira Sheskin as attributing the 6% growth in Jewish households since the last survey in 2011 “in part to interfaith marriages” – “If two Jews marry one another, you get one Jewish household. If two Jews marry non-Jews, you get two Jewish households.”

The study found that 16% of adults in intermarried families report they are raising their children Jewish and 5% Jewish and something else (compared to 96% and 0% respectively in in-married families). Emily Sigalow, one of the study’s directors, is quoted in the eJP story as saying “a lower percentage of interfaith couples said they raised their children Jewish than expected… In other big Jewish communities like Los Angeles and Chicago, there are higher percentages [of people saying their children are Jewish]…” Sigalow “attributed the difference to how pollsters phrase the questions: ‘We asked about how children are raised, whereas others asked about their Jewish identity.’”

Importantly, as to 20% of the children in intermarried families, and 27% of the children in those families under three years of age, the parents have not decided yet on religious upbringing – representing a big opportunity. Moreover, 44% of adults in intermarried families reporting they are raising their children as “none of the above” – yet 66% of those families celebrate Hanukkah and 62% attend a Passover seder. This illustrates the lack of clarity and consistency around what it means to raise a child Jewish, or Jewish and something else, or neither of those choices.

However, only 27% of intermarried households with children held a Jewish naming ceremony, and only 17% have had or are planning to have a bar or bat mitzvah. The low figure for naming ceremonies is understandable given the large percentage of undecideds with younger children, but the low figure for bar/bat mitzvah, when children obviously are older, is concerning.

The study asked questions about the reasons people did not attend religious services, but unlike some other local community studies, did not give as a possible answer not feeling welcome.

Finally, the study asked respondents how important it would be that their grandchildren be Jewish and marry someone Jewish. They conclude from the answers that Jewish New Yorkers feel that “Jewish continuity is important” – suggesting, wrongly I would say, that marrying someone Jewish is necessary for Jewish continuity. In fact, intermarrieds in the survey understood this: while 42% said it was important that their grandchildren be Jewish, only 17% said it was important that their grandchildren marry someone Jewish.

Progress

In March I wrote that Noah Feldman’s new book To Be a Jew Today offers A Fresh Perspective on Interfaith Marriage. This month an article in the Harvard Law Bulletin (where Feldman teaches) says he “explores the tension in discouraging intermarriage amid societal expectations that we should be free to marry whomever we happen to love, writing that ‘there is something troubling about saying that I can only love someone if the person is part of my Us, not if the person is part of my Them.’”

Samir Mehta’s “For American Jews, interfaith weddings are a new normal – and creatively weave both traditions together” is a very pleasant recounting of the ways interfaith couples incorporate their families’ traditions. At the end, under the heading “Tough conversations,” she writes that “Not everything is fun and easy in the world of interfaith weddings.” Couples who she interviewed told her stories about their weddings – but some were about rabbis who would not officiate for them, or family members who disapproved. But she concludes, “Overall, however, most people’s weddings were happy memories that offered hints to the interfaith lives and household that they would go on to create together.”

The second (perhaps annual?) Re-CHARGING Reform Judaism conference is being held May 29 and 30. As I wrote last year, although one of the motivations for the gathering then was “lagging Reform synagogue attendance and declining revenues,” nothing was said about inclusion of interfaith families as a way to reverse declining enrollment. I was pleased to see that this year, 18Doors’ Jodi Bromberg is a panelist, and I hope to report on what was said next month.

Also in the news:

  • In a positive development from Israel, the Supreme Court ruled that non-Orthodox conversions conducted in Israel would be recognized for purposes of Israeli citizenship. Previously, non-Orthodox conversions outside of Israel were recognized, but not those conduced in Israel. One leading political figure “welcomed the ruling, saying, ‘We all need to live here in mutual tolerance and respect.’”
  • A report of a presentation by Dr. Tatjana Lichtenstein, a professor at the University of Texas, on the experiences of intermarried families in the Holocaust.
  • PRRI published a survey on “Family Religious Dynamics and Interfaith Relationships” but unfortunately did not report any data on Jews or Jewish families.

