Dear Derek (and everyone else, of course),

I'm glad you responded to my post, but I'm also confused: how will
discussing my plans to encourage or discourage my descendants'
adherence to Judaism help us further our original concern, the need to
recognize and honor non-Jewish family members as they contribute to
Jewish life in Conservative synagogues? I hope you weren't planning
to start an outreach initiative by issuing a warm welcome to all the
"statistical anomalies" in your congregation. :)

Furthermore, as Rebecca has pointed out, there are several assumptions
in your post not entirely borne out by the data. I will leave the
statistics to her, but my own impression is that "all research" at the
moment has done relatively little to check levels of continued Jewish
involvement in one-Jewish-parent versus two-Jewish-parent homes
*while* -- and this is the important bit -- controlling for other
factors such as Jewish observance in the home, synagogue affiliation,
extensive Jewish education, and so forth. It is these categories, not
parentage, that I consider most crucial in transmitting Judaism to the
next generation.

(Since you asked, however, the answer is that I will focus on teaching
my children to love, understand, and enjoy Judaism; eventually I will
encourage them to marry people who share the values and interests
central to their own lives and to our life as a family. If I have not
succeeded in making Judaism central to their lives by the time they
are considering marriage, I am not convinced that telling them to
marry Jews and only Jews will truly help them produce Jewish
grandchildren in any sense other than the purely halakhic -- although
the grandkids will have their own choices to make as well. And since
I managed to marry a Jew without rejecting my parents' choice, I'd
like to think that in some sense my children can do the same.)

Shabbat shalom,
Wendy