Chevrei:

As Derek said in his response, it's late. So, like him, I'll leave the
bulk of the issues to be discussed later. I would like, however, do try
to identify the break in communication that I feel is happening here:

"You and Rebecca and the hundreds of other committed Jews whose parents
are not both Jewish are statistical anomalies.  All research indicates
that the likelihood of a child affiliating with any Jewish movement,
much less the Conservative movement, is extremely low. "

-- As I understand it, Wendy and I are talking about our experiences to
show that intermarriage does not, and need not, lead inexorably to the
interruption of Jewish continuity or the undertaking of serious Jewish
living.
We are not, as far as I can tell, at present discussing how the
anecdotal data that we provide should be integrated with the
statistical data that exists or what policy recommendations, if any, we
would make to our synagogues, minyanim, or the USCJ at large.
I, for one, am very concerned about matters of language and rhetoric,
which do not necessarily go hand-in-hand with particular issues of
policy or halakhic stance, though I am happy to also take those up
separately at another juncture.

-- As I understand it, Derek is responding with his understanding of
the big picture, in which what Wendy and I have to say is not relevant
because we are too small a constituency to matter. Whatever one makes
of the numbers, once we have them, I think it should be understood that
he is addressing quite a different matter from what I at least
understood to be the subject and point of Wendy's post.

I will be happy to discuss any data and statistical findings that
Derek or anyone else presents on this list. But until someone presents
some specifics that would substantiate Derek's claims, preferably in
more accurate and neutral terminology, we cannot reasonably assess
matters that are at these point reducible only to generalization and
assertion.
If we want to get somewhere, we need to talk about specific numbers,
the studies they came from, and what exactly they were measuring -- not
generalizations ("All research"), or non-numerical descriptors (
"extremely low"), or descriptors that wrongly attribute causation or
predictive power when correlation or descriptive data is all that
exists in the given study ("likelihood of a child affiliating with any
Jewish movement").

I also feel I need to take issue with what seems to me a misuse of the
term "statistical anomalies": being a minority, even a very small one,
is by no means the same as being a "statistical anomaly," and the term
is not a neutral or value-free one once it leaves its specific use in
data analysis, which it clearly has here.

I do not regard Jews are a "statistical anomaly" in the U.S., although
we are quite a small percentage of the population (a little over 2% by
most accountings, though it varies slightly depending on whose numbers
you're
using--http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/US-Israel/
usjewpop.html gives 2.2, relying on the AJC's _American Jewish Year
Book 2002_).

I do not know how small a group Wendy and I represent in the Jewish
population, let alone in the Conservative Jewish population. But I do
know that, given the data that I _do_ have, I would expect the number
of Conservative-affiliated Jewish children of intermarriage to be
significantly higher than 2% in either of the following
Conservative-related groups (for which I _do_ know, and will give here,
the parental-intermarriage data from Wertheimer's _Jews in the Center_:
bibliographical information given further below):

• Jews in families that belong to Conservative synagogues
(14% of Conservative synagogue members in the 1995 Ratner survey said
they were married to non-Jews. To get 2% Jewish children of
intermarriage in families that have membership in a Conservative
synagogue, we should then only need 1 in 7 of those members to have
_one_ Jewish child in their household, to give us a % roughly equal to
the % of Jews in the U.S. population.
This statistic would NOT be the same as # of children of intermarriage
who would show up as Conservative synagogue _members_ in something like
the Ratner survey, which is surveying the adult members of the
household and not the children.*
It is beyond the predictive power of such data sets to tell us
anything about the likelihood of these children becoming Conservative
synagogue members in the future.)

• Jews in families that self-identify as Conservative
(21% of adult Jews who self-identified as Conservative in the 1990
NJPS said they were married to non-Jews. To get 2% children of
intermarriage in these families, then, we need only about 1 in 10 to
have _one_ Jewish child in their household.)

