2009
ISSUE 72 |
11
challenges posed by the presence of so many
non-Jews and their intermarried spouses. For
example, how does the rabbi clearly promote
the conversion of non-Jewish spouses to Ju-
daism without undermining the attempt to
welcome mixed-married couples? Even more
pointedly, how does one teach a confirmation
class of adolescents that Jews should marry
Jews when half the sixteen-year-olds are the
children of Jewish and non-Jewish parents?
While these dilemmas are most keenly felt in
Reform temples, they emerge in Conservative
and Reconstructionist congregations as well.
Losing the Intermarriage Battle?
No matter how well Reform congregations
handle the intermarried families they reach,
American Judaism as a whole is failing to re-
verse the deleterious impact of intermarriage
on the Jewish population as a whole. As
HUC-JIR sociologist Bruce Phillips reports,
of those raised by two Jewish parents, almost
98%
were raised as Jewish by religion; of
those raised by one Jewish and one non-Jew-
ish parents, the figure drops to 39%; and of
those raised by a “half-Jew” and a non-Jew,
that is with one of four Jewish grandparents,
just 4% are raised in the Jewish religion.
On a proportionate basis, the number of
Orthodox Jewish children is almost twice the
number of Orthodox middle-aged people;
while the number of non-Orthodox children
falls to almost half of non-Orthodox middle-
aged people. Of people with at least one
Jewish parent who are now elderly, over 90%
identify as Jews; of young adults with at least
one Jewish parent, less than half identify as
Jews. Because of intermarriage, we are in a
sort of Jewish population meltdown with
grave consequences for the future of Conser-
vative, Reform, and other Judaic Movements
outside of Orthodoxy.
Outreach and welcoming are certainly
having an effect, bringing large numbers of in-
termarried Jews into our congregations. The
true challenge lies not with the intermarried
Jews we see, or we know, or are in our gener-
ally more committed families where,
thankfully, many intermarried young people
are making Jewish choices. The real problem
lies with the intermarried we never see, the
ones who live in areas of the country distant
from congregations, the ones with only a sin-
gle Jewish parent who begin their married lives
with only a tentative tie to being Jewish. The
two-generation outflow of such individuals –
clearly visible in all our population studies – is
truly sad and worrisome. Well over a million
Americans today, perhaps two, report they had
a Jewish parent or grandparent, yet identify as
Christian or as otherwise non-Jewish. And,
whatever their true number, the vast amount
of recent intermarriage promises hundreds of
thousands more in the coming years.
Multiple Modes of Jewish Engagement
All this should not ignore the many other
ways outside of religious congregational life
in which American Jews are Jewishly engaged.
Many still live in such Jewish neighborhoods
as New York’s Upper West Side, Squirrel Hill
(
Pittsburgh), and Silver Spring (Maryland),
even as more move to such radically different
locales as Las Vegas and other sparsely settled
Jewish environs in the Mountain and Pacific
regions. Jews in areas of greater residential
concentration, largely in the Northeast and
Midwest, not only have more Jewish neigh-
bors; they also report more Jewish spouses,
more Jewish friends, and more Jewish institu-
tional ties. Jews in the older areas of
settlement often still have an ethnic style;
many manifest Jewishness through domestic
political concerns or with regard to Israel.
On another plane, the JCC movement,
as I mentioned earlier, is widely overlooked as
a locus of Jewish community-building, to say
nothing of its great strides in informal Jewish
education. Furthermore, American Jews have
a very rich cultural life in music, art, litera-
ture,
scholarship,
journalism,
dance,
museums of various kinds, and also now on
the Internet.
Indeed, there are hundreds of millions
of pages on the Internet on Jewish matters.
Obviously, none existed fifteen years ago.
There is a documented increase in Jewish in-
volvement in social-justice activism, of which
Ruth Messinger and the American Jewish
World Service (AJWS) is the most visible phe-
nomenon. There are more Jewish cultural
activities than ever, be they concerts, musical
events, drama, art exhibitions, or Jewish liter-
ary magazines. There is thus a plethora of
Jewish life that is being led by people in their
twenties and thirties outside the traditional
network. And we cannot ignore the ongoing
influence of more pervasive Movements and
what we may call Jewish sensibilities, be they
nearly forty years of Jewish feminism, or the
more recently emerging Jewish spirituality
Movement with its shaping of prayer, healing,
and pastoral clergy such as by Rabbi Rachel
Cowan (see page 54) and others.
Particularly exciting is the work of many
of the younger generation – Jews in their
twenties and thirties – who are involved in
self-initiated acts of Jewish communal cre-
ation. The newly established independent
minyanim
and rabbi-led emergent spiritual
communities is particularly impressive. About
eighty of these have sprung up all over the
United States, several of them outside the ma-
jor Jewish centers. Some such communities –
Hadar and IKAR come to mind – report up-
wards of three thousand people on their
mailing lists, while other communities num-
ber as few as sixty or seventy participants (they
avoid using such conventional words as mem-
bers or congregations or officers).
–
Most young Jews today
who have a partner –
married or not – are
either married or
romantically involved
with non-Jews.
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