Why Not Judaism? Conversion Could Be the Answer to the Interfaith Marriage Problem

...From that perspective, one might have expected most Jews to rejoice about the marital trends of their children and grandchildren over the past three decades...

...Although Schindler's Reform movement created a Commission on Outreach in 1983, its principal function was to create educational programs that would help interfaith married families and their children feel more comfortable in the Jewish community—to facilitate rather than to instigate conversion...

...In 1749, Valentin Potocki, a Lithuanian nobleman, was burned at the stake in the middle of Vilnius because he chose to abandon his •Christian faith and practice Judaism...

...It is not a mission designed to replace a religious error with a religious truth...

...The Association of Sephardic Rabbis, also a highly traditional group, placed a complete ban on any and all conversions to Judaism...

...In the year 339 C.E...

...As shown in the accompanying chart, the rate more than doubled between the mid-1960s and the early 1970s, to about 1,800 per year between 1965 and 1974 and 3,200 between 1975 and 1984...

...Other scholars cite passages from the Talmud that suggest that the rabbis of ancient Israel accepted converts reluctandy as an accommodation to personal needs...

...Since the mid-1980s that figure has risen to about 53 percent Synagogues, Jewish community centers, Jewish family service agencies and even such national service organizations as Hadassah and B'nai B'rith Women are rushing to create outreach programs to cope with what appears to be a demographic revolution brewing in the melting pot—the large scale entry of gentiles into the Jewish family...

...References can also be found in the writings of ancient commentators like Juvenal and Tacitus about the apparendy widespread acceptance of Judaism in the Graeco-Roman world...

...The rise of Islam in the seventh century added yet another impediment to any Jewish inclination for evangelizing...

...How, then, did it happen that by the end of the 1980s there were nearly 200,000 new Jews—up from only about a third as many 25 years earlier...

...Emperor Constantine ordered the confiscation of property of anyone who abetted the conversion of a Christian to Judaism...

...Some feared that a Jewish outreach program would rekindle theological antisemitism and possibly undermine American support for Israel...

...But if the Christian denominations were not roused to "defend the faith" against the call for Jewish outreach, neither were the various branches of Judaism moved to actively seek out America's "unchurched" and bring them to temple...

...They studied it, earnesdy discussed it at conferences, maybe even hoped for it...

...The form taken by this measure of "demographic self-defense" is a new Jewish evangelism based not on zealous advocacy for a creed but anxiety about the survival of family identity...

...Converts are as troublesome to Israel as the plague of leprosy," says Rabbi Chelbo in the Talmud (Yevamot 47b...

...But alarm, anxiety, even disapproval have been the far more common Jewish responses to interfaith marriage...

...More importandy, the masses of American Jews who were the target audience for Schindler's message do not possess the religious zeal it takes to fuel a missionary movement...

...The realization that interfaith marriage cannot be stopped has led American Jews in most cases to a fundamental philosophical change, which might be summed up, albeit somewhat glibly in a twist on an old cliche: If we can't beat 'em, let 'em join us...

...Roughly at the same time in England, Lord George Gordon, a former president of the United Protestant League, was condemned to spend the rest of his life in prison on a concocted charge that thinly veiled his contemporaries' fury at the fact that Lord Gordon became Israel bar Abraham, a practicing Jew...

...As recently as 1849, Warder Cresson, a well-to-do Quaker from Philadelphia, found himself declared insane by his family because he converted to Judaism...

...Its consequences, however, are just beginning to crystallize in lives of hundreds of thousands of families and in the multitude of Jewish institutions that comprise the organized Jewish community in modern America...

...I believe," he said in his address to the Board of Trustees of the UAHC, "that it is time for our movement to launch a carefully conceived outreach program aimed at all Americans who are unchurched and who are seeking roots in religion....My friends, we Jews possess the water that can slake the thirst, the bread that can sate the great hunger...

...Schindler's words were not welcome in all Jewish quarters...

...Both mean son of David, in Irish and Hebrew respectively...

...The formal break with about 1,600 years of Jewish diffidence about welcoming converts actually occurred a little more than 10 years ago...

...Other rabbis worry that proselytes "delay the coming of the messiah...

...Perhaps psychological seduction is as bold as Jewish evangelism gets...

...The new Jewish evangelism bears litde resemblance to the more familiar Christian variants...

...In light of the long historical record of external constraints and internal restraints against seeking converts, Judaism has been regarded by both Jews and gentiles as a non-proselytizing religion...

