What We Learned at the Interfaith Opportunity Summit

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November 6, 2016
with Jodi Bromberg
published on eJewishPhilanthropy

In October 2016, an at-capacity crowd of 300-plus major foundation, federation and organization leaders gathered in Philadelphia at the Interfaith Opportunity Summit: Embracing the New Jewish Reality, the first-ever national convening on the topic of engaging interfaith families in Jewish life and community. The Summit happened now because of steadily growing interest in the issue, spurred by the award of the Genesis Prize to Michael Douglas in 2015 and the resulting matching challenge grant process run by the Jewish Funders Network, and because of InterfaithFamily’s emergence as the leading convener in the space, with a successful smaller gathering in Boston last year.

The Summit marked a watershed moment, putting engaging interfaith families at a high level in the mainstream Jewish community’s agenda, with the Jewish Federations of North America and the Jewish Funders Network partnering with IFF on the Summit. Every significant programmatic effort to engage interfaith families was represented. Three areas of learnings emerged: 1) the issues that need to be addressed to engage interfaith families; 2) the new efforts to engage them; and 3) the “narrative shift” in attitudes that must happen to make engagement efforts successful.

New Understandings about What Influences Engagement

There was considerable consensus about the applicability to interfaith families of a new conceptualization of what it means to be or to “do” Jewish. People will engage in Jewish life and community if Jewish values, rituals and practices, and forms of community help them meet common human needs for meaning and purpose, connect with others, and connect with something greater than themselves. In turn, interfaith couples will engage to the extent they are aware of this Jewish “stuff” and it is delivered in ways that are accessible to them.

There were stories of interfaith couples valuing Judaism’s gratitude practice, home family practice, focus on others, focus on improving the world, spiritual life, and ongoing questioning. How people will apply Jewish values and wisdom, and which traditions and forms of community they will adopt, however, is in flux, and traditional measures will not capture how people are defining and expressing their Jewishness today. At a session on entry points and pathways for interfaith families, speakers said we need to “bring the magic of Judaism as an enriching force in everyday lives to parents, grandparents, and children;” that “Jewish values help parents do the core job of parenting;” and that there is nothing that disengaged “free roamers” can talk about that they care about that isn’t addressed by Jewish values and traditions.

That much of Jewish religious life is organized around the concept of “the Jewish people,” and much of Jewish cultural life is by definition particularistic, raises the question how a partner from a different faith background can feel included in Jewish life. That in turn raises issues for the Jewish partners, who privilege their relationships over religion and other priorities, as found in the Continuum research sponsored by the Jacobson Family Foundation and a new study of mixed religion families by the Pew Research Center released in conjunction with the Summit. The Summit featured a text study session on different conceptions of Jewishness (nationality; ancestry; loyalty to a set of beliefs and doctrines; affiliation with a community; and identifying with a culture). An intermarried unconverted partner from a different faith tradition could feel included as a member of the Jewish people, and as a member of some Jewish communities but not others, while not a Jew. The idea of treating Jewish peoplehood as a family was also advanced. How peoplehood is understood and explained is a fertile area for further exploration.

The Summit featured a session on difficult boundary issues. The phenomenon of interfaith couples saying they are raising their children in more than one religion – partly Jewish and partly something else – is real. InterfaithFamily felt that the issue was important and warranted discussion, and invited a prominent proponent of “doing both,” to present at the Summit.  She argued that 1) families doing both are already part of synagogues and Jewish communities, and 2) that these couples want to engage in Judaism while educating their children about both religious traditions in the family, and don’t want to merge them together. Another speaker talked of an “open Judaism” that moved beyond tolerance to celebrating different religious traditions. Whether Jewish institutions will be willing to engage openly with these families without alienating them is another area for further consideration.

New Efforts to Engage Interfaith Families

One program session addressed ways to reach interfaith families through advertising, community organizing approaches and Israel trips. Recommendations included edgy, humorous advertising; explicit and prominent statements that interfaith families are welcome; and meeting people where they are, building relationships one-on-one and connecting them with others with similar interests, and providing content from the vast storehouse of Judaism that addresses their interests, and helps them do Jewish things.

One important suggestion was to empathize – to anticipate the hesitations that interfaith couples will have (Will we be welcomed or judged? Will there be people like us? Will we know enough?) and then tell stories of other interfaith families’ experiences that address those hesitations. Another was to focus on touchstone, nodal moments in peoples’ lives.

Several speakers emphasized the key role of grandparents, which one referred to as “the boots on the ground” with “high touch” relationships wanting to create “safe spaces.” Others emphasized the importance of reaching people through their friends: the disengaged “free roamers” have friends who are engaged and friends who are seekers, and all of them are social and on social media. People go to things when someone they know says “do you want to go to this, I’m going.”

If there was one consistent theme, it was the importance of relationships and relational processes in engaging interfaith families. The underlying theory is that identity formation is lifelong and dependent on experiences; people are susceptible to change because of college experiences or their experiences as couples. Jewish identity is relationally constructed and manifested in the “social self.” The stories of several of the interfaith couples who spoke at the Summit included examples of negotiation and compromise that resulted in Jewish engagement. Almost all of the speakers in a program session on entry points and pathways for interfaith couples, representing early childhood programs, couples’ groups, and Jewish learning programs, emphasized the importance of developing relationships; one said, “when relationships of trust and security are evident, families can thrive.”

