IF YOU PRICK US, DO WE NOT BLEED?

A Slice of America: Judaism Among Non-Jews (Debra Nussbaum Cohen, New York Times, 5/31/03)

[A] growing number of Americans who are not Jewish by any conventional definition — by traditional or the Reform movement's patrilineal standards — describe themselves as in some way Jewish.

In a postmodern and very American way that may alter the definition of Jewishness, many conclude that joining the faith no longer requires crossing the threshold of formal conversion, but is instead becoming a matter of simple self-identification. This even though traditionalists, those in the Conservative and Orthodox movements, oppose identification without conversion.

"People living as Jews without converting far outnumber the amount of people who convert to Judaism," said Gary Tobin, president of the Institute for Jewish and Community Research, a San Francisco-based group conducting demographic research on Jews.

"It's part of a phenomenon in American religion in general, where people taste and live certain lives to see if they fit," said Mr. Tobin, author of "Opening the Gates: How Pro-Active Conversion Can Revitalize the Jewish Community" (Jossey-Bass, 1999). . . .

While there have always been people identifying as Jewish though they were not, the twin circumstances of intermarriage and acceptance of Jews in American society have led to such an increase in recent years that the population is becoming quantifiable. A 1990 study, the National Jewish Population Survey, found 55,000 people who described themselves as Jewish but were not born into the faith and had not converted — essentially 1 percent of the American Jewish population.

The number is thought to have grown since then, said Steve Bayme, national director of contemporary Jewish life at the American Jewish Committee. "Today the boundary between being a Jew and a non-Jew is incredibly open and porous," Mr. Bayme said. As a result, current studies provide more ways for respondents to explain unconventional connections with Judaism.

The trend is bound to become a controversial issue as the size of the American Jewish population, as traditionally defined, shrinks because of intermarriage and a low birthrate. It may also lead to significant transformation in Jewish self-concept, which has long been based on parentage or formal conversion. . . .

A watershed break came in 1983, when the Reform movement's rabbis adopted a resolution permitting Jewishness to be conferred not just through conversion or birth to a Jewish mother, but also through birth to a Jewish father as long as the child is educated in Judaism and no other religion, and undergoes Jewish rites of passage.

In practice, however, Reform Judaism, the faith's largest denomination, often does not abide by even those specifics. "We don't focus on seeing who's Jewish and who's not," said Dru Greenwood, director of outreach and synagogue community for the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, the synagogue organization of the Reform movement. "We put our focus on welcoming people who want to live a Jewish life and be part of the Jewish community."

For the biblical Ruth, joining the Hebrews involved pledging, "Wherever you go, I will go, your people shall be my people, and your God my God." That pledge is now typically recited in conversion to Judaism. But Micah Berul has no plans to make it.

Mr. Berul's father was Jewish, and his mother is Catholic. As he was growing up, he says, he observed the major holidays of both religions, in "a secular way." When he was 17 his father died, and he began attending a Conservative synagogue to say the mourner's Kaddish, reading the unfamiliar Hebrew in English transliteration. A few months later he was considering conversion but, he says, did not want to have a drop of blood drawn from his penis as part of the required symbolic brit milah. . . .

"I feel Jewish, and since there's a segment of the Jewish world which views me as such, I feel confident saying I am," said Mr. Berul, a labor lawyer who is moving from Brooklyn to Berkeley, Calif.

In Berkeley there is a synagogue, Congregation Kehillah, that recognizes as Jewish all who say they are, and permits all ritual roles to anyone who wishes.

"For us this became a way to match the reality of life in our congregation, which does not regard discrimination as a good thing," said David Cooper, rabbi of the synagogue, which is affiliated with the small Jewish Renewal movement. . . .

Experts are split on whether the trend promises positive things for American Jews, through expanded numbers, or negative things, as the definition of "who is a Jew" becomes increasingly blurred.

"As a Jew myself, I don't know what this trend portends," said Professor Cohen, of Harvard. "Jewishness and Jewish society will certainly be different in a generation or two.

"It's unsettling, it's threatening, it certainly makes one wonder and worry about what this all means, but we simply have to allow that the vast majority of people act in ways far more consonant with their American values than their Jewish ones."

I once attended one of my wife's conversion classes with her. During a discussion of circumscision, one man asked what was done if the convert was already circumscised. The teacher said that they made a small symbolic prick just big enough to draw blood. The man asked, with more hope in his voice than I've heard expressed in one small sentence either before or since, "you mean, from a finger?"

"No. Not from a finger." Posted by David Cohen at June 1, 2003 8:39 PM