...With but rare exceptions, most Jews-by-choice will acknowledge that either in the courtship stage or after marriage they'd been made to feel, by spouse or in-laws, that they would be more enthusiastically loved and accepted by the Jewish family if they became Jewish themselves...

...This complex attitude, born from generalized American respect for one's ancestral roots, on the one hand, and the child-centered familism that uniquely animates American Jews, on the other, has FORUM had paradoxical consequences...

...As Peter Berger put it in 1979, "It is reasonable to regard Rabbi Schindler's proposal as a sensible and low-risk measure of Jewish demographic self-defense...

...Even long-established community relations agencies, like the Anti-Defamation League of vfrowing up in Wellesley, Massachusetts, a descendent of Pilgrims who came over on the Mayflower, Rachel Brown could hardly have Imagined that she would spend her adult life as Rabbi Rachel Cowan—the first woman convert to become a rabbi...

...Author, with her late husband Paul Cowan, of Mixed Blessings: Marriage Between Jews and Christians and moment columnist, Rachel became Jewish after 15 years of marriage and went on to become a rabbi eight years later, in 1988...

...the survival of the Jewish family and, by extension, the Jewish community...

...A demographic shift is occuring that will transform American Jews from "a people that dwell alone" into a unique American minority: one that takes advantage of cultural pluralism not only by blending into the majority but by absorbing large numbers of the majority as well...

...The Code ofJewish Law (Shulchan Aruch), compiled in the late sixteenth century, pathetically informs the reader in its preface to the laws on conversion that its provisions apply "only where the civil authorities permit Jews to accept converts...

...Instead it is a subde effort, comprised largely of self-help workshops and educational programs, to assure Jewish family continuity by having gentile spouses and offspring converted and absorbed into a Jewish life-style...

...Probably, fewer than a thousand gentiles per year became Jews-by-choice before 1965...

...Lydia converted to Judaism right before marrying Ben Kukoff, a product of an Orthodox Jewish family from the Brighton Beach section of Brooklyn...

...It is not at all clear from, the record of arcane ancient debates to what extent, if any, ordinary Jews extended themselves in their relations with the gentiles of the ancient world to try to bring them "under the canopy of the Torah...

...Seneca, the Roman philosopher and tragedian of the first century, moaned, The customs of this most accursed race have prevailed to such an extent that they are everywhere received...

...This figure contrasts sharply with the approximately 11 percent of currendy married Jews who chose non-Jewish partners prior to 1965...

...They also suggest a source of demographic replenishment...

...In 624 Mohammed began a war of annihilation against the Jews of Arabia...

...One consequence of Jewish success as a favorite American minority is that as Jews secured the tolerance and amiability of their gentile neighbors they became less distinctive in their religious beliefs and life-style...

...Respondents are offered a list of minorities such as Catholics, African Americans, Jews and the like...

...To be sure, no American Jew is likely anytime soon to knock on his Christian neighbors' door to try to bring them the "good news" of Moses or the Talmud...

...As the renowned sociologist of religion, Peter Berger observed in a May 1979, article, "Converting the Gentiles...

...Where once they might have turned to those institutions for comfort in the face of a crisis like interfaith marriage— and perhaps to absolve them from a sense of personal failure because their children married gentiles—Jews now want solutions to the problem of stigma and exclusion by making their institutions more embracing...

...Instead, it is about Kerry McDevItt, a Catholic from Philadelphia, graduated from Bishop McDevItt High School (named after a great-uncle...

...The question usually asked to determine this is: "Would you accept a member of this group in marriage with your own children...

...Instead it is based on a more mundane but very real existential concern about family continuity...

...in Commentary magazine, The mainline Christian churches are in a state of theological exhaustion and are most unlikely to be roused from it by a litde Jewish proselytizing....It seems unlikely that the conversion to Judaism of a few lapsed Presbyterians would provoke antisemitic reactions—except among those already so disposed...

...As Christianity became the dominant religion in the waning Roman empire, a succession of edicts made it increasingly risky for Jews to accept, much less to seek out, converts...

...While most conversions take place prior to marriage, about a third will occur sometime after the marriage...

...One facet of this conditional embrace, its matrimonial dimension, is captured in a vignette by the late Paul Cowan, coauthor of Mixed Blessings: Marriage Between Jews and Christians (Doubleday, 1987), reflecting on his wife's conversion to Judaism: For years I had thought I was completely indifferent to Rachel's religious decisions...

