Who gets to decide someone’s Jewish status, and what happens when that status comes into conflict with someone’s identity?
This week on Identity/Crisis, Yehuda Kurtzer sits down with Christine Hayes, Sterling Professor Emerita of Religious Studies at Yale and Hartman Senior Fellow for a provocative conversation about intermarriage, Jewish adjacency, and the boundaries of community and belonging.
A transcript of this episode is available below.
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In a frenzied media cycle, Identity/Crisis creates better conversations about the issues facing contemporary Jewish life. Host Yehuda Kurtzer, president of the Shalom Hartman Institute, talks with leading thinkers to unpack current events affecting Jewish communities in North America, Israel, and around the world, revealing the core Jewish values underlying the issues that matter most to you.
Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.
Yehuda: Hi everyone, welcome to Identity/Crisis, a show from the Shalom Hartman Institute creating better conversations about the essential issues facing Jewish life. I’m Yehuda Kurtzer. We’re recording on Thursday, August 28th, 2025. Earlier this week, I was at a meeting with a couple of folks where I was brought in to discuss some Jewish issues, as I often do, but it wasn’t a meeting in the Jewish community proper. We jumped into the discussion. It was heated and interesting. Afterwards, as I was leaving, one of the people in the room came over to me and said that she was, in fact, Jewish. Then she said, actually, half Jewish. Her mother was Jewish, her father was not. This kind of confession of sorts, people disclosing to me some aspect of their Jewish identity, is something I get often. Wherever I show up for work, wherever I go, I travel through the world as a Jewish person, but also as a Jewish leader of a Jewish institution. I wear a kippah. I have a really Jewish name, which basically means “Jew,” and I’m sure it’s also informed by the fact that I’m male, in those subtle ways in which gender and affect inform how people attribute identity to others or themselves, for better or worse. People want to identify themselves as Jews to other Jews, especially when they feel that their own identity might be invisible. Some of this may be how minorities operate, seeking kinship with others, and it’s a little bit more complicated for Jews because of the ways in which we all look different from one another. There’s no such thing as “looking Jewish.” Maybe some of all of this is residual from generations of attempting to assimilate in order to avoid persecution, but never leaving our identities behind in the process. When a person says to me, “I’m half Jewish,” a response that I’ve learned over the years is probably wrong, even though it’s never been received badly. I said to this person as I often do, no, no, you’re Jewish. She said, I’m half Jewish. I said, no, no, you’re Jewish. Almost like, don’t worry, we’re good. I approve of you. I think you’re okay. I think the reason I respond this way to someone describing themselves as half Jewish is because I worry that the person is selling themselves short, is gripped with some insecurity about the fact that they’re not really Jewish. But I think also I grew up Orthodox and still lead a halakhic life and conventional Orthodox legal thinking treats Jewish identity as a zero-sum game. Either you are Jewish by virtue of being born to a Jewish woman or converting according to Orthodox practice or you’re not Jewish. There’s no half Jewish. I think my instinctive response is more of the former than the latter. I want to let people know that they don’t have to hedge around me, that I’m not going to judge them on their partiality. But the reason my response—no, no, you’re really Jewish—is increasingly wrong, is because more and more Jews in North America, maybe even the majority at this point, they don’t treat their Jewishness, or more accurately, the Jewish components of their complex identity, as some sort of fixed variable that overrides the others. So in saying that they’re half Jewish, they’re oftentimes giving themselves the space to claim other heritages, or other faiths, or other background, on equal footing for their Jewishness. In other words, they want to be both/and and not either/or. And actually, I think Jewish identity today is even messier than both/and. In Shaye Cohen’s Beginnings of Jewishness, a book that I love, it’s now over 25 years old, he finds some comparison between the uncertainty around Jewishness in antiquity and the kind we experience today, though he notes that our experience today is moving more quickly in the evolution of these questions than we’ve seen before. He writes quite provocatively near the end of the introduction with words that might not be brought together in a sentence in today’s political climate. He says, I’m quoting, “Once upon a time we knew who was a Jew, who was a Black, what was a red wolf, and what was a rodent. Now we are not so sure. It’s not just Jews who wonder about their identity and proper taxonomic classification. Until geneticists discover the long elusive Jewish gene, Jewishness will remain a social construction, a variable, not a constant.” It’s no surprise then, returning to the present, that questions of identity and their corollary questions of boundaries so plague and vex our Jewish communities. Actually, it’s often easier for people to talk about boundaries than it is even to say anything clear about identities. It’s easier to describe who is not in than to give clear characteristics of who is. Intermarriage has been a bugaboo in the Jewish community for decades, even as it reflects an astonishing degree of Jewish social success and the elimination of the taboo on Jewish identity that characterized Christian Europe for so long. Intermarriage has been the canvas, I think, on which Jews have ascribed all of our fears about disappearance, capitulation to modernity, self-loathing, and more. But in recent years, intermarriage has actually been surpassed as the defining boundary crossing concern in Jewish public discourse by those who define themselves as anti-Israel or anti-Zionist. There was a brief time when a few Jewish sociologists tried to link the two, claiming that intermarriage would breed hatred of Jewish peoplehood. Today, it’s just much more straightforward. Many liberal Jewish