What I Would Like To Be Thankful For

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It’s Thanksgiving 2010. I have a lot of good fortune in my life and I try to be very grateful. That goes for my work at InterfaithFamily.com, too, but this year I’m not sure how thankful I feel. It has to do with Jewish attitudes towards intermarriage and whether they are changing and will change for the better. It’s related to my presentation at the General Assembly of the United Jewish Federations of North America, and to media reports since.

One of the most important books I’ve read is Ron Heifitz’s Leadership Without Easy Answers. I read it in one of my best classes at the Hornstein Program, organizational behavior taught by Susan Shevitz. His thesis is that the job of leadership is to move people to adapt their attitudes in significant ways.

What I tried to convey in my presentation is that every Jewish community could and should extend explicit welcoming messages to interfaith families, and could and should offer relatively low cost programs and services that will attract and engage interfaith families in Jewish life and community. But the real question was, why don’t Jewish communities do that? Why do Jewish funders allocate less than 1/10 of 1% of their total spending to engaging interfaith families?

I believe it’s because Jews and Jewish leaders view intermarriage as bad, as something negative, or at best, with ambivalence. Whether it’s because of tribalism, or because of flawed research that suggests that intermarried couples because of the fact of the intermarriage are and will be less Jewishly engaged, or because of misguided views that intermarriage can be prevented or reduced – whatever the source, too many Jews and Jewish leaders, in the words of one of IFF’s users, can’t resist saying that intermarriage is “bad bad bad.” One of the primary goals of InterfaithFamily.com’s work is to move Jews to adapt from that attitude, towards seeing the potential for positive Jewish engagement by interfaith families.

The GA presentation was structured as initial remarks by me and then by Steven M. Cohen, followed by responses from three top federations executives. Now Steven M. Cohen is the sociologist most associated with the survey reports that conclude that intermarriage leads to much less Jewish attitudes and behaviors. Even though I think he has made a lot of progress over the years, and now says that he supports more funding for engaging interfaith families, and that he doesn’t want to alienate interfaith families – still, when he made his remarks, it was like he couldn’t control himself from his default position that intermarriage is “bad bad bad.”

Cohen repeated his severe critique of the Boston federation’s report that showed that the 60% of interfaith families raising their children as Jews were much like in-married Reform Jews in their attitudes and behaviors. He recited a litany of comparisons where they fall short of their in-married counterparts – all while studiously avoiding any comparisons where they “score” ahead. You would never ever know, listening to Steven Cohen, that interfaith families raising Jewish children in Boston actually light Shabbat candles more than in-married Reform of Conservative families do.

There was a little moment of drama at the end of the session. I think Steven could sense that the last question had been asked. He took the mic and recited another litany, of things like Jewish summer camps, day schools, Israel trips, social networks that get young Jews together – and said that these steps could or would prevent or reduce intermarriage. I kind of grabbed the mic and said, we don’t have to promote those things as preventing intermarriage, we can promote them as building strong Jewish identity and desire to have Jewish families and children. There was a smattering of applause at that point, and the program ended.

That was really my point: Jews and Jewish leaders should stop talking about intermarriage as bad; they should promote Jewish experiences not as preventing intermarriage but as building identity and desire to have Jewish families; they should encourage young adults to choose partners who will support their Jewish engagement – whether or not the partner is a Jew.

The room was packed. I estimate there were over 200 people there — at 8:15 am! Several people came up and said very positive things to me afterwards, but it’s hard to gauge overall reaction. I heard indirectly that one of the federation executives on the panel told one of his donors that he had been sensitized that it is a problem to say that in-marriage, rather than strong Jewish identity, is the goal. To that extent, the program was a great success, and I’m thankful for that. If others felt that way, I’d be even more thankful.

I didn’t make good notes of the three federation executives’ remarks. Barry Shrage, the head of the Boston federation, basically said that saying don’t intermarry and fearing intermarriage won’t work, that we need to address interfaith couples with positive messages. Steve Rakitt, the head of the Atlanta federation, said the message should be to promote positive Jewish identity, and talked about the Pathways program to engage interfaith families that the Atlanta federation funds. The Boston and Atlanta federations are the only two that allocate any significant funding to programs to engage interfaith families. I’m thankful for that, but if more federations would follow suit, I’d be even more thankful.

Jay Sanderson, head of the Los Angeles federation, seemed to say that welcoming interfaith families wasn’t the right issue to be talking about – he said that we need to be welcoming everyone. My response was that yes, it’s important to be welcoming to everyone, but we need to have some services and programs that specifically address the unique needs of interfaith couples and families. Even after this session, my feeling is still that federation executives would just as soon not talk expressly and explicitly about engaging interfaith families.

