Here's a smart kid, Josh Nathan-Kazis, writing about how fears of intermarriage drove the organized Jewish community into the arms of the Chabad, the Orthodox Lubavitchers who think women should make the home.
It's a poorly kept secret in the Jewish community that most programming
for young Jews is supported out of a desire to prevent intermarriage… Hillel was reinvented as a matchmaking
service, [lacerating wit] operating under the almost lewd motto, "Maximizing the number
of Jews doing Jewish with other Jews." In the years that followed, the
language and strategies of the anti-intermarriage crusade were refined.
It was renamed Jewish continuity…At its best, Jewish continuity offers a vocabulary with
which innovative young Jews can express the importance of a vibrant
Jewish culture to older donors. [If this is ironic, it's genius] At its worst, however, the anxiety
surrounding continuity causes the community to let statistics drown out
content, values, and ideology.
Nathan-Kazis says the organized Jewish community should lose Chabad. I have advice for him: Talk about Palestinians. Poisoning goats and stealing the land of poor people is not good for anyone's marketing. Oh, sorry, I forgot, I married a non-Jew. I better shut up now. (And I was just telling my wife, I couldn't do this blog if I didn't have her behind me.)
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In all the preachy sit-coms since the days of Archie Bunker, parents pushing their children to date, marry, or prefer their "own kind" the racist or ignorant character is seldom, if ever a Jewish parent.
Christian priests and ministers always proclaim the righteousness of
tolerance in their sermons. Do they do so in temples? In Reform temples perhaps?
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