...Conversely, tolerance among the American public for interfaith marriage between Jews and Christians has increased from about 59 percent in the late 1960s to nearly 80 percent in the late 1980s...

...A Moslem who converted on his own would face the loss of all his worldly possessions...

...Nor have American Jews experienced any theological change of heart...

...For example, many Reform rabbis were quite ready to accept converts without requiring ritual immersion in the mikveh or requiring ritual circumcision for men...

...Among the most highly accultur-ated American Jews there is a growing fear that their very success in adapting to modern America may result in the rapid decline of the Jewish community within two or three generations...

...Paul's elation that "Rachel was one of us" is a feeling reported by almost all Jews whose gentile spouses convert to Judaism...

...Let us offer it freely, proudly—for our Lydia Kukoff, former director of the Commission on Reform Jewish Outreach, grew up in a large Italian family...

...She was the wife I loved, no matter what she chose to call herself...

...In light of the Jewish emphasis on the family as the bearer and transmitter of tradition, the most alarming consequence of this transformation of Jewish identity has been its impact on Jewish mate selection...

...Tapping the attitudes of more than 2,000 rabbis, synagogue presidents, Jewish community service professionals and other lay leaders, the JOI survey found that 80 to 90 percent favored the conversion of the gentile partner to Judaism in interfaith marriage...

...Forced by ghetto walls into separatism, Judaism flowered in its intensity and intellectual fermentation even as Christianity and Islam spread in breadth...

...His call simply reflected the emerging reality of the 1980s: Families are turning to their synagogues and communal institutions to help them deal with the fact of interfaith marriage rather than to help them fight it...

...While the rabbis of these two latter movements do require mikveh immersion and ritual circumcision for men, they are far more willing than their Orthodox counterparts to accept converts who wish to become Jews, even if the applicant is motivated by a prospective marriage to a Jew and is not committed to full practice of all the rituals required by the traditional religious system...

...Twenty-five or 30 years ago I would perform just a few conversions a year, privately in my study," say rabbis who have been in American synagogue pulpits for decades...

...well-being and for the sake of those who earnesdy seek what is ours to give...

...Quite simply, young American Jews since the end of the 1950s have found less reason to filter out their gentile friends as potential marriage mates...

...The historical record of the past 1,600 years gives ample evidence of the seriousness of these edicts in both the East and the West...

...Not that Jews as a group ever believed that the faith of Israel is a prerequisite for spiritual salvation (as for example, Christians believe in the necessity of accepting Jesus as savior...

...Though not all the programs have conversion as their main goal, all aim to help the interfaith married Nancy Kelly had spent three years as a novice In a Roman Catholic convent, planning a lifetime as a nun...

...Where once they might have turned to a rabbi or other communal leader to help them prevent or emotionally cope with a family problem like interfaith marriage, Jews now want their leaders to mirror in communal policies the emotional acceptance that most express for their children's marriage choices...

...Dio Cassius, a Roman writer of the third century, asserts that when Jews flocked to Rome in the first and second century C.E., they converted many natives to their own ways...

...Second, the child-centeredness of American Jewish family life has also spilled over into the expectation Jews have of their religious and communal institutions...

...According to tradition, before a candidate can be considered for conversion, the supervising rabbis must be assured that the conversion is solely for the sake of religious conviction...

...Few could see themselves as "a light unto the nations" in any but the most secularized sense...

...That is a remarkably high rate of approval for a phenomenon that was virtually unheard of just three generations ago...

...But most Jews have believed—and most probably continue to believe—in the world-perfecting efficacy of a life lived according to the social ethics of the Torah and the Talmud...

...After his victories in 628, he promulgated a series of laws that forbade the remaining Jews from accepting any Moslem convert on the pain of death...

...Gentile women are much more likely to convert to Judaism than are gentile men: About 80 percent of all converts to Judaism are women...

...has gready diminished the age-old control Jewish parents had exercised over the madng choices of their children—thereby lessening the parental resistance to interfaith marriage...

...Remarkable words for the religious leader of a portion of the community that has borne the reputation and practice, since the fall of the Roman empire, of not seeking converts...

...In retrospect, Rabbi Schindler's call for Jewish outreach was more a signal for Jewish leaders to accommodate to the reality of interfaith marriage among their own children than a call to spiritual arms to save the souls of the unchurched...

