We’re a Core Grantee!

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We are thrilled to announce that InterfaithFamily has received a “core grant” from the Natan Fund.

We’ve been grateful to have been funded by Natan for several years in one of their areas of interest, but being included as a core grantee, one of “a highly selective group of organizations that Natan has funded for more than three years,” is a great honor:

Core Grantees are those organizations most closely aligned with Natan’s grantmaking mission. Their exceptional leadership develops programs with significant and measurable impact, and they have the potential to make systemic change in the field in which they are working.

Considering who the other core grantees are, the honor is even greater: G-dcast, Hazon, Ikar, Keshet, Moishe House, and Olim Behayad (an organization that enables Ethiopian Israeli university graduates to find academic employment).

And the honor is still greater because the recognition comes from “a giving circle of young philanthropists dedicated to funding Jewish and Israeli nonprofit innovation,” as described in eJewishPhilanthropy last week.

Thank you!

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

Leaders by Choice

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There is a fascinating new issue of Sh’ma just out on the topic “leaders by choice.” InterfaithFamily’s Board Chair Mamie Kanfer Stewart, in No Conversion Required, writes:

[W]e have an opportunity to reframe the question, “Who is a Jew?” into “Who is part of the Jewish community?” Rather than focusing on Jewish status, we can honor everyone, Jewish or not, who is bringing the riches of Jewish traditions and sensibilities to our lives.

Our Board member, Lydia Kukoff, in Radical Choices: Conversion and Leadership, concludes:

One doesn’t have to be born a Jew to become a Jew and to be a Jewish leader. Are we ready to create a thoughtful campaign that welcomes non-Jews who profess no religion and encourage them to explore Judaism? The midrash teaches that Abraham and Sarah opened all four corners of their tent to welcome the stranger. Sarah converted the women and Abraham converted the men. How open are we?

The issue includes many other points of view and is well worth reading!

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

Intermarried Rabbis and Intermarriage Attitudes

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We’re back from Passover and there was a flurry of commentary about intermarriage in the Jewish media. Last week Benjamin Maron blogged about Rabbinical Students and Intermarriage, picking up on Rebecca Goodman’s February post on Rabbis and Intermarriage. This is all started when Daniel Kirzane, a rabbinic student at the Reform movement’s Hebrew Union College and the child of intermarried parents, wrote in a debate in Reform Judaism magazine that that seminary should admit students with non-Jewish partners — which it currently does not allow. (This debate has been going on at least since I blogged about it in 2009.)

Benjamin pointed out that a Reform rabbi, Mark Miller, wrote a rather scathing article in the Times of Israel, lamenting Reform Judaism’s supposed “embrace of assimilation.” I want to bring to your attention Aliza Worthington’s very powerful response, also in the Times of Israel, Rigidity is the real threat to Jewish continuity. Worthington tells her personal story of Jewish engagement despite — or perhaps because of — her own intermarriage, the welcome she and her husband received, how she shares Judaism now with her children — and then describes Miller’s response to Kirzane as follows:

You are taking people who have chosen Judaism — chosen it! — and shoving them away. Here is someone [Kirzane] who was born of an intermarriage of faiths, and he not only chose Judaism to follow, to study, but to live and to teach! And you belittle his parents’ love because it somehow makes his Judaism less authentic to you? You deny him his learning and his future livelihood should he fall in love with someone who is not Jewish? You’re worried that a rabbi who marries a gentile is threatening and disgraceful to the Jewish faith? Even though he cherishes Judaism.

I respect your education and career. I admire your devotion to our shared faith. I worry, though, that you have grossly misidentified the real threats to Judaism: Sanctimony, Superiority, and Judgmentalism.

