December 2018

It’s been busy since Thanksgiving — here’s a round-up of intermarriage news at the end of 2018.

What Christmas Means to Interfaith Families

The Forward today published my essay, “Stop Criticizing Interfaith Families Who Celebrate Christmas.” I’m always happy to appear in the Forward. But writers don’t get to pick titles, and the point of my essay was more a plea for Jews and Jewish leaders to understand what celebrating Christmas means to interfaith families. Instead of extending “happy holiday” wishes to families to whom Christmas is a warm family time without religious significance, too many Jews and Jewish leaders are still worried that “unambiguously Jewish families” won’t result. As I concluded in the essay, “Successfully encouraging interfaith families to engage in Jewish life necessitates that we overcome any lingering discomfort with interfaith families celebrating Christmas. It’s okay to say ‘happy holidays’ to them this week.”

Conservative Movement News

In a potentially very important development, a Richmond, Virginia Conservative synagogue Board has voted to allow its clergy to officiate at weddings of interfaith couples “when the movement formally allows its rabbis to do so.” The Forward’s Ari Feldman calls this “symbolic” but “an unprecedented measure of support for permitting intermarriage within the movement.” Rabbi Michael Knopf explains that his position on interfaith officiation changed. He says the Torah’s prohibition against marrying people from seven specified nations “should be reinterpreted to allow for interfaith officiation when it can ‘be reasonably presumed that the Jewish partner will remain Jewishly committed. Not everyone who marries outside the faith is a flight risk.’” With respect to the argument that intermarriage leads to less Jewish involvement, he says, “if the Jewish community takes a posture of embrace and inclusion towards the people, it becomes even more likely that they’ll deepen their involvement in Jewish life.” Knopf says his synagogue’s decision “was designed to prod the Conservative movement to ease its stance on interfaith weddings. There needs to be grass roots momentum from the rank-and-file if there’s going to be change on this issue.” It will be very interesting to see if other congregations follow suit.

Interfaith Families Increasingly Jewish

There was an important story the day before Thanksgiving, “Interfaith Families Increasingly Jewish,” by Stewart Ain in the New York Jewish Week. It was prompted by a new study of South Palm Beach County by the Cohen Center at Brandeis, which found that 66% of intermarried families were raising their children Jewish (the community is generally older, and the intermarriage rate is only 16%).

Paul Golin said he was struck that “more interfaith households are raising their kids with a Jewish identity than are not — which is the exact opposite of what we were told was going to happen with the increasing rate of intermarriage.”
Tobin Belzer said that the “focus of the next generation of scholars will be to look qualitatively at what it [being Jewish] means.” Instead of being cut off, she said, “there are more interesting avenues for exploring Jewish identity than ever before, and many of them are more inclusive than in previous generations.”
Ted Sasson said “the driver of the change is that millennial children are more likely to receive a Jewish education and other forms of Jewish socialization than other generations … are more likely to attend a Jewish summer camp and Hebrew school and have a bar or bat mitzvah than adults born in the 1960s and 1970s.” But he cautioned against resting on our laurels: “My own view is that the Jewish community invested a lot in outreach and engagement and that it would be wise to double down on that investment.”

Reform Movement Developments

The URJ announced that it will launch a pilot program in 2019 of its Wedding Officiation Network that will “connect couples with Reform rabbis and cantors in their communities to perform wedding ceremonies and lay the foundation for new relationships between young couples and their local congregations or Jewish community.” The URJ is also changing the way it delivers its Introduction to Judaism and A Taste of Judaism courses, away from in-person offerings at local congregations with local URJ staff in a limited number of local communities, to offering centralized support for all of its congregations, with curriculum and marketing resources and online offerings.

Mnookin Book

A new book, The Jewish American Paradox: Embracing Choice in a Changing World, by Robert Mnookin, a Harvard Law School professor, has received a lot of coverage, including an interview by Judy Bolton-Fasman in jewishboston.com, and reviews in the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles and the San Diego Jewish World. I’ll have more to say about the book later. I liked what Donald H. Harrison, editor of the San Diego paper, had to say:

This is a time when considerably more than 50 percent of American Jews are marrying non-Jewish partners, prompting some to believe that whereas the non-Jewish world never could annihilate us with its hate, its love, on the other hand, may so diminish our numbers that American Judaism may someday vanish. Mnookin does not subscribe to this point of view, and neither do I. The Jewish people have many values – among them, love of education, belief in doing acts of kindness, adherence to the idea that we can personally better ourselves and our world – that are appealing to people of other faiths. I know many intermarried couples who, accordingly, are raising their children as Jews. I believe if the Jewish people consistently welcome intermarriage, our ranks will grow rather than diminish.