...Evangelism, marketing and social work —in a delicate blend—comprise a newly emerging Jewish movement called outreach...

...Acceptance from the outside was increasingly reciprocated by blending from the inside...

...According to the 1990 National Jewish Population Study (NJPS), about 120,000 American Jews have joined the fold by formal religious conversion...

...Amongjews getting married between 1975 and 1984, about 51 percent chose a spouse who was not born or raised Jewish...

...Only after the prospective convert refuses to be dissuaded are rabbis permitted to facilitate the Jewish education and conversion of the candidate...

...In sharp contrast to religious missionary movements in general, the Jewish outreach is germinating among the least religious segments of the community...

...After graduating from the Eastman School of Music and Julliard, he planned a career as an opera singer...

...Historians disagree about whether Judaism was ever a vigorously proselytizing faith...

...From about 1 percent in the first few decades of this century, they grew to about 3 percent in the 1970s and 1980s...

...Traditional Jews, particularly the Orthodox, were outraged at the chutzpah of a Reform rabbi proposing to "make Jews" by standards contrary to traditional Jewish law, known as halachah...

...Initially Jews happily ignored some of the more Christian elements of the American ethos—the quasi-official character of such Christian holidays as Christmas and Easter, certain forms of residential and occupational exclusion and the pervasive Christian influence on the arts, education and culture...

...The new 'Jewish evangelism"—as an answer to skyrocketing Jewish interfaith marriage rates—is based not on zealous devotion to Judaism's beliefs but on anxiety about the survival of the Jewish family...

...First, it...

...Jewish entree into the highest echelons of commerce, culture and political life has only increased pressure on American Jews to become just like their gentile peers—particularly since successful assimilation into modern secularized America has not required any Christian creedal affirmation...

...Indeed, among the more surprising features of the new Jewish proselytizing effort is its total lack of religious zeal...

...The mass migration of Jews from Eastern Europe to America at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the subsequent killing in the Holocaust of those who remained behind produced a new climate in Jewish-gentile relations...

...While Kerry Ben-David sings as well as Kerry McDevItt, he now pursues a career as a cantor rather than as an opera singer...

...family, particularly the gentile spouse and children, feel more at home in the Jewish community...

...More personally still, Jews who had married gentiles were most reluctant to upset the emotional balance that seems to regulate the handling of religious and cultural differences in interfaith families...

...It is also, thereby, altering the age-old group relations between Jews and gentiles...

...Placing far greater emphasis on group survival and family harmony than on teaching salvation or any other doctrines of faith, outreach is the vehicle for a transformation of U.S...

...Indeed, the last 10 years of batde in the Israeli Knesset over the Law of Return— which revolves around the question of who is a Jew—has been largely stimulated by Schindler's 1978 manifesto and the programs of outreach that flowed from it...

...One group of militant Orthodox rabbis, the Shofar Association, took out full-page advertisements in the New York Times and other newspapers warning readers: "Beware of Counterfeit Conversions" to Judaism...

...Her marriage to Ed Kleinman dramatically altered that plan...

...Rather than wanting those institutions to be the steadfast bearers of an unchanging tradition, they look to those institutions to adapt to their own changing family needs...

...In radical departure from their long history, American Jews are increasingly becoming convinced that it would be better for themselves as individuals and for the Jewish people as a whole if hundreds of thousands of gentiles were to become Jews...

...It calls on Jews to discourage those seeking conversion...

...Jews embraced the civil religion of early twentieth century America, its emphasis on human equality, individualism, the right to be left alone, the abundant freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution and the abundant economic opportunity...

...The conditional embrace that seems to be associated with Jewish conversion is not based on any theological ambitions for the salvation of the gentile spouse or in-laws...

...Subsequent imperial edicts decreed imprisonment, expulsion and even death for Jews who helped gentiles convert...

...Though her mother was Catholic, the rest of her family were active members of a Baptist church, her paternal grandfather having joined that church upon arrival in America...

...Public opinion polls since the mid-1950s have consistendy registered the decline of prejudice against Jews...

...All the while, the major secular Jewish organizations that each year collect hundreds of millions of dollars for Jewish philanthropies in Israel and in the United States and provide such services as local community centers for education, culture and recreation and social services for troubled families and the like have remained totally aloof from the issue...

...Finally, the new welcoming attitude toward converts in the Jewish community reflects a new sense of realism about what it takes for a religious minority to survive, and maybe even thrive, in a free, open and pluralistic society...