I hope you will be able to evaluate the session for yourself. It was filmed by Shalom TV and their founder told me afterwards that it would be on their site, but it hasn’t appeared yet and I’m starting to wonder if it ever will. You can read my complete remarks on our site, and a shortened version on the Huffington Post and on eJewish Philanthropy.

So I got back from the GA and there was a spate of news stories coming out of Israel. On November 16 the Jerusalem Post reported that the Knesset held a special session on assimilation in the Diaspora and a new study showed high rates of intermarriage in the Diaspora. As usual, the Israeli view was to equate intermarriage with assimilation, the loss of Jewish identity and engagement. I’ve tried in the past to explain What Israelis Should Know About Intermarriage in North America – but it doesn’t feel like many are getting the message there. I’d be more thankful if they did.

On November 17, Alan Dershowitz was interviewed about his new novel that includes a romance between an Arab man and a Jewish woman. The interviewer from The Jewish Press, which is by its own admission mostly for Orthodox readers, says, “Intermarriage is generally thought of as one of the worst sins a Jew can commit” and asks why he protrayed the interfaith romance. Dershowitz gave what I consider a bad answer:

I don’t think I portray it in a positive light. I think I portray it realistically. I portray it the way I see it among my students. I’m trying to be descriptive, not prescriptive. I’m not suggesting it’s a good thing. I don’t support it. But I see it all around me. The other night I spoke at a Chabad Shabbat dinner at Harvard, and a lot of the students came with non-Jewish girlfriends and spouses. Many of them will eventually convert to Judaism but we’re going through a very challenging period now with intermarriage. I can’t ignore that in my writing.

I would have been thankful if he instead had said, “I don’t accept your question – most young Jews today do not consider intermarraige to be a sin. The other night I spoke at a Chabad Shabbat dinner at Harvard, and a lot of the students came with non-Jewish girlfriends and spouses. That just goes to show that young Jews feel that they can live Jewishly with non-Jewish partners – isn’t that great! That’s what we should hope will happen.”

I don’t want to overlook the more positive news and views. On November 18, there was a wonderful short piece in the Jewish Exponent by our friend Gari Weilbacher, the managing director of Interfaithways in Philadelphia, with yet another story of Jewish engagement in an intermarriage. On November 21, Sue Fishkoff reported that the Conservative movement is tipping towards openness to the children of intermarried couples. And on November 23, the Connecticut Jewish Ledger interviewed sociologist Arnold Dashefsky, who said:

On one hand, intermarriage could be a boon to the Jewish population. If the non-Jewish spouse decides to become Jewish or if the couple raises its children as Jews, they might actually increase the Jewish population. … [T]here is a portion of the Jewish population that is intermarried that is also committed to living a Jewish life, even if the spouse hasn’t converted. In our interviews – and I stress that they do not constitute a representative sample of all intermarried couples – in many dimensions, some couples had Jewish behaviors similar to or exceeding the larger Jewish population. In [some] areas – synagogue membership, lighting Shabbat and Chanukah candles, participating in a Passover seder – intermarried couples actually exceeded the American Jewish population as a whole… Fasting on Yom Kippur was identical among the two samples…. We believe that the Jewish community should offer encouragement to those members of intermarried couples who wish to affirm their Jewish identity and give the non-Jewish spouses support and recognition that this is something they want to share in.

I would be thankful if more sociologists talked about intermarriage like Dashefsky did.

How thankful do you think I should feel? Am I right to feel that there hasn’t been enough progress fast enough towards a positive attitude that sees intermarriage as an opportunity for Jewish engagement? Or is there progress that I’m not seeing and is it happening as fast as reasonably could be expected?

Either way, I hope you have a good and thankful Thanksgiving.

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

Chelsea and Marc in the Jewish News Again

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Each year the Forward, the only national Jewish newspaper, publishes a list called the “Forward 50” which they describe this year as a list of “men and women who have made a significant impact on the Jewish story in a Jewish way.”

Way back in 2001, I made the list, to my mother’s everlasting pride – she thought it was a list of the fifty most important Jews. I had criticized one of the leading critics of intermarriage as subjectively biased, and I think the Forward staff liked the controversy.

As usual, the list this year is entertaining reading – in particular this year because they added a 51st space, for two people: “Chelsea Clinton and Marc Mezvinsky, high-profile intermarriage.”

If you read this blog you know that we’ve had a lot of comment on the Clinton-Mezvinsky wedding, starting back when their engagement was announced, continuing with speculation about what kind of officiant they would have, and most recently with comment on the not very enthusiastic reaction of Jewish leaders to their wedding because a rabbi co-officiated with a Methodist minister before Shabbat had ended.

