by Rabbi Dov Fischer, American Spectator
For Ellen of Blessed Memory
The Jewish New Year 5782 began last week on September 6, 2021. Yom Kippur begins this Wednesday night the 15th with the recital of Kol Nidre. Many regard Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement) as the holiest day of the entire Jewish calendar year. Amid this Jewish High Holy Days season, this is a 10-part series of online articles that, with G-d’s help, I hope to transform into a larger book. It is prompted and inspired by questions I have been asked over the past half century by my readers and particularly these past five years by non-Jewish political conservatives of Christian background who often love Jews but cannot figure us out. Because most online opinion articles range between 600-3,000 words, this subject cannot be treated properly and completely in one single article or even in a limited series. However, this series marks an ambitious effort to address a perplexing question, one that perplexes America’s one million Orthodox Jews more than it does even non-Jewish conservative Christians.
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I am so deeply grateful to the outpouring I have received and the very warm readership response to this series. My efforts clearly have achieved the goal I sought and seem to have hit the mark toward which I have aimed. A handful of anti-Semitic trolls have posted hate, and their posts been deleted like pimples at a facial.
The purpose of this series is to inform readers authentically as to what Jews believe, to demystify. For those who live by other monotheistic faiths, may you be blessed in your pursuit of justice, kindness, morality, and ethics as you serve the One True Creator according to your understanding and belief. As explained in greater detail in Part 4, Judaism does not permit Jews to proselytize others.
The other installments in this series can be found at these links:
Part One: The Basic Definitions of Jews and Non-Orthodox Jewish Denominations can be found here.
Part Two: The Orthodox can be found here.
Part Three: The Ethnicities can be found here.
Part Four: Non-Jews can be found here.
Part Five: What Jews Who Know Authentic Judaism Believe: The Oral Law and Written Law can be found here.
Part Six: What Jews Who Know Authentic Judaism Believe: The Architecture of Judaism — The Talmud, the Halakhic Codes, and Authoritative Rabbinic Responsa can be found here
Part Seven: The Phenomenon of the Jewish Un-Jew can be found here
Part Eight: The Rise of the Absolutely Ignorant American Jew Who Knows Judaically “from Nothing” can be found here
Part Ten: Wrapping Factors Together: Understanding the Hopeless Disorientation of Knee-Jerk Leftist Jews can be found here
11. On Deep Red Conservative White Protestant Dixiecrats Who Kept Liberal Democrats in Power for a Century — and on Equally Confused Jews Just Like Them
In time, most of the northeastern big cities like Boston and New York became one-party Democrat cities except for New York’s outlier borough of Staten Island. In Brooklyn, no Republican ever wins a local election — ever. Even the most deeply conservative of people register and run as “Democrats” because there is no other way to get elected. One of America’s most conservative public officers this past quarter-century, recently retired New York State Assemblyman Dov Hikind, always was a Democrat. In truth, Dov is no Democrat, but it was the only way he could get elected. And all his voters are no more Democrat than he, but that is how they vote.
It makes no sense. And yet deeply conservative White Protestant non-Jews in America’s Deep South and elsewhere were and are the same — also for a century and more. During the Civil War, Lincoln and the Republicans wanted to end slavery, while the Democrats and their Ku Klux Klan wanted to preserve slavery. As a result, understandably, the South became uniformly Democrat in the 1860s. However, as another four score and seven more years passed, and then decades more, Deep South Christian conservative loyalty to Democrats made no sense. The Democrats were the party of the Left, the Republicans the party of conservatives, and the Deep South was socially, culturally, religiously, and politically conservative — the Christian “Bible Belt.” Yet, incomprehensibly, Dixiecrats ruled the South for 125 consecutive years as Southern White Protestant conservatives kept electing only Democrats until the 1980s. Consider these unfathomable results listing all the key statewide winners in Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana through 40 years from the 1940s and through the entire decade of the 1970s:
Alabama:
Gov. Frank Dixon
Gov. Chauncey Sparks
Gov. Jim Folsom
Gov. Gordon Persons
Gov. Jim Folsom
Gov. John Malcolm Patterson
Gov. George Wallace
Gov. Lurleen Wallace
Gov. Albert Brewer
Gov. George Wallace
Gov. Fob James
Gov. George Wallace
Sen. John H. Bankhead II
Sen. George Swift
Sen. John Sparkman
Sen. Howard Heflin
Sen. J. Lister Hill
Sen. James Allen
Sen. Maryon Pittman Allen
Sen. Donald Stewart
Mississippi:
Gov. Paul B. Johnson, Sr.
