Beyond “Welcome”

I wish I could say that Jack Wertheimer (“Intermarriage: Can Anything Be Done?”) is dead wrong. I wish I could join those in the intermarriage outreach industry who dismiss his arsenal of statistics and chastise him for driving away the intermarried with undue pessimism and an insufficiently “welcoming” attitude. But I can’t. Wertheimer is dead right in asserting that “the American Jewish community is in a fight for its life”—and that the champions of outreach have sold us a flawed model and false hopes.

Admittedly, I’m far from an impartial observer, having served in Jewish leadership positions for nearly fifteen years and watched as not a few programs for the intermarried trumpeted success while largely falling flat. As a director of a Jewish federation, I counseled distraught spouses as well as the parents, grandparents, and children of intermarriage seeking advice for insoluble problems that few Jewish communal leaders would even wish to acknowledge.

I also know intermarriage from the inside. When I met my wife, I was a lobster-eating, Jewishly illiterate, twice-a-year Jew. For her part, she had been raised in a devout Christian home and served as minister of music in a Texas mega-church. Today, a great deal of water having flowed under the bridge, we are an observant Jewish family living in Israel.