The perils of tolerance

A dozen years ago, the Toronto Globe and Mail published a book review by Queen’s University historian Gerald Tulchinsky entitled "Is Jewish History Ending?" in which he flagged the dangers posed by the growing gentile tolerance toward Jews: 

"What 20 centuries of persecution culiminating in the Holocaust could not do -- the obliteration of the Jewish people -- U.S. toleration ... will soon accomplish." 1

The biggest threat to world Jewry, according to Tulchinsky, back then, was the growing rate of intermarriage between Jews and gentiles. A decade later, similar concern about the rate of Jew-gentile intermarriage was again expressed:

"The rate of intermarriage is rising sharply given that nearly seven out of 10 Jews under the age of 30 marry outside of their faith."

The source for this statistic was an article headlined “Jews face 'holocaust' by interfaith marriages” that served as an introduction to an upcoming lecture by Esther Jungreis on “The Holocaust and the Final Solution to Intermarriage” to be delivered on the campus of Ottawa’s Carleton University.

Esther Jungreis is an international lecturer, called “the Jewish Billy Graham,” who compares -- so the article claims -- “intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews with self-imposed annihilation on the scale of the Nazi extermination campaign.” She is also described as a “Holocaust survivor ... [who] argues [that] there is a moral imperative for Jews to marry within the faith” and who sees in the tendency of Jews to intermarry with non-Jews a veritable "spiritual holocaust" that threatens the survival of Judaism. 2

Not surprisingly, Mrs Jungreis is controversial among some of her co-religionists, given that she has proved unwilling to concede even the validity of gentile conversion to Judaism:

“Conversions are usually a sham, you know, in name only. It's easy come, easy go, and there's no commitment behind it. It doesn't mean anything.”

Hardcore? Oh my word, Yes!

I wonder if Deborah Lipstadt is as hardcore as this? Jewish author Ellen Jaffe McClain in her book, Embracing the Stranger [p. 18], has included a reference to Lipstadt's exclusionary Jewish chauvinism that leads me to suspect she may well be.

McClain writes: "Although people like Deborah Lipstadt, the Emory University professor who has written and lectured widely on Holocaust denial, have exhorted Jewish parents to just say no to intermarriage [with gentiles], much the same way they expect their children not to take drugs, a large majority of [Jewish] parents and (more than a few rabbis) are unable to lay down opposition to intermarriage as a strict operating principle."

Typical of the double standard of many of the captains in the Holocaust industry, it is other people's exclusionary chauvinism Professor Lipstadt is apt to disapprove of, which she may damn as "racism" and so on, even as she flogs a marry-your-own-kind approach to life for Jewish singles.


1. Source: The Globe and Mail’s July 12, 1997, issue.

2. “Jews face 'holocaust' by interfaith marriages, Unions pose threat to Judaism: expert talking at Carleton,” Pauline Tam, The Ottawa Citizen, March 07, 2007

http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/news/story.html?id=486f8ed7-e85e-4967-ae40-3912809ec843