Sadly but not surprisingly, Worthington’s essay attracted vituperative comments which spurred Adin Feder, a high school student at Boston’s Gann Academy — a pluralistic Jewish day school — to write in The Threat of Warrantless Hatred:

…the problem is the absolutism and rigidity of those who write off and bash Jews who intermarry or subscribe to a different religious philosophy. Attacking and disowning a fellow Jew who decided to marry a Catholic isn’t just wrong. It’s also impractical.

In a recent survey I took of my grade at my pluralistic Jewish high school, I found that over half of the grade, 51%, is “open to marrying someone who is not Jewish”. A further 19% said that they “don’t know” if they would be open to it. Only 30% of the grade said that they are not “open to marrying someone who is not Jewish”. Keep in mind that these results are from students at a Jewish school!

Is the peanut gallery that claims to have been invested with the power to define “real Judaism” and therefore insult all other Jews who don’t fit that definition, prepared to repudiate a huge portion of the next generation of American Jews? Perhaps their energy would be better spent appealing to rather than insulting Jews, in order to ensure the continuity of the Jewish people.

Sadly, again, Feder’s article attracted more nasty comments — but Worthington had what I hope is the last word: “Thank God for kids like you who are thinking, educated, engaged, open-minded, compassionate, and articulate. You are the future of a strong, healthy Judaism. Thank you.”

The nasty comments are unfortunate but they aren’t really the point. There will always be people at the extreme who see their way as the only way and intermarriage as intolerable — just as there will always be people who are extremely passionate about the potential for positive Jewish engagement by interfaith families. But I wonder what this exchange of commentary demonstrates about the attitudes towards intermarriage of the “great middle.”

With the same-sex marriage cases recently before the Supreme Court, there has been much in the secular press, less about the extremely pro and extremely con voices in that debate, but much more about the revolution in attitudes of the “great middle” in favor of marriage equality. Is Feder’s survey — and remember, it’s from a Jewish high school — representative, indicative of a great shift in attitudes among younger Jews which will push negative views like those of Rabbi Miller to an ineffectual extreme? I wonder.

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

‘Til Faith Do Us Part

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Right around Passover, there was some prominent coverage in the secular press about intermarriage due to the publication of Naomi Schaefer Riley’s book, ‘Til Faith Do Us Part and reviews in the Wall Street Journal (where she has been a religion writer) and the New York Times.

I’ve ordered the book but haven’t had a chance to read it yet. I thought Riley’s suggestion that religious communities “strike a delicate balance” in their approach to interfaith families, as described in the Wall Street Journal review, was itself fairly balanced:

On the one hand, they must welcome them if they wish to keep up a connection with the believing spouse and his or her children. But they must also provide a strong sense of community and a gracious but confident expression of their own religious worldview. “Regularly engaging nonmember spouses in conversations about the faith is important,” she writes, noting that such engagement, if done with a soft touch, may bring the spouse into the fold. Finally, religious communities must focus more on reaching young adults, giving them a venue where they can engage their religious faith in a new way and meet a “soul mate” who draws them closer to the fold rather than leading them away from it.

I’m concerned about the emphasis on the last point — that interfaith marriage leads young adults “away from the fold.” According to the Wall Street Journal review, Riley says that questions about child-raising can “tear at the fabric of a marriage,” that interfaith families are on average less likely to be happy, that the partners lose steadiness of observance and belief, that children are more likely to reject their parents’ faiths, and that couples are more likely to divorce.

The divorce point makes me question the basis for Riley’s observations. Back in 2010, I wrote a blog post, Are Interfaith Marriages Really Failing Fast, about a story Riley wrote for the Washington Post. Here’s what I said back then:

My main complaint about the article is that it cites no compelling evidence whatsoever to support the thesis of the title that interfaith marriages are failing fast. It is a common perception, to be sure, that interfaith marriages fail at rates higher than same faith marriages, but I have never been able to find reliable evidence to that effect. In addition to citing a 1993 paper (but not any data in it comparing inter- and intra-faith divorce rates), Riley says that “According to calculations based on the American Religious Identification Survey of 2001, people who had been in mixed-religion marriages were three times more likely to be divorced or separated than those who were in same-religion marriages.” Who made the calculations? Are they published some place — and available to be scrutinized?

