Promote Jewish Engagement, Not In-Marriage

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with Jodi Bromberg
Reprinted with permission from eJewishPhilanthropy.

As Gary Rosenblatt has revealed (“Continuity: Why Should We Care,” January 22nd), a group of two dozen “concerned Jews” have met, exchanged papers, and propose to take some as yet undefined action to counter a “disturbing trend” of increased intermarriage. The group seeks a strategy to re-direct the approach of communal leaders and change-makers, like philanthropists, so as to promote in-marriage. We write to urge this group to re-frame their effort, not as one to discourage intermarriage, but rather as one to promote Jewish engagement.

Intermarriage is the reality of our time, as the Pew Report confirms, whether or not Jewish leaders “acquiesce” to that trend, as the group complains. Seventy-one percent of non-Orthodox Jews who married after 2000 married someone not Jewish. Most Jews today are marrying someone who is not Jewish. This is not a shifting tide of the ocean; this is the ocean.

We ask the group to consider: how will that vast population respond to an organized communal effort to promote in-marriage? Promoting in-marriage as ideal or preferable will necessarily have the effect of turning off those who will intermarry – as most will – to Jewish engagement. People don’t go where their choices are demeaned.

The New York Times recently featured a photo exhibit by an Israeli, Yael Ben-Zion, of twenty intermarried couples, including five with a Jewish partner. Ben-Zion is quoted as saying that “the really important questions” interfaith couples face include, “Are you accepted by your family and community?” A campaign to promote in-marriage will only contribute to interfaith couples and families feeling not accepted by the Jewish community.

We understand that the group is motivated by studies showing that by traditional measures, interfaith families are relatively disengaged from Jewish life and community. But we have no doubt that that picture of engagement would be markedly different today if the “audacious hospitality” recently endorsed by URJ President Rick Jacobs had been the Jewish community’s response to the continuity crisis that arose in the early 1990s.

Nearly twenty-five years later, however, the prevailing attitude towards intermarriage among too many Jewish leaders – and too many Jews – is still terribly negative. While Mr. Rosenblatt professes not to consider intermarriage a “disease,” that is the message that the group’s approach to intermarriage conveys. That message contributes directly to feelings of lack of acceptance, and the interfaith couples in Ben-Zion’s photo exhibit are the least of it. The relatively few attempts to ask interfaith families about their experiences with Jewish communities – focus groups assembled by philanthropists, surveys conducted by a federations, qualitative studies by academics, as well as numerous surveys conducted by InterfaithFamily – have consistently revealed negative off-putting experiences.

Conversely, audacious hospitality matters, and has a direct impact on families’ willingness and desire to make Jewish choices. As one Catholic mother wrote in her response to InterfaithFamily’s recent user survey, “The temple that we belong to is very open to interfaith marriages and that is why I am choosing to bring my son up Jewish.”

We recently spoke with a rabbi who leads one of the thriving urban groups that is attracting young Jews to worship services, text study and other Jewish experiences. Many of the participants are interfaith couples and the rabbi told us that she imposes no restrictions whatsoever on participation. She doesn’t ask whether a person is Jewish or not Jewish or some place in between; whatever anyone wants to do Jewishly, she allows. That is the kind of radical invitation and acceptance that is needed to maximize Jewish engagement. Another similar group describes their approach as “radical accessibility” – the idea that everyone is welcome to find meaning and community there.

Mr. Rosenblatt describes the programs that his group is apparently considering as those “that would bring young Jews into contact with each other socially, … subsidized child care, day schools, summer camps, and intensive Israel travel [to] provide the experiential and textual elements needed to create literate, caring Jews.” All of these programs, many of which are already funded, are desirable – regardless of their impact on intermarriage – because they strengthen Jewish identity and lead to increased engagement in Jewish life and community – something that we all want.

But if we want Jews in or from interfaith families to be so engaged, we can’t promote our programs by touting them as the cure or antidote to intermarriage. That is self-defeating, destructive and unnecessary. As importantly, there is an opportunity cost to spending time and resources thinking about ways to encourage endogamy rather than engagement. Interfaith families make up a substantial and increasing portion of our population. Why not focus on spending those resources on understanding and engaging that already existing population?