...By the end of the 1980s and in the early 1990s, the number has risen to around 3,600 per year...

...Because of the seriousness with which Christian and Moslem authorities clamped down on any incidence of Jewish conversion, rabbis from the early Middle Ages on took a highly restrictive attitude toward prospective proselytes...

...Oh December 2, 1978, Rabbi Alexander Schindler, president of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (UAHC)— whose members comprise about one-third of American Jewry—proposed that Jews, or at least Reform Jews, begin to "reach out to" the religiously unaffiliated, particularly those who have married Jews...

...Today there are formally organized "Introduction to Judaism" courses at such places as the 92nd Street YM-YWHA in New York, the University of Judaism in Los Angeles and at centers of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations throughout the country, with some enrolling as many as several hundred students a year...

...His marriage to Bonnie Godfrey, a traditional Conservative Jew, resulted in his conversion to Judaism after more than 10 years of marriage—and a change of name from McDevItt to Ben-David...

...Philo, the first-century Alexandrian philosopher, wrote that "a great number of other nations imitate the Jewish way of living" and estimated that in his time as many as a million Jews lived in Egypt—a figure that would not have been possible without large scale conversion among the native Egyptian population...

...In a matter of two or three generations American Jews became the paragon of the successful minority within the American mosaic...

...Though professing philosophical support for the idea of outreach, neither the Conservative nor the Reconstructionist branches of American Judaism made the least effort to seek out the religiously unaffiliated gentiles or even to aid those who are seeking entry into Judaism of their own volition...

...But interfaith marriage is the single most powerful social force that is driving the high numbers of conversions to Judaism and the radical transformation of Jewish attitudes toward it...

...But now I knew I felt stronger because Rachel was one of us...

...Instead it is rooted in what might be called the conditional embrace of the Jewish family...

...One fact about the history of Jewish evangelism does stand out quite clearly...

...But, unlike their ancestors who, like the famed Tevye from The Fiddler on the Roof, reacted with outrage when a child intermarried, modern American Jews have responded with a characteristically more pragmatic attitude...

...It is entirely possible that Jews-by-choice will comprise between 7 and 10 percent of the American Jewish population by 2010...

...B'nai B'rith, the American Jewish Congress and the American Jewish Committee, which have many decades of experience in interfaith dialogue and cooperation, took a position of benign neglect when it came to promoting outreach...

...Yet, while world Jewry had long abandoned any programmatic effort to missionize to the gentiles, it never broke entirely with the creed of the prophet Isaiah, who believed that "Israel shall be a light unto the nations that My salvation may reach the end of the earth...

...But they did nothing to advance it...

...The late Salo Baron of Columbia University, the most distinguished scholar of Jewish history in recent times, estimated that perhaps as much as 10 percent of the population of the ancient Roman empire was made up of Jews as a result of widespread conversions among the pagan populations who came under the influence of the exiles of ancient Judea...

...Liberal and secular American Jews were frightened that Schindler's call for outreach would upset the detente in Jewish-Christian relations, in effect at least since Vatican II in 1965, which said Catholics would not actively seek to convert Jews...

...Perhaps as a result of their enthusiastic embrace of America, Jews, in turn, have also been enthusiastically embraced by the golden land...

...Moreover, those figures betoken a sur prisingly high degree of consensus among people who are generally better known for fractiousness on issues of religious ideology...

...Thus, as the postwar baby-boom generation of America's Jews has come into middle age, they have increasingly come to take for granted the lack of Jewish distinctiveness in their everyday lives that their parents had cultivated only as a public strategy of adaptation to America...

...Even as it pioneered outreach, the'Reform movement has not followed all of the traditional standards for conversion...

...Only after a protracted court battle was he able to establish his sanity...

...In short, interfaith marriage has been one of the inexorable results of the highly successful blending of Jews in America...

...If present trends continue—and they almost surely will—converts to Judaism—or Jews-by-choice, as many prefer to be called— will comprise a substantial and increasing proportion of the American Jewish population...

...A survey conducted in the summer of 1990 at the Center for Jewish Studies of the City University of New York Graduate School under the sponsorship of the Jewish Outreach Institute (JOI) has revealed a change of heart on the part of the American Jewish leadership on the issue of conversion...

...After earning a master's degree in Hebrew Literature from Hebrew Union College in 1978, Lydia was hired by Rabbi Alexander Schindler, president of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, to spearhead the Reform movement's then newly established program of outreach to interfaith married families and their children...