Susan Katz Miller, in her blog On Being Both, also finds Riley’s stance on intermarriage to be “strangely pessimistic” and finds her “gloom and doom” not supported by Riley’s own data.

I also question the basis of Riley’s observations because at InterfaithFamily we have published many narratives and heard from so many interfaith couples that they have resolved questions about child-raising, have children who learn to love Jewish practice, and who themselves strengthened observance and belief — and are quite happy in their marriage. People like the brother of Stanley Fish, author of the review in the New York Times, who describes the lengths which their father went to break up his brother’s relationship and concludes:

If the idea was to separate the two young people, it didn’t work. Shortly after Ron got to California, he sent Ann a plane ticket. When she arrived, they got married and have remained married to this day. She got a job at the university, took a class in Judaism and, much to my brother’s surprise, converted, although it took her a while to find a rabbi willing to give her the required course of instruction. Just the other day she remarked, “It was a hard club to get into.”

The New York Times review suggests that Riley isn’t against intermarriage — she’s in an interfaith and inter-racial marriage that has worked:

She just wants prospective interfaith couples to know that it is work, that love doesn’t conquer all, that “a rocky road may lie ahead of them” and that they “need to think in practical terms about their faith differences — how it will affect the way they spend their time, their money, and the way they want to raise their kids.” Her message is that if you don’t make the mistake of thinking it will be a bed of roses, you’ll have a better chance of its not being a bed of thorns.

That’s balanced advice, too — although again, I’m concerned that “bed of thorns” overdoes it.

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

Our Passover/Easter Survey Results Are In

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Thanks to all of you who responded to our Passover/Easter survey.

The results are in! We just sent out the following press release — let us know what you think of the findings.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Edmund Case, edc@interfaithfamily.com, (617) 581-6805

Interfaith Families Continue To Participate in Secular Easter Activities Without Compromising Their Children’s Jewish Identity; Trend Towards More Comfort with Easter, Steady Observance of Passover

(Boston, MA) — The ninth annual Passover/Easter Survey conducted by InterfaithFamily, an independent non-profit, again shows that interfaith families raising their children Jewish address the “Spring dilemma,” the confluence of Passover and Easter, by continuing to participate in secular Easter activities and continuing to believe that doing so does not compromise their children’s Jewish identity.

Some observers of intermarriage have cast a skeptical eye on this behavior and argue that interfaith families can’t impart a strong Jewish identity to their children and celebrate Christmas or Easter. The results of InterfaithFamily’s surveys suggest that they are doing so.

Interfaith families raising Jewish children who participate in Easter celebrations are giving clear priority to Passover over Easter, as both a family celebration and a religious holiday:

  • Virtually all plan on hosting or attending a seder; 40% will host or attend Easter dinner, an increase from 31% in 2012.
  • Small minorities engage in “religious” Easter activities like attending church (9%) or telling the Easter story (only 1%).
  • Sixty percent see their Easter celebrations as entirely secular, down from 70% in 2012, but only 4% see their Passover celebrations as entirely secular.
  • A full 86% of the respondents believe that their participation in Easter celebrations does not affect their children’s Jewish identity.

“For nine years about half of interfaith couples raising Jewish children have told us they participate in Easter celebrations,” said Edmund Case, CEO of InterfaithFamily. “This year’s survey confirmed that these families by large measure see their Easter celebrations as secular in nature and not confusing to their children’s Jewish identity.”

“This year we observed somewhat more comfort in participating in Easter celebrations (45%), reversing a past decline from 47% in 2010 to 40% in 2011 to 32% in 2012,” Case added. “Meanwhile, the percentage of respondents who are not Jewish who reported being comfortable participating in Passover remained steady at 75%.