We were heartened by one voice in the group who is quoted as writing that “the communal response to increasing intermarriage should be encouraging intermarried families to raise their children as Jewish…” We urge the group to take that approach. Rather than promoting in-marriage, promote Jewish engagement – and in particular, join us in promoting Jewish engagement by interfaith families.

 

Debate Reignited

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A group of “concerned Jews” in response to the Pew survey propose to take concerted action to encourage Jewish leaders to encourage in-marriage. Julie Wiener writes that “the intermarriage debate” has “reignited” in a JTA article that was picked up by the Forward. Jodi Bromberg, InterfaithFamily’s new President, and I wrote an op-ed for eJewishPhilanthropy, Promote Jewish Engagement, Not In-Marriage. Paul Golin from JOI also had an op-ed in the New York Jewish Week.

To us the key point is that all of the actions any proponent of in-marriage proposes – increased Jewish education, social networks, Israel trips – are worthwhile because they promote Jewish engagement, which is what everyone on all sides of this debate wants. We say encourage those actions for that reason – because they promote the Jewish engagement we all want, regardless of who people marry. Encouraging those actions because they promote in-marriage is self-defeating – it will alienate the majority of the audience who will intermarry regardless of what Jewish leaders recommend.

Ironically, perhaps coincidentally, yesterday was the day of the very moving memorial service for Edgar Bronfman. One very subtle comment stood out to me: Hilllary Clinton expressed gratitude to Edgar and Jan Bronfman for the friendship and support they provided to Chelsea Clinton when she married a Jewish man. Edgar Bronfman, who will be sorely missed, understood the importance of genuine acceptance and welcome much more than the group of Jewish leaders who want to encourage in-marriage.

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

It Happens In the Best of Families

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There’s an uproar in Israel because a son of Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu is dating a Norwegian woman who is not Jewish. Daniel Treiman at JTA reports that some religious Knesset members are voicing dismay at the “big problem” of the son of the Prime Minister possibly intermarrying.

Almost every public statement that comes out of Israel about intermarriage equates it with assimilation and loss of Jewish identity and engagement. They just don’t get that many interfaith families are engaging in Jewish life.

It would behoove Jewish leaders to extend an embracing welcome to prominent couples who intermarry. We live in a culture crazed with celebrity – if celebrity interfaith couples engage Jewishly, that may increase the interest of others. That’s why we urged Jewish leaders to extend a big mazel tov to Chelsea Clinton a few years ago.

Speaking of mazel tov, Liel Liebovitz had it right in Tablet:

Let us say the only thing one ought to say to a young woman who has chosen to … move to Israel instead, which is shalom and welcome and so nice to have you here. And let us do whatever we can to make sure that should this young woman ever wish to become Mrs. Netanyahu Junior, she could either live comfortably and without harassment as a non-Jewish citizen of Israel enjoying equal rights and responsibilities, or, should she so wish, undergo a meaningful and beautiful conversion, a far cry from the censorious process currently offered by the imperious chief rabbinate. Until then, nothing but mazal tov to the young couple.

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

Bad Attitudes from Jewish Journalists

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In an unfortunate convergence, some of the leading Jewish journalists have almost simultaneously published more counter-productive negative messages about intermarriage.

The first piece is by Gary Rosenblatt of the New York Jewish Week. Here is the letter to the editor I just submitted:

I applaud Rabbi Rick Jacobs’ comments at the URJ Biennial and to Gary Rosenblatt (“A Call For ‘Audacious Hospitality’,” Jan. 15). Rabbi Jacobs is right that “finger-wagging” is a turnoff for intermarried Jews and their partners who might otherwise make Jewish choices. Mr. Rosenblatt professes not to think of intermarriage as a “disease,” but that is the message that he and Messrs. Cohen, Bayme and Wertheimer convey. The communal intervention they seek to encourage in-marriage would be a roadblock to the “on-ramps to Jewish life” that Rabbi Jacobs rightly wants to build for the majority of the next generation who will be the children of intermarriages.

The second is an editorial in the Forward. Here’s my letter to them:

I applaud Rabbi Rick Jacobs’ comments to the editors (“Intermarriage Rorschach Test,” Jan. 16) that “Jewish living, values, commitments… can be upheld in interfaith families” and not the “exclusive province of Jewish-Jewish couples.” By questioning “however Jewish” those individuals who choose to live lives of Jewish depth and meaning “actually are,” the Forward’s editors become part of the problem. Characterizing intermarriage as “diminishment” and in-marriage as “essential” is a self-fulfilling prophecy that will lead to more interfaith families who might otherwise make Jewish choices not doing so.