Gov. Dennis Murphree
Gov. Thomas Bailey
Gov. Fielding Wright
Gov. Hugh White
Gov. James Coleman
Gov. Ross Barnett
Gov. Paul B. Johnson, Jr.
Gov. John Bell Williams
Gov. William Waller
Gov. Cliff Finch
Gov. William Winter
Gov. William Aillain
Gov. Ray Mabus
Sen. Theodore Bilbo
Sen. James Eastland
Sen. Wall Doxey
Sen. John Stennis
Sen. James Eastland
Louisiana:
Gov. Sam Jones
Gov. Jimmie Davis
Gov. Earl Long
Gov. Robert Kennon
Gov. Earl Long
Gov. Jimmie Davis
Gov. John McKeithen
Gov. Edwin Edwards
Sen. William Feazell
Sen. Russell B. Long
Sen. Allen Ellender
Sen. Elaine Edwards
Sen. J. Bennett Johnston
There were approximately 50 statewide winners for governor or United States senator in deeply red conservative White Protestant Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana during the 40 years and more between 1940 and 1980. (Some, like the Wallaces of Alabama, won more than once, as they returned from enforced hiatus after being temporarily “termed out.”) Of those 50 elected statewide in the Deep Red South, all but one were Democrats.
Huh?
How to explain such voter insanity? How explain that the most conservative electorate in America consistently assured that Democrats would hold the Congress for the likes of Lyndon Johnson and Jimmy Carter, thus also assuring decades’ endless domination of left-wing Supreme Court picks and federal judges?
The historical record that saw the White Protestant Deep South stick like barnacles to Democrats for approximately 125 years consecutively until they finally were compelled to choose between such clearly antipodal candidates as Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan offers “Rosetta Stone” insight into the Jewish historical tendency to vote Democrat. Once a voting demographic attaches to a party, it becomes very challenging to detach them even when that affiliation no longer makes any sense and in fact becomes insane. They adhered fastidiously like political barnacles. Essentially, the group’s most politically ambitious individuals join the party of group choice and become invested in that party’s success. They learn that, to rise themselves, they must compromise principle for party. Everyone perhaps gets a once-in-a-career “freebie for conscience,” but a party will destroy the independent-spirited. In time, Connecticut Democrats spit Joe Lieberman out of their party, and Wyoming Republicans contemplate doing the same with Liz Cheney.
Just as the individual aspiring politico invests himself or herself in a party, so does the larger group. They donate to “their” party. They meet with that party’s candidates, establish themselves as party loyalists, invite the party’s most prominent leaders to address their annual church or temple banquets, take selfies eating corn dogs with them at the state fair, encourage their children to apply for minimum-wage patronage summer jobs picking up trash in the neighborhood park by using connections with that local politician in whom their demographic has invested so deeply. Reciprocally, the politician knows where his or her biscuits are gravied. He or she sees to it that the kids from the right groups get the jobs picking up the garbage. He makes time to speak at the major banquets of the groups who own his or her loyalty. When he is in Washington, he does whatever he darned-well feels like doing and votes whatever way his party tells him he needs to vote to acquire and retain personal political power. Thereafter, to maintain his power, he simply makes sure to take the right stands on the mere one or two parochial “pet” issues that warm the cockles of his voters back home.
For example, Adam Schiff of Glendale, California is a despicable man of no conscience, with no external manifestations of a soul, who sits powerfully on the House Intelligence Committee. He is a pathological liar in the way the term is defined: unlike others who falsify with regrets and thus experience pangs of troubled conscience, he lies painlessly because of a pathology, a sickness of spirit, that leaves him impervious to the physiological feeling that overcomes others when they falsify. Such people can beat lie detectors because their heart rates do not rise, nor do they generate more adrenalin, when they lie. As it happens, Rep. Schiff’s Congressional District includes perhaps the largest concentration of Armenian Americans anywhere in America, perhaps 70,000 votes worth. I know that community exceptionally well, and I love them. Scores of their young people have been my law students these past two decades, and something about that community — perhaps a shared sensitivity to the parallels between the Shoah and the Medz Yeghern — touches my very being. For years I have advocated that America formally recognize the Medz Yeghern, the mass murder of 1.5 million Armenians by the Turks, a people who refuse to acknowledge history’s irrefutable judgment that such systemic mass murder took place. I come to it from a place of conscience and shared humanity. By contrast, Schiff comes for votes. To remain powerful in Washington, to head impeachment panels and to have extraordinary access to make base mendacious assertions on CNN, he has to stand for the Armenian call that America tell Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey to admit the slaughter. As long as Schiff does so, the majority of his constituents except for the most politically engaged have no idea what else he is doing and what other stands he is taking in Washington on their dime. And the thing is, if he had but one more voting Turk in his district than Armenians, he instead would be issuing bulls for Istanbul and proclaiming “Vay Izmir.”
