I’VE JUST SPENT the last six chapters finding fault with the best-known ways of describing the tribe and its boundaries. I’ve expressed impatience with them all. So what’s my answer?
Let me begin, in rabbinic fashion, by answering a question with another question. For American Jews, is it possible or even desirable to agree on a common boundary? Some scholars argue that a collective must define itself by establishing clear boundaries. Moshe Halbertal has written, “The manner in which a community establishes the identity of its members is expressed in the ways it constructs the rules that govern how members are admitted into and removed from the community. The concepts of a community’s identity are honed at its edges, in its rites of passage and exclusion ceremonies, its admission demands and exclusion procedures.”1
Donniel Hartman, in his brilliant book The Boundaries of Judaism, contends, “As a collective identity, by definition Judaism cannot be determined solely by the actions of or decisions of individuals, but must entail some shared common notion of boundaries which serve to demarcate the space which all who are Jews agree to share.”2
I disagree with Hartman. In America today there is no “shared common notion of boundaries which… all who are Jews agree to share.” No single boundary is accepted by all American Jewish institutions. With a community as diverse as ours, it’s impossible to draw just one bright line that neatly divides Jews from non-Jews and captures what it means to “be Jewish” for all purposes that “all who are Jews agree to share.”
Instead, I propose a new two-part standard. One part defines the boundary for the American Jewish community as a whole—what I call the “Big Tent.”3 The second part relates to the particular groups or institutions under the Big Tent and their right to impose their own boundaries.
Under this standard, as you’ll see, a person may qualify as a Jew for purposes of the community as a whole but not for a particular subgroup. This approach reflects an idea we saw illustrated in the examples from Israel: the word Jew can have different meanings in different contexts. To explore the richness of this idea before I lay out the new standard, the law professor in me cannot resist using a famous problem employed to teach first-year law students about legal interpretation.
Suppose a city enacts a rule that provides, “No vehicle is permitted in any public park,” with a $100 fine for any violation.4 What counts as a “vehicle” for purposes of this ordinance?
I sometimes use this as a hypothetical in my contracts course. I typically begin the discussion by asking, “Would driving an automobile in the park violate the ordinance?” This invariably elicits a resounding yes from the students. I then follow with: “How about a motorcycle?” Another “yes” chorus. “What about riding a bicycle through the park?” Fewer yeses than before. “What about a parent pushing a baby in a stroller?” “Suppose a veterans group wants to build a war memorial that involves a military truck fixed to a pedestal?”5 “Can a child bring a toy truck into the park?”
By this point the room is silent.
The goal of this exercise is to teach students that words don’t have a fixed meaning; they must be interpreted in context. The Israeli Supreme Court faced this problem in interpreting the word Jew in the Brother Daniel case. There are many different approaches to interpreting words in statutes and other legal rules. One approach is simply to give a word its “plain meaning”—what an ordinary person would say the word means. But how does one establish that meaning? For a common word like vehicle, does one go to the dictionary? The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines vehicle as “a machine that is used to carry people or goods from one place to another.”6 A car and a motorcycle clearly fall within this definition. But so does the stroller. Fining a parent for pushing a stroller through a park seems perverse.
As I’ve said, I favor an interpretive approach that asks what the purpose of the rule was. Why did the city council enact this ordinance? What problem did it hope to solve? If the purpose was public safety, to protect pedestrians from injury, that offers guidance. The car, the motorcycle, and the bike pose clear hazards to pedestrians; the stroller, the toy car, and the stationary truck don’t.
But even when the purpose of the rule is clear, you might still have borderline cases. How about someone walking a bike through the park? Or a small child riding a tricycle? These fit the dictionary definition of vehicle, but they create only minimal risks. A public park has a purpose of providing recreational space for adults and children.7 If I were the judge in this case, I would rule that walking a bike in the park does not violate the statute, but riding a bike does. I would be aware that this approach might be seen as inconsistent: in one context I treat a bicycle as a vehicle and in the other context I don’t. But given what I see as the purpose of the ordinance, this approach makes sense to me. So does the result.