The people in these positions of Jewish leadership ought to stop to think about the impact of what they say about intermarriage on young interfaith couples – the Jewish partner or the partner who isn’t Jewish – who are exploring Jewish life, considering making Jewish choices, and quite naturally looking for welcome, acceptance, and embrace.

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

Opening the Gates

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Leading up to and during my vacation there have been three big intermarriage stories in the media. They all revolve around whether, and how, Jewish communities are going to open their gates and draw in interfaith couples and families.

First came a JTA story by Uriel Heilman, The War Against Intermarriage Has Been Lost. Now What? The title pretty much tells the content of the article: Jewish institutions and in particular religious denominations are not “fighting against intermarriage” so much any more; the question now is how to react to the intermarriages that are going to happen; the overall strategy appears to be to engage with the intermarried in an effort to have them embrace Judaism; the denominations differ in how far to go in that embrace, and how strongly to push for conversion. Heilman says there has been a shift in attitudes so that intermarriage is viewed as “a potential gain, in the form of the non-Jewish spouse or children who may convert.”

I’m not sure how widespread the shift in attitudes is – there have been lots of recent anti-intermarriage comments from Jewish leaders – and I think it’s unfortunate to see gain only when there is conversion. But the real issue is, what are Jewish institutions and denominations going to do to engage with the intermarried. I would be more interested in seeing a JTA article on the efforts that are underway to do exactly that.

Second was a series of three essays on MyJewishLearning.com about patrilineal descent. A Conservative rabbi, Alana Suskin, in The Non-Jewish Rabbi? The Problem of Patrilineal Descent, tells how badly she feels about not recognizing patrilineal Jews as Jewish in large part because it’s easy to convert. Then an Orthodox rabbi, Ben Greenberg, in Patrilineal Jewish Descent: An Open Orthodox Approach, also feels badly, and says that a child of Jewish patrilineal lineage, must be respected greatly for their identification with the Jewish people, their love of Judaism and of Israel… people of patrilineal descent [should] be referred to as Jews who need to rectify their status vis-a-vie Jewish law.” But Greenberg says that the Reform rabbis’ decision on patrilineality was a mistake from a “balcony perspective” because of the impact the decision had on recognition of people as Jews by other denominations.

I would say, from what I would respectfully suggest is perhaps a more important “balcony perspective,” what about the impact the decision had on the thousands of patrilineal Jews who are now engaged in Jewish life and community? I couldn’t help but make this connection when reading the Forward’s profile of Angela Buchdahl, First Asian-American Rabbi, Vies for Role at Central Synagogue. Rabbi Buchdahl is an amazing Jewish leader – and yes, a patrilineal Jew. (At least, that is, until her college years; we proudly reprinted Rabbi Buchdahl’s essay originally in Sh’ma, My Personal Story: Kimchee on the Seder Plate, where she says she went to the mikveh at that time to “reaffirm her Jewish legacy.”)

The Reform rabbi who wrote for MJL, Rachel Gurevitz, I think gets it right. In Patrilineal Descent: Why This Rabbi Feels No Angst she first acknowledges Rabbi Greenberg’s concern with complications for klal yisrael but says

[T]his is a red herring. The truth is that such questioning exists along a continuum that exists even within movements. Within the Orthodox branches of Judaism, only certain rabbis are recognized by the Orthodox rabbinate in Israel as performing accepted conversions. So yes, I agree with my colleagues that we have a responsibility to make our converts and our patrilineal Jews aware of the larger context, although I admit to doing so apologetically because I don’t find these explanations to make Judaism very appealing.