Wendy Rosov presented her program evaluations of InterfaithFamily’s Your Community initiative, which places a rabbi and a program manager in local communities to offer a range of services and programs targeted at interfaith couples, and of Honeymoon Israel, which provides immersive trips to Israel for locally-based cohorts of couples (69% to date have been interfaith couples). Rosov focused on two shared strategies: high touch relationship building, both between couples and staff and among couples, and providing a safe, non-judgmental space that facilitates discussion, negotiation and compromise between partners. Programmatic efforts that depend on relationship building and relational processes take time and are expensive (to the extent they depend on staff), and to the extent that reaching greater numbers requires more staff, the cost increases.

The kinds of outcomes these programs achieve tie in to the new conceptualizations of what it means to be or “do” Jewish. Shifting couple dynamics is particularly important, towards more equality around making Jewish choices, and towards more facility in discussing religious differences, doing Jewish things, and integrating traditions in ways that work for both partners. Outcomes being achieved include feeling connected to other Jewishly-engaged couples and to Jewish communities, incorporating Jewish traditions in their lives on a regular basis, and increased comfort in Jewish settings.

Changing the Narrative

At the concluding plenary a participant made a plea for a “shift in the dominant narrative.” Several Summit speakers referred to the remaining ambivalence over intermarriage and the full legitimacy of the intermarried. A Hillel representative reported that students find it ostracizing when their parents’ marriages are considered invalid, and Hillel professionals are “in the closet” about being in interfaith relationships or from interfaith families.

A concrete result of negative attitudes about intermarriage is the “door slamming” that interfaith couples can experience when seeking a rabbi to officiate at their life cycle events. A number of Conservative rabbis spoke about the pain they feel when they tell couples that they cannot officiate at their weddings; one said that “we massage the message but at the end of the day we are saying ‘no’ and it is real and painful.” A new study first discussed at the Summit, Under the Chuppah: Rabbinic Officiation and Intermarriage, may lead more rabbis to officiate. The audience audibly gasped when one of the report’s authors, Len Saxe, projected a slide showing that the percentage of in-married and intermarried couples who are raising their children as Jews by religion is very close when a rabbi is the sole officiant at the couples’ weddings – 96% for in-married couples compared to 85% for intermarried couples.

The stories of many speakers, on the other hand, reflected the cultural shift in attitudes that is needed in both institutions and individuals, and happening with some of them. Common threads in the experiences of the interfaith couples who spoke at the Summit included being invited in, seeing others like themselves, hearing explicit welcoming statements, and experiencing an overall diverse and welcoming milieu. A rabbi at one of their synagogues spoke of the blessings of intermarriage – bringing more thoughtful, questioning people “into the fold.”

Another speaker, a Protestant woman married to a Jewish man, raising their children Jewish, told about how she was deeply moved when she held the Torah for the first time at Simchat Torah immediately before the Summit. She reached that point, she said, because a rabbi said yes when asked to officiate at her wedding, and because at her emerging spiritual community she experienced “radical hospitality, not just tolerance,” there was no hint of “do more Jewish, be more Jewish, convert,” and it was a safe place to explore while feeling truly part of a community.

Many speakers emphasized the work on welcoming that remains to be done. More than one said that organizations that think they are welcome, really aren’t, and pointed out the need to train religious school teachers in particular. One said that if a couple has one bad experience, they may not come back. Another said that “we all need to be educated that we are all ambassadors.”

What’s Next?

The concluding plenary addressed what local communities need to do to engage interfaith families. There was consensus that both programs aimed explicitly at interfaith couples and families, and general programs that welcome everyone, including interfaith families, are needed. Wendy Rosov noted that one common strategy of InterfaithFamily/Your Community and Honeymoon Israel is a national organization with local community efforts.

The new data on the impact of rabbinic officiation supports the importance of relationship building in interfaith family engagement work. Len Saxe said that while they couldn’t prove that having a rabbi as a sole officiant caused the couples to raise their children as Jews by religion, there is some independent effect of rabbinic officiation, and he suggested that it could be the process by which the couple and the rabbi work together in preparation for the wedding.

With respect to changing the narrative, one participant pointed to a coming generational shift in attitudes. A worthy next step to the Summit might be to consider what can be done to speed up that shift.

InterfaithFamily introduced the Summit with the hope that the outcome would be a national coordinated effort to engage interfaith families. The question that now needs to be addressed is how to make that hope a reality.

Intermarriage in Britain: Tragedy or Opportunity?

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published in eJewishPhilanthropy

As a leader in efforts in the United States to engage interfaith families in Jewish life and community, and having considered trying to export those efforts to Britain, I read with great interest the recent report by David Graham of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research (JPR), “Jews in couples: Marriage, intermarriage, cohabitation and divorce in Britain.”