In developing my own standard for who is a Jew, what are my purposes? For the first part, which relates to the American Jewish community as a whole, I want a standard that is broadly inclusive, emphasizes individual choice, and does not require people to express their Jewishness in any particular way. In short, I want to welcome into the American Jewish community those who choose to be included but not those who don’t.
For the second part, my purpose is to respect the right of subgroups to develop and apply their own standards for membership and participation. I do not want to infringe on their liberty.
Therefore, my proposal is this:
Public Self-Identification. For the American Jewish community as a whole, the standard should be public self-identification. Are you willing to identify yourself publicly as a member of the Jewish people? If so, you’re welcome under the Big Tent of the American Jewish community. You’ll find a huge variety of organizations and groups here. Some are religious. Others focus on social justice or the needs of Israel. There are educational programs, community centers, museums, and film festivals. Come explore.
Local Discretion. Each organization or group under the Big Tent may set its own boundaries for membership and participation. An Orthodox synagogue, for example, can exclude from its congregation anyone who doesn’t meet halachic standards. A Reform congregation can have different standards for membership and participation. A Jewish day school can set its own criteria for admission. But no institution has the right to dictate the standard for any other.
I think the first part of this standard, which I’ll call the Big-Tent standard, is necessary for two reasons. First, it recognizes that there are many different dimensions to being Jewish, and it accepts them all: self-identification, ancestry, religious beliefs and observance, participation in Jewish community activities, and social networks of friends and family. It doesn’t try to draw an arbitrary line that favors one factor over the others.
Second, the Big-Tent standard minimizes the importance of descent and makes membership in the American Jewish community a matter of individual choice. This reflects my own ideological preferences as an American; individualism and choice are values to which I attach great importance. It also reflects the fact that, as the intermarriage rate has skyrocketed, an increasing number of Americans have Jewish family connections but don’t meet the matrilineal standard. I want to embrace as many of these people as possible—without requiring them to convert to Judaism. By being more inclusive, our community will be greatly enriched.
Now let me be specific about the people I want to embrace—if they want to be included. They fall into five categories, which I’ll identify in order of importance.
This is by far the largest group, and it’s growing quickly. These are the people I worry about. Many of them don’t feel fully included as Jews, especially if they haven’t been raised in a welcoming Jewish community. I’ll discuss this issue further in Chapter 10.
The Big-Tent standard would include them regardless of which parent is Jewish, whether they’re practicing the religion, or where they fall on the spectrum of intensity. But they must choose to identify.
Note that this standard is broader than the Reform standard, which only conditionally embraces children of mixed heritage. At least on paper, the Reform standard requires them to work to earn their credentials: to demonstrate some affirmative commitment to Judaism, such as attending Sunday school, becoming a bar or bat mitzvah, or being confirmed. Although I doubt this requirement is being much enforced in practice, the Reform approach does treat children of intermarriage differently from those who have two Jewish parents. The Big-Tent concept would eliminate this double standard.
This is another large and growing group. Many gentile spouses make significant contributions to the tribe, not only by raising Jewish children but often by paying temple membership dues and making other financial sacrifices. I want to include those who wish to self-identify as Jewish, even if they have no desire to convert to Judaism.
Let me illustrate with a story. Beth Andrews, the wife of a colleague and friend, was a prime example of someone who made a Jewish journey. Beth was raised as an Episcopalian. She married my good friend David Hoffman, a Reform Jew. After their children were born, they provided their children with a religious education by joining Kerem Shalom (Vineyard of Peace), a liberal Reconstructionist congregation in Concord, Massachusetts. They attended High Holy Days services together and participated in the congregation’s community life. Their children celebrated a bar and bat mitzvah. The family celebrated Passover and Hanukah every year; Beth loved cooking latkes and other sorts of Jewish food. But she never converted.
Beth was diagnosed with cancer when she was fifty-eight. Four years later David and Beth started making plans for hospice care. The hospice nurse, after asking about Beth’s health history and treatment preferences, asked about her religion. Beth hesitated, initially suggesting that maybe the answer was “none.” But then she said, “If you need to put down something, you can say I’m Jewish.” This declaration brought tears to David’s eyes. Beth died six weeks later. Her memorial service was celebrated at Kerem Shalom.