Deeply conservative White Protestant Southerners helped ruin our country by heaping upon 1960s Democrats the Senate majorities they needed to stack the U.S. Supreme Court with leftist justices who proceeded to legislate from the bench instead of interpret the Constitution our Founding Fathers conferred on them and us. Our entire national social fabric today in America — marriage, family, sex and gender, crime and punishment, religious freedom, speech and flag burning and pornography, reproductive rights, advanced education grants — has been transmogrified by an endless stream of critical federal court decisions this past half century, not only in Washington at the Supreme Court but throughout the respective United States Courts of Appeals districts. As the U.S. Senate became increasingly dysfunctional and as evolving Senate rules made it harder to pass controversial legislation because of the 60-vote threshold upon which both parties have agreed for half a century, politicians learned to hand the tough issues over to the courts like hot potatoes, and the non-elected courts welcomed the opportunity to branch into legislation, too. To one degree, liberal justices and appeals court judges continued interpreting codified law properly under the rules of stare decisis on most matters before them: contract breaches, product liability, property disputes, maritime and admiralty law, commerce and dormant commerce clauses. But for the “hot button” issues, liberal justices and judges became increasingly comfortable veering away from Constitutional precedent, legislative intent, and plain meaning — and finding new “penumbras of rights” in the Ninth Amendment and wherever else such “penumbras” might reign or shadow. In layman’s terms: they made it up, answering to their own consciences as though it were they who had drafted the Constitution in 1789 or enacted the United States Code.
During the critical forty years between the 1940s and the Reagan election, Congressional liberals became increasingly adept at stacking the courts with Supreme Court justices and federal appellate judges from their camp while trashing, sabotaging, and character-assassinating conservatives named by Republicans. Beyond Bork to be “borked,” they destroyed Clement Haynsworth, then G. Harrold Carswell, forcing Republican President Richard Nixon finally to name Harry Blackmun, who revealed as a liberal. Later they did all they could to destroy Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh. The courts went Left — and pulled a resisting conservative electorate with them — because the Democrats controlled the U.S. senate. And the Democrats controlled the U.S. senate because religiously, socially, culturally, and politically conservative White Protestant Deep Red Southerners — the most conservative people in America — kept electing Democrats and only Democrats for 125 consecutive years. Not only was this so in Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana but also in Georgia, South Carolina (except for Strom Thurmond, who switched parties in 1964), and North Carolina (except for Sen. Jesse Helms and Gov. James Holshouser in 1973). If the 10-12 Democrat U.S. senators whom those six Deep Red White Protestant conservative Southern states sent to Washington endlessly from 1940-1980 instead had been Republican, all of America today would be the socially, politically, religiously, and culturally conservative society those very voters wanted — but insanely sabotaged by voting irrationally the opposite. Even a Dr. Ben Carson could not have separated the conjoined White Protestant Christian conservatives from the Democrats to whom they adhered like barnacles.
And now we begin to understand the irrational phenomena underlying northeastern Democrat holds on demographic groups like certain New York Jews who vote irrationally and against interest today for a party that despises them and that has elevated the worst Jew-haters in Congress, miscreants like Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, to positions of influence.
Nonetheless, the analysis goes deeper.
12. Back to the Absolutely Ignorant American Jew Who Knows Judaically from Nothing — and Who Often Is Not Even Jewish: Figures Don’t Lie, but Liars Can Figure.