Regrettably, I found the tone and messaging of the report unfortunate. Viewing intermarriage as a tragedy to be feared, as something that might “engulf” the community, is not a smart communal approach. The trends identified in the report, of growth in segments of the community (Secular/Cultural, Reform/Progressive, young cohabitating adults) that are relatively heavily interfaith, suggest that the British Jewish community would be wise to increase efforts to engage their growing number of interfaith families, adding to efforts already underway.

Graham labels intermarriage “demographically corrosive,” largely based on the statistic that only 31 percent of the children of intermarried Jews are raised as Jews. As best I can tell, this statistic is based on the 2011 census, in which parents listed the religion of their children. Graham seems to acknowledge this ambiguity when he refers to “the children of Jews who are not being raised, or at least identified, as Jewish.” But relying on that statistic presents an incomplete picture of how intermarried parents expose their children to Jewishness. In American surveys, significant percentages of intermarried parents usually say they are raising their children “Jewish and something else,” or that they haven’t yet decided. It is reasonable to assume that this is true in Britain as well.

Graham admittedly takes “the perspective of ethnic preservation,” quoting Marshall Sklare as saying (in 1970) that “intermarriage strikes at the very core of Jewish group existence.” He also quotes Milton Gordon, who said (in 1964) that intermarriage leads to “the disappearance of the ethnic group as a separate entity and the evaporation of its distinctive values.” The problem here is that Jewishness is not just an ethnicity and our experience in the States shows that the boundaries of who is included in the Jewish community can be expanded without the loss of distinctive Jewish values.

Indeed, in America today, there is a ferment of activity based on ethics, culture, and spreading Judaism as a wisdom system or technology that helps people to lead better lives and to make the world better. The traditional measures of attitudes and practices used in the report are being increasingly challenged as not depicting the way people identify and act on their Jewishness or find it meaningful. The report acknowledges that the gap between intermarried and in-married Jews is smaller on ethical and cultural variables, and wider as to ‘socially exclusivist’ and religiously observant variables; the same is true in the States, where more and more non-traditional young Jews are not socially exclusivist or religiously observant in traditional ways.

Graham does not exhibit an objective or neutral attitude towards intermarriage. He assumes, for example, that “it might be expected that someone who shares their life with a non-Jew will exhibit weaker levels of Jewish attachment in general.” Even American social scientists that openly advocate to discourage or prevent intermarriage at this point agree that intermarriage is a natural result of acceptance and mixing in an open society, not a choice to leave Jewishness behind.

Besides, we don’t know what the Jewish identification and behavior of intermarried couples and families would be if they were genuinely welcomed to Jewish life and Jewish communities. Describing intermarriage as “corrosive” sends a clear message of disapproval to them. As Liberal Rabbi Aaron Goldstein has written, when the children of an intermarried couple “are not recognized as Jewish, or even, if they are, their parents’ relationship is described in terms of ‘marrying out,’ the message of rejection, intentional or not, could not be clearer.” People don’t want to engage with communities that brand their relationships as second-class or sub-optimal. But as Reform Rabbi Jonathan Romaine has written, we have a much better chance of keeping couples “within the Jewish orbit” by not “slamming the door in their face.”

*

In January 2015, while I was CEO of InterfaithFamily, I had a series of meetings in London to explore the feasibility of bringing the InterfaithFamily/Your Community model to Britain. I met with several rabbis from the Reform movement, a rabbi from the Liberal movement, representatives of JHub, and with Rabbi Guy Hall, a pioneering rabbi who officiates and co-officiates at weddings of interfaith couples in Britain.

The InterfaithFamily/Your Community model places a full-time rabbi and a full-time project manager in a community. Your Community staff build personal ‘trusted advisor’ relationships with interfaith families, through officiation referral and other consultations, and provide Jewish learning and community building experiences, in particular workshops and ‘meet-ups’ where interfaith couples can talk with others like themselves about making decisions about religious traditions for their families. In addition, they raise awareness and connect interfaith families with local resources, and advocate for increased welcoming by providing trainings and participating in meetings of other community organizations.

While some local synagogue rabbis have at the outset viewed the Your Community rabbi as a ‘competitor,’ over time most realize that the Your Community rabbi is reaching many couples who are not yet ready to become synagogue members, and is in fact frequently refers couples to synagogues. Independent evaluations show that the short-term desired outcomes of the Your Community model are being achieved, with survey respondents stating they feel more connected to other Jewishly-engaged couples, families, and organizations and comfortable incorporating Jewish practices into their family life.

While there clearly are relevant differences between Britain and the United States, I believe that the kinds of services and programs provided by the Your Community model, and the kinds of outcomes being achieved, are needed and with appropriate modifications would be beneficial in supporting existing efforts to engage interfaith families Jewishly. In connection with my trip I spoke and met with fundraising consultants, but at the time was not able to identify any readily available and interested funders. (Because services and programs for interfaith families are largely staff-driven, they are expensive; the approximate cost of the Your Community model is over $250,000 (£190,000) per annum.)