According to the Forward, the wedding “reinvigorated the intermarriage conversation for a new generation of American Jews.” Chelsea’s wedding to “an involved Jew… was a validating first in many ways” referring to the photos of a chuppah, a ketubah, and the groom in a tallis and yarmulke – “The Clintons and Mezvinskys telegraphed to the world that Judaism has nothing to hide.”

In explaining why they went beyond 50, clearly the controversy was again important: Chelsea and Marc are included “For the hot debate this couple caused about who is a Jew and what role nuptials play in religion, for how they captivated the American imagination and energized the conversation around Jewish identity.”

Next week I will be speaking at a session at the Jewish Federation of North America’s annual convention on the question, “Can we encourage in-marriage and welcome interfaith families?” We had a planning call for the session today and the other panelists did not seem thrilled to hear that I plan to bring up the Clinton-Mezvinsky wedding in my presentation. But I still feel strongly that the tepid reaction of Jewish leaders missed an opportunity to extend an enthusiastic welcome to a prominent couple that could have helped to inspire many other young couples to consider Jewish traditions for their own weddings and lives together. I’m glad that the Forward has kept the Clinton-Mezvinsky wedding in the spotlight.

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

Mark Zuckerberg Is Not In Love With A Stereotype

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I’m afraid that the Jewish world is about to blow it again with interfaith couples and families, as happened just two months ago with negative reactions to the wedding of Chelsea Clinton and Marc Mezvinsky. This time, it’s about Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of Facebook.

Apparently the soon-to-be-released movie, The Social Network, written by Aaron Sorkin, suggests that Zuckerberg created Facebook so he could meet non-Jewish girls. This according to a piece by Danielle Berrin in the Huffington Post yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg Created Facebook To Get Non-Jewish Girls, that is disturbing on many levels.

Berrin writes that the movie assumes that “for some Jewish men, and perhaps Mark Zuckerberg, being a Jewish woman is a turn-off.” Apparently there is a scene in the movie where Zuckerberg and his friends are looking at a group of Asian women dancing and one comments that Jewish guys connect with Asian girls because they are not Jewish.

I don’t deny that there are stereotypes in culture of Jewish women. As Berrin says, young Jewish women are depicted as Jewish American Princesses and adult Jewish women are depicted as the Overbearing Jewish Mother. To her credit, Berrin says that these stereotypes “obviously, are egregiously unfair.”

But Berrin offends when she suggests that it is not “pure fiction” when Sorkin suggests that in Zuckerberg’s eyes “one of the best things about being an Asian woman is that she isn’t a Jewish woman” on the basis of the fact that Zuckerberg is in a serious relationship with Priscilla Chan, a Chinese-American medical student, whom he started dating in college. She also ends her piece by saying that Jewish women aren’t the problem, the problem is that Jewish men like Zuckerberg are hanging out with the wrong ones.

The notion that Mark Zuckerberg is in love with Priscilla Chan because she is not Jewish, and that he wouldn’t be with her if he had hung out with the “right” Jewish women, is, with all respect, ridiculous. And offensive.

Do you know anyone who is in love with a stereotype as opposed to a real person? Do you know anyone who fell in love with a person because he or she was a stereotype – or was not a person who fit some negative stereotype?

There’s no explaining why Mark Zuckerberg or anyone else is in love with who they are in love with. But I’m pretty confident that people don’t fall in love based on whether a person they are attracted to fits one stereotype or doesn’t fit another.

Berrin offends for another reason: She says a profile of Zuckerberg in the New Yorker gave “the Jewish world yet another reason to fret over the its future by suggesting Zuckerberg is on the road to intermarriage.” Can I ask why that is a reason for the Jewish world to fret? This is the same kind of backward thinking that recently led Jewish leaders to declare the wedding of Chelsea Clinton and Marc Mezvinsky  “not a Jewish event.”

It’s too bad that this movie, judging from Berrin’s comments, is probably going to generate many more comments complaining that Jewish men aren’t interested in Jewish women and are on the road to intermarriage. It would be a lot smarter if the Jewish reaction to Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan would be a great big “mazel tov, welcome to our community.”

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

 

Question: Can Jews Encourage In-Marriage AND Welcome Interfaith Families

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A proposal I made for a workshop at the annual convention of the Jewish Federations of North America has been accepted. In November, I will be speaking before an audience of important Jewish leaders on this question: Can We Encourage In-Marriage and Welcome Interfaith Families? The session will involve presentations by me and my ideological nemesis, Steven M. Cohen, and then responses by some of the top federation executives in the country – Barry Shrage from Boston, Jay Sanderson from Los Angeles and Steve Rakitt from Atlanta. The panel will be moderated by Alisa Doctoroff, Chair of the UJA Federation of New York.

