If American Jews want to know what the party that most of them are loyal to wants them to think, they turn to Democratic National Committee Chair Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz for advice. But in a moment of unexpected and refreshing candor, Wasserman Shultz also gave her co-religionists some truth about the future of the Jewish community when she noted during a speech given to a South Florida Jewish Federation event that assimilation and intermarriages were both a “problem.” That this is self-evident is more than obvious given the data produced by the Pew Center’s historic survey of American Jewry that showed that assimilation and intermarriage have reached levels that call into question the future of non-Orthodox Jewry in this country. But the fact that Wasserman Schultz felt she had to almost immediately walk back her remarks with liberal Jews showering her with the opprobrium they usually reserve for Republicans tells us exactly why these problems are so intractable.

Wasserman Schultz is the sort of politician that is slow to disavow even the most transparently false attacks that she lobs at her GOP foes but she wasted no time in disavowing her seemingly anodyne comments, saying that were made in a context of concern for the community and that she “does not oppose intermarriage.”

In case she wasn’t clear that she had violated the rules of engagement for liberal Jews, New Jersey Jewish News editor Andrew Silow-Carroll wrote in a Times of Israel blog that she had blundered because it gave some conservative critics of gay marriage a chance to call her out for being inconsistent. But that minor aspect of the controversy misses the real point here.

The really bad news about the Pew Survey wasn’t just the fact that it showed soaring intermarriage rates and results about adherence to Jewish values that proved that non-Orthodox Jews are undergoing a process that is leading inevitably to the collapse of that once mighty community. As bad as that may be, of even greater concern for adherents of Reform and Conservative Judaism was the fact that their leaders as well as the heads of major Jewish organizations have decided that it is no longer possible to advocate in-marriage or steps that are aimed at encouraging Jews to marry other Jews.

This is a point I made not only in the COMMENTARY article I wrote in November 2013 about the Pew Survey but also in a subsequent piece in which I wrote of the efforts of a group of Jewish scholars, writers, and communal leaders to mobilize the community to try and change the conversation about intermarriage in a way that might help halt, if not reverse these ominous trends. But my guarded optimism about this project spearheaded by demographer Steven Cohen, the Jewish Theological Seminary’s Jack Wertheimer, and the American Jewish Committee’s Steven Bayme may have been unfounded. As Wertheimer and Cohen wrote in an essential piece published in Mosaic one year after the release of Pew, the organized Jewish community responded to data that promised an impending catastrophe with virtual indifference:

As the weeks and months passed, and as few if any new policies emerged to address the Pew findings, the conversation petered out. Today, the study’s major conclusions—on the relentless growth in rates of intermarriage, on the falling birthrates and attenuating affiliations of non-Orthodox Jews, and much more of a distressing nature—seem to have receded far into the background of American Jewish consciousness.

Though to their credit, Wertheimer and Cohen still believe it is possible for the Jewish community to embrace the need to promote endogamy via a program aimed at reinforcing Jewish identity as well as bringing young Jews together to create Jewish families, it’s hard to maintain much hope. The trouble isn’t just the refusal of federations to take this problem on in a meaningful way, it’s the fact that many Jewish groups and leaders—and specifically the liberal Jewish denominations that are most threatened by these trends—are actually spreading a message that refuses to characterize intermarriage as the problem that Wasserman Schultz rightly labeled it.

Rather than the non-Orthodox Jewish community rising to the challenge and beginning the task of trying to engage in an effort to stop viewing intermarriage as a fact of life or, as Reform movement head Rabbi Rick Jacobs called it, the moral equivalent of “gravity”—it has done just the opposite. As the publication of Pew recedes further into the background and the vital efforts of Wertheimer, Cohen, and Bayme have engendered little support outside of their group’s initial supporters, it appears the non-Orthodox have simply decided to ignore it.

The reason for this shortsighted decision is obvious. Intermarriage is so prevalent that the intermarried and their loved ones are now so ubiquitous throughout Jewish life that they form a powerful interest group. Since many if not most of them have now come to regard advocacy of endogamy as an insult, it has become next to impossible for communal organizations, especially those umbrella groups like federations that revolve around fundraising, to broach the issue. Instead, they prefer to speak of it as an opportunity rather than a dilemma, a foolish position that ignores the stark statistical evidence provided by Pew that shows the children of intermarriage are far less likely to get a Jewish education or raise a Jewish family than those who marry other Jews. The result of this silence is that the issues discussed by Pew are not being addressed in a way that gives the community any chance to even slow, let alone reverse, the demographic trends.

Forcing Wasserman Schultz (who also deserves credit for noting in the same speech the anti-Israel bias of the MSNBC cable news network) to retract her truth telling is a very bad sign for a liberal Jewry that was already in deep trouble. Though she may not have intended either her initial statement or her retraction to gain the attention that it did, this incident is a microcosm of everything that is dysfunctional about contemporary American Jewry.

Read Less