Aside from importing the InterfaithFamily Your Community or other American models, I believe that British Jewish leaders could learn from the experiences of those involved in engaging interfaith families, for example, at gatherings like next year’s Interfaith Opportunity Summit. Instead of the report’s conclusion that Jewish community leaders should focus on divorce rates, cohabitation, and age of first marriage as demographically impactful, the report’s statistics and trends, indicative of a generational shift in identity and practice, demand increased efforts to engage interfaith couples and families.

The Communal Response to Intermarriage: A Time to Reflect, A Time to Resolve

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published on eJewishPhilanthropy

As the new year approaches, I’m cleaning out my office (I’m a replaced CEO, now a consultant after hiring a terrific successor for InterfaithFamily), sorting through twenty years’ worth of papers and repeatedly reminded that the Jewish community’s response to intermarriage has differed vastly from its response to all other issues. At a time at a time of self- and communal- reflection and resolution-making, I’m asking why that is so, and whether this might finally be the year that a massive, coordinated effort to engage interfaith families in Jewish life and community begins.

I. The Communal Response to Intermarriage Is Different

The Jewish community is filled with talented, committed, and philanthropic leaders of organizations and funders. When there has been leadership and collaboration, the response to issues has been massive and near-universal. I’m thinking of the recent announcement that the Schusterman and Jim Joseph foundations will give $28.8 million over five years to BBYO; that it’s hard to find a community, federation or organization that is not actively addressing disability inclusion or teen engagement; about investments in day schools, PJ Library, summer camps, Hillel, Birthright Israel – all important, deserving efforts.

But no similarly massive, concerted response to intermarriage has been made.

Not that there haven’t been calls to action from respected places. In my clean-up I found a 1994 report of a Council of Jewish Federations task force that said, in response to the near-50% intermarriage rate in the 1990 NJPS, “The Jewish community has no choice [but] to respond with a broadened array of opportunities to engage the intermarried in communal life and community services,” and “With Federation leadership, services to the intermarried can be part of a total communal effort rather than just one of an individual organization.”

I found a speech for a 2005 JOI conference by Michael Rukin, z”l, a senior leader of CJP, Hillel and HIAS, who wrote that programmatic allocations since the 1990 NJPS showed that any call for more extensive outreach had been lost to programs that followed a strategy to “infuse the core Jews with greater knowledge, affiliation and commitment and the rest will follow.” “Fifteen years later, … the demographics of affiliation and intermarriage have not changed.” Rukin called for a “massive investment in creative programs of outreach to these families and their children,” “a significant change in the language (both verbal and on-verbal) towards” them, “a broad base of institutions working together,” “a major commitment from the federation system to infuse their agencies with a thrust of creative outreach programs,” a “renewed commitment from the religious movements,” and “the continued prodding of inspired philanthropists… with a rollout plan to massive numbers… [and] budget, way beyond the minuscule amounts currently available.”

The closest we ever came to following these recommendations was a 2008 Interfaith Initiative Funding Proposal, put together by a consortium of major foundations. Citing a “critical moment in the history of modern day Jewry,” the consortium said the “vibrancy, size and strength of the Jewish people” depended upon “a powerful new vision that empowers and enables the Jewish community to better serve” the “rapidly expanding population” of interfaith families with children. The proposal called for $7.5 million over three years to create a national entity, a “state of the art web site” (an enhanced www.interfaithfamily.com), and an array of integrated programs and services, targeted to interfaith families with children, in three pilot communities.

The consortium’s proposal wasn’t funded because of Madoff and a financial downturn. But I’ve never understood why, in the eight years since, that proposal, or something like it, wasn’t revived or redesigned, and then implemented by some new coalition of funders.

II. Why the Difference?

Why haven’t there been massive, concerted efforts to engage interfaith families? Some cite limited resources and competing priorities and not fitting with their strategies. But can anyone who wants to see more people more Jewishly engaged in any activity – learning, social justice, spirituality – question whether getting interfaith couples and families involved is essential to reaching those goals? Interfaith families are where the people we want to be Jewishly engaged are.

Some say we don’t need to address the issue explicitly, or offer targeted programs; if we build up pre-schools and camps and teen and college programs etc., those will capture enough interfaith families. But the leaders of those programs (including PJ Library and Birthright Israel) say that interfaith families and their children are their growth markets, and they aren’t satisfied with the numbers they’re reaching. One thing I learned over the last twenty years is that engaging interfaith families is a continuum that for many starts with addressing issues as they are dating and getting married; services and programs targeted at interfaith couples and families will result in many more of them getting involved later.

Some measure success by attracting large numbers of participants, and say that interfaith family engagement programs don’t. Another thing I’ve learned: engaging interfaith families depends largely on one-on-one or small group work with trained staff, or volunteers trained by staff, that don’t reach large numbers; interfaith family engagement work makes one Jewish family at a time, or at best, small groups of them. Another thing: “interfaithness” is a salient characteristic for interfaith couples during transitional, life cycle times but not all of the time. That makes it difficult to put on big-number programs; even at holiday times, interfaith couples may not want to be together with others like themselves the way that LGBT people and Jews of color might.

Some say that staff-driven relationship building is too expensive. But other well-funded programmatic interventions are staff-driven and expensive, and there is no reason to believe that the cost-per-participant-per-benefit is significantly higher for efforts to engage interfaith families.

