Position Paper on Non-Jewish Partner Policy (original) (raw)

"Patrilineal Descent and the Shaping of Intermarriage Discourse in American Judaism"

Zeramim, 2018

In 1982, historian Jonathan Sarna issued a critique of the common acceptance of intermarriage in American Jewish life as a "disease" afflicting the Jewish community. The young professor argued that Jews ought to consider exogamy as an "unfortunate" and considerable "defect" in an otherwise unprecedently positive situation in the United States. To him, intermarriage stems from our free, open and highly individualistic society. Intermarriage must be accepted as normative-an unfortunate but inescapable result of our voluntaristic democratic system. 2

Alan J. Yuter, “How the Halakhic Community Should Respond to the Conservative Movement’s Move Toward Accepting Intermarriage,” UTJ Viewpoints (March 2018)

How should the Halakhic community respond to the Conservative Movement's slow but inevitable acceptance of intermarriage as normative Jewish usage? ANSWER: 1. The Conservative Movement's very name is an oxymoron. It is a liberal, or more precisely, a libertine social, taste culture phenomenon that markets itself as a religious movement. It really is not "religious" by Jewish-halakhic-or academic-i.e. philological, historical, or theological benchmarks. How many Conservative synagogue communities boast memberships where but 10% of that membership observes the Shabbbat, Yom Tov, and kashrut according to the Rabbinical Assembly's Committee of Jewish Law and Standards' [CJLS] "official religion" definitions? 2. This social movement packages itself as "religious" in order to sell itself in Protestant America, and in the 1950's and 1960's, this packaging was wildly successful. Late Friday evening prayers became a "night out," musical instruments, normally forbidden on Jewish holy days [bBetsa 30a], were now permitted in the synagogue on Shabbat. If people will not pay to pray, they will pay in order to be entertained. The late Rabbi Moshe Feinstein once wrote "America is the land of the good time," and was he ever right! To paraphrase and apply Chabad's popular slogan, Conservative Jewish social policy has conditioned its dwindling constituency to demand, "We want Jewish gratification now, and we won't pay to wait."

Chaim I. Waxman, “Family and Identity: Marshall Sklare, the Social Scientific Study of America’s Jews, and Jewish Communal Policy,” Contemporary Jewry, vol. 39, no. 3-4 (September – December 2019): 379-406

The contents of Contemporary Jewry, the journal of Association for the Social Scientific Study of Jewry (ASSJ), are examined in an effort to evaluate arguments of overemphasis on the issues of intermarriage, fertility, and continuity. The findings do not indicate such an overemphasis. A socio-historical account of the field of the social scientific study of American Jewry, including an analysis of the perspectives of the new discipline's pioneer, Marshall Sklare, is then presented in an effort to explain how and why the issues of intermarriage and birth rates became central to the research of some of the major figures in ASSJ and the field in general.

Adam S. Ferziger, “Between Catholic Israel and the ‘K’rov Yisrael’: Non-Jews in Conservative Synagogues (1982–2009),” Journal of Jewish Studies 61:1 (Spring 2010), 88-116

Throughout much of the twentieth century, non-Jewish family members of intermarried Jews were completely excluded from membership and active ritual life in American Conservative congregations. The unprecedented rise of intermarriage rates during the last decades of the twentieth century caused many within the movement to reconsider such policies. This article focuses on American Conservative Judaism since the early 1980s and the original approaches that it has adopted toward non-Jewish spouses of Jewish individuals as well as other non-Jewish family members. This issue offers a new perspective on the internal difficulty manifest in the classic Conservative concept of 'Catholic Israel'.