Jewishness - can you lose it??

Today Faith Central's guest blogger, Nathan Jeffay, a journalist and religious affairs specialist, reports on this fascinating story of the Jewish advertising campaign implying that Jews who marry outside the faith are "lost".

This brings up, as did this report in June of a boy whose mother was a convert to Judaism, yet was refused entry to a Jewish school, big questions of religious faith and religious identity.

To what extent is religious faith a matter of cultural identity, and to what extent is it about active belief? What do you think?

Nathan Jeffay writes: Missing person signs show names and faces posted at a train station as grim-looking trains depart. Sombre music plays. Is it a new Holocaust memorial campaign? No, it’s a PR balls-up by a Jewish organisation that wants young people to visit Israel.

Masa, a Jewish organisation partly-funded by Diaspora Jewry runs trips for Jews from around the world to visit Israel. Nothing controversial there – every Jewish organisation, from Reform on the left to ultra-Orthodox on the right does the same. The trips are meant to inspire participants to become more interested in their Jewish identity.

But Masa thought it would be a good idea to run a marketing campaign using the aforementioned images and sound. On the missing-person signs are Jewish-sounding names and Jewish-looking faces. And a narrator says:

"More than 50% of young Jews overseas are assimilating, and we are losing them. Do you know a young Jew overseas? Call Project Masa, and together we will strengthen the tie to Israel so we won’t lose him. Masa — a year in Israel, a love for a lifetime."

This advert – watch the video - was not shown in the Diaspora, where Masa recruits, but in Israel. The idea was get the Israeli public to call a hotline to shop Diaspora Jews whom they fear will assimilate.

The campaign was due to run for ten days but was pulled on Tuesday, the sixth, after causing uproar across the Diaspora.

Unfortunately for Masa, the Israel public greeted it with a collective shrug, and only 200 people called in. They left just 100 names of Diaspora Jews. Given the cost of the campaign was $800,000, leads came at $8,000 a piece.

So what was deemed so offensive about the advert? Well except for the idea of Israelis being expected to act as intelligence agents to ensure the survival of Diaspora Jewry, there was the idea that 50% of Jews are “assimilating” and getting “lost.”

No source was cited for the figure, but it is widely believed to reflect the much discussed finding of the 1990 National Jewish Population Survey, sponsored by the Council of Jewish Federations, which reported a 52% annual rate of intermarriage in America.

The implication that all intermarried Jews are lost went down like a ton of bricks in the Diaspora – especially among intermarried Jews.

And another reason the advert touched such a raw nerve is that Israel-Diaspora relations are always very delicate. Once, Zionists hoped that all Jews would move to Israel and the Diaspora would become a thing of the past. Things have moved on, as discussed in [this article.]But critics of the advert said it harks back to the bad old days.

In the hours before the advert was pulled, Paula Edelstein, chair of the immigration department of the Jewish Agency, wrote a joint letter with Gilad Kariv, head of the Israel Movement for Progressive Judaism, criticising the way the ad drew a “fierce contrast between the Israeli reality and that of the Diaspora through the portrayal of the latter as an existential threat that leads Jews to the loss of their identity.” The implication of the advert, they said, was that Masa “is meant to stop assimilation through the negation of the Jewish life of Diaspora Jews.”

http://timesonline.typepad.com/faith/2009/09/jewishness-can-you-lose-it.html