Some say they’d like to support or take action to engage interfaith families but don’t know what works. In fact, this isn’t rocket science. There’s been remarkable consensus, from the 1994 CJF task force report, through the Interfaith Initiative Funding Proposal, to today: interfaith couples need easy access to information, explicitly welcoming messages and experiences, and services and programs to help them while dating and getting married and to find community with other Jewishly-engaged interfaith couples at the outset of their journeys.

Some say that evaluation of interfaith family engagement programs is insufficient without random sample, control group research like there is for Birthright Israel. But steadily increasing numbers of the best feasible evaluations show that interfaith family engagement programs achieve their desired outcomes. Other areas of Jewish life haven’t had to wait for gold standard proof of program effectiveness. Where information was inadequate, significant research was funded, with a commitment to then fund the directions indicated by the research. Why hold efforts to engage interfaith families to higher standards?

III. What’s Needed for Change

I believe that what makes the response to intermarriage different is continuing negative attitudes. Back in 1994, the CJF task force said that “Some significant changes may need to occur in both staff attitudes and approaches at every level in Federation and community agencies and organizations” to treat “intermarried families with sensitivity and respect.”  Not nearly enough change has occurred.

The traditional community in the US, let alone in Israel, sees any effort to engage interfaith families as intolerable promotion of intermarriage. Too many leaders still think we should discourage and can prevent intermarriage. Some think Birthright Israel, with fewer trip participants intermarrying than non-participants, is the antidote. It’s wonderful when young Jews marry other Jews, but as I’ve said before, sending everyone on Birthright is not sufficient: many people already have aged out of Birthright, and significant percentages of trip participants still intermarry.

The liberal Jewish community isn’t exempt from deep-seated negative attitudes. Some horror stories from the past few years: the active synagogue member, Harvard Business School grad, not herself Jewish, hearing someone at her synagogue say “we Jews are dumbing ourselves down by intermarrying;” the interfaith couple who reported, in a federation’s survey, that they were trying out services at a synagogue where someone said “maybe you people would be more comfortable somewhere else.”

Some think that negative attitudes among Jews about intermarriage will lessen over time because today’s young adults don’t think that way. I question how fast that will happen, given studies reporting college students questioning the Jewishness of other students.

In InterfaithFamily’s recent evaluations, some professionals have said that their lay leadership in is “behind” in understanding the importance of welcoming interfaith families. But when rabbis say they can’t or won’t officiate at weddings of interfaith couples, the Jewish stamp of disapproval on the relationship is unavoidable.

In the Hornstein Program I learned from Ron Heifitz’s Leadership Without Easy Answers that leaders move people to adapt their attitudes; the prime example was Lyndon Johnson who ironically, given his background, led Americans to give up their opposition to civil rights. Given the fractured nature of the Jewish community, I can’t foresee a single Lyndon Johnson able to move Jews to genuinely embrace interfaith couples.

Perhaps massive concerted action to engage interfaith families hasn’t happened because funders and organizations are consensus-driven. But lack of consensus hasn’t always prevented near-universal action in the liberal Jewish community – I’m thinking of the thankfully now widespread efforts to welcome LGBT people.

It may be that what is needed is a group of key leaders who jointly have the capability to lead an adaptation of attitudes in the community – and to fund and take action to engage interfaith families.

I admit to being a glass half-empty person. Over the past twenty years there has been progress, with ups and downs. Individual generous funders have led the way and enabled impactful efforts to engage interfaith families to occur. The InterfaithFamily/Your Community model with two full-time staff including a rabbi is now in place in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Washington DC. Cleveland has an affiliate with a full-time rabbi on one of its agency’s staffs. Honeymoon Israel is taking growing numbers of interfaith couples on impactful trips to Israel. There is ongoing activity in Boston, New York, Baltimore and elsewhere.

The award of the Genesis Prize to Michael Douglas and the resulting matching challenge grant initiative has stimulated interest among some funders, which the Jewish Funders Network is continuing to address, and other funders are talking. On October 26 the Interfaith Opportunity Summit will bring key foundation and federation leaders together with interfaith family engagement practitioners and other organizational leaders to explore what is needed to engage interfaith families in Jewish life nationally and in local communities.

I am an ever-hopeful person, too. There’s a strong foundation for the massive concerted effort that’s needed, and there’s growing interest and awareness of the importance of the issue. What we need now is resolve – will this be the year?

Intermarriage Crossroads?

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August 4, 2016
with Jodi Bromberg, CEO, InterfaithFamily
published on eJewishPhilanthropy

A significant upcoming convening may lay the groundwork for something missing from the liberal Jewish community for the past twenty-five years: concerted action by funders and community leaders to engage more interfaith families in Jewish life and community.

InterfaithFamily, in partnership with the Jewish Funders Network and the Jewish Federations of North America, is sponsoring the Interfaith Opportunity Summit: Embracing the New Jewish Reality, on Wednesday October 26, 2016 at the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia.

The goal of the Summit is to explore – with funders, federations, leaders of Jewish organizations and interfaith family engagement practitioners – the issues that need to be addressed to have more interfaith families engage in Jewish life and community, and begin to build consensus for increased efforts towards that end.

