August 2024 News from the Center

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Attitudes, Advocacy, and Change

I had coffee this month with a very experienced foundation professional, very supportive of interfaith family engagement, who I understood to say that advocacy for inclusion was no longer necessary or important. They felt that young people are already inclusive, and they only rarely hear conversion promoted.

When I founded InterfaithFamily (now 18Doors) as a non-profit back in 2001, one main goal was to counter the then-prevalent Jewish intellectual leadership’s persistent vocal negativity about interfaith marriage. It’s true that that has largely disappeared.

It’s also not the first time I’ve heard the need for advocacy questioned. In the first decade of the 2000s the president of one of the largest Jewish foundations told me they wouldn’t fund interfaith family engagement because the issue would go away by itself – again, young people were inclusive, and institutions that weren’t welcoming would wither. In the second decade Len Saxe of the Cohen Center declared that we had largely succeeded in welcoming interfaith families (I said that was premature).

With that background, the biggest news this month was the release by Jewish Silicon Valley of The 2024 Santa Clara County Jewish Community Study conducted by Rosov Consulting. The J’s report highlights that “people in interfaith relationships or with mixed-heritage backgrounds are often deterred because they do not feel ‘Jewish enough’ within Jewish spheres.”

The study found that only just over half of interfaith respondents reported they feel comfortable in most Jewish organizational spaces in the county, and only about half said that Jewish communities in Santa Clara County are welcoming to them. The study concludes that “building a culture of welcoming to diverse identity groups is both a major challenge and an opportunity for the Santa Clara County Jewish community.”

I believe that these findings affirm the ongoing need for the Center’s advocacy work. It is striking that even in the San Francisco Bay Area, regarded as one of the most liberal and intermarried communities in the country, significant numbers of interfaith respondents don’t feel comfortable or welcomed in Jewish spaces and communities.

We are still dealing with expressions of very negative attitudes about interfaith marriage. The most prominent interfaith couple today is of course Kamala Harris and Doug Emhoff. Most comment has been positive, including this nice story about how the relationship inspires her Black Jewish interfaith family, and an essay in The Christian Century about how Harris’s interfaith identity could help her win the election and how her open engagement with the religious traditions in her family “models a healthy way to build coalitions for social justice.”

But in another article about how Harris inspired Emhoff’s Jewish engagement, I was shocked to read this screed from Josh Hammer, senior editor-at-large at Newsweek: “Every Jewish man marrying a non-Jewish woman gives Hitler a victory from the grave. Emhoff is no different.”

Not shocking, because it comes from the right-wing Israeli news publication Arutz Sheva, but still deplorable, was this: “A sad finale to a sad presidency. The world inheriting the intermarried Kamala Harris is the sad ending to Joe Biden’s career.”

It’s important that statements like these not go unchallenged.

Attitudes and policies are changing, as evidenced most recently by the HUC decision to admit students in interfaith relationships, which was the subject of a nice NPR segment by Deena Prichep featuring Samira Mehta, Lex Rofeberg and Andrew Rehfeld. I’d like to believe that advocacy from many corners contributed to that long overdue decision.

I don’t agree that we should just sit around and wait patiently for change to happen. The HUC decision was also the subject this month of a Judaism Unbound podcast which questioned whether HUC, and Hebrew College, and the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, should all do teshuvah for the pain caused by their previous restrictive policies. They pointed out that the policies didn’t just harm the people who were barred from applying to their schools; by implicitly declaring interfaith relationships to be sub-optimal, the policies harmed all interfaith couples. That went on for way too long.

Lessons from Other Contexts

This month there were three interesting pieces that were not about interfaith family inclusion but with thinking that could be applicable to it and promote positive change.

First, the Forward published a powerful, both inspiring and sad, essay about a gay Orthodox rabbi, Shua Brick, who holds a leadership position in a Modern Orthodox community – that’s the inspiring part – apparently so long as he does not date and is celibate – that’s the sad part, to me.

