‘Should We Welcome?’ Is the Wrong Question
Your February 4 editorial “Who Isn’t a Jew?” rightly identified the discrepancy between the Jewish community’s embrace of Gabrielle Giffords as a Jew and its ongoing discomfort welcoming intermarried and patrilineal Jews. But the editorial ends by suggesting that there is still a need to disprove the notion that “opening the tent too wide will cause it to collapse.” Really?
We work with thousands of Jewish communal professionals and volunteer leaders and haven’t heard serious debate on that issue in years; if anything, the biggest attitudinal shift we saw from 2000 to 2010 was the move away from “Should we welcome in?” to the quest to determine “How we can best welcome in?”
In case after case of “tent-opening,” our community has been strengthened and our numbers have grown. Chabad has exploded across the continent and changed the engagement paradigm in many communities. The Reform movement’s acceptance of patrilineal descent has enabled tens of thousands of Americans to self-identify as Jewish who otherwise would have been forced to find their spiritual homes elsewhere. The Boston Jewish community has experienced population growth by encouraging and supporting more than 60% of its intermarried households to raise Jewish children. And those are just some examples.
The only tents we’ve seen collapse are those communities that were unable to welcome and engage newcomers and previously disenfranchised Jews.
Rabbi Kerry M. Olitzky
Executive Director
Jewish Outreach Institute
New York, N.Y.
Your editorial “Who Isn’t a Jew?” is spot on when it asks why wouldn’t the Jewish community claim someone like Gabrielle Giffords, a non-halachic but self-identifying Jew, as our own. But the editorial’s lament that intermarriage leads to fewer Jewish families is not necessarily true, as demonstrated by the Boston Jewish community’s 2005 demographic study, which found 60% of intermarried families in that city raising their children as Jews. Your lament is, however, self-fulfilling: Interfaith couples will not want to associate with a community that regards them as a likely cause of collapse.
There is a solution to the divide between the Orthodox and everyone else, too. It behooves everyone in the Jewish community to regard non-halachic but self-identifying Jews like Giffords as Jews for most purposes — like support for Israel, for example — and to address situations where halachic status matters only when they arise. For instance, an Orthodox Jew could choose to marry someone like Giffords if she had an Orthodox conversion and not otherwise.
Edmund Case
CEO
InterfaithFamily.com
Newton, Mass.
The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.
Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism you rely on. Make a gift today!
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
Most Popular
- 1
Culture Trump wants to honor Hannah Arendt in a ‘Garden of American Heroes.’ Is this a joke?
- 2
Fast Forward The invitation said, ‘No Jews.’ The response from campus officials, at least, was real.
- 3
Opinion A Holocaust perpetrator was just celebrated on US soil. I think I know why no one objected.
- 4
Fast Forward Columbia staff receive texts asking if they’re Jewish, as government hunts antisemitic harassment on campus
In Case You Missed It
-
Fast Forward Trump nominee Ed Martin, who praised a Nazi sympathizer, also compared Biden to Hitler
-
Opinion RFK Jr. and Trump are talking about an ‘autism registry’ — this sounds disturbingly familiar
-
Fast Forward Heavy police presence blocks anti-Israel protest in Brooklyn from reaching Jewish neighborhood
-
Yiddish קאָקני־ייִדיש“: אַ פּאָדקאַסט, אַ לשון און אַ שטײגער לעבן‘Cockney Yiddish’: A podcast, a language and a way of life
צװײ לאָנדאָנער היסטאָריקערינס לעבן אױף דאָס ייִדישע „איסט ענד“ אין אונדזער פֿאַנטאַזיע
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism
Republish This Story
Please read before republishing
We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines.
You must comply with the following:
- Credit the Forward
- Retain our pixel
- Preserve our canonical link in Google search
- Add a noindex tag in Google search
See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.
To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.