communities have given up the fight about intermarriage, have turned more broadly towards a culture of embrace, both for moral and for strategic reasons, but those same communities are now roiled as intensely about the question of whether their tents are big enough to include those who descend from communal orthodoxies on Israel. A fight, you might say, is no longer about bodies, but about ideas. And I’m not sure whether the stakes of this debate will result in a different outcome than the identity fights of our previous generations. Meanwhile, as all of this happens, our Jewish communities are simply not constituted of the same set of human beings with the same markers of identity that they once were. Jewish communities across North America, and Israel too, include some folks for whom their Jewish identity is holistic, fixed, stable, indelible. It includes a lot of others, like their loved ones, somewhere along a trajectory of belonging to the Jewish people or just loving them. It includes non-Jews. like Darin McKeever of the William Davidson Foundation who came on this show and described his experience of feeling, at times, among, at other times, apart, and at other times, adjacent. It’s an extraordinary development for a people that has been sustained for a long time by the myth of the stability of our identities, our boundaries, and our sense of peoplehood. And it’s fair to wonder whether Judaism as a tradition and as a font of wisdom is going to be able to keep pace in providing us with the language, tools, and a sense of continuity of the past to make this era in our history feel coherent. I’ve been having a version of this conversation for over a decade now with my colleague, Professor Christine Hayes, who is the Sterling Professor Emerita of Religious Studies in Classical Judaica at Yale University. For the past 10 years, she has also been a senior fellow in our research center here at Hartman in North America. Chris joined the Institute back then, not just to help get the research center off the ground here, but primarily to participate in a project of the time to build frameworks of study for rabbis who were struggling with all these questions about intermarriage and Jewish identity. Chris is one of the world’s preeminent Talmud scholars, one of Yale’s most beloved professors, and a cherished member of the Hartman faculty. Over the past two years, her time here has been spent teaching our new rabbinic ordination students and helping to shape the overall curriculum of classical texts and ideas that they encounter. But she’s also been working in our research center to write a major piece that we’re hoping to publish and distribute this year. And how to approach all of these questions of Jewish identity and “adjacency,” a term that will unpack, including both conceptual and textual frameworks to study and teach these issues, as well as concrete recommendations for the Jewish community to implement. Chris, thanks for coming on the show today to talk about all of this. What brings you into this work? What has motivated you in your career as a scholar? You have taken on theological questions, you’ve taken on Jewish legal questions in classical literature, you’ve taught Bible, you’ve taught Talmud. There’s something that feels like there’s a passion for you around these conversations, in particular around Jewish identity, as not merely academic questions, but really applied questions for contemporary Jewry. What’s it about? Christine: As you said, my interest, of course, in Judaism and Jewish tradition is vast and wide and varied, but this is an important piece of it. And I have to say that to some extent, the personal experience of being confronted with that question, are you Jewish? Because you find yourself in Jewish locations, Jewish situations, sometimes speaking Hebrew, sometimes participating fully in a prayer service, but you have the name Christine. And just as your name signals something, quite literally, Yehuda, meaning Jew, my name quite literally seems to signal something to people too. And so that incongruity catches people’s eyes, and at a very early time, you know, 30, 40 years ago when I would be in these situations and I would be asked the questions, are you Jewish? Or some other polite version of that question, people would find more polite ways to say it. And never knowing how to answer that question. As you said, it’s not a binary, it’s not a continuum. Of course, I couldn’t say yes, I’m Jewish. I had in no way undergone any kind of conversion. But there was something that didn’t feel right about saying no, as well. Or at least it was no with a big asterisk, right? No, but I need to explain to you that it is the tradition around which I orient my life, I go to services every Friday night as I did all through college and graduate school. So it seemed like it had to come with a long paragraph of annotation to say. And I think that’s what always intrigued me is, as you say, Jewish identity, like most identities, is not a zero-sum game. And people do experience it on a continuum. Not only Jewish identity vis-a-vis other types of ways of accounting for ourselves, there’s a continuum there, but also the religious versus the ethnic components of religious identity. Very often for people that’s also a continuum. They don’t necessarily choose one or the other. There are ways in which those are also intertwined and complicated. Yehuda: I’m interested in that take that Jewish identity is not zero sum, that it lives on a continuity. It feels to me like the crux of some of the tension that we face in the Jewish community is actually precisely between those who insist, no, it actually is. Meaning, there are going to be people who listen to this podcast who engage in this question for whom it actually feels very threatening to even use the language of discontinuity. I remember a few years ago at Hartman when right I think the year after we started doing this work, we had a whole summer Institute on what is a Jew or who is a Jew kind of revisiting what had felt like a dated version of that conversation within in new ways. And somebody had heard that I was teaching a class in which I suggested just this that like there are ontological ways to describe Jewish identity as Jew as a Jew as a Jew. And there are blurred ways to think about identity and just went on a complete rant about the idea that you would even