More Bad Attitude from Israel

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Back in October, the Jerusalem Post published an op-ed I wrote, What Israelis need to know about intermarriage in North America. As I blogged then, “it is critical for Israelis to know that intermarriage does not necessarily lead to loss of Jewish identity and affiliation; that many interfaith couples and families are engaging in Jewish life; and that intermarriage has the potential to increase support for Israel in America.”

Apparently, the Prime Minister of Israel, Benyamin Netanyahu, either didn’t read my op-ed, or if he did, the message didn’t register. In February, Prime Minister Netanyahu spoke at the Jewish Agency for Israel’s Board of Governors meeting. Our friends at eJewish Philanthropy quoted him as saying that one main palpable challenge to the Jewish future is “the loss of identity – the loss of identity through assimilation or through intermarriage or through both is the greatest toll-taker of Jewish numbers in the last half-century.”

Paul Golin, the associate executive director at the Jewish Outreach Institute, had an interesting op-ed in the New York Jewish Weeklast week. As Paul aptly says,

The suggestion that intermarriage also represents absorption beyond recognition into the larger culture is an affront to the literally hundreds of thousands of households where one parent happens to be Jewish that are currently raising Jewish children. If intermarriage means the same thing as assimilation, there wouldn’t be intermarried members of synagogues, children of intermarriage on Birthright Israel trips or intermarried leaders of Jewish communal organizations.

Continuing to group “intermarriage and assimilation” into a synonymous phrase pushes away the intermarried families already among us.

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

Worth Reading: More Talk About Intermarriage

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Just a quick post about two important discussions about intermarriage. In the current issue of the  Forward, Adam Bronfman debates Jack Wertheimer in Straight Talk About Assimilation: An Exchange. Adam is the managing director of the Samuel Bronfman Foundation, one of InterfaithFamily.com’s leading funders, and we continue to applaud his outspoken leadership on our issues.

Also, Jeremy Ben Ami, the executive director of J Street, had some interesting comments about intermarriage in an interview with Atlantic correspondent Jeffrey Goldberg. For comment, check out  J Street Chief Talks About Intermarriage on Tablet Magazine. As always, Andy Silow-Carroll, editor of the New Jersey Jewish News, has an insightful take on Ben Ami’s comments on his  blog.This post originally appeared on www.interfaithfamily.com and is reprinted with permission.

Noah Feldman on Intermarriage

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I went to a fascinating “conversation” last night between Rabbi Daniel Lehmann, the president of Hebrew College, and Noah Feldman, the Harvard Law School professor and frequent New York Times contributor. Feldman’s July 2007 New York Times magazine article about the reaction of his modern Orthodox community’s reaction to his intermarriage was the subject of heated commentary that our Micah Sachs blogged about extensively at the time.

Hebrew College is a wonderful institution which had a major role in developing the Me’ah program of adult Jewish education, runs Prozdor, an outstanding supplmentary high school Jewish education program, and a few years ago created a trans-denominational rabbinical school, among many other things. Rabbi Lehmann, who only recently became president of the College, said that intermarriage had become a much bigger issue there particularly in the rabbinical school, with issues being presented about whether people who are intermarried could be admitted to the school, or whether people who developed interfaith relationships while in school could be ordained. (Coincidentally, we’ve just published an article by Edie Mueller about her experience fifteen years ago when she wanted to attend rabbinical school and was told she could not be admitted because she was intermarried.)  Rabbi Lehmann said that the issue of officiation at weddings of interfaith couples is also being raised among their rabbinic students.

It is difficult to capture the wide ranging conversation about intermarriage between Lehmann, Feldman and the audience. One interesting thread was when Feldman described an internal tension in the thinking of American Jews about how we should think about who people should marry. After pointing out that a Jew would experience as anti-Semitic a situation where a non-Jewish family objected to their child marrying a Jew, he asked why is it socially normative for only Jews, and possibly African-Americans, to say that they want their children to marry only other like them? Someone made the point that the child of a black person and a white person will still be black, therefore blacks have less reason to insist on endogamous marriage, but the same isn’t true of the child of a Jew and a non-Jew.

After saying that half of Jews are “voting with their huppahs,” Feldman said there is a deep and profound soul-searching going on in the Jewish community about intermarriage, with many people feeling that their Judaism is not incompatible with their being intermarried. I understood Lehmann to say in that context that intermarriage “will certainly weaken” Jewish affiliation or continuity or community, a point that I argued with him privately after the program ended. If there was a flash point in the discussion, that was it.  As is usual in my experience in this kind of setting, the points of view were all over the spectrum. A woman in the audience said with emotion that her intermarriage had not lessened her Jewish involvement in any way. A man in the audience said he was intermarried, very active in the Workmen’s Circle, and his three teenage sons were fluent in Yiddish. Another woman in the after-program private discussions said that the way to prevent intermarriage was for parents to forbid interdating.