Here is someone who never converted to Judaism but who raised Jewish children and was actively engaged with a Jewish congregation. Near the end of her life she identified herself as Jewish. In my view Beth was an integral part of the American Jewish community and deserved to be recognized as such.
Indeed, gentile spouses like Beth are already being accepted to a substantial degree. They are not considered Jews, but the Reform and Reconstructionist movements embrace them as active participants in their congregations, albeit with limits that vary among congregations.8 Some Conservative congregations are also becoming more accepting.9
The difference between those approaches and mine is that for the American Jewish community as a whole, the Big-Tent standard would accept these spouses as Jews, if they wanted to be so included, without requiring conversion. Under the second part of my standard, each synagogue would still have the right to set its own rules.
In America there are probably tens of thousands of people who fall into this category, which may grow over time because of intermarriage. Some of these individuals may love and admire a Jewish grandparent and become interested in exploring their Jewish heritage. How can we encourage them to have a Jewish journey and participate in the Jewish community? They can convert in, of course. But why not provide another option? I would say, “If you choose to identify yourself as a Jew, I would embrace you as a Jew.”
The astute reader will note that individuals who fall into any of these first three categories would qualify to emigrate to Israel and automatically become citizens under the Law of Return, as amended in 1970. The Big-Tent standard simply goes a bit further—or, as some might say, a lot further—and allows them all to qualify as Jews.
I think it’s arbitrary to draw the line at having a Jewish grandparent. How much Jewish heritage should it take to be considered a Jew? I find it distasteful to quibble over percentages; to me it seems racist. Moreover, because so many European Jews converted to Christianity under duress, people with remote Jewish ancestry constitute a sizable group. Some of them may discover this ancestry as adults, and a few may be strongly drawn to explore their Jewish heritage.
Doreen Carvajal is a wonderful example. She is an American journalist who lives in Paris and has worked as a correspondent for the International Herald Tribune and now the New York Times. Born and raised as a Catholic in the San Francisco Bay Area, she is descended from a Spanish family that settled in Costa Rica in the sixteenth century. She grew up with no idea that her ancestors might have been Jewish. But in her career as a journalist, her byline sometimes caused people to comment on the name Carvajal; some told her it was an old Sephardic Jewish name, and one reader wrote to ask, “Do you know that your last name is the same as a family of secret Jews burned at the stake in Mexico in the sixteenth century?”10
Carvajal became obsessed with tracing her family’s Sephardic roots. Her search went back sixteen generations to the Spanish Inquisition and included archival research, interviews with relatives in Costa Rica, and even moving her family to a small village in Spain “for my own personal right of return—to recapture what might be a homeland, to salvage beginnings and an identity that my family forgot.”11 She wrote a book about her search in which she explored the culture of secrecy that the conversos and their descendants typically maintained for generations. As an adult, from her cousins, Carvajal learned that her great-aunt Luz had kept a menorah in a bedroom dresser and had told family members that they were descended from “Sefarditas,” the Costa Rican word for Sephardic Jews.12
When I interviewed Carvajal in 2014 she told me she was no longer a practicing Catholic and had become completely nonobservant. She had attended Yom Kippur services and Passover Seders and felt she “need[ed] an education” in Judaism. When I asked about her religious identity, she suggested that she was perhaps on the path to conversion, “step by step.”13
This is someone who has taken a significant Jewish journey—which is still unfolding—and whose strand of Jewish identity has become very important to her. I would certainly welcome her into the tribe if she chooses to identify herself as Jewish.