I’ve decided to seek help in shaping my presentation from InterfaithFamily.com’s community of readers. I have fifteen minutes to convey our position on a complicated question. I don’t want to spend a lot of time citing statistics, I want to tell stories – your stories – about how expression of preference for in-marriage affects interfaith couples. So please post your comments below.

I’d like to give three reference points for background. In an article I wrote for IFF then years ago, How to Talk to Your Kids about Interfaith Dating, I basically took the position that it was OK for Jews to say the following to young adults: We would like to see you live a Jewish life; if you want to, the statistics show that your chances are far greater if you marry someone who is Jewish; it is possible, but it isn’t so easy, to have a Jewish family and to raise Jewish children in an intermarriage. I’ve also said many times that it is not OK for Jews to say that intermarriage is wrong, or bad, or a violation of Jewish norms, because that message won’t deter the half of young adults who will intermarry anyway, but it will deter them from engaging Jewishly because people won’t go where they feel disapproval. So I’ve said in the past that it is possible to encourage in-marriage, but only in a very careful and limited way.

Recently Paul Golin, associate executive director of the Jewish Outreach Institute, took the position that Jewish leaders should fully shed the preference for in-marriage. He said that “preference for one type of family over another inevitably must lead to a lesser welcoming for intermarried families. You simply cannot say, ‘We welcome everybody equally, but we prefer one kind over another.’” Paul did add, however, that “This is not to say that we can’t discuss the challenges of raising Jewish children when one parent is not Jewish; what I’m talking about is the open preference for one type of couple over another, even when both may choose to raise Jewish children.”

Finally, I blogged recently about a report that  Steven M. Cohen had said that Jews and Jewish organizations are already plenty welcoming of interfaith couples. In response, I received a very powerful message from an individual that I posted on the blog (scroll down to July 21, 2010 comment). Here is part of what she said:

For all practical purposes, I am the ideal interfaith partner. I gave into everything, gave up all the religious traditions of my family and my childhood, and accepted that I was always going to be fundamentally different and separate from my children. And yet, the message that I get is that it is never enough, that I am simply wrong for not being Jewish, and I am a threat and a second class citizen. When I hear rabbis stress the evils of interfaith marriage in synagogue, how does Dr. Cohen think I feel? How do my children feel, knowing that their father was considered wrong, and that he married an unacceptable person? Is it so much to ask that yes, they soft pedal the admonitions and prejudice against intermarriage, given that we are advocating and living Jewish choices?

So now it’s your turn. What do you think? Should Jews and Jewish leaders fully shed the preference for in-marriage because it is not possible to welcome the non-preferred intermarried? Or is it possible to state a preference and still be welcoming – and if so, how? And if you were the person with fifteen minutes to make our case, what would you say?

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

There Is Still Work To Be Done on Welcoming Interfaith Families

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I’ve blogged previously on a recent report in the Forward that Steven M. Cohen had found, in a study for the Foundation for Jewish Camp, that most interfaith couples feel like that have an open invitation to be part of Jewish life, that outreach “has been misguided by focusing simply on being welcoming” and that “the response of welcoming, making personnel more sensitive to the intermarried, and watching your language and having smiling ushers is not going to be effective.”

I’m pleased to telll you that eJewishPhilanthropy has published an op-ed by Rabbi Kerry Olitzky, executive director of the Jewish Outreach Institute, and me. The title of the op-ed pretty much sums up our argument: There Is Still Work to Be Done on Welcoming Intermarried Families.

Our key points:

  • It is a false dichotomy to separate out the “competency barrier” for interfaith families from the way they are welcomed into the community.
  • Nobody in the outreach community has ever said “all that’s needed is open arms.” There has always been much more to it.
  • The overwhelming majority of all outreach programming we know of, including our own, are educational in nature, working to address the knowledge barrier as well as other barriers that intermarried families face to deeper Jewish involvement.
  • As important as education is policy change. The Reform and Reconstructionist movements made a place in the tent for Jews of patrilineal descent. We still must work with the community for other policy changes, for example on issues of burial or membership, which can make the community even more welcoming.

I was especially pleased to have InterfaithFamily.com and the Jewish Outreach Institute submit an opinion piece jointly and hope there will be more of that in the future.

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

The Significance of Chelsea Clinton’s Wedding

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In my last blog post, The Jewish World Reacts to the Clinton-Mezvinsky Wedding — and It Isn’t Pretty,  I said I was still reflecting on the significance of Chelsea Clinton’s wedding, and would have more to say about it.

Well I did reflect on it and I wrote an op-ed and the Forward published it today: The Missing ‘Mazel Tov.’