March 2024 News from the Center

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The Jewish world’s attention continues to be focused on Israel and antisemitism. There have been mentions in the media of increased interest in Jewish identity, but they haven’t been connected with inclusion of interfaith families. The topic apparently was not discussed on the agenda or the sidelines at either the Jewish Funders Network or CCAR conferences in March.

One significant development was the release of prominent Harvard Law School professor Noah Feldman’s new book, To Be a Jew Today – A New Guide to God, Israel and the Jewish People. Attention to the book has, not surprisingly, focused on what it says about Israel. But as my enthusiastic review published on the Times of Israel blogs says, Feldman offers A Fresh Perspective on Interfaith Marriage.

Feldman explains how the strong taboo against interfaith marriage has been overcome among progressive Jews by the competing values of free choice and romantic love. I was heartened by two points. First, Feldman suggests that traditional Jews could evolve Jewish law that they consider binding so as to accommodate interfaith marriages, as some have for gay marriages. Second, in what sounds like a radically inclusive Judaism in which partners from different faith traditions are thought of and treated as equal, he says that “the only challenge left” for progressive Jews “is to reframe the acceptance of interfaith marriage as affirmatively positive,” not just a reluctant concession to reality. I hope Feldman’s thinking on interfaith marriage gets the attention among Jewish leaders that it deserves.

Another significant development was the announcement of an important partnership between ADL and 18Doors that will address the need for programs and resources on antisemitism specifically for interfaith couples. As Jodi Bromberg said, “Couples and family members come from a place of love, connection and shared humanity—and yet, these conversations around antisemitism and allyship can be hard to navigate.” This partnership is a clear sign that the ADL recognizes the importance of helping interfaith couples remain allies and feel included in Jewish communities.

II do remain worried that statements, like one in the Boston Globe this week, that the Jewish people “are fundamentally alone,” and ongoing calls for strengthening Jewish peoplehood, by focusing on the “mainstream,” and putting our own oxygen masks on first, could result in pushing interfaith families and partners from different faith backgrounds away. I’m seeing more emails coming from Jewish organizations and professionals ending with “Am Yisrael Chai!” It’s a sentiment I share – may the Jewish people live and thrive.

But “Jewish people” is a shorthand term susceptible to different interpretation. It could mean Jews only. But it could include partners from different faith backgrounds who are not Jewish themselves. As I’ve said before, I wish people would use the term “Jewish community” because it’s more inclusive. The partners from different faith backgrounds and their extended families are the natural allies of the Jewish people – and the Jewish community needs all the allies it can get.

It’s very tricky. In The Jewish Mainstream, Adina Poupko writes that the Natan Fund, which she leads, has paid close attention to “outliers” – people not yet included in Jewish communal life – as “an early funder of LGBTQ inclusion, Jewish farming and environmentalism, new models of synagogues and grassroots communities, and Jewish arts and culture.” (She could have included interfaith families among her outliers – when I ran InterfaithFamily (now 18Doors), Natan was a very influential early funder).

But now, with Israel and the Jewish people at war on many fronts, she says we need to direct more of our funding to “the mainstream”:

“We need to shift from meeting people ‘where they are’ to providing them with opportunities to learn and engage and invite them over to where we are, where most Jews are. We shouldn’t be so accommodating that we turn our communities upside down or compromise on core tenets that are existentially important to nearly all of us.”

Poupko thankfully is careful to say that she’s not suggesting “that we put our support for the outliers on hold.” The point of her essay may be that anti-Zionists should not be accommodated, which is a whole other question. But it would be terrible if Jewish leaders start thinking that, and acting like, we shouldn’t be accommodating to those not yet included in Jewish life.

