Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, in an interview with the Jewish newspaper The Algemeiner released on Thursday, lamented that “intermarriage rates” are continuing to rise among Jews.
ADL CEO JONATHAN GREENBLATT: I have met a lot of October 8th Jews for whom the massacre on October 7th was a wake-up call. I’ve met a lot of people who feel much more galvanized, much more organized. But that will only be sustained if we offer them, you know, ways to participate in a real and robust way in Jewish life.
COHEN: And whose responsibility is that?
GREENBLATT: All of ours. But like, this is why we need a revolution in our community, on so many levels. So look, the reality is is that intermarriage rates continue to go up. Assimilation continues apace.
And look, I fight anti-Semitism. That is my job. But I worry a great deal about broader questions of Jewish identity, as I think we talked about over lunch. And so I think it’s really important that our synagogues, our schools, summer camps, all of our institutions and the federations and denominations and other groups that sort of manage them. I think we all need to look in the mirror and make sure that we’re doing everything we can to adapt and to iterate and to be part of where the world is going, not just where the world has been.
The ADL, as the leading “anti-racist” and “anti-hate” group in the country, decries opposition to intermarriage on their website and even has an entire curriculum for American school children encouraging intermarriage titled “Winning the Right to Marry: Historic Parallels.”
Without any other context this doesn’t sound racist? My interpretation is the opposite, that as intermarriage rates increase one would need to redefine what Jewish identity is.
But it wouldn’t surprise me if he was saying the opposite, it’s just that I didn’t get that from this.
He’s saying that the amount of pure Jews are decreasing because of intermarriage and that they need to better the Jewish “education” so Jews stop marrying Goyims
I’m really not getting that at all from that paragraph, even after reading it 10 times. I still land on “we need to redefine what being Jewish is”.
Maybe the text doesn’t convey the accentuation properly. Here’s the video of it being said. https://xcancel.com/infolibnews/status/1953803386174026141