A Personal Note
In this newsletter I recap the month’s developments and news related to inclusion of interfaith families in Jewish life.
A lot happened this month, starting with something personal – with a big interfaith family inclusion angle – my granddaughter’s bat mitzvah this month at Mishkan Chicago.
I’m still glowing from the overwhelming joy I felt. My granddaughter is a beautiful person, inside and out. She did a wonderful job that made her loving family very proud.
Tazria Metzora may be the most dreaded b mitzvah Torah portion. It’s about how people with skin afflictions (translated as leprosy) are treated, and the text is pretty gross. My granddaughter declined my offers to help her with her d’var Torah. She decided to speak about how we treat people who are different or other.
You’ll understand how I was so deeply moved when she said, “often people who aren’t Jewish and who are raising kids within the Jewish community feel othered or judged. My mom has supported me in my Jewish upbringing to get me here today. So we need to appreciate everyone in the community and make room for all of us.”
I was also deeply grateful to my daughter-in-law’s supportive family – her Quaker mother, who I overheard proudly presenting my granddaughter with a book about Jewish women, and her sisters, who opened and closed the Ark, and a nephew who was able to attend.
Rabbis Lizzi Heydemann and Steven Philp are models of inclusivity. My son mentioned the Quaker faith when speaking to my granddaughter. I think many rabbis would have cringed at even the mention of a different faith. But R’Lizzi a few minutes later ran towards it, commenting that we were about to say a prayer, the Amidah, which involved an opportunity for silence like what is common in Quaker services.
On the personal, individual level, there is so much reason for hope: interfaith families that find living Jewishly compelling; families from different faith backgrounds who are supportive; rabbis who “get it.”
On the organizational, institutional level this month, not so much reason for hope, sadly.
18Doors and the Funding Community
On April 7 JTA broke the story, “National support group for interfaith Jewish families guts staff amid funding crisis,” that was reprinted widely in the Forward, Jerusalem Post, Times of Israel, and Jweekly. 18Doors, the organization I founded as InterfaithFamily, laid off more than two-thirds of its staff due to a funding shortfall.
I have no formal connection to the organization. My understanding is that there are discussions about finding homes in other organizations for some of 18Doors’ programs, and about possibly continuing as a smaller organization focused on field building; at this writing, the future is not clear.
On April 10 eJP published my op-ed, “From crisis to opportunity: Now is the time for a serious effort to engage interfaith families.” I said the news was personally devastating, and a loss to the thousands of interfaith families the organization serves and the many Jewish leaders who benefit from its resources and training.
(Coincidentally, at my granddaughter’s bat mitzvah, Rabbi Heydemann told the congregation that InterfaithFamily had helped to change the climate around interfaith families finding rabbis to officiate at their weddings, and Rabbi Philp told me that his participation in 18Doors’ Rukin Fellowship that trains rabbis to be inclusive was very helpful to him.)
I also wrote that the news was an indictment of the funding community which has never adequately funded efforts to engage interfaith families Jewishly.
I’m proud of the work InterfaithFamily and then 18Doors did over the years. We moved the needle towards more interfaith families being more Jewishly engaged to a degree – but not far enough.
As JTA reported, while the rate of interfaith marriage has increased since 2001, most children from these marriages are being raised Jewish, with participation in synagogues and Jewish institutions common. Two seminaries now admit students in interfaith relationships, and the Conservative movement seeks to be more inclusive. For the most part, Jewish leaders, at least in America, are not railing against interfaith marriage.
But far fewer interfaith than inmarried couples are synagogue members, or provide their children with Jewish education. My recent review of a dozen years of national and local Jewish community studies shows that interfaith families feel much less of a sense of belonging to the Jewish people or their local Jewish communities, and some number of interfaith couples still feel like “outsiders” and “other.” Helping interfaith couples and the partners from different faith backgrounds to feel that sense of belonging, essential to their Jewish engagement, remains the challenge of our time.