introduce it. How do you, how do we, how do you think about even kind of domesticating that conversation among those Jews for whom the very notion that this is a spectrum is actually a threatening idea for them? Christine: You know, it’s always difficult to know how to lower the temperature enough that people can think about things differently. And it may not always be possible. Uncertainty makes a lot of people very uncomfortable. But I’ve often found that there are really two components to thinking about Jewish identity. One is perhaps halakha, and the other is history. And there’s an interesting way to bring those two things together. There are people who will assert that, halakha is just very clear on this. Well, actually, halakha has a really kind of interesting existing history. And even halakhically, there is a range or a spectrum of positions out there because there is no single pope and there are number of different authorities who will give halakhic consideration. But even within the Orthodox community, in which there does seem to be a very clear definition, halakhic definition, that someone with a Jewish mother is Jewish, there are still differences in terms of the application of that principle to particular cases because life is inevitably extraordinarily complicated and peculiar things happen. Orthodox groups will even, the requirements they have for determining someone’s status as a Jew, require certain things, but whether those requirements are actually met? Well, that requires deliberation, deliberation by a qualified beit din. Is your beit din qualified? It may not be, in which case even Orthodox communities will end up with different rulings in particular cases. And so once you can help people understand that ascribing Jewish status to a person, regardless of whether they themselves identify as Jewish, the recognition by others of their status is so much more complicated than the idea of just invoking a particular halakhic standard. It always requires practical reasoning and thinking and analysis of the particular situation. I think once people begin to see that just historically and halakhically it’s always been a complicated question, which is why for all these thousands of years it has persisted, right, that we don’t have an easy answer, even after centuries. Helping people understand that can sometimes lower the temperature and get them to say, okay, so let’s take some conscious steps to decide the criteria on which we’re going to have this conversation. Yehuda: Yeah, it’s actually you speak of lowering the temperature. I remember about 10 years ago we did a series on this topic at B’nai Jeshurun in New York, wheeling out some of the first research that we were doing thinking about these issues. And again, our goal institutionally and with the work that you’re doing is not to create some sort of normative standard—this is who is a Jew; this is how it should be boundaried—but here’s a body of content and knowledge and some key questions and ways to think about these issues that could help develop a more sophisticated and mature conversation. And I did as an opening talk, I did a kind of like, four objections to intermarriage. And even by the way, breaking it down that way, forced people to interrogate—is my objection to intermarriage because I think someone has violated a boundary? Is it because I think that they have done something wrong? Is it because Jewish identity means something? So I tried to break those out. And I had a powerful experience at the end where somebody came over and said, I’m married to a formerly intermarried Jew—meaning, she had converted in the process between the time that they had got married and now. And she said, this was a very helpful talk for me just to understand the antipathy that I experienced from my in-laws. I could actually figure out what they were ultimately about. I wonder if you could unpack, you used two words prior that play a major feature in some of this research and some of the educational content that you’re producing, the difference between identity and status. It feels to me like a really valuable distinction and might help us for this conversation. Christine: So identity, as Ellenson frames it, refers to a person’s own understanding of who they are, their subjective sense of themselves. And so when you think of Darind McKeever’s statement that he at times felt among, sometimes felt apart, sometimes felt adjacent. So identity, Jewish identity, when we understand it as a subjective experience is those moments when someone feels that they are among, they’re a part of, they’re among the Jewish people. But status is something that’s determined by a group conferred by some authoritative group and so it may have no regard for the individual’s own sense of themselves, their own subjective experience. So that’s why for me, for example, in the example when I spoke earlier about the difficulty of answering the question, are you Jewish? It was clear that from the point of view of status, the answer is no, right? And that’s an easy answer to give. Are you asking me if I have Jewish status? No. No problem. I can answer that quickly. But if you’re asking, am I Jewish? Are you asking about my subjective sense, there are times when I feel very much among. There are times when I am surprised when people remind me that I’m not Jewish. I’m like, yes, that’s right. I have to sort of do a double take for a second. And there are times when I feel apart and there are times when I feel adjacent. So identity is your subjective sense. Status is something that is conferred by some group that uses some set of criteria that they established that may not take account of your subjective experience. Now sometimes those who confer status are interested in your subjective experience and that can become a part of their formulation of your status. I think that’s happening increasingly. I think that some of the shifts that we’re seeing in certain communities now that are having new conversations about who to include, are referring not just to certain external criteria such as what halakha might say or certain kinds of behaviors or actions, but are also interested in talking to individuals about what their commitments are or their values are. Are they interested in raising a Jewish family, for example? So these kinds of subjective considerations can get folded into new understandings of what