THE REFORMATION ROLLS ON:

Last year, in a now-infamous commencement address to the graduates at the Reform movement's Hebrew Union College, novelist Michael Chabon surprised his audience with a disquisition on the virtues of intermarriage, which he described as the "source of all human greatness." Expressing abhorrence of "homogeneity and insularity, exclusion and segregation," he urged the graduates--newly credentialed rabbis and educators--to "find room in our Jewish community for all those who want to share in our traditions."

In a scathing response, Sylvia Fishman, Steven Cohen, and Jack Wertheimer charged Chabon with seeking to "dismantle Judaism." Their real quarry, however, was not the showboating novelist but rather the "left camp" in the broader Jewish communal debate over intermarriage. By failing to come to terms with the damage intermarriage has caused to Jewish family and communal life, Fishman, Cohen, and Wertheimer argued, advocates for greater outreach to intermarried families opened the door to Chabon's more extreme rhetoric: "We urge the proponents of welcoming and inclusion . . . to think anew about where they stand in regard to Chabon's challenge. . . . Where would you draw boundaries?"

Robert Mnookin, a Harvard Law professor and self-described secular Jew, picks up that gauntlet. His book, The Jewish American Paradox, advocates broadening the criteria for inclusion in the Jewish collective and opening wide the doors of Jewish communal life. The book expresses Mnookin's conviction that only a Judaism of choice, open to all who publicly declare their belonging, has any prospect of flourishing in American society.

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