As we’ve seen, Brother Daniel fell into this category. A more famous example was Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger (1926–2007), the “Jewish Cardinal” who rose to become the archbishop of Paris. Lustiger’s parents were Polish Jews who had moved to Paris around World War I. Lustiger himself was born in France and converted to Catholicism at the age of thirteen, over his father’s objections. He became a priest and rose in the Church hierarchy until Pope John Paul II appointed him the archbishop of Paris in 1981. Like Brother Daniel, Lustiger always insisted that he remained ethnically Jewish.14 On being appointed archbishop of Paris, he declared, “I was born Jewish and so remain, even if that is unacceptable for many. For me, the vocation of Israel is bringing light to the goyim. That is my hope, and I believe that Christianity is the means for achieving it.”15
Lustiger’s Jewish ancestry would be hard for any Jew to discredit. His Jewish mother died at Auschwitz. He fought anti-Semitism all his life. He also helped negotiate the resolution of a bitter conflict between Jewish groups and Carmelite nuns who had built a Carmelite convent at Auschwitz.
Brother Daniel and Cardinal Lustiger claimed to believe the tenets of both religions. The strongest argument that such individuals are not Jews, in my view, is that Catholicism and Judaism are in direct conflict with each other on a major point of theology: whether Jesus is the Messiah. A person cannot believe both “yes” and “no” at the same time. I think this conflict might be relevant to a synagogue trying to decide whether to accept such a person as a member. But if a Jew by birth identifies as an ethnic Jew—part of the people—while practicing a different religion, I wouldn’t exclude him from the Big Tent. His Jewish strand is clearly salient. Moreover, Catholicism is only one religion to which a Jew by birth might be drawn. American Jews are often attracted to other religions, such as Buddhism.16
When I’ve discussed the Big-Tent standard with friends, colleagues, students, and others, the reactions of some have ranged from bafflement to indignation and disbelief. Here are their key objections and my responses.
Yes, there are people I’d leave out: those who don’t publicly identify with the tribe and don’t want to belong—in other words, people who are Jews by birth but don’t consider themselves Jewish. Erik Erikson and Madeleine Albright are good examples. Choice is essential in both directions. If a person wants to leave the tribe or never join it in the first place, I respect that choice.
As one of my inquisitors demanded, “What if a Minnesota farmer, descended from Norwegian immigrants, wakes up one day and decides he wants to be Jewish? He goes out to the cornfield and declares to the sky, ‘I’m a Jew!’ Are you seriously going to accept him as part of the tribe?”
I’m not worried about the Minnesota farmer. If that happens, it will be rare. If he comes into the Tent wanting to look around, I certainly won’t object. Whether he finds a subgroup willing to accept him is another story. The religious groups would require him to convert, but he might find secular groups happy to educate him and welcome his contributions.
Nor am I concerned about, say, an opportunistic college student with no Jewish background who declares he is Jewish in order to get a free Birthright trip to Israel. Under the Big-Tent standard, nothing would prevent the Birthright organization from imposing a stricter standard.
You’re right, it’s extremely thin. But there is no consensus in America about the mission.
I wish I could in good conscience require more than public self-identification—for example, some sort of active participation in the Jewish community. All of us, whether we’re born Jewish or join the tribe in other ways, should express our choice through action in our lives and service to the collective. As a nonobservant Jew, I’ve given a lot of thought to how I express that in the world.
But I’m not about to tell people that their way of being Jewish is not good enough. As a liberal, I don’t want to presume to tell people how to express being Jewish. In America there’s an extraordinary range of ways you can do it. I don’t think there is one right way.
Another reason to keep my minimum requirement light—or, as critics might say, “lite”—is that I want to welcome marginal Jews: people whose Jewish identity is weak and who may even have one foot out the door.
As Herbert Gans suggested in his theory about symbolic ethnicity, many Jews might say they’re proud to be Jewish, especially when researchers for the Pew Report come around, but what does that really mean? For many, being Jewish has little effect on their daily lives. They don’t know much about Jewish history and aren’t participating in the community.
The Jewish community is divided on how to deal with this category of Jews. One approach is to ignore them and focus only on Jews who are willing to be very actively engaged. The other approach is to reach out to them and hope to light a spark.
I fall into the latter camp. I want to invite them to participate more—especially if they’re young. I don’t accept that they’re a lost cause. Even if the Jewish strand of their identity is very thin at this point in their lives, it may become more important at a later time, as it did for me. I want the door to be wide open.
