The Jerusalem Post reports on an undated fundraiser thrown for Hadassah in Los Angeles by Iranian-American Jews who have a “private waterfall in the back garden”, at which Stewart Greenebaum of Baltimore warned that assimilation and intermarriage were evaporating the Jewish sources of wealth that have backed Israel here. Greenebaum’s response is what Bill Kristol has said, and AIPAC too: the lobby must speak to a “larger audience,” i.e., gentiles too. I’m all for that; let’s have a wide-open conversation.
It’s also interesting that Israel’s demographic threat–too many Palestinians in the Occupied Territories threaten the Jewish majority in historic Palestine–echoes the demographic threat to Israel here. The AJC sounded the alarm bells on this last year in the landmark study showing that 62 percent of American Jews under 35 have intermarried and they are three times as likely as their inmarried coreligionists to feel “alienated” from Israel.