I would love to quote the entire piece here but please read it on the Forward site. In a nutshell, I think the significance of the Clinton-Mezvinsky wedding is because of their celebrity the way they conducted their wedding could inspire many other interfaith couples to seriously consider incorporating Jewish practices in their weddings – like Chelsea and Marc did so prominently – and hopefully in their lives together after their weddings. In addition, I think it was very fortunate that Chelsea and Marc were able to find a rabbi of the stature of James Ponet to co-officiate the wedding with a Methodist minister.

Instead of an enthusiastic, hearty “Mazel tov,” the reaction of Jewish leaders, as detailed in my last blog post, was to pronounce the wedding as “not a Jewish event.” This was the worst possible response to express, because it can only serve to discourage and push away not just Chelsea Clinton and Marc Mezvinsky, but the thousands of other interfaith couples who are watching.

Because of space limitations, the Forward cut two paragraphs, which I’ll include here:

“There is a serious disconnect between what young couples want and what our religious leaders want to provide. Thirty to 45% of the requests made to InterfaithFamily.com’s Jewish Clergy Officiation Referral Service are for rabbis who co-officiate. In recent research done for us, rabbis who do not officiate reported overwhelmingly that they are able to successfully tell couples they can’t officiate without alienating them; but interfaith couples emphasized that a rabbis’ refusals to officiate are likely to turn them away from their congregations.”

“JTA quotes Jewish sociologist Steven M. Cohen as saying that we should celebrate the marriage of these individuals, but not the type of marriage it represents. The head of the Conservative movement said “intermarriage is not ideal” but we “must welcome interfaith families.” This have-it-both-ways response simply won’t cut it with young couples. If you were Chelsea Clinton, considering whether to get more involved in Jewish life, how would you feel?”

I hope you will read the entire piece and welcome your comments and suggestions here.

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

The Jewish World Reacts to the Clinton-Mezvinsky Wedding — and It Isn’t Pretty

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It’s been a long week at InterfaithFamily.com, starting with the news last Saturday night that Chelsea Clinton and Marc Mezvinsky had a rabbi and a minister at their wedding with very evident Jewish traditions. In this post I’m going to try to just summarize the coverage. I’m still reflecting on the significance of it all, and will have more to say about that.

At the beginning of the week the media coverage from the Jewish angle focused on what happens next for newly married interfaith couples. On Monday there was a story on ABCNews.com, Chelsea Clinton’s Interfaith Marriage Challenge: Kids, Holidays, Soul-Searching.The writer, Luchina Fisher, noted that the wedding featured many Jewish traditions: the couple married under a chuppah or canopy; the groom wore a yarmulke or skull cap and tallis or prayer shawl; friends and family recited the Seven Blessings typically read at traditional Jewish weddings. She then quoted me:

“To me that’s an indication that the groom identifies Jewishly,” Edmund Case, the head of InterfaithFamily.com told ABCNews.com. “It’s also apparent that Chelsea must have been fine with it or it wouldn’t have happened. Also, given the prominence of her family, they must have been accepting of it.”

Cathy Grossman also had a story on Monday, Clinton-Mezvinsky wedding reflects mix of religions in USA. Cathy noted,

The website InterfaithFamily.com offers DVDs for a Love and Religion course created by Marion Usher, a marriage and family counselor who has run workshops for interfaith couples for 16 years at the Jewish Community Center in Washington, D.C. DVD sales soared after Usher began offering advice online timed to the Clinton-Mezvinsky wedding.

On Tuesday I had a second post on the Huffington Post, where I tried to answer the question, Chelsea Clinton’s Interfaith Marriage: What Comes Next? Later on Tuesday, though, the coverage from the Jewish perspective turned away from what couples like Chelsea and Marc face, and started reporting on negative reactions to the wedding in the Jewish world. Jacob Berkman had a story for JTA, which is starting to be widely re-printed in local Jewish papers:  Clinton-Mezvinsky wedding raises questions about intermarriage. After a great introduction – “Is it possible that the first iconic Jewish picture of the decade is of an interfaith marriage? Photographs taken Saturday show the Jewish groom wearing a yarmulke and a crumpled tallit staring into the eyes of his giddy bride under a traditional Jewish wedding canopy with a framed ketubah, a Jewish wedding contract, in the background.” – Jacob starts quoting Jewish leaders expressing ambivalence.