Jewish leaders have repeatedly expressed concern since high intermarriage rates were announced in the early 1990’s. In most fields – day schools, camps, teen engagement, Israel trips, social justice – funders and professionals have joined together to plan, support and execute major programmatic activities to strengthen organizations and expand recruitment.

The field of engaging interfaith families, however, is different, distinguished by the lack of concerted action by funders and professionals. Individual organizations – notably the Reform movement, Big Tent Judaism, and InterfaithFamily – have developed and offered successful programmatic efforts, and generous foundations, federations and individuals have made those efforts possible with financial support. But there has never been concerted action like that in other fields, apart from a proposal for joint action by several foundations in 2008-2009 that failed because of losses dues to Madoff and the economic downturn.

It is interesting to speculate on the reasons why arguably the single most important issue for the liberal Jewish community has not attracted concerted action. It may be that intermarriage is still viewed so negatively by so many that funders and professionals are discouraged from supporting any related efforts that are not designed to discourage or prevent it. Or, that there is simply too wide a chasm between those who wish to prevent or discourage intermarriage and those that seek to embrace and welcome interfaith couples and families – and therefore, no shared understanding of the way forward.

Recent signs, however, indicate a growing shift in attitudes that could support significant concerted action to engage interfaith families – most notably, the award of the Genesis Prize to Michael Douglas in order to highlight the importance of welcoming intermarried families, followed by the Jewish Funders Network/Genesis Prize matching grant initiative to attract increased financial support for those welcoming efforts. In addition, there has been increased attention from organizations like Hillel, and the Union for Reform Judaism’s “Audacious Hospitality” work.

The Interfaith Opportunity Summit will now bring together everyone interested or potentially interested in engaging interfaith families Jewishly – foundations, federations, Jewish organizations and interfaith family engagement practitioners. The initial response to the Summit is another sign of shifting attitudes; in addition to partnering with the JFN and the JFNA, participants in the Summit program include:

  • the URJ, Big Tent Judaism, Honeymoon Israel and InterfaithFamily;
  • the Schusterman, Crown, Jacobson, Lippman Kanfer, Miller, Joyce & Irving Goldman, and Genesis Prize foundations;
  • the Philadelphia, Boston, New York and LA federations;
  • national organizations including Hillel, the Foundation for Jewish Camp, PJ Library, the JCC Association, the Society for Classical Reform Judaism, the Reconstructionist movement, the Federation of Jewish Mens Clubs and International Institute for Secular Humanistic Judaism;
  • thought leaders including Yehuda Kurtzer, Alan Cooperman, Ted Sasson, Tobin Belzer, Fern Chertok, Wendy Rosov, Susan Katz Miller, Keren McGinity, Paul Golin and Marion Usher;
  • numerous innovative organizations including Romemu, Lab/Shul, jewbelong, Tribe 12, Sixth & I, Central Synagogue, Rodeph Shalom, the JCC in Manhattan, Jewish Learning Ventures.

Because of the importance of understanding the lived experiences of interfaith families, Summit participants will also hear from millennial children of intermarriage, young interfaith couples, and interfaith families with young children. The grantees of the JFN/Genesis Prize matching grant initiative, and other interfaith family engagement programs, have all been invited to participate and discuss their programs with interested attendees at tables over an extended lunchtime.

The Summit will provide a rich discussion of the issues that need to be addressed to have more interfaith families engage in Jewish life and community. How can Jews and their partners from different faith traditions experience the value of Jewish wisdom, express their spirituality in Jewish settings, and feel included in “the Jewish people?” How can we effectively reach the spectrum of interfaith couples, from those who are seeking to those who are not, through messaging and marketing to interfaith families, and relationship building/community organizing approaches to them? What services and programs are effective entry points and ways to facilitate progress into more engagement, and what promising trends are emerging? How can we address difficult attitude and boundary issues surrounding intermarriage: privileging in-marriage, wedding officiation, ritual participation, and conversion? Can those who say they are “doing both” be included in Jewish life and communities?

The concluding plenary will tie together the preceding sessions and address what a local Jewish community needs to offer to engage interfaith families, and the appropriate roles of general programs aimed at and marketed for everyone, and programs targeted at people in interfaith relationships.

By bringing together funders and organization leaders – people in a position to make things happen – with practitioners in the field, we hope to build consensus on what increased efforts need to be taken to engage interfaith families and to facilitate the possibility of concerted large-scale action towards that goal. We hope that you’ll be there to join the conversation.

Jodi Bromberg is the CEO of InterfaithFamily. Ed Case, the founder of InterfaithFamily, is an independent writer, speaker and consultant. More information about the Interfaith Opportunity Summit program is available here, and registration is available here.

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.

 

Limmud Chicago 2011

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I led a session on “changing attitudes towards intermarriage” today at Limmud Chicago. It was fun!

