I grew up in St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in LeRoy, New York, a small town about halfway between Rochester and Buffalo. Belonging to St. Marks meant Sunday School, choir practice, church camp, church suppers, and, as a teenager, service as an altar boy. Most of my ancestors on both sides of my family arrived in America before 1776. My father’s family lived north of the Mason Dixon line. My mother’s family lived south of that line until her parents moved from Virginia to Buffalo, where my parents met, so my family has ancestors who fought for independence and on both sides of the Civil War.
Before leaving LeRoy, the only Jews I knew were the characters in Chaim Potok’s novels. I loved their introspection, their struggles with their families and communities, and the brilliance of their inner dialogs. I never thought I could have friends like that, until I met my Jewish classmates at Harvard College.
I attended my first Jewish service while I was a law student. I went with my future wife, Sharon, to the High Holiday services led by the Hillel rabbi in a packed Sanders Theater. Later, Sharon and I started going to Friday night services at Shaare Zedeck Synagogue in Puerto Rico. That was part of the deal we made when I broached the idea of spending a year in San Juan so I could clerk for a federal judge, or at least so I remember. Sharon remembers no such deal and reports that we went to Shaare Zedeck to meet people. Whoever is right, it was an easy introduction to synagogue for me. We were just visiting, nobody seemed to care that I didn’t know what I was doing, and Sharon was a good teacher.
I stopped working on Shabbat a few years later. I was working at a large law firm in Washington while Sharon experienced quasi-single parenthood in the suburbs. Observing Shabbat gave us a reliable way to spend more time as a family. We went to Beth Tikvah Synagogue in Rockville, rather than closer synagogues, because the rabbi, Howard Gorin, told Sharon he would allow me on the bimah with her for our daughter’s naming, even though I was not Jewish.
Not long after that, our three-year-old son announced at the dinner table, “I’m Jewish, Mommy is Jewish, Rachie is Jewish.” He looked at me and asked, “What are you, Daddy?”
I don’t remember what I said, but it could not have made sense to him, because it would not have made sense to me. We were living a more Jewish life than almost anyone we knew, other than our Orthodox neighbors—so much so that the wife of another young lawyer at my firm commented to Sharon, “It must be nice to be married to someone who’s the same religion as you. My husband is Methodist and I’m Presbyterian and we can’t agree on which church to go to.”
“If people think I’m Jewish, what’s holding me back?” I wondered. Even my mother thought it was time. “Tom,” she had said before our interfaith wedding, “I don’t care what religion you choose, but your family should have just one religion.”
Inertia was a factor to be sure, but the real problem was pride. I knew so little, but I knew enough to know that the Jewish learning curve was massive. As long as I was just the nice, intermarried spouse who went with his family to synagogue, I could excuse my lack of knowledge. If I signed up, it would be a different story.
But then our son asked that question. Did I want to be part of his people or not?
How could I not? So, I made the call to Rabbi Gorin that he had been waiting for. Sitting in his office to discuss what conversion would entail, it never would have occurred to me that, one day, I would be the president of Lower Merion Synagogue, the largest Orthodox congregation in Pennsylvania.
On the way to that day, Sharon and I joined five synagogues in four different cities, I converted twice (first with a Conservative beit din in Miami and then with an Orthodox one in West Hartford, Connecticut), we spent two sabbaticals and many summers in Jerusalem, and we put our three children through Jewish day schools. From the beginning of my academic career, first in Miami, then West Hartford, and now Philadelphia, I have been the person the dean’s assistant emails to check on the dates for the Jewish holidays.
Ours is an American Jewish story. The details may be unique, but the story of a Christian-American man or woman falling in love with his or her Jewish-American friends and then deciding to join the Jewish people is not.
* * *
I spent the past academic year on sabbatical as a faculty fellow at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. The sabbatical/fellowship year provided me the opportunity to reflect on the meaning of my family’s American Jewish story in the larger context of Jewish intermarriage and conversion.
From the scholarly literature, I learned that not much is known about the people who intermarried and converted into the Jewish people until nearly the twentieth century. We know that it did happen.1 But the social separation between Jews and non-Jews in most of the world prior to the mid-nineteenth century means it’s unlikely that intermarriage and conversion-in to the Jewish people occurred very often, relative to marriage between two Jews—which clearly was the dominant pattern—and conversion-out, much of which was forced.2
Until sometime in the twentieth century, intermarriage almost always was a stop on a journey out of the Jewish people. University of Michigan Professor Todd Endelman reports that in Europe and among US elites, intermarriage was a way to try to escape social limits on Jews; while in the rural US it was a function of the small number of Jews outside of a few big cities and, thus, looks more like ordinary American assimilation.3
Rates of intermarriage increased significantly in the US over the course of the twentieth century, to the point where there was grave concern within Jewish institutions in the US about the “continuity crisis” this posed.4 More recent research suggests that American Jewish continuity is not at risk to the extent first thought.5 Many, if not most, of the children of intermarried couples in North America identify as Jews, and the originally non-Jewish spouses often come to identify with the Jewish people, whether they go through a formal conversion process or not.6
The extent to which Reform and even Conservative congregations depend on the volunteer work of converts and their spouses, and the increasing number of those congregations that grant some form of membership status to a non-Jewish spouse illustrate this new reality.7 As I can attest, the trend extends to at least part of the Orthodox world as well. Non-Jewish spouses cannot be members of Orthodox synagogues, but there are converts active in each of the Orthodox synagogues I have frequented since first joining Beth David Synagogue in West Hartford, and their families are over-represented on synagogue committees and other volunteer activities.
