Opinion
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Point from page 35
ences — day schools, camps, youth
movements and Hillel, Israel travel
and study, and intensive adult educa-
tion — could have twice the impact,
for little extra investment, if they
attracted interfaith families and their
children.
On the Boardwalk
248-626-7776
Boston Model
The timing of Cohen's paper is par-
ticularly unfortunate because after
the recent finding that 60 percent of
Boston's interfaith families are raising
their children as Jews, policymakers
and funders have a very clear road to
follow to get these results everywhere:
• Fund Reform's outreach staff and
programming, as the Boston federa-
tion does and foundations do in San
Francisco. Every Union for Reform
Judaism regional office could have a
substantial outreach effort.
• Back the efforts of Rabbi Charles
Simon's Federation of Jewish Men's
Clubs and its pioneering kiruv work
in the Conservative movement.
• Spur the JCC world to explicitly
communicate the message that the
JCCs welcome everyone in the Jewish
Thursday, March 22
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Friday, March 23
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Saturday, March 24
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community, including interfaith fami-
lies, and to have at least a part-time
professional devoted to offering out-
reach programs in the JCCs.
• Support independent outreach
organizations. Fund more evaluations
of the impact of outreach programs.
The Jewish community has an
opportunity to make this the best of
times. Seeing intermarried families
as a separate, inferior portion of our
population, as Cohen does, leads to a
dead-end; intermarried families, like
anyone else, will not affiliate with a
group that demeans them and offers
little programming to welcome them.
The key to Boston's successful
targeting of interfaith families is not
the actual outreach programs; those
flowed from a communal choice to
adopt a welcoming and inclusive atti-
tude toward interfaith families and to
respond to intermarriage positively.
Which shall we be: two Jewries or
one?
Edmund Case is the president and publish-
er of Interfaithfamily.com . Michah Sachs is
its online managing editor.
Counterpoint from page 35
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few years, there's nothing new here. It
simply reminds us that intermarriages
continue to grow in number; that most
intermarried couples raise non-Jewish
children; and that the children of the
intermarried overwhelmingly marry
non-Jews.
However, Jewish education — e.g.,
day schools, youth groups, Jewish
camps, Israel trips — lowers intermar-
riage. So does Jewish association, such
as experienced by living in Jewish areas,
attending universities with large Jewish
student bodies and participating in
Jewish cultural events, spiritual com-
munities and social justice activities.
I also highlight the growing con-
viction that we have to do better at
promoting conversion, making conver-
sion the ultimate objective of outreach
efforts.
"A Tale of Two Jewries" is an advo-
cacy piece. It was not written for the
intermarried or as a guide for how to
engage with the intermarried. Neither
was it written in the cautionary style
favored by the academy.
It is meant to communicate. It is
meant for the Jewish policymaking
community — the philanthropists, the
federations and other agencies that are
making critical funding decisions.
It says intermarriage poses a grave
threat to the numbers of communally
identifying Jews. But it also says that
you can make a difference.
You can invest in Jewish education.
You can support growing efforts by
Jewish young people in social justice,
culture and spiritual communities.
You can launch experiments to convert
more non-Jews to Judaism, such as by
paying for community rabbis dedi-
cated to helping prospective converts
embark upon Jewish journeys. You can
do all this and more.
Or you can watch the Jewish popula-
tion start to contract as my generation
of baby boomers begins leaving this
world for the next, to be replaced — or
not — by a numerically much smaller
cohort of Jewish descendants. The
choice is yours. I
Steven M. Cohen is a professor of Jewish
social policy at the Reform movement's
Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of
Religion in New York.