At least five federations in their recent community studies have stated that it is essential to engage interfaith families [which] requires a strong investment…. So far, that investment has not been forthcoming. Today, only one community, Cleveland, has a robust local program, jHub, that explicitly serves interfaith families with a broad array of services. Every sizeable community should have a similar program, and they should be networked together with a central national organization that also provides resources and training to professionals and lay leaders who want to be inclusive.
I hope that 18Doors can be or play an important role in the kind of national network that is needed — and that the funding community will take the opportunity presented by 18Doors’ crisis to finally fund a serious effort to engage interfaith families. It’s nearly 20 years overdue, but it’s not too late.
Just today, the Cleveland Jewish News has a story about diversity that in part highlights jHub. It quotes a local Jewish professional and says, “the growth of interfaith families and their participation in Jewish life shows the continued celebration of diversity in the community. That said, challenges come along with that, such as being more welcoming to interfaith families in synagogues or religious spaces…. [That’s a challenge that the legacy organizations and the community have to think about.”
Missed Opportunity 1: The Reform movement
Rabbi Esther Lederman, the new head of the URJ’s new Jewish Life & Leadership department, wrote a very nice essay for eJP, “‘I Will Be What I Will Be’: A Futuring Stance.” At one point she says, “The multiplicity of diverse Jewish identities, from racial and ethnic backgrounds to sexual orientation, gender identities, economic backgrounds and neurodiversity, is astounding and beautiful. It is a future that will be richer for encompassing the lived experiences of a greater number of individuals of diverse backgrounds and unique perspectives.”
This was a missed opportunity, perhaps inadvertent, to mention diverse faith backgrounds – which actually is by far the largest diversity in the American Jewish community, and the Reform community in particular. The leaders of the Reform movement seem to think that interfaith family inclusion is at the center of its work because it was pioneered by the movement, and that they have been successful at it, so they don’t need to talk about or prioritize doing anything about it.
But only 13% of interfaith families belong to synagogues. I wouldn’t be satisfied with that level of success.
MIssed Opportunity 2: PJ Library
Lara Knuettel, chief philanthropy officer of PJ Library, wrote a very nice essay for eJP, “It’s On All of Us To Share the Stories of the Jewish People.” She describes a recent PJ Library event where “children could choose books with characters who reflected a full range of Jewish identities and histories” including books in or including Spanish, Russian, Hebrew, Yiddish, and Ladino, and showing Shabbat celebrated in different ways, but with no mention of children in interfaith families.
I agree 100% with what Kneuttel says:
[T]he stories we tell shape how our children see themselves, who they become, and how they engage with the world. The stories we elevate signal who belongs, whose voices matter, and how children come to understand both their own identities and those of others…. [S]upporting the stories children have access to is one way to ensure that Jewish life, in all its variety, continues to be celebrated, shared and passed on from generation to generation.
That’s why I wish she had explicitly mentioned children in interfaith families as among those whose stories PJ Library wants to support. Don’t get me wrong: PJ Library is a great organization, and has made efforts to offer books highlighting interfaith families. But my recent review of local Jewish community studies showed that only 28% of eligible interfaith families received PJ Library books compared to 50% of inmarried families. To change that, they need to talk about and market to interfaith families explicitly, like they have for ethnic and gender diversities.
Missed Opportunity 3: Israel
Zvika Klein, the editor-in-chief of The Jerusalem Post, wrote there about how Israel should “speak to people who stand close to the Jewish story, sometimes very close, but do not fit neatly into one box.”
Klein says there are almost nine million people who are eligible to move to Israel under the Law of Return (presumably because they have a Jewish grandparent) plus “millions” who “seek some form of connection to the Jewish people and the Jewish state.” He says “Israel needs future citizens, loyal friends, serious allies, informed advocates, students, and fellow travelers” and should “open the door wider” with routes and methods to build attachment with these people: “A country that was built to gather exiles should be better at recognizing the people standing near the edge of the camp, waiting to see whether anyone inside is ready to speak to them.”
Yet another missed opportunity: nothing said about the partners from different faith backgrounds married to Jews. Is it unreasonable to expect “one of the world’s top journalists specializing in Jewish Diaspora affairs,” as the Post describes Klein, to say something explicit about that very large group?