It caught my eye when, after saying that same-sex marriage is incompatible with halacha, Rabbi Brick says that the “follow up” is that “if you love them you’re going to do their wedding, and if you won’t do their wedding, you don’t love them.” This reminded me of Noah Feldman saying in his book that some Orthodox rabbis are officiating at weddings of same-sex couples and wanting to adapt halacha in recognition of the importance of romantic love.

Second, Rabba Yaffa Epstein, senior scholar and educator in residence at The Jewish Education Project, wrote “Instead of red lines, let’s draw 12 paths.” Concerned about divisions and polarization among Jewish people, she says “I understand that red lines will be drawn, and clear boundaries are necessary for a people to understand itself and its values,” but that “the Jewish people have never done well when we adopt an us vs. them attitude.” She describes a powerful image of the twelve tribes walking separately through the Red Sea “being able to see one another, to experience it together, while still maintaining their individuality.”

Rabba Epstein does not explicitly say what kind of boundaries she is talking about, but it must be about Zionism and attitudes towards Israel. Yet the language seemed to me to be very applicable to boundaries around interfaith couples and partners from different faith backgrounds. Like this: “It is the time to move forward, together — united, but not uniform. Unity allows us to tap into our roots as a family, work together and become stronger as a people through our diverse perspectives. We do not need to walk the same path, nor do we need to demonize one another’s paths.” And this: “[S]o much focus, so much energy and so much of the discourse revolves around identifying the ways in which we differ, feeding distrust and highlighting reasons to discount one another. What if we began instead with the reasons why it is imperative for us to find common ground and the windows to see into each other’s worlds? Establishing red lines can come second (or, if we do this work right, they might not even be needed).”

Third, a report in eJewishPhilanthropy about a new program that involves JCCs combatting antisemitism notes that “there are 172 JCCs serving over 1.5 million people every week, a third of whom are not Jewish. The Jews who are members are often not connected to other Jewish organizations or temples.” JCCs have “an incredible opportunity to humanize … Judaism … to a group of individuals who may not interact with the Jewish community in any other way.” It’s not an exact parallel, but I’ve always felt that JCCs have not sufficiently taken advantage of their being very well-positioned to encourage Jewish engagement by interfaith families whose only connection is through JCCs.

Also in the News

  • Hiddush, an Israeli organization that promotes freedom of religion, run by Rabbi Uri Regev, released a survey that half of Israeli Jews would prefer to marry in Israel in non-Orthodox wedding ceremonies. Currently, interfaith couples, same-sex couples, and people who don’t qualify as Jewish by the standards of the Orthodox Rabbinate, cannot legally marry in Israel.
  • I loved the story in the J. that Mark Zuckerberg sings the mi shebeirach – not a traditional bedtime song or prayer – to his daughters. The J. reported that his wife practiced Buddhism, but an item on the People magazine website says she converted to Judaism.
  • In an unexpected TV episode discussion this month, covered in the Forward and Hey Alma, contestant Jeremy Simon tells Bachelorette Jen that it’s important for him that his future children have Jewish identity; Jen says she’s open to it, and has celebrated Shabbat with Jewish friends, but wants children to know her Buddhist traditions; Jeremy says he’s open to that. Unfortunately, Jeremy didn’t make the final three.
  • Kveller had a nice story, “What It Means To Be Jewish-Adjacent.” I’ve never loved the term “Jewish adjacent,” and agree with this author that “all labels have associated downsides and of course won’t feel right for everyone.” But I also can’t disagree that the term “currently meets [her] where [she’s] at.”
  • An interfaith relationship was featured in a rom-com musical, “Sabbath Girl,” in New York City this month.
  • A somewhat unusual essay by a UK demographer notes that the “amidst the sense of crisis about intermarriage in the 1990s, no organisation thought to commission research on Jewish love, sexuality and sexual attraction… Jews are sexual beings and … ‘love’ is an unruly emotion… [T]hose of us who count Jews [are reminded] that behind every demographic statistic, the erotic lurks and will not be tamed.” I understand this as recognition that liberal Jews are motivated by romantic love – hardly a surprise? – and my take away is that of course we need to be inclusive of the couples that result.

