To the Editor:
Jonathan S. Tobin asserts that efforts by the organized Jewish community in America to reach out to secular and intermarried families have been a failure, and that they have diverted precious resources from the core population of committed Jews. [“The Madoff Scandal and the Future of American Jewry,” February]. I beg to differ.
Boston is the only locale in which the Jewish federation has funded outreach programs for interfaith families and studied their effects. It found that 60 percent of such families are raising their children as Jews, which means an increase in the size of the Jewish community. Not surprisingly, the area’s Combined Jewish Philanthropies has seen its annual receipts grow steadily from $25 million in 2000 to $42 million in 2008.
Mr. Tobin estimates annual amount of Jewish philanthropic giving in the U.S. is $5 billion. Of this, we found that less than $4 million goes to interfaith families. The “outreach model” cannot be deemed a failure because it has never been implemented on a national scale. What the Boston example shows is that a Jewish community that seeks to engage can indeed renew the commitment of Jews on the margins and non-Jews to the community and its future.
Edmund C. Case
InterfaithFamily.com
_____________
To the Editor:
According to Jonathan S. Tobin, “the results of the past two decades suggest that the outreach model is a failure.” One wonders whether Chabad leaders would agree with that assertion. Be that as it may, Mr. Tobin may be right that efforts to engage those at the periphery of Jewish life do not appear to have increased the number of committed Jewish families—but is that any reason to abandon them? Yes, the Jewish community must strengthen its core, but it should also reach out. There is much we can and should do (in the words of the liturgy) “to draw near our dispersed ones”—not just to assure the community’s continuity but because it is the right thing to do.
Rabbi Carl M. Perkins
Needham, Massachusetts
_____________
To the Editor:
Jonathan S. Tobin feels that American Jewish federations have neglected what should be their first priority—Jewish education—for fear that this would favor the most committed members of the community and upset the “consensus-driven culture of Jewish philanthropy.” This misses the boat. Consensus-seeking is not to blame; such failures as may exist stem from the lack of strong, focused leadership.
The consensus among the leaders of Chicago’s Federation, for one, is to serve and strengthen the entire community by promoting Jewish education among those who might not have considered it; fostering strong partnerships with synagogue communities of all denominations; working with every major campus in Illinois to promote Israel advocacy and Jewish studies programs; and remaining dedicated to the traditional federation roles of helping the indigent, the elderly, and the distressed.
Even as Mr. Tobin disparages the institutional culture of federations, he properly recognizes that our governance has helped protect us from Madoff-style losses. In these difficult times, we should not forget that there is a great role to be played by an invigorated, mission-driven federation system.
Steven B. Nasatir
Jewish Federation
of Metropolitan Chicago
Chicago, Illinois
_____________
To the Editor:
Jonathan S. Tobin acutely measures the fallout from Madoff and urges the Jewish community to confront the elephants in the room. The crises facing American Jews were there prior to the Madoff debacle, and have been pitifully addressed by “organized” Jewry.
As he writes, “the inability of the apparatus of Jewish philanthropy to find the will to focus its existing resources on the threat posed by rising levels of assimilation dwarfs the worries generated by financial scandals, even those as serious as Madoff.” The monies exist within our communities to address the issues. The will and leadership are egregiously missing. What are we saving for?
Gary E. Erlbaum
Ardmore, Pennsylvania
_____________
To the Editor:
Thanks for Jonathan S. Tobin’s important and heartfelt article about the Jewish community and its priorities. As president of the federation of Milwaukee, where we are struggling to reduce spending by 20-25 percent, we take only small comfort that our affliction has merely been the market and not Madoff. At this point in time, it is the very idea of federated giving that needs to be defended. But perhaps therein lies the silver lining—if when things get tough we can still come together as a community, we will be stronger and healthier when we emerge.
Jerry Benjamin
Milwaukee, Wisconsin
_____________
Jonathan S. Tobin writes:
Edmund C. Case believes that the 2005 Greater Boston Jewish Community Study vindicates his belief that devoting disproportionate resources to outreach to the intermarried is a wise policy. In fact, as researchers Steven M. Cohen, Jack Ukeles, and Ron Miller wrote in an insightful 2006 essay in the Forward, drawing such a conclusion from that survey is completely unjustified.
As is the case with many opinion polls, the key to understanding the data lies in the way the questions are asked. The wording of the Boston study was ambiguous. It allowed families who are raising their children in more than one religion to answer in the affirmative as to whether their children were raised as Jews. Similar studies conducted in other cities were more specific and, predictably, got very different results. Had the families been given a choice to answer whether the children were “Jewish and something else”—as they were in other cities—it is not unreasonable to think that the numbers that outreach advocates have heralded would have been far different.
Moreover, as Cohen, Ukeles, and Miller pointed out, even if we assume that the 60-percent figure for children in interfaith families being raised as Jews is correct, there is no reason to believe that Boston’s outreach programs were the main reason. In fact, as those three authors point out, what was unique about Boston was not so much a devotion to outreach as it was as a greater commitment to Jewish education.
If there is any conclusion to be drawn from the existing data, it is that Jewish education makes the greatest difference in promoting lifelong Jewish commitment and in-marriage. That was the point emphasized by the authors of the Boston study and, as such, it does not call for the sort of outreach backed by Mr. Case.
As for his claim that we cannot judge the effectiveness of this strategy because it has not been tried on a national scale, what he is asking us to do is to risk the scarce resources of the Jewish community on a theory that is not even justified by the only study he can cite.
Rabbi Carl M. Perkins is right to assert that the activities of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement are an outstanding example of successful outreach. Chabad’s programs have introduced Jewish practice to a large population of Jews in far-flung locations as well as on college campuses. But Chabad’s welcoming atmosphere for all comers is very different from the sort of activity that interfaith-outreach proponents generally support. The latter is often based on the notion that the Jewish community must revise or alter its existing notions of the boundaries between Jewish and non-Jewish identity. Inevitably that creates a dynamic in which Judaism can come to be defined principally by its desire for inclusion. Chabad’s commitment to an open-door policy has not altered its intrinsic approach to Judaism or its belief in the halakhic prohibition against intermarriage.
Steven B. Nasatir contends that the acknowledged failures of Jewish community institutions are due to a failure of the leadership to stick to their mission rather than a timid “consensus-driven culture.” He is correct that there has been a widespread failure of leadership, but it is precisely the imperative to arrive at consensus—and thus avoid open debate—that has often hampered the ability of otherwise able leaders to make the decisive choices about funding and priorities that need to be made.
The Jewish United Fund/Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago that Mr. Nasatir leads is an example of a community-wide philanthropy that has rightly embraced the need to accord Jewish education the priority it deserves. But this praiseworthy consensus in Chicago is the exception, not the rule, when it comes to Jewish communities in this country. Elsewhere, education and, in particular, the need to fund day schools and Jewish camps has not been given the support required to make these institutions accessible to all families regardless of income. The result is that quality Jewish education in this country has become off-limits to many middle-class families. Rather than seek to create an education safety net that would ensure that no Jewish child is deprived of the opportunity of a day- school education because of tuition costs, most Jewish federations have simply failed to raise or to allocate the funds that would alleviate this crucial problem. As Mr. Nasatir acknowledges, I noted that federations were well situated to survive the assault from Madoff-style frauds. The problem with federations is not so much their corporate structure as the way communal politics and the futile search for consensus has often stopped them from doing what they need to do.
I thank Gary E. Erlbaum and Jerry Benjamin for their generous comments and commend them and other Jewish leaders throughout the country who are not only attempting to keep the ship of Jewish philanthropy afloat but to keep it set on the right course.
