In a recent essay, Amichai Lau-Lavie, a rabbi ordained by the Jewish Theological Seminary, has proposed a way for his fellow rabbis in the Conservative movement to condone, and even perform, intermarriages under certain circumstances. Julie Schonfeld is unconvinced:

[Lau-Lavie] notes that his paper is not a t’shuvah or rabbinic responsum per se. . . . It is [nonetheless] framed in rabbinic terminology and style. But the literary device of saying “this is not a t’shuvah” should not conceal the fact that it cannot be [one], because such an enterprise cannot succeed. The reason a Conservative rabbi cannot officiate at the wedding between a Jew and a non-Jew is not because he or she doesn’t love and care about [the couple] enough. Rather it is because a commitment to the halakhic framework makes this impossible. . . .

Judaism, as a continuous 3,000-year-old tradition, promotes the highly countercultural idea . . .  that [there is] special opportunity for spiritual and moral growth in the maintenance and appreciation of boundaries—whether regarding time, food, consumption, moral conduct, and even relationships. . . . Those boundaries include the reservation of Jewish rituals that are the explicit performance of Jewish commitments to Jews.

Rabbi Lau-Lavie opens his paper speaking of the pain he felt when saying no to couples whose weddings he could not officiate. Indeed, the anguish felt by couples in love, their extended families, and the rabbi who cannot perform an interfaith wedding is very real. But there is a group of people, a rather large group, whose feelings were conspicuously absent from this paper. Those are the people who, seeking an open but traditional Jewish community, count on the Conservative rabbinate to maintain the halakhic framework and the network of Conservative communities, synagogues, camps, and schools which they call home.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.