Finally, Rabbi Moshe Hauer, executive vice president of the Orthodox Union, writes that in the aftermath of October 7 Jews have been “made to feel utterly alone by the hostility of the world,” but that ironically the Jewish spirit of many has been awakened – what he calls “a tidal wave of prosemitism.” Rabbi Hauer caught my eye when he said that we must figure out how to lock in the wave of prosemitism “for those who have yet to firmly establish themselves within the Jewish communal family.” Given the Orthodox Union’s past statements, I doubt that Rabbi Hauer had interfaith families and partners from different faith backgrounds in mind. But there’s always hope.

Also worth reading:

  • In Kriah and a Crucifix: A Rabbi’s Story of Interfaith Mourning Rabbi Simon Stratford, an 18Doors Rukin Fellow, writes that “I’ve realized that in a person’s darkest hours, my role as a rabbi isn’t to set boundaries and limit the participation of mourners but rather to do what I can to make them feel included and supported in their grief.”
  • In The Story of Esther, the Story of Us,  Crystal Hill relates her own interfaith family to Purim’s story of Esther’s interfaith family and current concerns about expressing identity.
  • A group of Orthodox Church and Catholic Church representatives are recommending that the Orthodox Church and the Catholic Church take steps to recognize each others’ marriages.

Noah Feldman on Intermarriage

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I went to a fascinating “conversation” last night between Rabbi Daniel Lehmann, the president of Hebrew College, and Noah Feldman, the Harvard Law School professor and frequent New York Times contributor. Feldman’s July 2007 New York Times magazine article about the reaction of his modern Orthodox community’s reaction to his intermarriage was the subject of heated commentary that our Micah Sachs blogged about extensively at the time.

Hebrew College is a wonderful institution which had a major role in developing the Me’ah program of adult Jewish education, runs Prozdor, an outstanding supplmentary high school Jewish education program, and a few years ago created a trans-denominational rabbinical school, among many other things. Rabbi Lehmann, who only recently became president of the College, said that intermarriage had become a much bigger issue there particularly in the rabbinical school, with issues being presented about whether people who are intermarried could be admitted to the school, or whether people who developed interfaith relationships while in school could be ordained. (Coincidentally, we’ve just published an article by Edie Mueller about her experience fifteen years ago when she wanted to attend rabbinical school and was told she could not be admitted because she was intermarried.)  Rabbi Lehmann said that the issue of officiation at weddings of interfaith couples is also being raised among their rabbinic students.

It is difficult to capture the wide ranging conversation about intermarriage between Lehmann, Feldman and the audience. One interesting thread was when Feldman described an internal tension in the thinking of American Jews about how we should think about who people should marry. After pointing out that a Jew would experience as anti-Semitic a situation where a non-Jewish family objected to their child marrying a Jew, he asked why is it socially normative for only Jews, and possibly African-Americans, to say that they want their children to marry only other like them? Someone made the point that the child of a black person and a white person will still be black, therefore blacks have less reason to insist on endogamous marriage, but the same isn’t true of the child of a Jew and a non-Jew.

After saying that half of Jews are “voting with their huppahs,” Feldman said there is a deep and profound soul-searching going on in the Jewish community about intermarriage, with many people feeling that their Judaism is not incompatible with their being intermarried. I understood Lehmann to say in that context that intermarriage “will certainly weaken” Jewish affiliation or continuity or community, a point that I argued with him privately after the program ended. If there was a flash point in the discussion, that was it.  As is usual in my experience in this kind of setting, the points of view were all over the spectrum. A woman in the audience said with emotion that her intermarriage had not lessened her Jewish involvement in any way. A man in the audience said he was intermarried, very active in the Workmen’s Circle, and his three teenage sons were fluent in Yiddish. Another woman in the after-program private discussions said that the way to prevent intermarriage was for parents to forbid interdating.

Aside from the two audience comments, the one perspective that was not presented clearly by either Lehmann or Feldman was the view that intermarriage is an opportunity for enlarging and enriching the Jewish community. Feldman didn’t discuss how he and his wife are raising their children, and the importance of encouraging and supporting Jewish choices by interfaith couples and families in that regard was overlooked.

This post originally appeared on www.interfaithfamily.com and is reprinted with permission.