For more information, read “What We Learned from the 2013 Passover/Easter Survey,” available online at: http://www.interfaithfamily.com/files/pdf/WhatWeLearnedfromthe2013PassoverEasterSurvey.pdf.

About InterfaithFamily
InterfaithFamily empowers people in interfaith relationships — individuals, couples, families and their children — to engage in Jewish life and make Jewish choices, and strongly encourages Jewish communities to welcome them. We are the premiere resource supporting interfaith couples exploring Jewish life and inclusive Jewish communities, offering educational content; connections to welcoming organizations, professionals and programs; resources and trainings for organizations, clergy and other program providers; and our new InterfaithFamily/Your Community initiative, providing coordinated comprehensive offerings in local communities including Chicago, San Francisco and Philadelphia.

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EDITOR’S NOTE: InterfaithFamily has developed a resource page for interfaith families dealing with the Passover and Easter holidays that includes resources such as “Tips for Interfaith Families: How To Make a Seder Inclusive” and numerous articles that help interfaith families have a more enjoyable and meaningful holiday season. For more, visit www.interfaithfamily.com/passover.

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

A Razzie Award for the Jewish Media?

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I’ve been thinking about starting a “Razzie Award” — referring to raspberries, referring to the negative sound of “blowing a raspberry,” sort of like “worst of” awards — for the Jewish media. The latest contender would be “Branding Judaism” by Mayrav Saar in Orange County Jewish Life.

What particularly bothers me about this one is that Saar quotes a podcast by Archie Gottesman, who happens to be my cousin, and a supporter of InterfaithFamily, saying: “If you don’t want to see your grandchildren being baptized someday, the time to think about it is now.” Suggesting that Gottesman was sending a “don’t intermarry” message, Saar says:

I’ve been to church weddings of people with Jewish surnames. I’ve sent Christmas presents to children whose grandmothers lit menorahs. And we all know the stats: 47% of Jews marry non-Jews. When they have kids only 28% of them are raised Jewish and only 10% of those Jewish kids go on to marry Jews themselves. So nearly all children of intermarriage are lost to the Jewish people.

Aside from the outdated statistics, the assumption that receiving Christmas presents makes children of intermarried parents not Jewish, and the flat wrong statement that “nearly all children of intermarriage are lost,” Saar is wrong about Gottesman’s message. Archie’s December, 2010 JTA op-ed, New Ten Commandments for the Jewish People, includes this:

  1. Jewish grandchildren
    You want them, right? Then raise your children to be Jewish. Children do not decide religion; parents do. No matter who you marry, decide ahead of time that the kids will be brought up as Jews. Wishy-washy will get your children joining a church or just not considering themselves Jewish. If the thought of being invited to your grandchild’s baptism troubles you, do something about it now. [emphasis mine]

Like I said about two other Razzie Award contenders recently, I would hope that Jewish media writers would like to contribute to attracting young interfaith couples to engage in Jewish life and community. Making gratuitous negative comments about intermarriage doesn’t help.

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

Israel Doesn’t Want Reform Converts?

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There is a very powerful op-ed in the New York Jewish Week today, Israel Doesn’t Want a Reform Convert Like Me by Rabbi Heidi Hoover who serves as rabbi of Temple Beth Emeth v’Ohr Progressive Shaari Zedek in Brooklyn.

Jewish status in Israel is controlled by the Chief Rabbinate, and conversions by non-Orthodox rabbis – and now even under by some Orthodox rabbis – are not recognized. Because Rabbi Hoover converted to Judaism under Reform auspices, her conversion is not recognized, and she concludes, “Israel doesn’t want me.”

I think Rabbi Hoover is exactly right when she says,

One of the messages that American Jews receive relentlessly is that we need to support Israel. There is much hand wringing over the perceived lessening of American Jewish connection to Israel among teens and young adults, and even among rabbinical students. I believe this lessening of connection is in part due to a growing number of American Jews who cannot fully live as Jews in Israel because their status as Jews is not recognized by the Chief Rabbinate….