Letters in the Scroll

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I hope your Jewish holidays this year were good. Despite all of the bad news in the world, my holidays were excellent. They ended with the first grade consecration of my oldest grandchild on erev Simchat Torah at Temple Sinai in Brookline, Massachusetts. The rabbi had all of the children present at the service sit cross-legged on both sides of the center aisle of the sanctuary and rolled out two Torah scrolls with the children holding them off the floor while the end of one and the beginning of the other were read; the look of awe on my grandson’s face was wonderful to see. I wish all of the people who say that the grandchildren and children of intermarriage won’t be Jewish could have seen it.

My holidays began on an equal high, and that’s saying a lot. Rabbi Allison Berry of Temple Shalom in Newton, Massachusetts gave a truly wonderful sermon, The View From Mt. Sinai – Building Our Inclusive Community. Recalling Jewish tradition that the people gathered at Mt. Sinai included generations past and future, she said “I was at Mt. Sinai. I was there, and so were you.” She said “all of us were part of the … chain of tradition.” And then she made  explicit who she was talking about, mentioning first by name the parents and children of an interfaith family (before mentioning her adopted Korean-American sister, an upcoming Bat Mitzvah who uses sign language, seniors and transgender people). Noting that nearly half of the Temple’s religious school students come from interfaith families, she said “you are part of us. We appreciate the many ways you expand what it means to be Jewish…. We are honored you have chosen this community.”

Rabbi Berry is a rabbi who “gets it.” I wish the critics of intermarriage who say the Jewish community is already plenty welcoming to interfaith families would take this to heart: “I’ve learned from experience there is a tremendous difference between being a welcoming community and being a community that actually includes. We need to allow our perceptions and assumptions to be challenged. We need to be vulnerable and sometimes uncomfortable. We need to be aware that language has the power to include or exclude.”

I was especially moved when Rabbi Berry quoted Rabbi Jonathan Sacks as saying “The Jewish people is a living Sefer Torah [Torah scroll], and each of us is one of its letters.” While Rabbi Sacks is a brilliant Jewish scholar and teacher, he is a harsh critic of intermarriage; one of his many books, Will We Have Jewish Grandchildren, suggests he would be surprised that my grandson was just consecrated, and I don’t think he would say there are letters in the Torah for intermarried partners from different faith traditions, or for the children of mothers who are not Jewish. But Rabbi Berry does. She said that “Somewhere embedded on the scrolls behind me, in our ark, is the letter containing” the story of the interfaith family she first mentioned;

Together these letters of Torah construct our history and our future. They are an expression of our joys, sorrows, and moments of transcendence. When we leave people out or do not see those asking to be allowed in, we lose letters vital to the integrity of our Torah. When we build sacred, inclusive community we stand together as envisioned at Sinai….

We need more rabbis like Rabbi Berry whose deep-seated attitude is that there are letters in the Torah not just for every Jew, but for every Jewishly-engaged person.

It was quiet on the intermarriage front during the holidays. I was very pleased to be quoted in a great JTA story about How Mark Zuckerberg Is Embracing His Judaism; I had said in my last blog post, after Zuckerberg’s Facebook post that he had given his grandfather’s Kiddush cup to his daughter, that “The fact that such a super-influential couple clearly are making Jewish choices for their family is the best news with which to start the new year. Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan could really change the course of Jewish history if they got involved in efforts to engage interfaith families in Jewish life.” I’d like to think there are letters in the Torah for Priscilla Chan and her children.

Before the holidays there was a lot of news about developments in the Conservative movement. The leaders of the movement just today came out with a statement that affirms the movement’s invitation to partners from different faith traditions to convert, its prohibition on rabbis officiating at weddings of interfaith couples, and its desire to honor and include them:

It is a blessing that growing numbers of non-Jews are willing to see us as colleagues, neighbors, friends and even family…. We joyously include them and their families in the lives of our congregations and organizations, in our teaching of Torah, in our worship, in our social action. And we find ways to celebrate their marriage and love that honors their choice not to merge their identity with the people Israel by being present as pastors before the wedding, as rabbinic guides and companions after the wedding and as loving friends during the wedding period.