Jewish status might look like. Yehuda: Another example of how different identities might inform status decisions might even include two different individuals who come to the same rabbi for a conversion process, one of whom has been raised by a Jewish parent but no longer considers that significant for their denomination to which they belong, but actually knows everything. And you know, and someone else is coming with nothing that might accelerate the conversion process for one or the other, meaning you’ve acquired enough that we can confer status a little bit more easily, right? Christine: Certainly. Yehuda: Yeah, I wanna poke at this a little bit because dispassionately and intellectually, the difference between those categories, I think is very, very valuable, right? Identity is something we think about for ourselves, status is conferred by communities. In practice, the distinction between identity status causes an immense amount of pain, right? So an example I remember of years ago of someone I knew who had a profound Jewish identity, but did not have the status markers to belong to a particular community. Now, it’s interesting actually, from a purely halakhic standpoint, if you walk into a Jewish institution and say that you’re Jewish, they’re not really supposed to ask you how and why, right? But this person wasn’t comfortable with that. What he actually wanted was to disclose why his status markers were not sufficient for that community’s definition of Jewishness, but wanted to be recognized with status regardless. And it caused immense pain, he had to leave the community. There was no good answer. Is there a way to reconcile that for the Jewish people or do we have to create a little bit more resilience for all of us to say, it doesn’t matter how you feel, communities get to establish status according to their own rules? Christine: I’m very sympathetic to the idea that communities do get to establish status according to their own rules. What I think is very important, however, is that there be intentional conversations in those communities so that they really are choosing their criteria and can articulate them in a way that makes sense for that community. And unfortunately, I think what happens so often is that communities have simply inherited certain criteria for maybe membership in the community, quite apart from intermarriage and other things, but just membership in the community. They’ve inherited them and they may have been appropriate at some form or time, but there may be new realities on the ground that if they were aware of them, they might rethink some of those categories. Whether towards greater strictness or leniency, I don’t know. I guess my concern is that whatever choices communities make, they be informed and intentional and they work to serve that community well and the people that they care about wherever those people are situated in relationship to the community. Are you serving well those people? And I think that’s part of the document that I’m working on now, is to invite communities to have those intentional conversations wherever their decision may fall. But it needs to be a decision that’s informed, first of all, by reality. You spoke earlier about the shifting meaning of intermarriage. In an earlier age, in the post-war period, the common wisdom about intermarriage was that it was at worst an act of disloyalty to the Jewish people, sort of an act of rebellion. It shows that the person was ignorant of their Jewish heritage and they were consciously making a choice to break. It was perhaps a sign of the infection of individualism. That’s part of American society. This sort of common wisdom has been talked about by sociologists like Jennifer Thompson. It’s maybe because people are desperate for approval by non-Jews. Some of those things may have been true. In the 2000s and later, that’s generally not the story of intermarriage. That’s not what’s going on. And so a community whose fears of intermarriage are based on an old paradigm or model of what intermarriage might represent are not going to be well served by those policies, right? They really might want to take a look at what’s happening now, understand that sometimes intermarriage is actually not the moment when someone chooses to leave the tradition, it’s actually sometimes the moment where they discover that they care about their tradition and are eager to share it with someone they’re going to spend their life with. That’s a very different meaning for intermarriage and if our communities aren’t basing their policies and their practices on those realities, it’s hard for me to feel that if they’re not basing their policies and practices on those realities, they’re not serving their own community well or the people who would very much like to contribute to their communities. Yehuda: Can I push you to say what would be a bad example of persisting with markers of status that are inconsistent with a community’s values and what would be a good one? Christine: I suppose an example might be failure to assist an individual, a married couple who really are committed to passing on Jewish identity, heritage, education to their children, but not supporting them by allowing them access to educational tools, perhaps. And I’m not even necessarily saying you have to let them into a particular school, but just to somehow say that’s not a possibility for you and we’re not going to support that on your part. That seems to me to be unfortunate. People can probably find a community that will, but it’s very easy to say that. We have attachments to certain communities. We want to belong to certain communities. The example that you gave was painful, not, I assume, because that person couldn’t find some community that would give him Jewish status based on his identity, but that particular community to which he wanted to be attached wouldn’t, and that’s where the pain came from. Yehuda: I think maybe what you’re getting at is that part of what made Jewish communities inhospitable spaces to people with what you might call ambiguous status, right? Part of what made them inhospitable was, number one, as you described, a whole set of descriptions and fears that no longer appear to be true. Intermarriage, by and large, is no longer a rebellion. It’s not about that. It’s kind of just the self-actualization, it’s the networks in which people live, it’s just all of those