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.
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