I have several thoughts on this. First, the tribe has never been defined exclusively by descent. In biblical times non-Jews were welcome to join the tribe simply by marrying in. Beginning in the Roman era the method of entry changed to religious conversion. What I’m suggesting is an additional way for people to join the tribe: self-identification.
Second, the descent aspect is central to Judaism and always will be, whether we define it narrowly or broadly. Even if we make it easy for people with no blood or spousal ties to join the tribe, such members will be rare. Virtually all the people I’d like to welcome or reabsorb have a Jewish family connection of some sort.
My third point goes to the question: How will we maintain our psychological bond? As I’ve noted, the mere fact of having Jewish ancestry doesn’t create that bond. It’s what we are taught and what we choose to make of it. Moreover, Jews will always be a tiny minority in this country. It’s that minority status, combined with the importance of descent and what we do to express our Jewishness that will keep us bonded to each other.
This is a fair question. Suppose the Big-Tent standard—public self-identification—applied only to individuals who had at least one Jewish grandparent or were married to a Jew, and all others had to convert? As a practical matter, the “all others” category would be very small.
My response is that being Jewish does not require “born Jews” to be religiously observant, so it shouldn’t require that of others either. For many American Jews (perhaps a majority) their primary identification is with the ethnic/cultural collective. I want a way for others to join this collective without facing an unduly burdensome process. Formal religious conversion is a formidable barrier to entry.
One way of mitigating this problem is to relax the standards for religious conversion. I’d certainly favor that. In principle I would also favor creating some method of secular conversion. It might require learning about the Jewish religion, history, and culture. One might need to pass a test. There have been discussions within the Jewish community about creating such an option, but the idea has never come to fruition, in part because there is no institutional mechanism for bringing it about.
Daniel Elazar, an Israeli-born political scientist who spent much of his time in the United States, has made this argument:
The American Jewish community is built on an associational base to a far greater extent than that of any other in Jewish history. In other words, not only is there no external or internal compulsion to affiliate with organized Jewry, but also there is no automatic way to become a member of the Jewish community. Nor is there even a clear way to affiliate with the community as a whole. To participate in any organized Jewish life in America one must make a voluntary association with some particular organization or institution.17
The “American Jewish community,” and my notion of a “Big Tent” are metaphors. There is no gatekeeper, akin to a night-club bouncer, for the community as a whole. American Jews don’t have a formal umbrella organization that speaks for the entire community. But most Jews do feel connected to some sort of collective enterprise that is not simply religious, and the various subgroups seem to acknowledge some link with each other. I want to keep this tribal dimension alive but to make it a tribe of choice.
This is no doubt true. Many Jews think the matrilineal principle should be the only standard, for all purposes. That’s why my standard has two parts. Under the second part, traditionally observant Jews can impose this boundary for those organizations they control.
The challenge of deciding who counts as Jewish has no simple answer. What I’m really arguing for is greater tolerance for ambiguity. The Jewish community has evolved for thousands of years and is still evolving. The American community is increasingly diverse. Conflicting standards already exist. The intermarriage rate is exploding. Instead of fighting this trend, which I think is futile, we should find a productive way to address it.
My biggest quarrel is with the Orthodox, both here and in Israel, who purport to be gatekeepers for the entire community. I do not want the religious authorities, either here or in Israel, to decide who gets to be part of the family—especially in America. I’m not asking the Orthodox to give up the way they interpret Jewish law; they can set the standards for their own community of worship. I’m asking them to be more tolerant.
For example, I’d like them to stop telling people, “You’re not Jewish.” When they meet a self-identified Jew who doesn’t meet their standards, I would frankly hope they’d say nothing. But if they feel compelled to make a comment, I hope they’d say something like, “By my standard you are not Jewish, but I recognize that you see it differently.” And to say it with respect.
What I’m trying to get at is a level of generosity. A recognition that there is no standard that neatly solves all problems. An acknowledgment that, as a practical matter, American Jews do have the gift of individual choice. Let’s reach out to those who might be reachable. Welcome everyone who wants to come in.