An interesting mix of people came – several who identified themselves as Orthodox, several young adults, several who looked like grandparents, and in between. We did a “take the temperature of the room” exercise where I asked people if they agreed, disagreed, or weren’t sure about, the following statements (thanks to Benjamin Maron for piloting this approach at TribeFest):
* if a rabbi and a priest or minister co-officiate, it’s not a Jewish wedding
* if you intermarry, your family will be a Jewish family only if your partner converts
* you can only raise Jewish children if both parents are Jewish
* if you have a Christmas tree in your house, your children won’t be Jewish.

The more traditional folks present expressed concerns on several fronts – a wedding between a Jew and someone not Jewish under Jewish law is not a Jewish wedding, why does a rabbi have to officiate, why couldn’t a judge officiate; what is the future going to be when there are so many people who identify as Jews who aren’t halachically Jewish; people won’t be recognized as Jews in Israel; etc. The very nice thing about the discussion is that it was civil and respectful on all sides. I don’t think anything was resolved, but I did offer my idea that everyone in the Jewish community could recognize self-identifying but non-halachic Jews as Jews for all purposes except those where halachic status matter.

I saw a lot of heads nodding when I talked about Jewish partners in interfaith relationships who say they get more Jewishly active because of the relationship, and partners who are not Jewish who get very Jewishly involved. People I talked with after the session appeared to be thirsting for ways to positively respond to and engage interfaith couples.

I haven’t been to a Limmud before and to be honest when I arrived it looked like a  mostly traditional set of attendees that made me wonder if anyone would come to my session and how it would be received. But it looked like perhaps 10% of the registration did come and it was a very lively discussion. It was great to be there, and I want to especially thank Debbie Burton, who has written many articles for InterfaithFamily.com, and has commented frequently on our discussion boards, for inviting me.

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

More About the Reform/Progressive World

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In my post last week about the World Union of Progressive Judaism convention, we highlighted Rabbi Larry Kushner’s presentation and mentioned that our own Karen Kushner spoke at a panel. We’re glad now to make available Karen’s remarks, Accepting the Gift of Interfaith Marriage. Karen is also featured in Dan Pine’s jweekly article, Conference Panel Defines Interfaith for Modern Era.

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

Intermarriage Around the Reform/Progressive World

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Our friend, and terrific journalist, Sue Fishkoff had a JTA story about the annual convention of the World Union of Progressive Judaism that missed what I think was a more important part of the convention.

The World Union of Progressive Judaism (WUPJ) is the association of Reform movements from all over the world. (Outside of the US, Reform Judaism is often called Progressive Judaism, hence the name of the association.) The WUPJ rarely holds its annual meeting in the US, but it did last week in San Francisco.

Sue’s story focuses on how Progressive Jews outside of the US have not adopted the American Reform Jewish movement’s doctrine of patrilineal descent which considers as Jewish the child of a Jewish father and non-Jewish mother who is raised as a Jew. Sue attended a panel discussion on that subject, and reports that other than in the Liberal movement in England and in the former Soviet Union (and one congregation each in Ireland and Holland), no other Diaspora community recognizes patrilineal descent.

I wish Sue had been able to cover the panel discussion at which IFF’s Chief Education Officer, Karen Kushner, and our Advisory Board member, Rosanne Levitt, spoke about the importance of programming to welcome interfaith couples and families. And I wish she had been able to cover the evening session at which Rabbi Lawrence Kushner spoke, because what he had to say presents a compelling case in favor of patrilineal descent and other measures to welcome and include interfaith couples and families in Jewish communities – and not just in the US.

Yes, full disclosure, Rabbi Kushner is Karen Kushner’s husband – but according to the website of the Union for Reform Judaism itself, he is considered “one of the top leaders of  American Reform Jewry” along with Rabbis Eric Yoffie (head of the US Reform movement), David Ellenson (head of Hebrew Union College, the Reform seminary), and David Saperstein (head of the URJ’s Religious Action Center).

Rabbi Kushner was kind enough to share his remarks, What it Means to Me to Be a Reform Jew, with IFF’s readers. Some of my favorite quotes:

It turns out that “assimilate” has two definitions. The more common, of course, means to dissolve into the local culture. It’s in that sense that our enemies accuse us of being assimilationist. But the reason we’re still here is because the word can also mean, not to disappear, but to deliberately take in something from the outside and make it one’s own. For example: The music business has assimilated hip-hop. And we Reform Jews have assimilated some very beautiful but non-Jewish liberal Western ideas: The equality of women; the normalization of gay people; social justice for everyone, not only Jews. But we didn’t swallow these ideas whole. We received them, we shaped them, we grounded them, we assimilated them. We made them Jewish, we made them mitzvot. That’s what we Reform Jews do; it’s who we are; it may even be why God wants us around.

We have been so terrified a Jew might fall in love with a non-Jew, we forgot that, every year, tens, hundreds of thousands of non-Jews also fall in love with, marry, and have children with Jews. They may not yet be willing or able to become Jews, but they have, with their very lives, thrown in their lot with us. Like it or not, they are members of our extended family. And they deserve an honored place at the table—and maybe even to be counted in the minyans Reform Jews claim they don’t count.