American Jews and others get much of our current demographic data from this landmark Pew report. Pew asks interviewees to self-identify. If someone tells a pollster he or his parents are or were “Jewish,” Pew takes it as gospel. However, as we have seen, through 3,000 years of Judaism from the beginning of time until 1983, the only definition of a “Jew” was to be born to a Jewish mother or to convert to Judaism by accepting the laws of Judaism completely and unequivocally, undertaking to live them for the rest of one’s life and to teach them to one’s children, affirming a complete and total belief that every word in the Torah is true and the word of G-d as spoken to Moses, and affirming a life-long commitment to the halakhic process of mesorah (Tradition) by which successive generations of the leading authoritative rabbinic decisors hand down each generation’s continuing guidelines (as in our generation’s need for guidance to live engaged in the “digital age” without denying ourselves what is permitted but while observing what is required).
On March 15, 1983, the Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR), the Reform movement’s body of rabbis, passed an unprecedented resolution from which they have not backed away but have doubled-down. Prepared by a committee on patrilineal descent entitled “The Status of Children of Mixed Marriages,” the CCAR resolution stated that “we face, today, an unprecedented situation due to the changed conditions in which decisions concerning the status of the child of a mixed marriage are to be made.” Contrary to thousands of years of unbroken Jewish practice and tradition — which even Reform acknowledged through its first 150 years as binding — the resolution overnight accepted the children of Jewish fathers and non-Jewish mothers as “Jewish” if the parents nominally would claim they would rear the child that way. Of course, the Jewish spouse who marries a non-Jew is not best situated to know what constitutes rearing a child as a Jew. As contested as our own American citizenship debate now is, imagine an America where each and every local judge since 1983 has disregarded Title 8 of the U.S. Code, with citizenship not even depending on law but on the judge you shop for.
The Reform movement’s body of congregational temples is the URJ (Union for Reform Judaism), and their president, Rabbi Rick Jacobs, now travels the country proudly proclaiming that “interfaith families are now the majority of the movement.” (See embedded link at page 9, left column.)
Rabbi Jacobs’s assertion that the majority of Reform-affiliated families today are headed by a Jewish and non-Jewish intermarried spouse invites a closer look at the underlying math. Let’s say there are 200 married people at the Reform Temple, comprising 100 marriages, and 60 of the marriages (the majority, assuming not a bare majority nor an overwhelming one) are intermarriages. That means, outright, that at least 60 of those 200 in the temple are non-Jewish under any definition. That number alone would comprise 30 percent. However, beyond that, of those outright 60 non-Jews’ 60 “Jewish” spouses, a certain number themselves are non-Jewish. Many of those adults are the self-identified “Jewish” grown-up children in Year 2021 of outright non-Jewish mothers who intermarried Jews, and who after 1983 (38 years ago) reared them “patrilineally” as though Jews — although they are not and never were. Others are the children of “Jewish” mothers who in fact “converted to Judaism” via a Reform or Reconstructionist or Humanist or Whatever rabbi, which means those mothers also are and were non-Jewish because such “conversions” do not require adherence to Torah law, acceptance of the veracity of every word in the Torah, fidelity to the mesorah (“Tradition”) of rabbinic authority, or compliance with the laws of Judaism like kosher eating and proper Sabbath observance. Some 10-20 (could be more, could be fewer) of the 60 “Jewish” intermarried spouses thus themselves actually are not Jewish. They simply are not.
Even non-Orthodox Conservative rabbis (the ones denominationally with a capital “c”) regard large swaths of Reform “converts” to be non-Jewish because many such “converts” never have immersed in a mikveh ritual body of water required even in Conservative Judaism as a sine qua non towards acceptable conversion. Thus, the numbers of outright non-Jews in our 200-person hypothetical sample of Year 2021 Reform households stand at 70-80 non-Jews or 35-40 percent “of the movement.” These non-Jewish families in turn then have their own children for the next generation. Inasmuch as Reform’s patrilineal policy now is 38 years extant — two generations — the numbers of outright non-Jewish Reform “Jews” today, among Reform Jews born since the 1980s, is well at 40-50 percent or higher. (By contrast, older Reform Jews who were born and grew up well before the 1983 “patrilineal” tsunami and before Jews started marrying non-Jews at record highs — say, people age 60 and up — would number a markedly higher percentage of actual Jews.)