Aside from the two audience comments, the one perspective that was not presented clearly by either Lehmann or Feldman was the view that intermarriage is an opportunity for enlarging and enriching the Jewish community. Feldman didn’t discuss how he and his wife are raising their children, and the importance of encouraging and supporting Jewish choices by interfaith couples and families in that regard was overlooked.

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

Breaking New Ground with Jewish Leaders

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Last week the United Jewish Communities (UJC) held its annual convention, called the General Assembly (GA). Something different and potentially very significant happened: there was talk about intermarriage, in a positive way.

Since I got involved in the professional Jewish world nine years ago, I think I’ve been to every GA except for two that were held in Israel, including last week’s. There are probably more Jewish leaders gathered at the annual GA than at any other time or place.

For many years I have lobbied the UJC, usually  unsuccessfully, to devote  convention sessions to the subject of outreach to the intermarried. (Like most conventions, there are big “plenary” sessions where most participants attend, and then there are multiple competing sessions over many time slots that attract smaller groups.)

I’ve actually spoken on panels at at least two GA’s, but the sessions were always about inclusivity generally, not outreach to interfaith families in particular. At last year’s GA in Nashville, there was nothing about intermarriage on the program. A GA visitor who didn’t know better, based on the absence of discussion at GA’s, wouldn’t be aware that outreach to interfaith families was the biggest challenge and opportunity the Jewish community faces.

I’m sorry I couldn’t go to Jerusalem this year, because finally things changed. I urge you to watch a video blog posted by Jacob Berkman of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, which is embedded below. Berkman reports that Edgar Bronfman and Adam Bronfman broke new ground by bringing the subject of welcoming interfaith families to the front stage of the Jewish world.

I blogged last month about an important new book by Edgar Bronfman, Hope, Not Fear, and we recently published an excerpt from the book that has attracted some interesting comments. But the Bronfmans’ speeches at the GA have taken the discussion to an entirely new level.

Edgar Bronfman spoke first, at a pre-GA gathering focused on the “Next Generation.” In his speech he said the Jewish community needs to stop regarding intermarriage as the “enemy.”. UJC leaders, including Kathy Manning, chair of the UJC executive committee, are quoted as responding sympathetically to viewing intermarriage as an opportunity.

adambronfman250Most remarkably, Adam Bronfman, Edgar’s son and managing director of the Samuel Bronfman Foundation (one of InterfaithFamily.com’s most generous supporters), spoke at a plenary session about the future of the Jewish people. Based on his own experience he urged the thousands of Jewish leaders in attendance to consider the potential for positive Jewish involvement by interfaith families if Jews and Jewish institutions welcome them.

Berkman’s video blog includes excerpts from the speech as well as a revealing interview in which Adam further explains his views: if an interfaith couple chooses to lead a Jewish life, institutions should be completely open to them; interfaith couples “on the ground” are living Jewishly and not focusing on status issues; more and more Jewish institutions are recognizing that the future for them lies in the Jewish world as it is composed, with 50% of young adults who identify as Jews having grown up with one Jewish parent. He concludes by saying that Judaism was never meant to exist in a “gated community” but was always meant to be open, that its central ideas will remain but be surrounded by evolving new ideas; and that if something is of value, people will be attracted to it and will not leave.

It is extremely gratifying to me to know that a positive response to intermarriage has finally made it to the front stage of Jewish leadership. I can only hope that those in attendance take the message to heart and that positive attitudes and concrete actions follow.

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

Hope, Not Fear

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I started InterfaithFamily.com as an independent non-profit in January 2002. There was a time three or four years into it that I gave serious thought to closing down. I started to write an essay that I thought I would submit to Moment magazine complaining bitterly about the lack of funding support for outreach to interfaith families.

Yes, we did have pioneering support, without which we couldn’t have gotten started, from the Walter & Elise Haas Fund, the Richard & Rhoda Goldman Fund, the Jacob and Hilda Blaustein Foundation, and Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Boston. But we were plateaued at a low level, and our existing funders were looking for others to join them.

There was a change in the funding climate that began in 2006. Important funders finally realized that attracting more interfaith families to Jewish life was essential to the growth and strength of the Jewish community. After fluctuating below $375,000 for four years, we raised $535,000 in 2006 and $875,000 in 2007, enabling us to take on important new projects with new staff and start a transition from a start up to a more mature organization.

Edgar M. Bronfman was a key catalyst in this change. His Samuel Bronfman Foundation was our first major new funder in 2006 and since then has been among our most generous funders.