...Jewish proselytizing is emerging as a desperate effort by American Jewish parents whose adult children are increasingly choosing gentile marriage partners to insure that they will nevertheless have Jewish grandchildren...

...The emerging attitude is not about the salvation of the soul or even about the truth claims of a creed...

...Nearly 90 percent of all conversions to Judaism take place within the context of interfaith marriage...

...As coundess parents, facing the prospect of an interfaith marriage, have put it: "We don't want to lose our religion, but we don't want to lose our children and grandchildren either...

...The new welcoming attitude toward converts is not to be found in the policies of any of the denominations or organizations...

...Tellingly, Jewish fears to the contrary notwithstanding, the reaction from Protestant and Catholic quarters has remained a resounding silence...

...They are driven by a growing fear that, due to the high and increasing incidence of marriage between Jews and gentiles, Jews are fast becoming a demo-graphically endangered species...

...As small a minority as these two groups are at present, they nonetheless represent a'novel development in the evolving relaConversion Could Be the Answer to the Interfaith Marriage Problem EGON MAYER tionship between Jews and gentiles in the modern world...

...From the perspective of immigrant Jews and their descendants, the remarkable hospitality of a pluralistic America evoked a sense of gratitude toward its culture...

...Aside from their demographic impact, these new Jews are having a wide-ranging impact on the institutional programs and policies of the organized Jewish community as well as on its ideological mindscape...

...The Jewish belief system has always been pluralistic: "All God's children have a place in the world to come," regardless of whether they believe in the Buddha, Christ, Allah or Elohim...

...Halachah, which still binds most Orthodox and some Conservative Jews, forbids the acceptance of converts if they are joining out of such ulterior motives as marriage to a Jewish spouse, desire to be better accepted by Jewish in-laws or desire to produce Jewish children...

...According to the 1990 NJPS, more than half of all currently married Jews who married since 1985 have married someone who was not born or raised Jewish...

...The principal reason is interfaith marriage between Jews and gentiles...

...Together, the two groups (generally referred to as Jews-by-choice) comprise 3.3 percent of the current American Jewish population of 5.5 million...

...The mission and methods of the new Jewish outreach movement are not theological but sociological...

...For their children it has come to prevail in private life as well, as the Smiquely American form of Jewish identity...

...While the latter gained multitudes of adherents worldwide, the former sprouted a multitude of ideas about what Judaism means to its adherents who lived as minorities in tension with their dominant host cultures...

...David Belin, a prominent attorney from Des Moines, Iowa, who has played a major role in transforming American Jewish attitudes toward "outreach to the gentiles," founded the Jewish Outreach Institute in 1987, citing the Isaiah who looked to the day when the house of the one God would be called "a house of prayer for all people...

...Apart from its general hesitancy in welcoming converts, halachah requires that converts "accept the yoke of the Torah," that is, obey the complex Jewish ritual system, undergo ritual immersion in a mikveh (ritual bath), a ceremony that is historically the forerunner of Christian baptism, and have themselves circumcised, in the case of males...

...Since the early 1970s, when marriage between Jews and gentiles began to skyrocket, the number of conversions has grown steadily...

...Another 65,000 identify themselves as Jewish even though they were not born Jewish and did not undergo formal conversion.These people are Jewish only by self-definition, without the benefit of clergy...

...The reason for the upsurge in conversions to Judaism is neither a newfound spirit of evangelism among Jews nor a sudden Mosaic epiphany among gentiles...

...The increasing generational distance from immigrant ancestors has further attenuated the influence of tradition upon American Jewish lives...

...The Conservative and Reconstructionist movements (about 40 percent of American Jewry), which soon began to follow Reform's lead on outreach, also take a less stringent attitude toward the basis on which they'll accept converts to Judaism...

...The first sign of change occurred between 1965 and 1974, when 31 percent of marrying Jews chose a spouse who was not born or raised Jewish...

...The conquered have imposed their laws on the conquerors...

...The potential for extinction this time, however, is not the result of hate and persecution but rather of love and absorption-by-matrimony into a benignly accepting majority...

...It is equally hard to imagine that irate Presbyterians [or anyone else] would launch a missionary counteroffensive...

...Nancy became Jewish by conversion In 1985 and has spent much of her time since providing emotional and Intellectual support to other Jews-by-choice in the Boston area...

...Jews...