First, Steven M. Cohen tries to have it both ways: “we should celebrate the particular marriage of these two fine individuals, but we ought not celebrate the type of marriage it constitutes and represents.” Then Rabbi Eric Yoffie reportedly told JTA, “The Reform movement frowns upon its rabbis conducting weddings on the Sabbath.” “Rabbi Steven Wernick, the CEO of the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, said intermarriage is certainly ‘not ideal,’ but that the Conservative movement in 2008 decided that it must welcome interfaith families and ‘help their spouses along their spiritual journeys.’” At least Rabbi Yoffie also said, “I look at the couple and my response is, ‘I hope they will make a choice to raise their children in a single religion and tradition and second, as a Jew and rabbi, I hope it will be Judaism.”

It was left to me to make an unequivocal statement: “Case said that accepting this marriage and welcoming this intermarried family into the Jewish fold could help pave the way for the Jewish community to be more accepting of others.” I was also quoted as saying that “the Clinton wedding certainly had stirred interest in intermarriage, noting that traffic to his website was up 35 percent in July compared to the same month last year. “

Also on Tuesday, Julie Wiener put up her article that would appear in the New York Jewish Week, which focuses on co-officiation. Julie says that “Even as the number of liberal rabbis willing to preside at weddings of Jews to gentiles appears to be growing, co-officiation with clergy of another faith, while hardly unheard of, remains taboo.” Julie quotes me:

“The mainstream of the Reform rabbinate is not with co-officiation yet,” says Ed Case, CEO of InterfaithFamily.com, which since 2007 has run a free referral service for interfaith couples seeking clergy to officiate at their wedding. Despite the mainstream opposition, 40 percent of the almost 400 rabbis and cantors in IFF’s database (some ordained by the Reform and Reconstructionist seminaries, some by nondenominational ones) are willing to co-officiate, and in the past six months 31.5 percent of the approximately 120 couples each month using the service have sought someone to co-officiate. (In 2009, 43 percent of couples contacting IFF were seeking someone to co-officiate.) “I’ve had Reform rabbis say they don’t want to have anything to do with us because our referral service” provides co-officiating rabbis to those couples who want them, Case says.

Julie interviewed Rabbi Ellen Dreyfuss, the president of the Reform rabbis’ association, who said “The rabbi’s presence and officiation at a wedding is reflective of a commitment on the part of the couple to have a Jewish home and a Jewish family, so co-officiation with clergy of another faith does not reflect that commit. It reflects, rather, indecision on the part of the couple… Religiously it’s problematic because [the bride and groom are] trying to create a both and there’s no such thing as a both.” Rabbi Richard Hirsh, executive director of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association, also says that “having a co-officiated ceremony points in the direction of a home that won’t be primarily Jewish.”

As Rabbi Kerry Olitzky of JOI aptly points out, however, “the common assumption is that when a couple wishes a rabbi to co-officiate, the couple is going to bring up the future children in two faiths or the couple has not made a decision…. That’s probably a premature conclusion to make.” And I said, about Rabbi James Ponet, who co-officiated at the Clinton-Mezvinsky wedding, “I think it’s really significant that a highly regarded rabbi would be willing to co-officiate and before Shabbat was over. I think it’s positive too. Maybe it will have some influence.”

Julie gives our own Rabbi Lev Baesh the last word:

Lev Baesh, a Reform rabbi and CCAR member who is the director of InterfaithFamily.com’s resource center for Jewish clergy and oversees the referral service, says he co-officiates because, “My view is that any Jew who wants Jewish ritual in their life should have it.”
Even if a couple hasn’t yet decided whether or not to have a Jewish household, “the wedding is a great opportunity to show Judaism is something that has meaning and value for them.”
The hope is that if they have a good experience, then “down the road” these couples will get more engaged in Jewish life.
“I know that I’m not just hoping this, because I also do a lot of baby namings,” Rabbi Baesh says.

Finally, on Thursday, Allison Gaudet Yarrow at the Forward wrote Wedding Blues: Rabbis At Odds With Their Rules, which again focuses on co-officiation. Yarrow’s summary: “Top leaders from all the major streams of Judaism – Reform, Conservative, Orthodox and Reconstructionist – were at pains to stress that the Sabbath day nuptials of Chelsea Clinton and Marc Mezvinsky were not a Jewish event.” She quoted me as saying,

In his work with Interfaithfamily.com, which offers, among other things, a clergy referral service, CEO Ed Case sees a disconnect between rabbis who feel they can navigate the interfaith issue without offending interfaith couples and those particular couples’ experience of interacting with rabbis who won’t perform or recognize interfaith unions.
“For better or for worse, what couples want and what lay people want are different than where the rabbinate is. People don’t feel bound by requirements or traditions, and they want to do what they want to do,” he said.
Case hoped interfaith couples would look at the Jewish rituals in the Clinton-Mezvinsky wedding and think, “If this is good enough for Chelsea Clinton, it’s good enough for me.”