Rabbi Gurevitz then focuses on what I would agree is most important:

[T]he individuals whose lives and identities we are talking about. Here’s the bottom line. The reality is that if someone is observing Jewish practice, celebrating in Jewish time, identifying with the Jewish people, or perhaps doing none of these things but, when asked, makes a claim to be Jewish or “part Jewish” because of their ancestry, it is largely irrelevant to them whether you or I agree or approve. When it does become relevant is when they seek access to our institutions, and especially our synagogues. At that point, we rabbis become the gatekeepers. And we are entitled to abide by whatever formulation of what makes a Jew that we, or our larger denominations, decide. We all have our requirements. And we all have good reasons for those requirements that we can articulate to those seeking entry. But let us recognize that what we are doing is gate-keeping, and let us be mindful of how and when we act as gatekeepers and what our purpose in those moments is. And let us celebrate and be proud of sustaining and sharing a religious heritage that others wish to claim as their own and live by.

The third major story was an excerpt of a “live discussion” on interfaith marriage on Huffington Post, where Rabbi David Wolpe, widely-regarded as one of the most influential rabbis in America, explains why he won’t officiate at weddings of interfaith couples. Contrary to Uriel Heilman’s perceived shift in attitudes towards seeing intermarriage as a potential gain, Rabbi Wolpe actually says (I don’t have a transcript but I made notes when listening to the video) that “invariably,” in an intermarriage, the chances that the children will be raised as Jewish are much less, and that intermarriage “almost always” results in a diminishment of Judaism. That is the first reason he gives for not officiating at weddings of interfaith couples. I would respectfully suggest that the chances of the children being raised as Jewish and the chances of the intermarriage not resulting in “diminishment” would be increased if interfaith couples could find officiating rabbis for their weddings and be spared from hearing Rabbi Wolpe’s rationale.

Rabbi Wolpe also says that he doesn’t officiate because a Jewish wedding involves a marriage according to Jewish law and a person who isn’t Jewish isn’t subject to Jewish law. I can’t argue with any rabbi who takes that position, although I think he goes too far when suggesting that it’s “bad faith” for a rabbi to officiate because he or she isn’t representing Jewish tradition. He says that is true “at least for me” but it comes across as a cheap shot at all of the serious committed rabbis who do officiate for interfaith couples.

The common thread of all of this press is, how open are our gates going to be – in our efforts to engage interfaith couples and families, in who we recognize as Jews, and in for whom we officiate. Those are the key questions. I’m for wide open gates.

Now back to vacation.

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

Sadness and Hope

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It’s been a hard week in Boston. A family member of someone very important to InterfaithFamily was severely injured in the Marathon bombing. I live in Newton a few miles from where the second suspect was ultimately captured and we were on lock down Friday, wondering what we might encounter if we stepped outside.

Unfortunately I also felt a pall settling over the attitudes towards intermarriage of the leaders of the Jewish community. First I felt the cause of engaging interfaith families Jewishly left out. In eJewishPhilanthropy Jay Ruderman wrote about a major upcoming conference for funders on inclusivity for Jews with disabilities. It made me wonder, will we ever see an announcement like this (paraphrasing Ruderman’s):

The upcoming [Including Interfaith Families] Funding Conference is specifically designed to engage and challenge Jewish funders. We do not want philanthropists to change their funding strategies but we want them to consider being more inclusive with their charitable donations.

Conference attendees will learn:

  • how to include supports, services and opportunities for [interfaith families]
  • how to recognize programs that promote inclusion
  • how to deal with pressure from prominent organizations to fund programs that [exclude].

To advance the cause of inclusive philanthropy, the conference partners with major Jewish organizations so they too can bring this message to their funders. Partners include the Jewish Funders Network, Jewish Federations of North America, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and Combined Jewish Philanthropies in Boston. Their participation shows the importance attached to full inclusion and their commitment to making it a reality.

Next, IFF’s friend and colleague Idit Klein wrote a truly wonderful piece about the remarkable turnabout in acceptance of LGBT Jews. But again I felt left out and wondering whether Idit’s conclusion will ever apply to interfaith families:

[E]xpanding the circle of stakeholders starts when we locate the particularities of our identity within the larger collective. In doing so, the larger collective begins to see each of its members as part of the “we” — embracing diversity as a unifying element of the Jewish future.

Don’t get me wrong — I am totally in favor of inclusivity for Jews with disabilities and LGBT Jews. But the inclusivity agenda should not be co-opted so as to not apply to interfaith families, and without detracting at all from those other worthy causes engaging interfaith families should not be neglected. Just in terms of numbers, the potential impact of engaging interfaith families Jewishly vastly outweighs any other issue. When will the Jewish Funders Network and the Jewish Federations of North America and individuals with the capacity and will of Jay Ruderman seize that opportunity?

