Interfaith Marriages: Are We Moving from Surrender to Celebration?

by Shmuel Rosner for JewishJournal

A.

At the 2013 Biennial of the Union for Reform Judaism, the President of the Union, rabbi Rick Jacobs, devoted his keynote speech to a topic he called “the genesis of our future”. The speech, more than an hour long, actually addressed many topics. But there was a common theme to them all: “Big waves require more skill and courage to ride - but if ridden artfully, they enable us to go faster and further than ever before”. Rabbi Jacobs proposed to reimagine a Judaism that can ride the waves of the present to guarantee for a Jewish future.

He first mentioned the Pew study of American Jews about 20 minutes into the speech. The leaders of American Judaism cannot “ignore the facts”, Jacobs said. What facts? Of course, the Pew data contains many facts from which to choose. But the leader of Reform Judaism, as was natural for him to do in such a celebratory gathering, picked the ones suitable to his cause. Pew revealed that “we are not just the largest stream of American Jewry, but larger than all the other streams combined”. It also revealed that “in spite of the many Orthodox outreach efforts, including Chabad, to bring less observant Jews into greater observance, the data reveal no real success”.

Jacobs was not shy about his goal in highlighting these specific data – rather than talk about the fact that Orthodox Jews score higher on every measurement of active Jewish life. “The time is long overdue for us to stop using Orthodox Jewish practice as the baseline against which we define our own Jewish practice”, he said. A fair point. A point we should consider as we turn to look at Jacobs’ way of talking about interfaith marriages.

B.

The Pew data is pretty clear when it comes to interfaith marriages in the Jewish community. First – it is clear from the data that such marriages are very common, to the extent that most young Jews today (especially so if we discount the Orthodox) end up having non-Jewish spouses. Second – it is clear that intermarried families have weaker ties to organized Jewish life and are less prone to actively practice Judaism. Jacobs is naturally right to mention the “creativity, leadership, and service of hundreds of thousands of interfaith families… [that] enrich our congregational lives”. They obviously do. Yet when the numbers speak – rather than anecdotes – it is also obvious that the Jewish people lose the participation and engagement of many more hundreds and thousands of families in the course of the process of assimilation through marriage.

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