Young Adults

People say young people look at potential partners from different traditions as equals, and aren’t concerned with interfaith dating. But in JSwipe, Parental Pressure, and Lapsed Catholic Girlfriends: How Young Jews are Dating Today, Sophie Hurwitz, a Wellesley College sophomore writing for New Voices, says, “For many millennial Jews, parental pressure still looms large over their romantic lives. The fears surrounding interfaith marriage that permeate the Jewish community, alongside an idea that dating Jewish is ‘just easier,’ prompts many parents to urge their children to exclusively date other Jews.” The story is based on a handful of interviews, but it is illuminating about the young adult perspective.

Peter Feld, responding to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez announcing that she had Sephardic ancestry, takes a much different view about young adults’ attitudes. He says:

American Jewish life is witnessing a transformation. A new perspective, informed by intersectionality, inclusion and other left values, is replacing the old one marked by matrilineal heritage and religious ritual. On topics ranging from who is a Jew to where to stand on Israel to what policies domestically Jews should support, young American Jews are leading a shift in identity that’s influencing the community as a whole.

The rejection of “concrete identity” in favor of inclusive values and respect for complex origin stories contrasts sharply to the traditional fear of assimilation, which was posed as a constant threat in 20th century Jewish life. Jewish parents and clergy railed against it, organizing youth groups and summer camps to ward it off.

But now, in the relentlessly diverse world of Millennials and Gen Z, this fixation seems hopelessly archaic…. [A] new generation … is [p]rimed to accept how a person sees their own identity instead of acting as gatekeepers.

Responding to Israeli minister Naftali Bennet’s blaming alienation from Israel on assimilation, Feld says,

The likes of Naftali Bennett who wish to connect with American Jews should take note that we respond better to appeals to our core values, and to an inclusive definition of Jewishness, than to fearmongering about assimilation.

More Hanukkah and Christmas

I was surprised to find this wonderful comment in an article by an Israeli about Jewish law surrounding lighting and displaying the menorah:

How many times do we choose to exclude others in our prayer groups, or our Jewish lives because we don’t consider them to be authentically Jewish? There are so many who have joined the Jewish community who are sincere and devoted but who are consistently rejected or viewed with suspicion by some, because we have not yet found a way to see them as valid, as worthy of being “one of us.”

I also loved this comment about the meaning of the word “Hanukkah”:

The essence of the word Hanukkah — a dedication — is the ability of Judaism to continue. And historically, continuity has meant three elements: remembrance, education and resistance. These elements seem especially resonant this year, when history, knowledge, and the ability of the individual and society to stand up are all under attack.

Jordana Horn criticized Ivanka Trump for an Instagram post showing one of her children “looking awed at the magnificent Christmas décor” at the White House, wishing she had posted a picture of her family being Jewish.

In Hanukkah Is Not Christmas. This Year, Let’s Embrace That, another effort to define “Jewish” along traditional lines, Ben Shapiro makes the outlandish claim that “failure to see Hanukkah for what it truly is means that our children will be far more likely to abandon Judaism than to embrace it.” He says what it truly means is “the requirement for a fulsome Jewish lifestyle that infuses our entire being, that motivates us all year, that gives us something to live and die for.” “This authentic view of Hanukkah enables Jews to see Christmas in a different light: not as a competing holiday, but as a ritual complete with aesthetic beauty but lacking any Jewish spiritual relevance.” “If we fail to commit to Judaism more broadly but think that a few presents and some over-oiled hash browns will keep our kids Jewish, we’ve missed the message of Hanukkah entirely.”

The URJ offered a nice article with advice for interfaith couples on talking about and making decisions about celebrating the December holidays (and another about grandparenting interfaith grandchildren). A secular paper in Arizona had a long article about how interfaith couples celebrate.

Recognition

There’s been a flap in Australia, where an Orthodox day school refused admission to the child of one of its graduates and his wife, who converted to Judaism but not under Orthodox auspices. Nine Orthodox rabbis said, “The Torah is eternal and unchanging. It has an inbuilt system that deals with new situations and modern innovations, but the very definition of Jewish identity is not subject to change.”

Suggested Corrections

In a recent piece expressing concern over declining numbers of liberal Jews, Rabbi John Rosove said we need to “reverse the loss of 75% of the children of intermarriages who do not identify as Jews.” Actually, 59% of young adult children of intermarriages identify as Jews.

In a review of Samira Mehta’s Beyond Chrismukkah, How Christian-Jewish Intermarriage Became Normal, Emily Soloff says “By the 1980s, talk about preventing intermarriage or encouraging conversion of one spouse largely disappeared, including from the agenda of my own agency, the American Jewish Committee.” That’s not accurate – the AJC was active in promoting statements about the Jewish future in 1991 and 1996 that took a very dim view of intermarriage, and active in 2000 in the Jewish Inmarriage Initiative.

This essay was originally published in the Forward.

This month, many interfaith families are celebrating Christmas.

Unfortunately, there won’t be many expressions of “Happy Holidays” coming from the Jewish world.

Recently, Gil Troy described the very existence of intermarriage as “the great unspoken yet perennial source of anguish haunting the Jewish world…American Jewry’s great divider,” and said that “no Jewish community could ever survive a 70% intermarriage rate.” A Canadian rabbi described intermarriage as “an internal threat to the Jewish community.”