Reading the scholarly literature on intermarriage and conversion, and the even larger volume of popular and Jewish institutional literature, I was struck by the relative absence of the voices of originally non-Jewish spouses. There are exceptions, of course. Jennifer Thompson and Keren McGinity have conducted qualitative and ethnographic research that includes these voices; if you look hard enough, you can find some first-person accounts.8 But the center of gravity in much of the scholarly and popular literature reflects an institutional perspective that treats the people drawn to their Jewish neighbors, friends, classmates, and co-workers as a threat—to be approached at arm’s length at best.
As Zayde to four young Jewish grandchildren (and counting), and as a veteran of synagogue and Jewish day school boards, I understand that institutional perspective. But here in North America, Jews are not going to stop falling in love with their non-Jewish neighbors, friends, classmates, and co-workers. And those neighbors, friends, classmates, and co-workers are going to face a choice as a result. “Do I join the Jewish people or not?”
Having made my choice, I have a stake in the answers they give to this question. Like most people reading these words, I would like those answers to be “Yes,” if that comes with a commitment to live as a Jew and knowledge of what that means. But I would like the answer to be “Yes” even if their only commitment is to support the Jewish identity of their spouses and children and to learn over time what that means. That was my commitment when I took the first steps beyond what Yale Professor of Religious Studies Christine Hayes calls “Jewish adjacency” toward gaining formal status as a Jew, first under the rules of the Conservative stream of Judaism and, later, under Orthodox rules.9
Developing a Jewish identity and being recognized by the community as authentically Jewish (what Hayes helpfully calls gaining “standing” in the Jewish community) are, as Hayes carefully explains, related to the formal process of gaining official Jewish status within one or more of the streams of Jewish practice.10 But, as she also explains, identity and standing involve different and less well-marked processes.11
Because I had years of Jewish adjacency and our family was so present at synagogue and day school, I gained Jewish standing among our Conservative Jewish community in Miami as soon as I finished my first conversion and gained Jewish status. The same thing happened when we wanted to join an Orthodox synagogue in West Hartford, Connecticut. We had just returned to the US after living on the Jewish calendar in Jerusalem during a sabbatical year, and we wanted to be part of a community trying their best to do the same in the Diaspora. Our children were in Orthodox day school, and we already observed the other mitzvot that the rabbis required (Shabbat, kashrut, taharat ha-mishpachah), so the West Hartford Orthodox rabbis and our new community saw my conversion as a technicality. I went through a real process that taught me things that I needed and wanted to know, and I affirmed real commitments, but the outcome was never in doubt.
Developing a Jewish identity that felt authentic to me was much harder, and there were many more bumps along the way. Like the time, not so long ago, the rabbi told me that, despite what I might have heard, a certain prominent person in the community had not said that a convert couldn’t be president of Lower Merion Synagogue—which of course meant that some people were saying such a thing. Or the time more recently, when a different very important person in the community expressed doubt about whether I could say kaddish for my mother (whose ashes were interred at St. Marks). I could and did. Or the time many years ago, during my first conversion, when the mohel in Miami asked me to recite the Sh’ma. As hard as it may be to believe, I thought at the time that the Sh’ma was just the single line Sharon recited with our children each night. So, he had to lead me through the rest, syllable by painfully humiliating syllable. Or the many times when I went to services at a synagogue in a new place for the first time, hoping desperately that nobody would ask me to do something that would somehow demonstrate that I didn’t really belong.
I wish I could say that I experienced those and other experiences as bumps on the road to Jewish status or standing, and not as challenges to whether I would ever feel authentically a Jew. But, except for the kaddish example (which just got me sad and angry), each and every one of these experiences challenged my emerging self-identity as a Jew, and even today I’m not sure that I’m done with those challenges.
If my experience is anything like that of others, we need not only to do more to treat the people who are drawn to us as opportunities rather than threats, but also to recognize that coming close is a process that can take a lifetime to complete. The latter can be true as well for born Jews who were raised, or who became, distant from committed Jewish life; but it is differently true for converts and the Jewishly adjacent for reasons I’m sure I do not need to explain to this audience.
Professor Hayes and her Hartman Institute collaborators have provided a caring and thoughtful roadmap for Jewish organizations that wish to explore how to foster a community of belonging.12 I advocate even more strongly than they can (because they are speaking to the widest possible range of Jewish organizations) for committed Jews and secure Jewish communities to embrace the Jewishly adjacent. We should listen to and learn from them. We should explore ways to encourage them to make their own version of my choice, while respecting the choices they make. But we should, especially, support them along the way.