The question of Jewish status depends on who you are asking, or whose opinion you care about. Rabbi Hoover tells people in her congregation who are converts under liberal auspices, and people who identify as Jewish whose mothers were not Jewish, that “they are, in fact, Jewish,” but she wants them to be prepared that there are those who will not recognize them as such. That’s important, especially for the many young adults raised as Jews in interfaith families whose Jewish status would be questioned by others.

I think Rabbi Hoover also is exactly right when she concludes,

It is crucial that American Jews of all denominations join to support religious pluralism in Israel, and in the United States as well. We need to find ways to respect and recognize each other’s conversions and life-cycle rituals. There are not so many of us that we can afford to be divided, and if Israel continues to disenfranchise American Jews, she cannot expect their support to continue indefinitely.

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

Are Attitudes Towards Intermarriage Changing, Revisited

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Almost three years ago, in April 2010, I complimented the Forward’s Editor-at-Large, for an essay he wrote about a family member’s bar mitzvah at a Conservative synagogue. I said then,

It is heartening to me for a thought leader of J.J. Goldberg’s stature to say that it felt natural and necessary for a non-Jewish parent to be an integral part of the celebration of raising a Jewish child, to question “how many other parents don’t bring their children into the covenant because they think — correctly, all too often — they won’t be welcomed,” and to give praise (very well-deserved, in my opinion) to [a rabbi] who “dared to open [his community’s] gates as few other rabbis have done.”

When more Jewish leaders recognize that Goldberg’s cousin’s family — with an unconverted non-Jewish parent participating in raising a Jewish child — is not sub-optimal, but instead is a positive Jewish outcome equal to any other — then we will have a truly “changing Judaism.” I hope Goldberg’s essay will help move us in that direction.

Unfortunately, Goldberg’s current essay, How Many American Jews Are There?, makes me wonder about progress. In an otherwise fine and thoughtful discussion of Jewish population estimates, Goldberg mentions “certain new discoveries that are changing our understanding of how Jews view themselves that aren’t fully absorbed into survey methodology.” One of them is, “there’s a growing, still unmeasured tendency among children of intermarriage to identify as Jewish” — something that could certainly be taken as very positive.

Sadly, however, Goldberg adds: “perhaps because it’s fashionable in Washington and Hollywood.” Why the gratuitous slap at children of intermarriage identifying as Jewish? Does Goldberg think his cousin, who impressed him so much at his bar mitzvah three years ago, identifies as Jewish because it’s fashionable?

This follows on the Forward’s Editor-in-Chief, Jane Eisner, writing For 2013, A Marriage Agenda. In an otherwise fine and thoughtful discussion of marriage and birth rates, she gratuitously mentions being “haunted” by whether marriage-age children will marry other Jews — again with no recognition whatsoever of the potential for positive Jewish engagement that could result.

I would hope that leading Jewish journalists like Goldberg and Eisner would like to contribute to attracting young interfaith couples to engage in Jewish life and community. Making gratuitous negative comments about intermarriage doesn’t help.

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

A New Year to Engage Interfaith Families in Jewish Life

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September 28, 2012

The Jewish New Year begins with headlines from the New York Jewish Community Study of 2011. First, there is a huge amount of intermarriage, and it is continuing. Second, while the intermarried are generally disengaged from Jewish life and community, those that are engaged demonstrate attitudes and behaviors comparable to the in-married. The critical question, then, is what can be done in this new Jewish year to engage interfaith families Jewishly?

The study confirms that intermarriage is the reality in the non-Orthodox community. Between 2006 and 2011, one in three non-Orthodox Jews who married, married someone who was not Jewish; half of the non-Orthodox couples formed were intermarried couples. Measured by the study’s index of Jewish engagement — stacked as it is against the intermarried because it does not include indicators that can be undertaken individually or with friends and family — the intermarried generally score low, with fewer giving Jewish education to their children, joining Jewish organizations or giving to Jewish causes.