things. So partly it was the coding of this as rebellion and therefore a desire to kind of punish that rebellion or at least prevent it from kind of infecting the whole culture of insiders. I think the second feature though was probably kind of a perception that it’s always a slippery slope. So if I give space for somebody who I think is making bad identity choices, right, by conferring them any status whatsoever, then the whole thing is going to fall and erode. So I would guess maybe a good example of like, of this is communities being really clear about what Jewish status is required for. Right? So it’s a big difference between, you know, in any particular synagogue, there may be ritual behaviors that a synagogue should be allowed to say, I’m sorry, only Jews can engage in these ritual behaviors because they have metaphysical or legal ramifications, right, as opposed to, I don’t know, being a member in good standing, or being able to get seats at high holidays so you can sit with your family together. And I’ll say though, it is very hard for communities that have deep fears about their future to avoid slippery slope attitudes towards communal change. You know, if we keep allowing this to happen, then it’s just gonna, it’s gonna normalize something that we wish wasn’t happening. Christine: But again, even to use words like normalize, assumes there’s something abnormal, which, it’s not perhaps common, and it’s perhaps not envisaged in some of the traditions in literature, but it pathologizes it a little bit. And then it’s more difficult, once something is pathologized, it is more difficult to find ways to reframe it and to see that actually there might be some positive things. If intermarriage is a fact, and increasingly it’s pretty clear that in America it’s a fact, then not pathologizing it might allow some of the benefits of it. There’s something to be said for people who are intentionally creating and shaping their Judaism and much more intentionally perhaps creating and shaping their Jewish homes than others who are sort of falling into their identity and they’re not being very intentional about it. That might be one way to think about this in positive terms. Although even that was based on an assumption about endogamous Jews and intermarried Jews. I think addressing and confronting fears upfront is very important. I think a version of what you’re suggesting. is what again sociologists have pointed out, that for many American Jews, intermarriage becomes a proxy or a projection of their own fears and worries about their own assimilation. At least I’m not assimilated to the point where I’m intermarrying. I’m still holding on to my distinct Jewish identity, but they may in fact be assimilating in a hundred other ways, right? But this becomes a way to export that worry and project it onto intermarried individuals and to deflect Jews’ own anxiety about the meaning and nature of their own Jewishness, as if only intermarried Jews are affected by individualism or assimilation. And I think sometimes that proves to be an obstacle to thinking honestly about the meaning of Jewishness and the way in which Jewishness is always a choice, always cultivated by everyone who claims that identity or wants that status, whether they are native born or not native born. Yehuda: I’m going ask you a little bit of an edgy question, which is why is it that Jewishness gives much more space for the identity choice than some other identities? And I’ll give you the most famous example was the episode maybe about a decade ago of Rachel Dolezal, the woman in Seattle, who claimed she was Black, right? And there was a universal condemnation by the Black community, of like, no, you’re not. Meaning it was, I have this identity and I have conferred zero status, right? A rejection of that. Whereas there seems to be an expectation that that voluntary choice, that motivates identity, that there’s just more freedom allowed of Jews and non-Jews as well. We know that there is a whole category now of Jews who operate within the framework of “voluntary affiliational identity,” people who neither convert nor had a Jewish parent, but who can describe themselves as Jewish and probably can find a community that will confer status upon them. So why do you see that distinction continuing to hold? Christine: Because choice has always been there right from the very beginning. You go back to the earliest biblical sources, there’s always been the assimilation in of people who were not born into the people. That’s been there from the beginning. Moses’s wife, Tzipporah, and his son, Gershon, was fully Israelite. So it’s always been. And that’s one of the things about identities that have a large or central ethnic component. And there is, to a very high degree, an ethnic element to Jewish identity. Now ethnic is not the same as biological. People often confuse that. People marry into ethnic communities all the time and become members of those ethnic communities. There is a kind of a fiction of kinship in ethnic communities, right? They understand themselves to come from a particular line of people, usually living in a particular place but not necessarily remaining there. But that doesn’t mean they don’t incorporate people through marriage or other types of affiliations. So people can enter ethnic communities all the time. It’s not an, you know, permeable boundary around. So ethnicity is a set of practices and self understandings and cultural activities and sometimes including religious activities, right? Religion and worship are components of an ethnicity sometimes. So, you know, if Jews are a people, but there are people who engage in certain sort of practices and many of them worship a God in a particular way, but we also know that many of them are secular. And that’s what’s interesting about an ethnicity. An ethnicity does form a group, but it doesn’t necessarily privilege biological kinship only, even though it makes claims about kinship, and it doesn’t only privilege certain cultural or religious elements either. And there is an element of choice as much as there isn’t an element of givenness about it. Yehuda: Look, I think that description… It makes sense to me in the sense that once you are able to signal, from as early as we can, the possibility of conversion, either the biblical version of conversion, which is you essentially join a polity, or the rabbinic version of