We can be confident as we do this, because we have so much to offer: Torah, avodah, tikkun olam, and, perhaps most importantly, the communities that make these and other aspects of a full Jewish life possible. That life provides so much meaning and such generous human connection in a world without enough of both. Yes, some of the people we embrace will remain only Jewishly adjacent, but their lives will be richer as a result; ours will be, too.
Tom Baker is the Henry R. Silverman Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School. He is also the former president of the Lower Merion Synagogue, the largest Orthodox congregation in Pennsylvania.
For Additional Reading
Berman, Lila Corwin. The American Jewish Philanthropic Complex: The History of a Multibillion-Dollar Institution. Princeton University Press, 2020.
Cohen, Shaye J.D. The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties. University of California Press, 1999.
Cohen, Steven M. “Jewish identity research in the United States: Concepts and findings, in Demographic Shifts in the Jewish World: Forecasts and Implications.” Jewish Agency, 2002.
Diamant, Anita. Choosing a Jewish Life. Schocken Press, 1997.
Endelman, Todd. Leaving the Jewish Fold: Conversion and Radical Assimilation in Modern Jewish History. Princeton University Press, 2015.
Hayes, Christine. “Building Communities of Belonging: Jewish Identity, Conversion, Intermarriage, and Adjacency.” Kogod Research Center for Contemporary Jewish Thought at the Shalom Hartman Institute, 2026.
Kaufman, Joanne. “Are you a Jew? To serve on a synagogue board, increasingly the answer can be ‘No.’” Forward, July 20, 2023.
Lipset, Seymour Martin and Earl Raab. Jews and the New American Scene. Harvard University Press, 1995.
McGinity, Keren R. Still Jewish: A History of Women and Intermarriage in America. New York University Press, 2009.
McGinity, Keren R. Marrying Out: Jewish Men, Intermarriage, and Fatherhood. Indiana University Press, 2014.
Sasson, Theodore, Janet Krasner Aronson, Fern Chertok, Charle Kadushin, and Leonard Saxe. “Millennial Children of Intermarriage: Religious Upbringing, Identification, and Behavior Among Children of Jewish and Non-Jewish Parents.” Contemporary Jewry 37, no. 1 (2017), 99-123.
Suberman, Stella. The Jew Store. Algonquin Books, 1998.
Survey on Reform Synagogue Interfaith Inclusion Policies and Practices. Center for Radically Inclusive Judaism, 2019. Available at: https://www.cfrij.com/surveys/survey-on-reform-synagogue-interfaith-inclusion-policies-and-practices/.
Thompson, Jennifer A. Jewish on their Own Terms: How Intermarried Couples are Changing American Judaism. Rutgers University Press, 2013.
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1 Shaye J.D. Cohen, The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties (University of California Press, 1999), 3-4.
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2 Todd Endelman, Leaving the Jewish Fold: Conversion and Radical Assimilation in Modern Jewish History )Princeton University Press, 2015), 94.
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3 Endelman at 11, 51, 81, 177, 361-362; see also Stella Suberman, The Jew Store (Algonquin Books, 1998).
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4 See, e.g., Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab, Jews and the New American Scene (Harvard University Press, 1995), 74; Steven M. Cohen, “Jewish identity research in the United States: Concepts and findings, in Demographic Shifts in the Jewish World: Forecasts and Implications,” Jewish Agency (2002): 17; Lila Corwin Berman, The American Jewish Philanthropic Complex: The History of a Multibillion-Dollar Institution (Princeton University Press, 2020), 10.
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5 Keren R. McGinity, Still Jewish: A History of Women and Intermarriage in America (New York University Press, 2009); Marrying Out: Jewish Men, Intermarriage, and Fatherhood (Indiana University Press, 2014); Jennifer A. Thompson, Jewish on their Own Terms: How Intermarried Couples are Changing American Judaism (Rutgers University Press, 2013).
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6 Theodore Sasson, Janet Krasner Aronson, Fern Chertok, Charle Kadushin, and Leonard Saxe, “Millennial Children of Intermarriage: Religious Upbringing, Identification, and Behavior Among Children of Jewish and Non-Jewish Parents,” Contemporary Jewry 37, no.1 ( 2017): 117; McGinity, Still Jewish, 210.
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7 See, e.g., Joanne Kaufman, “Are you a Jew? To serve on a synagogue board, increasingly the answer can be ‘No.’” Forward, July 20, 2023; Survey on Reform Synagogue Interfaith Inclusion Policies and Practices, Center for Radically Inclusive Judaism, 2019.
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8 See, e.g., Thompson (2013); McGinity (2009 and 2014).
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9 Christine Hayes, “Building Communities of Belonging: Jewish Identity, Conversion, Intermarriage, and Adjacency,” Kogod Research Center for Contemporary Jewish Thought at the Shalom Hartman Institute (2026), 23.
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10 Hayes, 10.
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11 Hayes, 9.
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12 Hayes, 9.