Edgar Bronfman is wrong on intermarriage

Edgar Bronfman is an idiot. Of course, let's wait and see how his own great-grandchildren will turn out.

It is time to abandon "racist" ideas and encourage intermarried couples to raise their children as Jews, according to World Jewish Congress leader Edgar Bronfman.

In an interview with the Jewish Chronicle, to be published in London on Friday, he said he believed "the whole concept of Jewish peoplehood, and the lines being pure, begins to sound a bit like Nazism, meaning racism."

..."It was fine 100 years ago," and it can probably be stopped at its current level, "but we're certainly not going to turn it off.

"Now we have a choice. We can double the amount of Jews that there are, or we can irritate everybody who's intermarried and lose them all." It was not necessary to insist on the non-Jewish partner converting, he continued: "I think the only condition we should make is that should bring up their children as Jewish." Some might convert in time, but "the rabbi who refuses to marry such couples is turning people off," he said. "My answer to 'who is a Jew' is 'anybody who wants to be.'" People did not emigrate to America to become better Jews but to have a better life: "And now we have five generations of that... The price of becoming successful in America is that people have forgone their Judaism.

"I don't want to give up on secular Jews. I want them to become more Jewish." All seven of his children from five marriages were brought up as Jews, he said, but only one, Matthew, is an observant Jew. "That was his choice."

"My answer to 'who is a Jew' is 'anybody who wants to be.'"? That's a healthy standard...Idiot...


Here is what JewishPress.com >The Jewish Press had to say:

Once one gets over Bronfman`s invective -- the idea that halachic standards for Judaic integrity are a form of Nazism or racism is really beyond comment -- his discourse is merely a restatement of Reform doctrine that there is no such thing as normative Judaism reflective of a transcendent, Divine set of principles designed to make us 'a light unto the nations.'

Judaism, rather, is, according to Bronfman and those wit similar insight, whatever anyone says it is. One suspects that Bronfman`s motivation was tied in significant ways to his own and his family`s extensive experience with intermarriage and a desire for acceptance and communal legitimacy. Even taking him at his word, he plainly is advocating the destruction of Judaism in order to save it.