However, of those intermarried households that do join synagogues, 90 percent send their children to supplemental school, and of those that are raising their children as Jews, more than half score high on the study’s index. The study recognizes the policy implications of these findings when it says that “expanding congregation-based efforts to engage intermarried households is worth pursuing” and that “communal efforts to engage intermarried couples should support efforts to raise Jewish children.”

Unfortunately, community studies tell us precious little about why some interfaith families chose to engage Jewishly. But for the past three years, InterfaithFamily has been including questions in its two annual holiday surveys that ask what factors contribute to interfaith families joining Jewish organizations and synagogues and expanding their connections to Judaism — and what they experience as barriers. Our surveys are not “scientific” or based on a random sample; the respondents are self-selected and some may have responded to more than one survey. But no one else is asking these questions, and our full report sheds what is currently the most available light on these important issues. This is what close to 700 responses from six surveys, from people in interfaith relationships who are raising Jewish children and are members of Jewish organizations or synagogues, tell us:

Explicit Statements Expressing Welcoming Attitudes

Interfaith families are attracted by explicit statements of welcome by the organization’s professionals (79 percent said this attracted them “a lot”) or by the organization itself in membership materials, bulletins and websites (70 percent). Welcome communicated in public, and openly talking about interfaith family issues, are specifically identified as helpful; being vague about the approach to interfaith families is seen as a barrier.

The New York study reported that the vast majority of the intermarried say they do not feel “uncomfortable” attending most Jewish events and activities. The principal author, Steven M. Cohen, is quoted as saying that “If discomfort is not a major obstacle to Jewish engagement, then welcoming is not the solution.” But our survey respondents emphatically indicate that they are heavily influenced by expressions of welcoming attitudes. One said, “My spouse was welcomed as a genuine part of the congregation family in all aspects, as was my son. This allowed me, as the Jewish partner, to comfortably express my Jewish identity without my spouse feeling alienated.” Another said, “They treat me like an important part of the Jewish community, even though I am not Jewish.” One indicated that interfaith families give more weight to differences in openness to them than to other important considerations: “Our synagogue doesn’t offer childcare during services, and we have begun attending a different synagogue that offers a wonderful children’s program that our kids adore. The problem is that that synagogue is not as open to interfaith families, so while we enjoy attending services there, we are unlikely to become members there.”

Moreover, the most often-mentioned barrier to expanded Jewish connection is perceived unwelcoming attitudes from both professionals and organization members. One said, “I feel that deep down the clergy/professionals feel differently. I get the sense that they would prefer I be Jewish.” Another referred to the “Neanderthal attitude of some members to non-Jews, which has offended my wife royally.” The New York study exposed a continuing deep-seated negative attitude about intermarriage: High percentages of parents said they would be upset if their adult child married someone not Jewish who did not convert. That attitude could well explain the source of our respondents’ disinviting experiences and feeling that the fact of their relationship is a cause of upset in a community is a factor likely to discourage a couple from engaging with that community. As one of our respondents said, “as long as being an interfaith family is considered a problem, we will never be reached.”

Inclusive Policies on Participation by Interfaith Families

The organization or synagogues’ policies about interfaith families participating in worship services and at life cycle events attracted 64 percent of our respondents “a lot.” One said, “My previous synagogue did not allow the non-Jewish members of my family to fully participate in my son’s bar mitzvah. We have since left that congregation.” Non-acceptance of “patrilineal” Jews was identified as “a real turn-off … even if the kids want to learn they are told that they can never be Jewish…”

Invitations to Learn vs. Invitations to Convert

While a not insignificant percentage (32 percent) were attracted “a lot” by invitations to learn about conversion, almost twice as many (58 percent) were attracted by invitations to learn about Judaism. A few of the responses to the open-ended questions mentioned the absence of pushing to convert as a helpful factor and perceived attempts to convert as a barrier.