The presence at the table of these potentially new members of our family reminds us that we have something precious. They help us reexamine, deepen, and cherish our own piety. Jews who have chosen Judaism through conversion or, yes, through marrying a Jew and trying to make a Jewish home, free us from ethnocentrism and smugness. These people are not the enemy; they’re a gift.

[It is] the 21st Century and intermarriage is here to stay. The only question before us now is whether or not we will acknowledge social and religious reality and see what, yes, Heaven, wants of us now.

We at IFF are glad that the Kushners and Rosanne Levitt put a positive response to intermarriage on the WUPJ agenda, and we hope the delegates from around the world took in their message and will bring it back to their communities.

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

Attitude Antennae

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My “attitude antennae” were buzzing this week – because of several notable expressions of attitudes, both negative and positive, about intermarriage.

Neil Steinberg, a writer for the Chicago Sun-Times, took a cheap shot in a column about the Super Bowl TV ad for Groupon that has been widely criticized as insensitive to human rights violations in Tibet. What intermarriage has to do with that, I don’t know, but he does the usual equating intermarriage with assimilation: “Judaism is circling the drain, with Jews shrugging, intermarrying and forgetting to raise their children in the faith…”

That’s what we usually hear from Israel, and there was another example of that this week – a member of the Knesset sponsored “Jewish Identity Day” in which many of the Knesset committee meetings discussed issues relating to Jewish identity, assimilation, intermarriage, and Jewish education. As reported in Arutz Sheva/Israel National News, one Knesset member equates Jewish women marrying Arab men as assimilation and says it can be prevented by intense education.

But this week I also read the most positive comments about intermarriage that I’ve ever seen coming out of Israel. Rabbi Naamah Kelman, the dean of Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem, and her husband Dr. Elan Ezrachi, an educational consultant, wrote the following in Ha’aretz:

Over the past 30 years, several demographic studies of Jewry in the United States have been published. For many years the dominant line was that mixed marriages were a disaster that would lead to a decline in the number of Jews. There is, however, another view that sees connections between Jews and non-Jews as in fact a possibility for expanding the definitions of identity and enlarging the ranks.

Beyond the demographic hairsplitting, it appears there is a phenomenon of historic dimensions developing there: Instead of fleeing from Judaism, entering Judaism; instead of black and white definitions, “hybrid” definitions that enable surprising connections between Jews and non-Jews. These new definitions are expanding the boundaries of the tribe.

While Judaism in Israel is moving further to the margins and concentrating mainly on whom to push out of the fold – the convert, the foreigner, the half-Jew or the new immigrant serving in the Israel Defense Forces – in American Judaism a dynamic of acceptance, embrace and widening circles is developing. This is another measure of the growing gap between Israeli society and the largest Jewish community in the world.

Finally, Gary Rosenblatt in the New York Jewish Week feels positive about some gatherings of young Jews in Europe. Acknowledging that the typical view of Europe is “an ageing demographic threatened by intermarriage and assimilation,” he writes that many of the new Jewish start-ups in Europe “deal with intermarriage by, in a sense, ignoring it. Their programs tend to be open to everyone.”

Barbara Spectre, the American-born director of  Paideia, refers to what is happening in Europe as “the dis-assimilation” of Jewish life, with even young people who are intermarried or not considered Jewish by halachic standards asserting their identity and exploring Jewish roots and culture. She calls for a change in “rhetoric and attitude” among Israeli and American Jewish leaders who refuse to “hear good news” about what she sees as “a great transformation taking place.”

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

More Attitude About Intermarriage

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I’m pleased to tell you that Shalom TV has made available an edited video of my GA session, Can We Encourage In-marriage and Welcome Interfaith Families? It’s even on the front page of the Shalom TV site! The video is 44 minutes long, and it may take a while to download. (If your cable provider carries Shalom TV, you can watch the program on On Demand, until January 2.)

I’ve previously blogged about how I felt about the session, and now I would be very interested in hearing from anyone who watches the video. Did I successfully convey in my presentation that every Jewish community could extend explicit welcoming messages to interfaith families, and offer relatively low cost programs and services that will attract and engage interfaith families in Jewish life and community? Do you agree with my observation that it seemed that Steven M. Cohen expressed his default position that intermarriage is “bad bad bad?” Did my message come across that Jews and Jewish leaders should stop talking about intermarriage as bad; we should promote Jewish experiences not as preventing intermarriage but as building identity and desire to have Jewish families; and we should encourage young adults to choose partners who will support their Jewish engagement – whether or not the partner is a Jew.

Coincidentally, Julie Wiener had a great article this week in a special section on singles in the New York Jewish Week: A Secret Love No More. She interviewed a number of people – including InterfaithFamily.com’s own Board member from Atlanta, Rebecca Hoelting – and recounts her own experiences, about whether or not there is growing acceptance of interdating. It’s definitely worth reading. Most interesting to me was Julie’s conclusion, which seems consistent with my main point at the GA session:

Whereas ending up with a Jewish partner, regardless of his or her level of observance or commitment, used to be non-negotiable for those who wanted to live a Jewish life, the new priority increasingly seems to be finding someone, Jewish or not, who is supportive of one’s Jewish pursuits.

If you do watch the GA video, please let us know what you think.

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