Leonard Fein and Steven M. Cohen have written a masterful reply to Rabbi Eric Yoffie’s screed about the delusions of secular Jews. It is a must-read for anyone who has been involved in this conversation.

Favorite bit:

Yoffie complains that these allegedly faithless secular Jews continue to assemble in synagogues and to undertake acts of family life and communal celebration that are either explicitly religious or that radiate with the power of deep faith. Indeed, he may be drawing upon his familiarity with his own Reform movement. In the same survey we find that of those identifying as Reform, just 6 percent (6 percent!) see themselves as religious Jews “to a great extent.” Among the same Reform Jews three times as many (18 percent) see themselves as secular, and nearly seven times as many (41 percent) call themselves
cultural Jews.

Fein and Cohen (a leading Jewish demographer on the faculty of HUC-JIR) are much more polite than I was.  For reasons that I won’t go into here, I hear Orthodox rabbis make similar claims all the time.  So I was just shocked (really…not in an ironic Claude Rains-y way) to see it coming from Yoffie. Continue reading →