These are strange times we live in and getting progressively stranger. This month’s flavor of strangeness is a JTA op-ed by leading American Jewish sociologist Steven M. Cohen and intermarriage advocate Kerry Olitzky addressing a pressing problem: that “many would-be members of the Jewish People have no possibility of engaging in a course of study and socialization that would lead to public recognition of their having joined the Jewish People.”
Cohen and Olitzky are talking about non-Jews who don’t want to undergo religious conversion because they feel that “would be an insincere affirmation of religious faith. Perhaps they are agnostic or atheist or secular or even committed to another faith tradition.” Yes that will definitely scotch the conversion thing.
Also they write some may feel “conversion requires abandonment of … holidays like Christmas.” Now where’d they get an outlandish notion like that? They obviously don’t read this column or they’d know all about the people from Pew and their Boro Park evergreen tree sightings.
They note that “[e]ven though significant numbers of Jews are secular [and] atheist … holding such positions … presents prospective converts with insurmountable barriers to conversion” in an apparent attempt to highlight what they see as the logical inconsistency of having different criteria for existing members of an exclusive club and for those looking to join it. But that’s a distinction that ought to be familiar to Cohen and Olitzky as American citizens. While espousing the violent overthrow of American democracy won’t cause them to lose their citizenship it will thankfully prevent Marxist revolutionaries from ever gaining that prized status along with its manifold privileges.
Create a free account to keep reading.
