We recently blogged about an article in the Forward in which Dr. Steve Cohen challenged the relevance of the methods used by JOI and InterfaithFamily.com in welcoming intermarried families to the Jewish community. In a study about interfaith families and Jewish camps, he made the argument that intermarried families feel adequately welcomed – the problem is a “competence barrier” once they are inside. While we responded with a letter to the editor explaining that these “barriers to participation” are something we have been working to lower all along, Julie Wiener of the [New York] Jewish Week had a different reaction. She looked at Dr. Cohen’s study and was “struck by how little space it seemed to devote to its purported purpose – determining what strategies might encourage more interfaith families to consider Jewish camp – and how much space it instead devotes to rehashing Cohen’s favorite topic: how interfaith families are less engaged in Jewish life than are in-married ones.”

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