*We need to keep this time-gap effect in mind whenever we are analyzing
current data and especially when trying to extrapolate to the future:
people often say, “If present trends continue, X will happen” [the
Jewish people will disappear, the world will starve, etc.]–but we need
to know a fair bit about context to decide whether it’s likely that
“present trends will continue,” or which ones, or how!
For example:
In the past, the rates of intermarriage in the Conservative movement
have been higher for men than for women (also true for the Jewish
community as a whole) though the gap has closed over time and is now at
40% for both (according to data in Sylvia Barack Fishman’s recent
_Double or Nothing: Jewish Families and Mixed Marriage_)–but current
demographics on the children will reflect the earlier numbers, with
more intermarried male Jews than intermarried female Jews.
I have specified "one Jewish child" in the intermarried groups above
without regard to whether that child was born Jewish to a mother who
affiliates with Conservative Judaism, or was converted via the
necessary halakhic steps after being born to a non-Jewish mother
married to a father who affiliates with Conservative Judaism, in either
of the groups above (synagogue members in one case, self-identifying
Conservative Jews in the other).

I will post here a somewhat-edited version of some of the statistics
that I have found of interest on the topics of intermarriage and
denominational affiliation (from Wertheimer's _Jews in the Center_: see
below for bibliographical information) and posted on the JOI blog.** I
know that these statistics are not specific to the topic Derek raised
(children of intermarriage), but it does address affiliation of
intermarried families. And it gets some data on the table in a form
that I can give it to you now without too much fussing.

** Specifically from http://joi.org/blog/index.php?p=66#comments
(Comments 4+). I invite you to take a look at what else I've said on
that site--
http://joi.org/blog/index.php?p=63#comments is my latest; others
include http://joi.org/blog/index.php?p=71#comments (for Father's Day)
and http://joi.org/blog/index.php?p=52#comments (mine is comment
#19--you'll have to scroll down a ways)

--as well as at
http://zackarysholemberger.blogspot.com/2005/06/son-of-intermarriage-
or-what-do-we.html

So here it is:

Data from 1990 NJPS giving percentages for those raised Conservative
who have changed to another denomination (or religion):
2.1% Orthodox
58.9% Reform
4.3% Reconstructionist (note: twice as many as to Ortho!)
11.4% “Just Jewish”
10.5% Other
12.8% Christian

Source: Table 2.12, “Denominational Changes of Conservative Jews,” in
“Conservative Jewry: A Sociodemographic Overview,” Sidney Goldstein &
Alice Goldstein, in _Jews in the Center: Conservative Synagogues and
their Members_, ed. Jack Wertheimer (Rutgers University Press, 2000),
p. 86.

It’s worth noting what that chapter’s data has to say on both
intermarriage AND conversionary marriages (where one partner was not
born Jewish but converted) as they correlate with denominational
switching to/from Conservative Judaism:

“The data on intermarriage show that the in-switchers have particularly
low levels of mixed marriages, with only 15% married to a non-Jewish
spouse** compared to one-quarter of the stayers. Notably more of the
in-switchers are in conversionary marriages than either the stayers or
the out-switchers. Of those who left Conservative Judaism, half are
married to a non-Jewish spouse, and many of these no longer consider
themselves Jewish." [Becca's note: they do not seem to give the
numbers for how many of this intermarried half can be found in each of
the categories above--but even if _every single person_ who switched to
"Christian" or "Other" above were intermarried, that would account for
only 23.3%, leaving approx. 26.7% of those switching out of CJ to
movements to the left, or to the refusal of all denominational labels
("Just Jewish")--surely a number & phenomenon worth paying attention
to.] "Our findings thus suggest that switching is very often related to
intermarriage, and quite likely is the direct result of intermarriage.
If intermarriage levels continue at the high levels characteristic of
the 1985-90 marriage cohort, then losses can be expected to continue at
equally high levels unless some kind of direct and successful
intervention is developed.”

I would be interested in what data is available to with specific
reference to non-Jewish spouses who convert _after_ marriage (I know
personally many in this position, but anecdotal evidence is not the
same as statistical evidence!)–that is, who are among “intermarried”
couples at the start of their marriage and then are part of a
“conversionary” marriage later on.

**Becca’s note: this is almost exactly the same rate as for
Conservative synagogue _members_ (14%) in the previous chapter of the
same volume (see p. 61, presenting data from 1995 Ratner survey).

So, as with my being interested to know that my mother is among the 1
in 7 Conservative synagogue _members_ who are intermarried (14%), I
would be interested to know how much or little statistical company she
and I have as intermarried/child-of-intermarried individuals who are
Mover-Increasers–in the white “Increased practice, increased
involvement” on the graph, which has GROWN in every generation (as has
its opposite, the grey “steady lack of involvement")–in Horowitz’s
terms. [Referring to info & graph at http://joi.org/blog/index.php?p=66]

And particularly how much or little company we have in being among
those in the group who still affiliate Conservative.