Pew reports that Reform Jews comprise 37 percent of American Jewry, with Conservative Jews (denominationally capital “c”) at 17 percent, and Orthodox at 9 percent. The Orthodox numbers reported by Pew manifestly are incompatible with observable reality in terms of proportion of actual Jews, but the numbers could be correct based on Pew’s fanciful maximizing of Jewish demographics. Pew is not to blame; they survey people’s stated opinions and do not hold themselves out as rabbinic authorities. Beyond this, Pew says that another 32 percent of Jews claim no religious affiliation whatsoever, so their numbers stand to be less Judaic than even Reform’s population. Worded in another chart, Pew declares that 27 percent of American “Jews” report “no religion.” Among that group, we may expect many authentic Jews, too — truly Jewish-born apostates like George Soros, Bernie Sanders, and the Ben & Jerry’s founders. Even so, the numbers reflect huge numbers of non-Jews innocently but erroneously self-reporting in that group as “Jews.” If Reform Jews are 37 percent, and Jews of “no religion” are 27 percent, that means approximately one-third of reported American “Jews” simply, plainly are not Jews. These are the data available, conservatively interpreted.
That would mean that approximately one-third of reported American “Jews” simply, plainly are not Jews. It could be that a Marilyn Monroe while married to Arthur Miller, and an Elizabeth Taylor while married to Mike Todd — and both “converted” for marriage by a Reform rabbi — would have told a survey agency like Pew back in the 1950s that each is Jewish. And, sure, it would be fun to count them on the team. But they never were Jewish and lived thoroughly non-Jewish lives until their deaths. Thus, the data reflect that 33-40 percent of today’s reported American “Jews” plainly are non-Jews. That would mean that highly generous census reports of 7.5 million “Jews” now in America, suggesting preposterously a 25 percent increase from the 6 million of the 1970s, actually should be more accurately set at 4.5 to 5 million Jews.
Pew says Orthodox Jews are 9-10 percent of an American “Jewry” numbering 7.5 million. That would approximate 750,000 Orthodox Jews in America. However, if there are 750,000 Orthodox Jews in America but only amid a more realistic 4.5 million-person community, that then puts the Orthodox percent of American Jewry at one-sixth or 16.66 percent. Similarly, if there are 750,000 Orthodox Jews among a slightly larger population of 5 million, that puts the Orthodox percent of American Jewry at 15 percent. Moreover, Orthodox Jews regularly get undercounted in these surveys because they are harder to count — for practical logistical reasons. On the one hand, Reform “converts” are especially eager to answer the phone and respond to such surveys to declare themselves “Jews by Choice.” By contrast, Orthodox Jews, particularly Haredim, do not want to be bothered. When the Pew surveyor calls, Haredim and Modern Orthodox (see Part 2 of this series) have less interest in taking the call or remaining on the phone. Many such calls are made on weekends, to maximize reaching survey targets at a time of week when they will agree to set aside a significant chunk of personal time to answer long polling surveys that ask about household, income, education, parental religious practices, personal observances of High Holidays, Sukkot, Chanukah, Purim, Passover, Shavuot, Fast Days, views on Israel, political preferences, and adult children’s observances and practices. With our classic American five-day work week, people naturally have more free time for 30-minute and hour-long phone surveys on weekends. However, Orthodox Jews do not touch the phone on Shabbat, except in cases of life or death, and that makes them unreachable most of Friday and Saturday. Efforts to count population numbers within the greater Orthodox community are further obstructed because — get this: Jewish law forbids counting Jews.
Interestingly, when the World Zionist Congress (WZC) conducted elections in March 2020 for delegates to their quadrennial international convention, Reform Judaism and their left cohort won 40 or so seats, Conservative Judaism (denominational capital “c”) won 20 or so seats, and Orthodoxy and their conservative (political small “c”) allies won 70 or so seats. Although those numbers were not a scientific population survey but a voluntary affirmation of Jewish affiliation in the context of Zionist engagement, the WZC numbers, by which Orthodox Jews and their conservative (small “c”) cohort so overwhelmingly outvoted the combined non-Orthodox and progressive left, are impossible to square with the Pew numbers that put the Orthodox at only 9 percent of the community. Politics and energy can explain variations in free elections, as can community cohesion, organizing, and “get-out-the-vote” dynamics, but WZC free-election results that are so profoundly contrary to the Pew numbers underscore that Orthodoxy comprises substantially more than 9 percent of American Jewry even among the larger “Pew Jew” body count who merely self-identify as “Jews” despite so many being non-Jewish.