Some scholars even find interfaith celebrations particularly threatening. In a recently-published volume, Sylvia Barack Fishman wrote about the importance of “unambiguously Jewish households” and questioned what “raising Jewish children” means to intermarried couples. This was a continuation of her earlier assertion, in Double or Nothing? Jewish Families and Mixed Marriage, that interfaith families who “incorporate Christian holiday festivities” into their lives fail to transmit Jewish identity to their children.

Fishman says this is the case even when the families interpret these festivities as not having religious significance to them.

But when considering the significance of holiday celebrations, isn’t it essential to understand what the festivities mean for those doing the actual celebrating?

Holidays, of course, have multiple meanings, and most interfaith families view their Christmas celebrations very differently than Fishman does. To most interfaith families who celebrate Christmas, these celebrations are secular celebrations of their heritage. They are not religious or “anti-Jewish” ones and are an important part of their interfaith identities.

Earlier this month, Michael David Lucas argued that it is hypocritical for liberal Jews to celebrate Hanukkah, which he defined as a celebration of “religious fundamentalism and violence.” But he himself ended up choosing to celebrate it for “the possibility of light in dark times, the importance of even the smallest miracles,” and he might as well have chosen to celebrate it for the value of religious freedom.

Like Hanukkah, Christmas is susceptible to multiple meanings. While a religious Christmas centers around celebrating the birth of the divine Jesus, that’s not what the celebrations mean to virtually all of the interfaith families who partake.

InterfaithFamily has conducted ten years’ of December holiday surveys which found that, of interfaith families raising their children as Jews, about half had Christmas trees in their own homes and virtually all said their Christmas celebrations were not religious in nature or confusing to their children.

The important 2016 Millennial Children of Intermarriage study confirmed what InterfaithFamily’s surveys have shown: “Home observance of holidays from multiple faith traditions did not seem to confuse these children of intermarriage”; they recall holiday celebrations as “desacralized” family events without religious content, special as occasions for the gathering of extended family; “some indicated that celebration of major Christian holidays felt much more like an American tradition than tied to religion.”

A Jewish educator whose child attended a Jewish day school once wrote for InterfaithFamily that a Christmas tree is not “outright Christian,” a statement about the holiday’s meaning that has stayed with me ever since.

She had a tree in her home because her husband “wanted our boys to appreciate the traditions from both sides of the family without necessarily identifying with anything outright Christian…As we see it, our job is to make our family’s Jewish identity so natural, so much a part of us, that it’s not threatened by the presence of a Grand Fir in our living room for one month out of the year.”

In my forthcoming book, Radical Inclusion: Engaging Interfaith Families for a Thriving Jewish Future, I outline three invitations that can be extended to interfaith families, which are relevant year round but especially poignant this time of year.

The first is to engage in Jewish traditions— including Jewish holidays — because they teach compelling values and can serve as a framework to help people live lives of meaning and to raise caring children. Celebrating Hanukkah as a symbol of light, miracles and religious freedom is a prime example.

But when interfaith families are involved, we also have to address Christmas. In 2011, an argument comparable to Mr. Lucas’s was made by two different writers, who argued that interfaith families who celebrate Hanukkah should not also celebrate Christmas, because the meaning of Hanukkah is to honor Jews who resisted practicing any religion other than Judaism.

In a post on InterfaithFamily’s blog, one writer responded:

“I simply fail to recognize how celebrating a secularized Christmas is a danger to me or my Judaism…. The idea that my childhood—being raised to respect and understand the traditions of my father—somehow damaged my Judaism is downright offensive. In fact, I think it would only be more offensive if my mother had insisted upon banishing my dad’s traditions from our home entirely, despite his commitment to raising a Jewish child. Sadly, it’s attitudes like these that lead interfaith couples and their children to feel alienated from, and unwelcomed by, the larger Jewish community — which is the exact opposite of their stated goal. If you ask me, that’s a much bigger problem than the Christmas tree in my living room.”

The antipathy that a decreasing but significant number of Jews still have for Christmas attributes a particular, religious meaning to the holiday and expresses a desire to hold tight to traditional behaviors without modification. But at this point, half or more of young Jewish adults have one Jewish parent, and almost all of them grew up celebrating Christmas similar to the way they celebrate Thanksgiving: As a secular celebration of family and food.

When Elena Kagan was nominated to the Supreme Court, she was asked at her confirmation hearing where she was on Christmas Day. She joked, “Like all Jews, I was probably at a Chinese restaurant.”

It was funny, but we are way past the time when all Jews are at Chinese restaurants on Christmas. Probably half or more are having Christmas dinner with their relatives who aren’t Jewish. We shouldn’t decry that fact, or shy away from acknowledging it, or ascribe a meaning to it that the participants don’t share.

Successfully encouraging interfaith families to engage in Jewish life necessitates that we overcome any lingering discomfort with interfaith families celebrating Christmas. It’s okay to say “happy holidays” to them this week.