Presence of Other Interfaith Families

Fifty-three percent of respondents said they were attracted “a lot” if “there are a lot of interfaith families who are members.” “The visibility of non-Jewish members encouraged us to join.”

Programming and Groups ‘For Interfaith Families’

Forty-five percent of respondents were attracted “a lot” by the Jewish organization or synagogue offering programs “that are described as being ‘for interfaith families’.” Thirty percent of respondents said they were attracted “a lot” by the organization or synagogue organizing “groups of interfaith couples (havurah, interfaith discussion group, etc.)” The absence of such programs and groups was identified as a barrier.

Knowing what factors attract and repel interfaith families from Jewish organizations and synagogues, local communities can act in two directions to engage interfaith families Jewishly. The first is to ensure that interfaith families receive explicit messages of welcome from the community and its organizations and leaders, and the second is to offer programs and classes for them.

In the long run, ensuring that interfaith families are genuinely welcomed will require significant attitudinal change among Jews and Jewish leaders away from “upset” and toward seeing the potential for positive Jewish engagement by interfaith families. In the shorter term, an important step toward this goal is making available and publicizing information about welcoming organizations, professionals and programs, so that potentially interested interfaith couples can hear they are welcome and find out what is available to them and where.

Another important step is providing resource materials and inclusivity and sensitivity trainings to local Jewish professionals and lay leaders, to increase the chances that interfaith couples will experience positive attitudes and a warm welcome when they do connect. These materials and trainings can help organizations and professionals resolve difficult issues around ritual and leadership participation, and how best to present opportunities for Jewish learning and for conversion.

Finally, communities can offer programs and classes explicitly marketed as “for interfaith families,” and foster the formation of groups of interfaith couples and families in which they can explore and experience Jewish life together.

This three-pronged approach of publicizing what is available in the Jewish community for interfaith families, trainings and programs was recommended in the historic December 2011 report of the UJA-Federation of New York’s Task Force on Welcoming Interfaith Families: “an approach that unapologetically announces its welcome, provides sustained, networked, professionally staffed, and well-advertised gateway educational programs targeted to interfaith couples and families, and provides ongoing training for professionals and lay leaders.” It is the framework of InterfaithFamily’s Your Community initiative, which recently completed a very successful first year pilot, InterfaithFamily/Chicago, and is about to expand to San Francisco and Philadelphia. And it is endorsed by the New York study’s comment that “we ought to be focusing on engaging the intermarried, approaches that certainly include welcoming, but go to building relationships and offering opportunities to educate and participate.”

The New York study asks, “To what extent has the Jewish community made progress [compared to the 2002 study] in closing the engagement gap associated with intermarriage?” Given the negligible communal efforts to engage interfaith families Jewishly in the last 10 years, the lack of progress should not be a surprise. Whether we make progress in the next 10 years is up to us.

This new Jewish year can be the start of a sustained communal effort to engage interfaith families. The New York study’s figures show that the goal of having more than 50 percent of interfaith families raise their children Jewish is within reach — because in addition to the 31 percent of the children of intermarried households who are raised Jewish, 11 percent more are raised “Jewish and something else” and 13 percent have parents who are undecided. We can move many of those children into the Jewish column if we try.

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

What Draws Interfaith Families to Jewish Life

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I’m pleased to report that the New York Jewish Week has published my op-ed, What Draws Interfaith Families to Jewish Life. A considerably longer version is on the Huffington Post, A New Year To Engage Interfaith Families in Jewish Life.

Having just come off Yom Kippur’s intense period of introspection about the past and the future, it feels that the time is now right for this call for a new sustained effort to engage interfaith families in Jewish life and community.

You can find the report on the first year of our InterfaithFamily/Chicago project here, and the report on our holiday surveys here.

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