Jewish Outreach: A New Agenda
 by Egon Mayer

More than fifty years ago, there were two pieces of conventional wisdom about interfaith marriage: one applied to American society in general, the other to the Jewish community within it. The broadly applied view was that intermarriage was the flame under the melting pot. It produced the dynamic force that would make real the motto imprinted on our coinage: e pluribus unum [“from many, one”]. That view, when applied to the American Jewish community, saw in intermarriage—as one rabbi put it—“the last nail in the coffin of Jewish assimilation.” Common to both views was a tendency to see interfaith marriages in what we sociologists call the macro-social perspective. In that perspective, interfaith marriage is seen not for itself, but for what it represents to some larger entity. To be sure, all personal behavior, especially behavior that results in the formation of enduring couples and families, has consequences for the shape, character, and values of the larger society. But such consequences are only probabilistic. They are possibilities, potentialities, shaped by a wide variety of often unforeseen circumstances. Yet, when the behavior of individuals is seen largely—not to say exclusively—for what its consequences might be, such behavior and the individuals engaged in it become miscast, misunderstood, and often mistreated beyond reason. That has certainly been the case of interfaith marriage, when viewed either as the harbinger of the fulfillment of the American dream or the materialization of the American-Jewish nightmare.

Growing Sensitivity
Since the publication of the 1990 National Jewish Population Survey (NJPS 1990), the Jewish community has become far more attuned and sensitive to the realities of interfaith family life. This greater sensitivity has resulted from a number of developments. First, the bare facts of NJPS 1990 drove home the point that among the youngest marriage cohort the incidence of intermarriage is no longer a minority phenomenon. The majority of young Jews were (and are) marrying someone who is not Jewish. Second, NJPS 1990 drove home the point that lamenting this fact or excoriating the families who are producing this fact will do nothing to lessen it. The statistical findings of NJPS and the realities of modern American Jewish family life they illuminated triggered an outpouring of new initiatives within the Jewish community to deal with interfaith families in an entirely new way. Rather than seeing in them merely the specter of a much feared future, the new initiatives (broadly described as “outreach”) began to view and treat individuals, couples, and families as entities in their own right, on their own terms.

New Possibilities
Over the past decade, the organized Jewish community and a broad array of independent Jewish philanthropic family foundations have poured millions of dollars into programs, planned events, and experiences that would convey to interfaith couples the new collective agenda: to build bridges rather than walls, to find new ways of inclusion rather than repeat old formulae of exclusion, and in general to provide interfaith couples no less than any other family with opportunities to participate in the life of the Jewish community on terms that make the most sense to themselves. How this new approach to inter-faith marriage and the individuals engaged in them will affect either American society or the Jewish community remains to be seen. For now, we can only say that the new approach has certainly lessened the anger and the pain that has so often accompanied the interfaith marriage experience in Jewish life in the past. One can only hope and believe that the lessening of anger and pain in the lives of individual families will surely have nothing but a beneficial effect on the life of the community as a whole.