“The denominational war for the heart and soul of American Judaism is over”

The denominational war for the heart and soul of American Judaism is over. The struggle of the early generation of Eastern European Jewish immigrants to instill a love of traditional Judaism to their American-born children enchanted with the more American milieu of the other denominations is over. This is not our central struggle, and this is not our battlefield.

… Our struggle is not with the other streams of religious Jewish expression in America. While the predictions in the first half of the twentieth century foresaw an America without Orthodox Jews, this proved dramatically false. The youngest movement in Judaism is Orthodoxy. The only movement in Judaism not experiencing massive rates of assimilation and intermarriage is Orthodoxy. (This is not to say that an intermarried family ceases to connect with the Jewish community, but, by definition, it will be an attenuated connection with competing religious interests.)

Rabbi Ben Greenberg, “The Millennial Generation: From the Chosen Nation to the Nation that Chooses”, Conversations, Issue 24 (Winter 2016/5776), 76.