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Excellent piece from @profjenthompson on a new report on Birthright. “What Birthright is giving the Jewish community does not tap into the wellspring of creative energy we could be nurturing.” And first, we must stop focusing on marriage outcomes https://forward.com/opinion/459296/birthrights-insulting-obsession-with-intermarriage-is-erasing-young-jews/
I’ve been shouting for at least a decade that the Jewish community would benefit greatly from studying young people who engage with the klezmer and Yiddish world. Unsurprisingly, my plea has been met mostly with silence or condescending dismissal
Here’s the reality. Intermarriage has been/will continue to utterly reshape Am-Jewish life, whether you like it or not. What if we went beyond weak tea ‘welcoming’ intermarried couples & put all that intermarriage freakout money into objectively studying the sociological reality?
We’ve had 30 years just from the 1990 study and almost no serious communal inquiry into the ethnographic reality of intermarriage. No serious inquiry NOT working from a pre-determined objective of ‘stopping’ intermarriage.
People aren’t stupid. They know that so much of the programming out there is delivered to the people being targeted with a secret grimace. The market for these programs are ppl whose families reflect the reality of intermarriage and who may themselves be intermarried.