Second, I felt that continuing expressions of negativity about intermarriage seemed to peak this week, and I have to wonder whether the relative neglect of our cause still is tied to these kinds of views. Our Board Chair, Mamie Kanfer Stewart, had a very positive piece in Sh’ma, No Conversion Required, urging Jewish leaders to

[R]eframe 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.

But then came a comment from Harold Berman, who with his wife Gayle Berman has been getting a lot of publicity about their book, Doublelife: One Family, Two Faiths and a Journey of Hope, and has founded an organization to help intermarried families who wish to explore becoming observant Jewish families, which is what happened to the Bermans. Again, don’t get me wrong: I think it’s great if partners who aren’t Jewish decide to convert and become traditionally observant. But Jewish leaders must realize that this is not likely to happen in anything but a marginal fractional of the large intermarried population.

And then came a comment from Rabbi Richard Hirsh, the Executive Director of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Assembly, who questions why the Jewish community should thank parents who are not Jewish for raising their children as Jews, asking whether doing so suggests that there is something “negative, risky or difficult” about someone being raised as a Jew. Rabbi Hirsh explicitly takes great pains to not be insensitive, but with all respect, his question reveals a lack of understanding of the dynamic of interfaith families raising Jewish children. It’s quite simple: people who are giving up passing on their own religious traditions to their children, in favor of raising them as Jews, something the Jewish community needs to have happen if it is to grow and be enriched, deserve expressions of appreciation.

Elsewhere in Sh’ma is perhaps the worst of all, Identity, Intermarriage and the Larger Picture by a Conservative Rabbi, Amitai Adler, who says “intermarriage does the Jewish People no favors” and that “We solved the problem of what to do if one falls in love with a non-Jew a long time ago, by creating the halachot of conversion. There is little reason to think that solution is insufficient.” Rabbi Adler, the outflow of members from the synagogues of your denomination, which most people attribute to a relative lack of welcoming to interfaith couples, suggests otherwise. If you are right that “endogamy… [is] essential to the integrity and continuance of the Jewish People” [emphasis in original] then the future of our people is dim, given the ongoing reality of intermarriage.

In the meantime there is Naomi Schaefer Riley, who continues to get publicity for her book ‘Til Faith Do Us Part, that I’ve blogged about before. Despite the fact that she is herself an intermarried Jew raising Jewish children apparently in a happy marriage, and despite the fact that the survey on which she bases her book had only 44 Jews which she admits is “too small to draw definitive conclusions,” her message in her New York Times op-ed still is that Jewish (and other) intermarriage leads to more divorce and weakened religious affiliation.

I do try to keep my eye on the positive. On April 28 the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington is sponsoring a “community conversation” in which we are participating that I hope will lead to increased programming for interfaith families there. On June 19 the UJA Federation of New York is sponsoring a “Touching Lives and Growing Our Community” forum on engaging interfaith families in which we are participating that I hope will have the result. In March I spoke at the Beth El Temple, a leading Conservative synagogue in West Hartford CT, and we are finding increased interest among Conservative rabbis. Our friends at the Jewish Outreach Institute are making progress too.

In the meantime we are steadily advancing our InterfaithFamily/Your Community model and finding increasing willingness from Jewish communal organizations to partner with us in Chicago, San Francisco and Philadelphia. Thousands of people are coming to our website every day — almost 5,000 on the day Passover began. We get on average six requests a day to our referral service that helps interfaith couples find rabbis and cantor for their weddings and other life cycle events. There is no doubt in my mind that the future growth and vitality of the liberal Jewish community depends on engaging these very real people in Jewish life, and I hope that those who are making the effort aren’t hearing or aren’t affected by the negative views of some Jewish leaders. I’m certain we would have many more interfaith families engaging Jewishly if we had a truly inclusive culture.

We also are extremely fortunate to have some enlightened funders who have not been swayed by negativity. But like Jay Ruderman, “we need more partners in our efforts.” To paraphrase him again, I ask, when will we see importance attached to full inclusion of interfaith families in Jewish life and community — and commitment from Jewish leaders to making that a reality?

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.

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.

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.