Inclusion Is Hard Work
People will engage in a group if they feel that they belong. Being helped to feel belonging is hard – it means being received for who you are, not who the group wants you to become. In Clal’s Wisdom Daily, Reverend Jill Harman explained:
There are spaces that open their doors and make me feel received, and then there are spaces that open their doors but already have a shape in mind for who I should become once I step inside. That difference isn’t always obvious at first. Sometimes a place feels warm and generous and full of good people, and sometimes it really is all of those things. And still, over time, something in me begins to notice that the welcome is leaning somewhere. It has a direction to it, a quiet belief that closeness will eventually soften you into someone easier to claim.
That’s where the ache begins: Even when that pressure is gentle, it changes the feeling of the room. Something in me stops being able to rest, because I’m no longer sure whether the kindness is meant for who I am or for who someone hopes I’ll become. That makes it very hard to stay.
I loved that Conservative Rabbi Ben Herman, coincidentally a current 18Doors Rukin Fellow, made a similar point in “Why We Changed the Rules So Non-Jews Can Be Members of Our Synagogue.” Rabbi Herman describes the distinction between being diverse and being inclusive (citing Verna Myers, who coincidentally I used to work with long ago when I was a lawyer): “‘Diversity is being invited to the party; inclusion is being asked to dance.’ Being invited is wonderful, but without agency in the congregation’s decision-making processes, one is not truly included.”
The article relates that, with Rabbi Herman’s support, 75% of the congregation were in favor of adopting changed by-laws under which “Non-Jews in interfaith relationships are now considered full members of the congregation, and patrilineal Jews may serve on the Board of Trustees.” That’s progress.
But 25% against even being considered members – that’s still a lot of opposition. It clearly signals that many in the congregation are hoping that partners from different faith backgrounds will become something else.
Traditional Attitudes in Canada
The same attitude seems prevalent in Canada. The Canadian Jewish News asks “how important is marrying within the faith to singles today?” and reports on new research based on interviews of fifty-one single Canadian Jews about attitudes towards marriage partners. The singles interviewed, and their parents as described by them, all still seem to be coming from a place where what matters in a partner is their being Jewish – not that what matters is a couple and their family engaging in Jewish life regardless of the religious identity of the partner. There’s an assumption that intermarrying will be disappointing to the parents and problematic to the individual.
Along with those traditional attitudes, there is less interfaith marriage in Canada than in the US, but it is steadily increasing. Fern Chertok and Matthew Brookner from the Cohen Center did a study, cited in this research, that showed increasing acceptance of interfaith marriage, but “many of the couples that were interviewed indicate that they feel not fully accepted by the community,” particularly couples with mothers who were not Jewish. Several couples also reported pressure for conversion. One interviewee said, “in some congregations, it feels like if you’re not Jewish, you can come but you can’t really be part of things.”
The Canadian Jewish News also summarizes a new study of intermarriage in Canada, which says, “Our research suggests that, if the Jewish community can recruit more Jewish children to Jewish day schools and summer camps and attract more Jewish immigrants to Canada, the increasing rate of Jewish intermarriage may slow.” The researchers clearly seem to be coming from a perspective that interfaith marriage is undesirable, something to be discouraged if not prevented. They even suggest that increasing antisemitism may slow the intermarriage rate. Increasing antisemitism can’t be a good thing.
In Other News
- Noah Wyle, star of The Pitt, talks with the British Jewish press about his Jewish background
- It’s now clear that Season 3 of “Nobody Wants This” will be about conversion – with Sarah Silverman playing the rabbi who leads Joanne’s conversion class.
*****
A sad note: Jim Ball, one of the original board members of InterfaithFamily, died this month. I met Jim nearly forty years ago when we were both involved in the Reform movement’s northeast region outreach committee. A convert himself, he understood the importance of interfaith family inclusion and was always a kind, interesting and helpful board member. Sincere condolences to his wife Anita Diamant and daughter Emilia Diamant.
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