conversion, which is you engage in ritual, which allegedly transforms your identity, essentially this myth of being able to acquire a bloodline, which the rabbis bequeath to us, once you’ve opened up that door, you’ve made it possible for people to be on this kind of trajectory towards identity. It also, I guess paradoxically, justifies those Jews in the modern period who shut that down as dramatically as they can, refuse to engage in processes of conversion anymore. In other words, they close the door that way, right? The edicts in the Syrian community. Those feel like in some ways the most consistent. I guess the argument would be that the least consistent position are those who would say, of course you can cross over and become a Jew, but that that only has to happen through particular ways and not doing so pretending as though any other kind of the bleeding over into Jewishness is somehow illegitimate, that that may be a status decision, but it’s kind of incorrect read of how identity operates. Christine: And it also creates a peculiar asymmetry between native-born Jews and non-native-born Jews. Many of the things that are cited sometimes as reasons to not confer Jewish status on non-Jews are things that are alive and well within communities of native-born Jews. For example, the requirement that they should lead a halakhically observant life. Very often the people, native-born Jews in that particular community aren’t necessarily leading a completely halakhically observant life. That they should believe in God. Well, there are many Jews sometimes in the very communities that state that as a requirement of conferring Jewish status, a person must believe in God. They will have many members in their community who would say they do not. So that’s one of the peculiar things about this, is that when people decide that their community is going to set certain criteria, they very often are setting up peculiar asymmetries between the existing membership and those who are seeking membership. It’s interesting because you mentioned the Syrian community, which was really about 100 years ago, that they first issued their edict. It was very much in response to fears of dissolution. If you read the edict, the reasons that are given are very sociocultural. It’s not about preserving a distinct bloodline. It’s about preserving a way of life which they fear is under threat because of assimilation, that the practices of the people, their identity. And I think sometimes people confuse that as being somehow a racial purity kind of requirement, but the language of the Edict itself, when you read it, makes it very clear what their fear is, the loss of the traditions and the traditional ways. Yehuda: Yeah, so guess the other fear that animates a lot of Jewish life today, which makes people put up boundaries, is fear connected directly to safety. And there’s a lot to talk about here, including the intense protection culture that now surrounds Jewish institutions, which is clearly warring with our instinct. The whole move over the last 30 years of creating our Jewish institutions to be welcoming spaces is… physically now, has this huge obstacle of the guardians at the gates. So that feels like one, but the second, the corollary to that is unbelievable tensions in Jewish life, far less now around identity as relates to Jewishness and far more about opinions as relates to Israel. And there’s a logic to it, of—if you feel that the Jewish people are bodily at risk, those who you feel are engaging in ideas, ideologies, and politics that are endangering that polity become dangerous. And I wonder how I wonder whether you think this that kind of analogy or that shift holds, and if you have a sense as to whether the same language around identity and status can apply to these kind of ideological debates the same way that you’re trying to apply them to this discussion on an intermarriage. Christine: I don’t know if this really directly answers your questions, but to the extent that so much of the debate around Israel, some of it is about loyalty and whatever that might represent in people’s minds, but also I think this fear of disappearance, which is a deep-seated fear, and it’s a fear many minorities have, but it’s a particular fear for Jews, given the realities of history. And so there is a fear of disappearance, and I think there’s an analogy with people who are concerned about either intermarriage or other types of non-Jewish affiliation and adjacency. haven’t really spoken about much, but intermarriage is just one form of affiliation. It’s one that’s got the legal bond of marriage with it, but there are other forms of non-Jewish affiliation and participation in community. And again, there’s an analogous sphere there of disappearance, that somehow there’s some kind of dilution. Again, we go back to certain metaphors. In this case, it’s less pathology than more sort of a chemistry, a metaphor of dilution of something that’s pure. And there again, a lot of the recent sociological research suggests that that may not reflect a reality, that there are many intermarried couples that make conscious decisions to commit to Jewish continuity, to raise children. There are all sorts of incredible outreach programs. There’s Mother’s Circle that began in Atlanta. It’s now spread to many, other Jewish cities, but they offer courses for non-Jewish women who are married to Jewish spouses who are very committed to raising Jewish families and sometimes are doing far more to achieve that goal than their native-born Jewish spouse. It’s kind of funny and ironic sometimes, but this is a way to kind of demystify Judaism for these people, according to their website, they want these women to learn how to find meaning in and to uphold Jewish rituals and holidays and values and give these women the tools to raise their children Jewish. 