The news that 18Doors has laid off two-thirds of its staff because of a budget shortfall is personally devastating. The future of the organization that was my legacy to the Jewish community, and which I was involved in until parting ways in 2016, is now in doubt; more importantly, a reduction in 18Doors’ services is a loss to the thousands of interfaith families it serves and to the many Jewish leaders who benefit from its resources and training.

Some explain 18Doors’ financial squeeze on the understandable current shift in donor giving priorities towards Israel and antisemitism that is impacting other nonprofits. In my opinion, that’s too easy. The truth is that 18Doors and others working to engage interfaith families Jewishly have never been adequately funded. 

Adobe Stock

If any good can come from this crisis, foundations and federations have an opportunity now to come together and fund the kind of serious effort to engage interfaith families that has long been needed — and has been clearly outlined for almost 20 years.

When I founded InterfaithFamily in 2001, it was clear to me that the inexorable tide of interfaith marriage meant that non-Orthodox Judaism needed to engage more interfaith families if it was to thrive into the future. That is more true than ever, with 72% of liberal Jews intermarrying.

The realization that the demographic trend needed to be responded to positively was obvious to me, but in the 1990s and until at least 2015, most of the intellectual leaders of the Jewish community railed against interfaith marriage as necessarily leading to assimilation, and promoted efforts to prevent it. 

Surveys showed then (and still show now) relatively less Jewish engagement by interfaith families. The funding community could have responded to that data with positive efforts to increase engagement, but apparently were persuaded that that would be a waste of resources. 

They did pour resources into very worthwhile programs — day schools, camps, Birthright Israel —  that increase participants’ Jewish identity and engagement, regardless of their marriage choices. But the expressed motivation behind the programs, emphasized in their marketing materials, was that they would result in fewer interfaith marriages, making them less attractive to the interfaith families they need to attract. 

In those years, most Jewish leaders would say that interfaith marriage was the biggest challenge the Jewish community faced. But by 2005, I calculated that Jewish funders spent less than one-tenth of 1% of their total spending on efforts expressly aimed at engaging interfaith families. That never significantly improved.

I founded InterfaithFamily in 2001 with myself and a half-time editor. We offered online personal stories and “how-to” information aimed at encouraging and supporting Jewish life; and we also offered an officiation referral service to help couples find rabbis for their weddings and lifecycle events. It became clear to me that local communities needed a central office to support individual interfaith families and the Jewish organizations that wanted to welcome them, as well as to advocate for inclusion.

Almost twenty years ago, in 2008, a group of significant funders came together. They engaged a consultant to survey the field and developed a plan to have a national organization, a website and, at the outset, three offices in local communities of the kind I envisioned. An economic downturn and the Madoff fraud derailed that effort. I’ve never understood why those funders did not regroup. The plan they outlined is still very much needed.

InterfaithFamily tried to implement the plan itself. We launched InterfaithFamily/Chicago in 2011, the first of what became, by 2015, seven local InterfaithFamily/Your Community programs, each with a full-time rabbi and full-time support person. But it was exhausting operating the local programs on a shoestring, with inadequate local funding and skeletal national staff support. I hired Jodi Bromberg to be my successor and retired from the organization in 2016. 

I remained a friend of the organization but had no formal connection. The rebranded 18Doors replaced the expensive Your Community initiative with the excellent Rukin Fellows program that spreads inclusion efforts in local communities by training rabbis. They expanded professional development efforts led by Rabbi Miriam Wajnberg, to date in Atlanta, Houston and Chicago. This kind of field building work remains vitally important, and it isn’t available from any other organization.

I don’t know the particulars of 18Doors’ funding issues. But one thing is clear: the funding community never prioritized either InterfaithFamily/18Doors in particular, or the cause of engaging interfaith families more generally. To my great frustration, I never persuaded leading Jewish funders to allocate the level of resources necessary to scale InterfaithFamily’s efforts to the levels needed to have a significant impact. 

Our biggest funder at the time made vastly larger grants to other causes. One of the largest Jewish foundations showered funding on inclusion of another marginalized group, but said interfaith family inclusion would take care of itself over time. One of the largest foundations rejected our argument that we needed to engage interfaith couples when they were starting out, and families with young children, in order to have a pipeline of older children who would then engage in the Jewish activity that funder supported. 

After a long presentation, the principal of a large foundation rejected our plan to build a national organization with local offices — basically the plan the earlier funding group had outlined — by summarily saying “You’re trying to do too much,” then showered millions of dollars on a related but less comprehensive project. 

More than one foundation principal, whose families controlled enormous resources — and who were in interfaith relationships themselves — only gave what for them were insignificant amounts. 

A very large federation appointed a task force that recommended a comprehensive approach to interfaith family engagement — which the federation never implemented.  

I can’t explain funder behavior. Maybe we didn’t present our plans well or demonstrate that we could execute them. I can’t help thinking, though, that interfaith marriage was then and remains an “icky” issue: the residual result of all of the old attacks against it, echoes of our bubbies saying “Don’t marry a shiksa” still in our heads. Perhaps liberal Jews are looking over their shoulders at the Orthodox, who still equate interfaith marriage with assimilation. Noah Felman, in To Be a Jew Today, says that even in the most progressive parts of the Jewish community, the acceptance of interfaith marriage is only a concession to social reality — I would say a reluctant concession — instead of being the affirmatively positive that is needed.

I’m proud of the work InterfaithFamily and then 18Doors did over the years. We moved the needle towards more interfaith families being more Jewishly engaged to a degree — but not far enough. 

As JTA reported, while the rate of interfaith marriage has increased since 2001, most children from these marriages are being raised Jewish, with participation in synagogues and Jewish institutions common. Two seminaries now admit students in interfaith relationships, and the Conservative movement seeks to be more inclusive. For the most part, Jewish leaders, at least in America, are not railing against interfaith marriage.

But far fewer interfaith than inmarried couples are synagogue members, or provide their children with Jewish education. My recent review of a dozen years of national and local Jewish community studies shows that interfaith families feel much less of a sense of belonging to the Jewish people or their local Jewish communities, and some number of interfaith couples still feel like “outsiders” and “other.” Helping interfaith couples and the partners from different faith backgrounds to feel that sense of belonging, essential to their Jewish engagement, remains the challenge of our time.

At least five federations in their recent community studies have stated that it is essential to engage interfaith families; three have said that “Convincing intermarried parents to enroll their children in Jewish educational programs requires a strong investment in efforts to attract interfaith families to communal programs and events and clear communication that these families are a valued part of the Jewish community.” So far, that investment has not been forthcoming. Today, only one community, Cleveland, has a robust local program, jHub, that explicitly serves interfaith families with a broad array of services. Every sizeable community should have a similar program, and they should be networked together with a central national organization that also provides resources and training to professionals and lay leaders who want to be inclusive. 

I hope that 18Doors can be or play an important role in the kind of national network that is needed — and that the funding community will take the opportunity presented by 18Doors’ crisis to finally fund a serious effort to engage interfaith families. It’s nearly 20 years overdue, but it’s not too late.

Edmund Case, the retired founder of InterfaithFamily (now 18Doors), is the president of the Center for Radically Inclusive Judaismand author of Radical Inclusion: Engaging Interfaith Families for a Thriving Jewish Futureand “A New Theory of Interfaith Marriage.”