We now have some insight as to why Mr. Bronfman supports our organization, as well as our friends at the Jewish Outreach Institute. With Beth Zasloff, he has written an important new book: Hope, Not Fear: A Path to Jewish Renaissance Here are some of the key things he has to say about intermarriage:

If we speak about intermarriage as a disaster for the Jewish people, we send a message to intermarried families that is mixed at best. How can you welcome people in while at the same time telling them that their loving relationship is in part responsible for the destruction of the Jewish people? No one should be made to feel our welcome is conditional or begrudging. The many non-Jews who marry Jews must not be regarded as a threat to Jewish survival but as honored guests in a house of joy, learning and pride.

The oft-cited figure that among intermarried families only 33 percent of children are raised Jewish does not take into account the possibility that if the Jewish community were more welcoming, those numbers could grow dramatically.

Our concern as a community now should be to welcome people into our community, not to build boundaries around it. Conversion should be a choice people make from their hearts and when they are ready, not a condition by which they and their children are accepted into the Jewish community. There are many non-Jews who may not be ready to formally convert – particularly if their parents are living – but may be willing to raise their children as Jews. From my son Adam I learned how insulting it is if your children, who have a non-Jewish mother, are considered not Jews by other Jews, despite the fact that they grew up in a Jewish….”

If more funders and policy makers in the Jewish community adopted Mr. Bronfman’s attitude towards intermarriage, we would see a much greater communal effort to attract interfaith families to Jewish life. We can only hope that that will be the case.

You can find an interesting interview of Mr. Bronfman’s co-author, Beth Zasloff, on Daniel Septimus’ blog at MyJewishLearning.com. You can also listen to an NPR On Point show that focused on the book with a discussion with Mr. Bronfman and Sylvia Barack Fishman.

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

“Keeping the Faith”

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Yesterday’s Boston Sunday Globe magazine “Coupling” column by Alison Lobron provides an illuminating perspective on how young adult Jews think about interdating and intermarriage.

Alison describes herself as a “not-very-active Jew” who had no Bat Mitzvah, no Hebrew lessons, and no family tradition of Jewish holidays. After a two-year relationship with a “not-very-active Protestant” on which religion had little impact broke up, friends suggested Alison enter Boston’s lively Jewish social scene.

She relates how the first time she went to services at a synagogue known as a young-adult mixing spot, she felt that she “barely counted as Jewish,” “spent most of the evening searching the prayer book for a nonexistent English translation,” felt lonely when two people assumed she was an out-of-town, non-Jewish guest of someone, and felt that she didn’t have much in common with “people with whom I was supposed to share a culture.”

Alison writes that in dating, people “must figure out how much we care about” ethnic, religious and family affiliations, and concludes that just as she wouldn’t limit her friendship circle to Jews, she wouldn’t limit her dating pool, either. However, “a funny thing happened during my adventures in Jewish dating… I did become attracted to aspects of Judaism itself, like the ritual of Friday night dinners with family as a peaceful door to the weekend… I do see [cultural identity] as a part of myself that will need to be reconciled and sorted out with any future Prince Charming. Still,… that prince can come from any number of tribes.”

Those of us who are interested in encouraging Jewish choices among young adults who are interdating or likely to interdate can draw many lessons about effective programmatic responses from Alison’s short account:
* Jewish cultural identity has a strong attraction even among Jews with little Jewish upbringing
* Jews–let alone non-Jews–feel unwelcomed when prayer books don’t have English translations and when people make thoughtless comments about whether they are or aren’t Jewish
* Shabbat ritual can be a very attractive aspect of Judaism

The organized Jewish community should capitalize on the opportunity presented by young adult Jews like Alison Lobron, who are not willing to restrict their dating to Jews and expect that their intended one can come from “any number of tribes,” but see their Jewish identity as something that to reconcile and sort out with that partner.

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

Attitudinal Shifts in Favor of Outreach

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Our friends at STAR (Synagogues: Transformation and Renewal) issued an interesting press release today on their new survey of rabbis’ attitudes. Over 100 rabbis who are participating in STAR’s programs responded to questions about their goals and views of the future as the Jewish New Year begins.

Of particular interest to us:

“The vast majority [of the rabbis surveyed] (90%) also point to a need within their community to reach out to segments that have historically been less involved, such as gays and lesbians, interfaith couples, single parents, and singles.

‘These findings demonstrate openness to community diversity,’ says Rabbi [Hayyim] Herring [STAR’s executive director]. ‘The ground is fertile for these attitudinal shifts to be reinforced in programs and policies.’”

Attitudinal shifts in favor of reaching out to interfaith couples, reinforced in programs and policies–there’s a great New Year’s resolution!

STAR promotes Jewish renewal through congregational innovation and leadership development and is a philanthropic partnership of the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation, Jewish Life Network/Steinhardt Foundation and The Samuel Bronfman Foundation.

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