18 Doors is another program that supports people in that cause. So if the fear is disappearance, to some extent, again, it’s a fear that’s not always based in reality. Even the quantitative surveys and statistics show that a large number of intermarried couples are raising their children Jewish and their children do identify. I don’t know that it’s the majority. I think it’s maybe only about half. But it doesn’t seem to match entirely the narrative of intermarriages leading to Jewish disappearance. And even if there are concerns about that, one of the reasons, sometimes, that people don’t convert or some of the reasons, among the reasons that people don’t convert, and not always because it’s a subjective choice or it’s not always because of lack of commitment to Jewish identity, Jewish continuity or Jewish family. Someone may be very committed to that, but for personal reasons, perhaps a parent or other sorts of subjective connections within their family, or their own historical memory or, as you said, we do have competing identities and people feel that to convert is to shut down something that remains real, but is not perhaps the organizing principle of their identity, but not one they are entirely ready to say this is not a part of me anymore. So there are subjective reasons but there are also objective reasons. Sometimes the type of conversion a person would prefer just isn’t available in their community. They might want a Conservative or Reform conversion, but that isn’t offered by the community that they’re affiliated with, or they may like to find a way to participate in and be part of the Jewish community through a non-religious pathway, and that’s just simply not readily available in a lot of places. They may seek a type of conversion that wouldn’t be appropriate for some context that they need it. So there are all sorts of interesting… we can’t assume that when someone doesn’t convert in a marriage that it’s because they’re not interested and not committed. There are numerous reasons that people find quite reasonable obstacles to converting and yet it doesn’t diminish their desire to or their commitment to Jewish continuity. So that fear of disappearances perhaps not always just justified. Yehuda: Yeah, I guess when you switch to the fear of Jewish safety, which I think is what motivates some of the tensions around boundaries in the Jewish community today, where the distinction really shows up is it would have been quote unquote “justifiable” to see so much fear of this kind of ethnic boundary crossing, assimilation, around intermarriage if we were also living through a period of tremendous proselytizing of Jews or tremendous forms of anti-Semitism that still hadn’t prevented non-Jews from wanting married Jews because then you would see communities being like, listen, we’re really skeptical that blurring the boundaries of this identity is going to have damaging consequences to us. And I guess the flip side of that is that when people say, I’m really worried about having people who hold to views that I feel endanger the Jewish people, the state of Israel, et cetera, it’s not surprising post October 7th that that culture of defensiveness has emerged, that culture of fear, and that in some ways we’re hearkening back to what many of our rabbinic sources describe as the kind of anchoring question of conversion, which is not, can you identify the kashrut of frozen peas? It’s, will you be with the Jewish people when we are threatened? Christine: In hard times, absolutely. And again, I just, to me it’s always so important to really examine our assumptions. So again, if the fear is a fear of safety, you know, that you’re allowing people into the community, who can turn on the community, let’s look at the facts, you know, let’s see what’s happening in America today. When we look at individual humans and the lived experience of actual human beings, we sometimes find that our fears have a little less basis in reality than we might otherwise have supposed. After October 7th, it’s interesting how many synagogues experienced a huge number of inquiries about conversion. I know that Central Synagogue in Manhattan, the requests for conversion and conversion classes went up exponentially and they’ve had to sort of hire extra folks to handle the demand. was a very interesting article by Jeannie Suk Gersen who considered conversion for a very long time and somehow it was that moment of being asked, you know, where do you stand? Do you stand with those people even in these difficult and horrible times? That really catalyzed her decision. So human beings are complicated and there’s nothing that says that native-born Jews are not going to be the ones who feel more alienated from their tradition and are more ready to head for the exits after events like October 7th and things that have happened in its wake than persons who are standing on the boundary trying to figure out exactly where they are. It’s difficult to know what causes one person to fall on one side of a boundary or on the other side of a boundary, no matter their origin. Yehuda: I’ve been wondering lately about this kind of global referendum that we’re living in around immigration and borders and what its metaphorical or even actual ramifications are going to be for a Jewish community that most of what we’re describing, this kind of proliferation of diverse expressions of identity. And I think it really is magnificent, the way you’re talking about this, all of the categories, the ways that Jewish adjacency works, and the way the intermarriage works. I’ve seen my own community enriched so dramatically, the Hartman Institute enriched so dramatically, through stakeholders who are all over the map on Jewish identity, on our staff and on our board and in our faculty. It feels like not a coincidence to me that this flourished during a period of American history and global history where we were playing with more fluidity around borders, the rise of globalization, the kind of trust in the liberal order that we would be safe and protected. And we’re watching like a really significant global shift taking place where that position is increasingly narrower as a mainstream position, where not only the Republican Party in America, but the Democratic Party in America at this point can’t speak about open borders without it being a political liability. I wonder if you think… what kind of implications that’s gonna have on the nature of this conversation that Jews have been developing, and even kind of pioneering, about the nature of boundaries belonging and boundary crossing. Christine: It’s always a question whether the Jewish community will mimic or counter model what’s going on in the larger society. I think obviously at any time you’re going to see both, and there will be communities that will pick up on some of that rhetoric and find it congenial. But I also think Jews are really good at being counter-cultural. I think that they’ve