Radical Inclusion: Engaging Interfaith Families for a Thriving Jewish Future

Case, founder of the nonprofit InterfaithFamily, makes a case in his forceful debut that, given the numbers of Jews marrying partners from a different faith, preserving Jewish traditions depends upon the Jewish community being more open to and welcoming of interfaith marriages. As people are increasingly marrying across religious and cultural traditions, almost three-quarters of “non-Orthodox Jews are now intermarrying,” Case writes, citing the Pew Research Center's 2013 study A Portrait of Jewish Americans. That trend leads him to argue that Jewish institutions of all kinds should be accepting of mixed-faith families in the hope that such an attitude will create meaningful and strong connections across traditional cultural boundaries—even where the non-Jewish spouse elects not to convert to Judaism. Case makes the simple but persuasive point that rejection of the legitimacy of such marriages will only lead to alienation from the Jewish community. Jewish readers curious about how interfaith marriage is affecting Judaism will find much of interest here. [em](BookLife) [/em]

Correction: An earlier version of this review incorrectly named the source of statistics used by the author in the book. The review has also been updated to remove a mischaracterization inadvertently introduced in the editing process.