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

Mazel Tov in Advance to Chelsea and Marc

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With the big event happening Saturday night, this is our last chance to send a Mazel tov in advance to Chelsea and Marc. With the air space above Rhinebeck cleared, and guests reportedly required to turn in their camera phones, we don’t know when word will leak out about the ceremony and who officiated – but eventually it will.

Our friend Rabbi Mayer Selekman gave a great interview on the CBS affiliate in Philadelphia in which he explained the meaning of Jewish wedding traditions – it’s worth watching.

Amidst all the gossip about who is attending, what it is costing, who designed the dress, there have been some very interesting blog posts about the significance of this wedding and marriage for the Jewish community. Rabbi Irwin Kula had an extremely thoughtful (as usual) post in the Huffington Post. In this powerful message Kula moves from the fact of the wedding of a prominent interfaith couple to the need for faiths and groups to emphasize not more group members but rather wisdom and practice drawn from their tradition that helps people construct lives that are ethical, vital and loving.

The Clinton-Mezvinsky wedding is a perfect expression of the emerging American religious and social landscape in which one’s inherited group identity bears little or no significance on one’s marriage…

What is unprecedented — wonderful for some and horrifying to others — is that in this era no one needs to reject his or her identity to cross these century-old boundaries. Multiple identities… is the new reality.

We Americans… customize our religious identities — less in terms of some group-belonging need, creedal purity, or theological consistency, and more in order to get a job done — and in doing so, we find greater meaning and purpose.

[Y]ou cannot have people mixing religious ideas and practices… [and] creating families with diverse inheritances… and expect existing religious institutions to be unaffected… Fewer and fewer Americans are getting religion in the cathedrals. They are getting what they need to get their spiritual/meaning-making job done in the bazaar…

Religious leaders … will need to be concerned less with creating good upstanding members of their group (theologically or sociologically) and more with providing wisdom and practice drawn from their tradition that is accessible, usable, and good enough to get the job done: helping “mixers, blenders, benders, and switchers” construct ever-changing lives that are more ethical, vital, and loving within their already-existing webs of relations.

“On Faith” at the Washington Post has run four pieces by our colleague Dr. Marion Usher that offer great advice to intermarrying couples from her standpoint as a psychologist with years of experience working with interfaith couples. The first piece is about choosing a “lead religion” – an interesting approach that Dr. Usher has developed and recommends; the  second piece is about where interfaith couples can go for help, the third piece is about raising children in an interfaith household, and the fourth piece is about developing a solid relationship foundation. I contributed the fifth piece in the series, on what the elements of a Jewish wedding ceremony symbolize and mean.

On Faith has also assembled an amazing panel of commentaries. The comments from the rabbis on the panel unfortunately express a lot of ambivalence towards intermarriage. The head of the United Synagogue for Conservative Judaism, Rabbi Steven Wernick, says:

In itself, intermarriage may not be ideal for the Jewish community – but it is a reality that we cannot afford to ignore. Ultimately, our goal must be the creation of strong, committed Jewish families. And if we can achieve that goal through both in-marriage and intermarriage, then we must make keruv, outreach and welcome, a priority for our synagogues and communities.

Popular Rabbi David Wolpe in a piece titled “A Blessing and a Threat” says:

Love vaults over boundaries and that is often both beautiful and compelling. Much can be lost along the way however, and it is difficult to keep both the integrity of a tradition and its universal messages. As with all great blessings, the blessings of America exact a considerable cost.

Rabbi Jack Moline says “I oppose intermarriage before the fact. After the fact, I support marriage.”

Finally, back to who is officiating – Rabbi Jason Miller says “I have it on good authority that Chelsea’s wedding this Saturday night at Astor Mansion in Rhinebeck, NY will be co-officiated by both a rabbi and a Methodist minister.” I asked Rabbi Miller what his authority was and he said a “colleague” had talked to the minister but the colleague wouldn’t tell him who the minister was and the minister had signed a non-disclosure agreement. So it looks like we’re just going to have to wait.

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

What the Camp Study Was Really About

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Our blog post, Why Intermarrieds Stay Away, on Steven M. Cohen’s new theory that the Jewish community is plenty welcoming of interfaith families, attracted many very thoughtful comments. I mentioned that this new theory was revealed in a study done for the Foundation for Jewish Camp, but until recently hadn’t had a chance to look at the study itself.

It’s a shame that all of the publicity seems to have focused on Cohen’s new theory, because the study – Recruiting Jewish Campers: A Study of the Midwestern Market — wasn’t about that issue at all. The Foundation for Jewish Camp had partnered with the Jack & Goldie Wolfe Miller Fund on an initiative to provide camps with the market research, marketing consultation, and training tools to enable them to reach new families. The preface of the study, which was the result of the market research, states that “enormous opportunity exists to engage a much larger number of Jewish children and teens. Particularly important is the opportunity to engage the children of mixed married families.” One of the specific goals of the research was to address this question: “How can Jewish camps reach out to Jewishly unengaged families and those mixed married who are raising their children as Jews in some way? How should their messaging and communication change for the same purpose?”

