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This is my favorite thought-stopping word. It gives me some nostalgia for when it used to appear all the time in progressive editorials. It doesn’t really signify anything except that the reader was insulted by the writing (which also doesn’t signify anything).
This is complicated:
the influential and regenerative kernel of Judaism is the orthodox/conservative, their billionaire funders, their political influences, their attachment to Israel. This cohort creates all the rabbis and most of the leaders of the Jewish community, eg run all the Chabad houses. Orthodox Jews do not intermarry, I think like 1% do. They have the highest birth rate and are inheriting Judaism. There’s lots of articles on this.
It’s true that reform intermarry, but the data is still more complicated, because what counts for “intermarry” may be Jewish+JewishAtheist. I have yet to find data on the number of Jewish+OtherReligion marriages but maybe someone smarter can find that. From Tablet: “The Pew study offered respondents who were parents a wider range of possible responses. Among respondents with a non-Jewish spouse [[61% as of 2020, 53% when this article was written]], 20 percent were raising their children Jewish by religion, 25 percent partly Jewish by religion, 16 percent Jewish not-by-religion, and 37 percent not Jewish.” So 37% of 61% are being raised without Jewish affiliation, or about 22%. I would like more clarity by demographers on what the intermarriage rate is for “Jewish+non-Jewish-ancestry”, as this gives us a better picture on intermarriage given how many non-religious but self-identifying Jews there are. The question the polls ask is “do you have a Jewish spouse” which doesn’t really tell us the future of Jewish affiliation. From Tablet again: “Admittedly, the secret of Jewish survival may be the propensity to panic about our fate. The grim predictions made in the 1990s may have proved wrong because Jewish organizations, federations, and private foundations did what they needed to do to turn the tide. They funded massive new investment in Jewish summer camps, Hillels, Taglit-Birthright Israel, and innovative startups—all programs that reach a fairly wide spectrum of Jewish children and young adults”.
Everything I have read indicates that the Orthodox love to convert by-birth-Jews into their conservative flock. This is why they do
the man on the street interviewsJewish outreach campaign by asking Jewish-looking people if they are Jewish. Heck, this is why they fund Chabad centers all over the world.It varies, to some extent the ultra orthodox are more tolerant of sincere orthodox converts of other races than liberal Jews for whom it’s more of an ethnic and cultural identity rather than a religious one.
Re the spouse thing, your ‘37% of 61%’ only seems to encompass those Jewish parents raising children of actively another religion, since one imagines atheists would pick category 2 and those raising their kids with a mix of, say, Jewish and Christian holidays would pick 1.
Most secular Jews still identify as Jewish, and certainly their religiously-identifying-as Jewish spouse would likely identify them as being Jewish in that case, so I’d guess only a very, very tiny percentage of ‘intermarriage’ figures capture unions between religious Jews and atheist Jews. I don’t know any Jew who would describe that as an intermarriage on a census form or in a survey.
I think it’s quite strong evidence, honestly. Other tight-knit groups like Pakistanis in Britain, Copts in Egypt, many of those tiny Christian sects that survive in the Middle East, all have very low intermarriage rates compared to Jews. The supposed lack of orthodox intermarriage is overstated since Orthodox Jews who marry unconverted gentiles just become reform or secular Jews.
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