Comments on the Bronfman Book

Several questions/comments were sent to me about the last post.

1. How did you (Dawn) get the book?
Rosanne Levitt, in a visit to the east coast, spoke with an employee of the Bronfman Foundation. She told the woman about the Alliance’s efforts to support advanced education among Interfaith Outreach workers and was offered several copies of the book.

2. Given that Bronfman didn’t connect with the professionals will you (Dawn) be sharing your thoughts with Bronfman and copying key individuals?
I spoke with the same young man who interviewed a number of us for the Foundation about a year ago, Ben Greene. Other key individuals in the work would be YOU ALL!

3. I have begun reading the book but have not found it compelling.
As a professional in this field you will find that the material in the book is already well known to you. In fact we discussed some of this in our Think Tank last September 2008. The book is basically a layperson’s survey of current data. The good news is that we can hope that more people will read and learn some of this basic information. The bad news is that, as a novice, his deductions are not always on target.

Two more thoughts
Perceptions of interfaith couples/families
One problem is that Bronfman uses his intermarried son to gain insight. This is a very common error: The survey of one. You now have a single individual’s experience representing a huge population. This is frequent in our line of work. A parent sees their child intermarry and it impacts them. They come to us with an adamant view informed solely by their child. Or an intermarried Jew comes and believes that all interfaith couples’ marriages are just like theirs. It would have been useful had Bronfman then been aware of this and ackn

Level of sophistication
Second, the challenge to those of us who are long time practitioners in this field is that we may feel discouraged by the lack of experience around us. All the more reason that we need to work on developing a more sophisticated and informed professional group.