been doing that since the very beginning with Abraham. What’s fascinating to me is the rise over the last 25 years in the number of synagogues and communities that are independent, that are non-denominational—it’s been an explosion, which is a way, it’s one way that Jews are saying, we want to think some things through ourselves. And the boundaries around the community are precisely among the things that they want to think about for themselves. In the 2000s, there were three independent synagogues. By 2009, there were 70. Estimates in 2020 are that about 10% of the congregations and/or communities—sometimes hard to define congregation, synagogue, community—but about 10% of the 3700 communities are independent, which would make 370. That was five years ago. So we’re seeing more and more communities who are not bound to a denominational determination on intermarriage or the boundaries of the community. They’re working it out for themselves, which is why I think precisely these communities want and need documents and resources for just staging conversations to be able to make intentional choices that serve their community and those they care about on the edges of the community. So whether Jews will mimic what’s going on or be a counter model to what’s going on, I’m not sure, but I do know that for certain we have had this explosion of communities that have opened themselves up to thinking about things independently. Yehuda: You don’t seem to fear that the product of that is some story about collective Jewish identity. I think for individual Jews, citizens of any of these independent communities, yeah, I don’t really care whether my synagogue—I care a lot about my synagogue—I don’t really care whether my synagogue abides by the status rules that are imposed on them by an external denomination. I want our synagogue to have the status rules determined by the rabbi in the community that they’re in, because sometimes anyway, they’re making all those complicated choices. Who they convert anyway is a status choice that they make independently. And I think that there are, I’m not sure that the denominational model continues to serve us. It’s probably its own other podcast, but they’re the thing that the denominational model sustained was—great, so status rules basically live in basically three camps, and I have to keep negotiating between those three camps to make sure that we’re all part of the same shared enterprise. Absent any sort of tribal sensibility, any sort of collective work, we are fissuring and we are fracturing into something that feels very different. Christine: Well, it’s interesting to put all of one’s denominational eggs in this one basket. I always find that fascinating. And you yourself are pointing out, I think, in this podcast that we’re kind of shifting, right? The community is kind of shifting now to a different litmus test, a different thing that’s fissuring and fracturing the community. So was it just the flavor of the month before? And now we can figure out ways to hold Jewish community together despite differences over identity questions, because we’ve discovered there’s something else bigger out there? So that already begins to make it seem a little bit more relative to me than some sort of absolute difference among communities or something that will absolutely challenge Jewish collectivity. I don’t know, it’s hard for me to be concerned about collectivity of a group that has existed under extraordinary circumstances for more than 3,000 years, but I don’t want to be too flip about it, obviously it’s a real question. I do think that the idea of unity without uniformity is an idea that serves us well because I think that that is precisely what has defined this thing, this very messy thing we call Jewish collectivity, is precisely a kind of unity that has not assumed uniformity. I think that’s been historically true. I think we fool ourselves into thinking that things were somehow once so united and so simple. That certainly wasn’t true in ancient times. You could take an Alexandrian Jew like Philo and put them alongside a rabbi and they’re from entirely different worlds speaking different languages with radically different ideas. They’re both Jews. So I don’t really know what to make of this thing that you’re calling Jewish collectivity. I wonder if it’s harkening back to a certain myth of a more uniform unity that I’m not sure ever existed and I think, hurrah. You know, I’m glad that it never existed. I think it’s what’s made it possible for Jews to adapt and survive through so many changes throughout history. Yehuda: I’ll end with this. The opening question that I asked you was a kind of personal reflective question and I’ll kind of want to harken back to that, which is, in all the time we work together you exhibit a certain kind of patience with Jewish life and its vicissitudes, and a kind of optimism. And I wonder whether that’s about knowing a lot of Torah. I don’t know what it’s about. What do you think it is that—because what you’re fundamentally doing here is trying to cultivate a constructive conversation about the constantly transforming condition of being Jewish as opposed to all of the alternatives that are out there in the communal discourse. What is it that you think is driving that patience with this people and its optimism that whatever version of this challenge we’re going to confront, we’re going to be able to get through it? Christine: Love. That’s my one word answer. Love. Love for the tradition, love for the ideas, love for its fascinating countercultural view of the world, the dignity of humankind, why we’re here, what we should be doing from cradle to grave, all of those things have made me very happy to be a non-Jew living in the shadow of the synagogue, which is how I described myself for many years, before I came up with the word adjacent. And that fills me with optimism, just that positionality is one that has been a huge gift to me in my life. If anyone else is interested in that, happy to open the door and show them how I’ve managed it, but also happy to help communities think about ways to make it just something that’s more within reach of anyone who should want it. That may involve marriage. In my case, it didn’t. It may not. So… It’s… I don’t think I have a better answer than that. Yehuda: I love it. Chris, thanks so much for being on the show today. Christine: Thank you.
