"what - is a Jew"
Wednesday, December 26, 2007
The Jewish state has absorbed over the past two decades some 300,000 halachically non-Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union. Yet the vast majority of these new Israeli citizens don't see themselves as "non-Jews": Either they await conversion through a process that is painfully and unnecessarily slow, or they assert their Jewishness through a civic Israeli identity that will increasingly challenge the mainstream Orthodox monopoly on official religious functions here.
Outside Israel, the high rate of intermarriage among the non-Orthodox majority of Diaspora Jews, especially in North America, has turned out not only to have had the effect of depleting through assimilation the ranks of Reform and Conservative communities; it has also blurred the essence of a Jewishness once defined even by the non-Orthodox streams as something as definite as membership in a synagogue, into a desire by those who enter into mixed marriages to still be counted in some manner among the Jewish People, albeit on terms they wish to proscribe.
Click here to read this article, "A meeting (not) of movements' minds," from The Jerusalem Post.