All the surrounding data I know of suggests that most of the
intermarrieds in this group have, up to 1990 at any rate, largely been
found leaving Conservative Judaism for movements to the left of it. I
don’t know what it would say about children of intermarriage like me,
but obviously if the parents reaffiliate Reform the child is likely to
be raised Reform, so I would expect again I’m a likely minority.
...
Here are the Goldsteins’ chapter’s stats from the NJPS on intermarriage
as analyzed by denomination of respondent:

in 1990 NJPS, total %s who reported selves being married to a non-Jew:

Reform: 38%
Conservative: 21% [higher than the 14% above from 1995 Ratner survey,
which is narrowed to Conservative synagogue MEMBERS, as opposed to all
who self-identify with a given movement whether or not they belong to a
synagogue of that or any stripe]
Orthodox: 7%

BUT:
in 1990 NJPS for marriages between 1985 and 1990, the % given are:
Reform: almost three-fourths
Conservative: just under half
Orthodox: one-fourth

Of which the authors write: “This pattern is directly related to
attitudes toward intermarriages; a much larger proportion of
Conservative Jews are opposed to it than is true among the Reform, with
the Orthodox most strongly opposed.” (p. 73)

Note that they correctly identify only correlation ("related") not
causation ("caused” or “is the result of"): we don’t know whether to
attribute this outcome to:
• the attitudes of the individuals in these movements (which is the one
they mention overtly)
• the policies of the movement and/or the halachic decisions of its
legal bodies (questions of politics and structure and law, not of
directly of personal viewpoint as above)
• reaffiliation to the left by those who feel uncomfortable with the
views (option 1) or policies (option 2) on this point of the movement
in which they started

Above I gave the evidence for option #3 re: half of the Conservative
Jews who went to Reform being those who are intermarried. The
Goldsteins also give some data here that suggests that issues of
rhetorial stance or cultural acceptance may be at play as strongly as
those of halacha:

“Notably more of the in-switchers [to Conservative Judaism–75.6% in
from Orthodox, mostly decades ago as part of a generational shift] are
in conversionary marriages than either the stayers or the
out-switchers” (87).

Once a non-Jew has fulfilled the halachic requirements for conversion,
she or he is just as Jewish as anyone else. But the data show that, of
those who switched here (3/4 of whom went from Orthodox to
Conservative), more of them had spouses that had converted. Their
flight from Orthodoxy was unlikely to be purely a halachic matter,
because the converted spouse is a Jew. I would suggest that the
cultural and social norms of their Orthodox communities at the time
they left them–not the halacha itself in those communities–may have
been the most powerful push factor driving them to leave. (One might
suggest Conservative’s mixed seating as a potential “pull” factor for
not separating a perhaps more tentative or isolated not-Jewish-born
spouse from his/her partner while at synagogue.)

Note that in the NJPS data cited above, one-quarter–one in four!–of
marriages between 1985 and 1990 involving someone who self-identified
as an Orthodox Jew were to a non-Jew. About a 25% intermarriage rate.

That’s a lot, relatively speaking. That’s higher than the overall rate
of 21% for self-identified Conservative Jews. Much higher than the 15%
rate for those who switched from outside Conservative Judaism (75% of
whom were coming from Orthodoxy, remember) to inside it. Or than the
14% rate for Conservative synagogue members.

Again: the NJPS data on denomination here comes from
self-identification by participants–not synagogue membership, standard
of observance, halachic qualifications, or anything else . Just as the
% for Conservative synagogue members (14%) is lower than that for all
self-identified Conservative Jews in the survey overall (21%), I would
expect this approx. 25% for all self-identified Orthodox Jews to be
lower among surveyed Orthodox synagogue members. (And perhaps someone
reading this is aware of what those #s are and will share the
information with us? More data is a good thing!)

So intermarriage isn’t just a phenomenon of the left. The rates in
those recent Orthodox marriages are similar to ones in the progressive
movements several decades ago. So we’re all in this together, just at
different points in the sociological trajectory of the phenomenon–not
the curse, not the blessing, but the neutral fact or phenomenon, though
construed by detractors as the former and partisans as the latter–of
intermarriage.