“The greatest threat to Jewish life in the United States is not the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It’s religious illiteracy”

The greatest threat to Jewish life in the United States is not the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It’s religious illiteracy. The American Jewish community represents an unprecedented experiment in what happens when you combine mass ignorance of Jewish law and tradition with radical acceptance by the gentile world. The result is tragic. It’s not tragic because more than seventy percent of non-Orthodox American Jews now intermarry. People should grab love where they can. It’s tragic because so many of the young American Jews who choose not to raise Jewish families don’t even know what they’re discarding. They can’t make an informed choice because their parents, rabbis and community leaders haven’t given them a strong enough foundation in what Judaism is. They’ve never been challenged or inspired or touched by a Jewish text. They’ve never encountered something in the Tanakh or Talmud that helped them understand how to live.

Peter Beinart, “American rabbis, these High Holidays, talk about Jewish texts, not the Jewish State”, HaAretz.com (22 September 2014) [http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/1.617158]