There is a lot of interesting discussion in the study. I was particularly glad to see the recognition “that if you want to predict whether a family will send their child to a Jewish camp, you’re better off knowing about how involved they and their children are in Jewish life. Once you know that, it won’t help much, if at all, to learn whether they happen to be an in-married or mixed  married family.” I’ve argued with Steven Cohen for years that instead of reporting on the Jewish behaviors of all intermarrieds as compared to all in-marrieds, it would be more helpful to report on the Jewish behaviors of Jewishly-engaged intermarrieds as compared to in-marrieds, because if the gaps are lower – which they are – the policy question becomes how can we get this population to be more Jewishly engaged.

Another interesting point made is this: “Camps need to recognize that messages which testify to their Jewish cultural depth and sophistication … probably alienate parents (and children) who feel ill-at-ease or unfamiliar with more intense Jewish cultural environments, such as may be symbolized by use of Hebrew letters and phrases.”

One recommended strategy aimed specifically at attracting the children of intermarrieds is “to focus initially (if not well beyond) on the selected subset of the mixed married who are congregationally affiliated. The congregationally affiliated mixed married are so much more engaged in Jewish camps–and  so much more aware of them–than their counterparts who are outside congregations.”

Another strategy: “the likely efficacy of offering scholarship assistance. Those who are the least attracted to Jewish camp are the ones who find camp least affordable.  Financial aid or incentives may be especially valuable in  prompting the least interested (such as many mixed married families) to sample Jewish camp for the first time.”

You can find the complete study on the Foundation for Jewish Camp website, or the Berman Archive website. It’s worth reading.

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

Why Intermarrieds Stay Away

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There’s a new article coming out in the Forward by Gal Beckerman,  New Study Finds That It’s Not a Lack of Welcome That’s Keeping the Intermarrieds Away.

Beckerman starts by saying that “the guiding principle” of organizations like InterfaithFamily.com and the Jewish Outreach Institute is to “be more welcoming.” Then Beckerman says that Steven M. Cohen in a recent study for the Foundation for Jewish Camp found that most interfaith couples feel like that have an open invitation to be part of Jewish life. Cohen is quoted as saying that outreach “has been misguided by focusing simply on being welcoming” and that “the response of welcoming, making personnel more sensitive to the intermarried, and watching your language and having smiling ushers is not going to be effective.” He suggests that there is a competence barrier, that the couple does not have access to what is going on once they are in a synagogue, that they need not open arms but a helping hand.

Encouraging Jewish communities to be more welcoming is only one part of InterfaithFamily.com’s strategy. We have a theory of change that posits that interfaith couples will engage in Jewish life if they are attracted to it, if they feel knowledgeable about it, if they can reconcile the other religious tradition in their family – and if they experience welcome in Jewish settings. In short – there is a need for the community to be welcoming, and there is a need to help interfaith couples feel competent.

The notion that interfaith couples don’t feel unwelcome in Jewish settings simply does not recognize reality. Belittling being welcoming as a matter of having smiling ushers may explain why Cohen doesn’t “get it.” Being welcoming is much more than that. Sylvia Barack Fishman chimes in with a particularly insulting comment. She suggests that outreach leaders focus on overcoming stigma because they are intermarried themselves and had to overcome uncomfortable stares in an earlier era, decades ago, no longer relevant.

I’ve got news for you Sylvia, and Steven: there is still a tremendous need for improvement in the welcoming department. I just watched the video of a focus group that IFF’s marketing communications consultants conducted last week. People said they didn’t feel welcomed when they heard “don’t intermarry” messages, when they felt subtle pressure to convert, when rabbis tell them what they have to do in order to participate, when the first reactions they experience are suspicion and infiltration. The issue of officiation came up a lot; one person said, “rejection stays with you. It turns you off to the synagogue and it turns you off to Judaism.”

At least Cohen says that being welcoming is “a good thing to do.” That’s a start. And his support for providing Jewish education to the intermarried, and “changing our own expectations of new initiates to Jewish life” – that is very positive as well.

I appreciate being quoted in the article for saying that welcoming institutions and increased Jewish literacy are both necessary, and I agree with Kerry Olitzky from JOI that literacy can be addressed but “you have to demonstrate to people… that they are going to be welcomed and embraced, that there are others like them that are part of this community, that they will feel like they belong.”

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