There is a lot that is positive in this language. But with all respect, the stated reasoning behind the officiation prohibition – “Honoring the integrity of both partners in a wedding, and for the sake of deepening faithful Jewish living” – is misguided, in my view. The partner from a different faith tradition who wants a rabbi to officiate isn’t dishonoring his or her integrity, and I believe it is clear that officiation leads to more faithful Jewish living, not less. They are saying, in effect, that that partner doesn’t have a letter in the Torah unless he or she converts.

Positive Outlooks Greet the New Year

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The discussion about Conservative rabbis officiating for interfaith couples has quieted, other than a terrible piece by one of the Cohen Center’s own researchers, that I blogged about separately. I’d rather focus on the positive responses to intermarriage as the High Holidays approach, and fortunately there is are five of them!

Back when Mark Zuckerberg was marrying Priscilla Chan, there were all sorts of derogatory comments from critics of intermarriage to the effect that his children would not be Jewish. So I was very pleased to see Zuckerberg’s Facebook posts showing him with his daughter in front of lit Shabbat candles, what looked like a home-baked Challah, and a message that he had given her his great-great-grandfather’s Kiddush cup. The fact that such a super-influential couple clearly are making Jewish choices for their family is the best news with which to start the new year. Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan could really change the course of Jewish history if they got involved in efforts to engage interfaith families in Jewish life.

Second, Steven M. Cohen, in a new piece about declining number of Conservative and Reform Jews, says that arresting the decline “means encouraging more non-Jewish partners and spouses to convert to Judaism.” That’s not the positive news – the positive news is a much different response: the “radical welcoming” recommended by Rabbi Aaron Lerner, the UCLA Hillel executive director – a modern Orthodox rabbi, who grew up in an interfaith family himself. Rabbi Lerner writes that on college campuses, the intermarriage debate is already over – meaning that they regularly serve students who come from intermarried households, and sometimes those with only one Jewish grandparent, who they serve as long as they want to become part of their community in some way. Cohen could learn a thing or two from Rabbi Lerner:

Hillel and our Jewish community benefit enormously from that diversity.

Nobody can know for sure whether someone will grow into Judaism and Jewish life just because of their birth parents.

A Jewish student in an interfaith relationship may be inspired by our Shabbat dinners to keep that tradition for his entire life, no matter who he marries.

If these young students feel intrigued by Jewish learning, choose to identify with their Jewish lives and take on leadership roles in our community, they will be the ones shaping the future of Jewish life in America. But none of that happens if we don’t make them welcome and included members of our campus community… I understand the communal sensitivities to intermarriage. But it happens whether we like it or not. If we don’t give these young men and women a right to be part of our community, we risk losing them forever.

A third inclusive response is reported by Susan Katz Miller in a piece about PJ Library. She notes that PJ is inclusive – when it asked in its recent survey about Jewish engagement of subscribers, it asked if children were being raised Jewish or Jewish and something else; it also asked how important it was to parents that their children identify as all or partly Jewish. She reports being told that 50% of interfaith families in the survey said they were raising children Jewish and something else, and 45% Jewish only. She quotes Winnie Sandler Grinspoon, president of the Harold Grinspoon Foundation, as saying ““This entire program is for interfaith families, and non-interfaith families, whether it’s the exclusive religion in the home or not” she says. “If your family is looking for tools, and you’re going to present Judaism to your children, whether it’s the only thing you teach them or part of what you teach them, then this is a very easy tool.”

(There were other brief news items that are consistent with the value of an inclusive approach. The Philadelphia Jewish Exponent had a nice piece about interfaith families celebrating the High Holidays (featuring Rabbi Robyn Frisch, director of InterfaithFamily/Philadelphia), and the secular paper in Norfolk, Virginia had a nice article about Rabbi Ellen Jaffe-Gill’s work with an interfaith couple. The national past president of the Reform movement’s youth group wrote an inspiring piece about how she discovered the Jew she is meant to be – revealing incidentally that she comes from an interfaith family. Batya Ungar-Sargon, the Forward opinion editor, notes the element of coercion in the Orthodox approach to continuity, with disavowal of coercion and embrace of freedom the point of being liberal. There’s also an interesting article in America, a Jesuit publication, When a Jew and a Catholic Marry. The author interviews four couples to illustrate different ways they engage with their religious traditions.)