Pew explains how they count Jews. For example:
People are categorized as “Jews of no religion” if they answer a question about their present religion by saying they are atheist, agnostic or have no religion in particular; and they say they had a Jewish parent or were raised Jewish; and they consider themselves Jewish in some way aside from religion, such as ethnically, culturally or because of their family background.…
Combining 5.8 million adult Jews (the estimated size of the net Jewish population in this survey) with 1.8 million children (living in households with a Jewish adult and who are being raised Jewish in some way, including those who are being raised both Jewish and in another religion) yields a total estimate (rounded to the nearest 100,000) of 7.5 million Jews of all ages in the United States, or 2.4% of the total U.S. population.
In this report, as in the 2013 study, children are treated differently from adults: Children who are being raised as Jewish and in some other religion are included in the Jewish population estimate, while adults who identify as Jewish and some other religion are not. This accounts for the uncertainty inherent in projecting how children will identify when they grow up; some children who are raised as Jewish and another religion go on to identify, in adulthood, solely as Jewish.
(Emphases added.)
In sum, we find that 33-40 percent — and probably much more — of self-reporting American “Jews” are not Jews, with ever-higher numbers and percentages of “false Jews” among those born each decade since the 1980s and particularly in the past 20 years. The ramifications are enormous. When the media report that 25 percent of American Jews oppose Israel or support BDS or regard Israel as “apartheid” or support “Palestinian” demands that Israel hand them Judea and Samaria, we gain new clarity that overwhelming numbers of those hostile respondents include the core of self-identifiers who are not actually Jews to begin with, though they may think they are. They simply are not Jews. Of course they have less identification with Israel! Thus, once one grasps the demographic realities beneath the reported data, it no longer surprises that 9 percent of such “Jewish” respondents say Israel has “no right to exist.” Indeed, exactly as to be expected, the younger the cohort of surveyed “Jews” in such surveys, the less identification with Israel and with things Judaic — because the higher the percent of post-1983 non-Jews responding as “Jews.” In other words, things are not what they seem because “figures don’t lie” — but liars can figure. When pollsters state that 70 percent of Jews vote Democrat and 30 percent Republican, there is good reason to suspect that the tilt among actual Jews towards Democrat liberalism more probably lies more along the lines of 55-45 percent, with a solid chunk of those Jewish voters being “Dov Hikind Democrats” who are conservative Republican through-and-through, but register and vote Democrat as they do in municipalities that are “one-party Democrat towns.”
Judaism is not and never has been transmitted by blood, genes, DNA; contrarily, patrilineal bloodlines were among the ways Hitler and the German Nazis defined Jews. But “23 and Me” types of results, though ethnically interesting, carry no Judaic meaning.
I am an Orthodox rabbi of more than 40 years. (See Part One of this series.) I served six years on the Executive Committee of the Rabbinical Council of America, the leading organization of Orthodox rabbis in North America. I am rabbi of a National Council of Young Israel synagogue and have been counted among Young Israel rabbis for the past twenty years. We are 135 mainstream normative Orthodox synagogues comprised of 25,000 member families. Previously, I served as senior rabbi at a congregation affiliated with the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America (UOJCA). You may have seen our nationally respected “OU” symbol on food products assuring the highest quality of kosher supervision. I can tell you, as a matter of fundamental policy that is known by every serious practicing congregational Orthodox rabbi in America today and that is followed religiously by every such congregation — even the more flexible “Modern Orthodox” American rabbis and shuls: Nowadays, no Orthodox congregational rabbi will agree to conduct a marriage for a couple who have found the rabbi through the internet but who have no prior affiliation with the rabbi’s community until that rabbi independently has verified that both prospective spouses actually meet the classic normative 3,000-year definition of “authentically Jewish.” Even the most theologically flexible Modern Orthodox congregations now require that new families seeking to have their son or daughter bar– or bat-mitzva’d at the synagogue first must document that the mother authentically was Jewish when the child was born or that the child properly was converted to Judaism in a manner consonant with the 3,000-year classic normative standard. Indeed, Orthodox synagogues will not even allow people to purchase gravesite plots in their cemetery sections, no matter how much they are dying to get in, until prospective buyers can prove unequivocally that they (or the deceased whom they wish to inter) meet Judaism’s classic 3,000-year definition of Judaism. As a result, intermarried couples ultimately cannot lie side-by-side for eternity in Orthodox sections of cemeteries, nor can the children of a Jewish father and non-Jewish birth mother be buried in a family plot with their father in a cemetery’s Orthodox section.