Marc Mezvinsky and Chelsea Clinton exit their wedding ceremony.

"help their spouses along their spiritual
journeys."
Rabbi Shmuley Hecht, who is
Orthodox and the rabbinical adviser at
Yale University's Eliezer Jewish Society,
said intermarriage can work only if the
non-Jewish spouse converts to Judaism
through an Orthodox conversion and

genuinely changes religions.
Otherwise, he said, the marriage is
doomed to fail because down the road, any
self-aware Jew, "however defined, will feel
the call of their people and have the fullness
of their being disrupted by intermarriage?'
Rabbi Brad Hirschfield, also Orthodox
and president of the National Jewish Center

for Learning and
Leadership, said that
when marriages break
down, it usually has
little to do with religion.
All religions should
stop worrying about
intermarriage and start
worrying about how to
help couples make their
relationships work, he
wrote.
Ed Case, the
executive director of
Interfaithfamily.com,
said the Clinton wed-
ding certainly had
stirred interest in inter-
marriage, noting that
traffic to his website
was up 35 percent in
July compared to the
same month last year.
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.
Golin said he is skeptical that the
Clinton-Mezvinsky wedding does any-
thing more than revive existing battle
lines in the Jewish debate over inter-
marriage.

"The horse is so far out of the barn on
this one Golin said, noting that as an
intermarried person himself, he is turned
off by much of the debate over intermar-
riage as a problem. "The folks who are
fearful that my kind of Judaism is going
to destroy Judaism are still going to be
fearful. The folks who are fully embrac-
ing of interfaith families are going to
be embracing. I don't see a whole lot of
movement:'
The Orthodox Union declined to com-
ment on the wedding. Separately, the head
of its kashruth division, Rabbi Menachem
Genack, a longtime Clinton friend and
political supporter, declined to comment.
The Mezvinsky-Clinton wedding is
affirmation both of the success of the
Jewish community and that American
Jewry must learn how to deal with inter-
married families and figure out how
to bring them into the Jewish fold, the
Reform movement's Yoffie said.
"The price of our reaffirmation in
American society is a high rate of inter-
marriage he said. "We can't be embraced
and not expect that our young people
won't be marrying with their young peo-
ple. Unless we are prepared to withdraw
into a ghetto, there is no solution.
"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: I don't know if
they have had that conversation:' ❑

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