In the fourth important item, Allison Darcy, a graduate student, asks Are Your Jewish Views on Intermarriage Racist? She had decided not to date people who weren’t Jewish because there was “too much pushback from the Jewish communities” in which she felt at home. A seminar on race theory prompted her to examine the implications of Jews’ prioritizing of in-marriage. For religious Jews who want to share their religion, it stems from a religious source; otherwise some amount of the conviction that Jews should marry Jews is based on ideas of racial purity.

It’s not a religious argument. It’s a racial one. It’s about keeping a people undiluted and preventing the adoption of other cultural traditions, which are clearly evil and out to usurp us. It’s a belief that it’s our duty to keep everyone else away, rather than to strengthen our own traditions so that they can stand equally and simultaneously with others. In my mind, it’s the easy way out.

Darcy acknowledges that the difference in Jewish engagement between children of in-married vs. intermarried parents – but aptly points to the Cohen Center’s study on millennials to say tha “by encouraging engagement with the community, we can near even this out.” Her conclusion: aside from religious-based objections,

This idea that intermarriage is dangerous is a judgment, pure and simple. It implies that other lifestyles are inferior, and that we ourselves aren’t strong enough to uphold our own. And at the end of the day, it’s racist to insist on marrying within your own race for no other reason than they are the same as you.

The fifth item – I was startled by this, given past pronouncements by the Jerusalem Post – is an editorial that takes the position that Israel should allow everyone the right to marry as they chose, not subject to the control of the Chief Rabbinate.

If at one time it was believed the State of Israel could be a vehicle for promoting Jewish continuity and discouraging intermarriage, this is no longer the case. We live in an era in which old conceptions of hierarchy and authority no longer apply. People demand personal autonomy, whether it be the right of a homosexual couple to affirm their love for one another through marriage or the right of a Jew to marry a non-Jew. Dragging the State of Israel into the intricacies of halacha is bad for personal freedom and bad for religion….

… Instead of investing time and energy in policing the boundaries of religious adherence, religious leaders should be thinking of creative ways to reach the hearts and minds of the unaffiliated.

… Those who care about adhering to the intricacies of halacha should, of course, have the right to investigate the Jewishness of their prospective spouse.

But for many Israelis, love – the sharing of common goals and values, including living a Jewish life as defined by the couple, and a mutual willingness to support and cherish – is enough.

The Jerusalem Post endorsing interfaith couples living Jewish lives as defined by the couples – now that is another great start to the new year. I hope yours is a sweet and meaningful one.

It Happens In the Best of Families

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mazel Tov, Mark and Priscilla

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As our friend Jason Miller reported earlier today, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and longtime girlfriend Priscilla Chan were married yesterday.

A year and a half ago I expressed concern that the Jewish world was about to “blow it” again with a celebrity interfaith couple. At the time, a columnist had speculated that Zuckerberg was in love with Chan because she was not Jewish. I said that was ridiculous and offensive, and worried that we were going to see the same kinds of negative reactions to Zuckerberg’s relationship with Chan as we saw from Jewish leaders about the wedding of Chelsea Clinton and Marc Mezvinsky.

Sure enough, Dr. Aliza Lavie, from Bar Ilan University in Israel, reportedly spoke out against Zuckerberg’s marriage and pronounced that “The children of another successful Jewish man will not be counted as Jews.”

Dr. Lavie, we beg to differ. There are thousands and thousands of children of Jewish men who count themselves and Jews, and who are counted in significant parts of the Jewish community as Jews. It is tiresome but necessary to keep on repeating this to Israelis – and to many American Jews too who haven’t yet got the message.

We send a hearty mazel tov to Mark and Priscilla and we hope they will find welcome and support and encouragement whenever and however they may choose to engage in Jewish life and community.

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.