Big Tent Judaism

Jewish Identity in America: Half-Full or Half-Empty?

Earlier this month, eJewishPhilanthropy.com featured a piece by James Hyman discussing the American Jewish identity. What does it mean to be an American Jew today, and how involved in Jewish life should we be? If we consider ourselves Jewish but don’t practice the religion or participate in the community, are we still Jewish?

Hyman begins his article by citing a study that shows there to be some 6 million people who self-identify as Jewish in the United States. This number is much higher than originally thought, yet there certainly aren’t 6 million members of synagogues in the United States. So who are these Jewish Americans? Some belong to synagogue and are active in their local Jewish communities, but most are on the periphery, identifying with Judaism more as a culture than a religion.

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Beyond the “Dilemma”

As soon as the fall holidays pass and a chill descends upon the Northeast, we at the Jewish Outreach Institute (JOI) start receiving calls about Hanukkah programming.

“What can we do for Hanukkah?” a Jewish communal professional asks in hopes of reaching the unaffiliated. “Do you offer a December Dilemma class?” a synagogue educator asks in hopes of welcoming interfaith couples.

These calls mark progress in the Jewish community. We can see a shift among Jewish institutions in that they are thinking more about how to serve a broader spectrum of Jewish households. We applaud this growing awareness and encourage the Jewish community to offer many more programs around the holidays that are low-barrier, easy-access, and serve people where they are. This includes the many intermarried households that are not yet engaging with the organized Jewish community.

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Going “Halfsies” on the Holidays

After nearly twenty-five years of existence, it is often gratifying for us at JOI to look back and see the changes in the Jewish community. Nowhere is this more evident than in the shifts in the Jewish community around intermarriage, and the way that families from interfaith backgrounds relate to Judaism. In this story in Tablet magazine, Jeffrey Sharlet reflects on his early experiences navigating a world in which interfaith families were emphatically not the norm, and it is nice to see how much has changed.

To me, the most poignant part of this story is the author’s complete ignorance, at age five, about the story and meaning of Hanukkah. It is interesting to me that Sharlet says, when speaking about the Christmas story, that, “this was an answer we all knew.” And yet he had never heard the word Judaism in his young life, let alone the story of the Maccabees.

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