By Chris Menahan – Information Liberation
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.
Transcript:
ALGEMEINER’S DAVID COHEN: Is it your sense that Jewish people are getting complacent, that they’re not engaging to degrees and levels we should be?
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.”
Evidently, the ADL’s vocal support for intermarriage doesn’t apply to Jews.