It's odd that Mr. Wertheimer boasts that "nearly 25,000 are going [on birthright israel trips] this summer alone!" Birthright israel operates by fairly inclusive parameters -- anybody with a single Jewish grandparent, even patrilineally, can participate. The problem is that once they get back from the trip, they are denigrated by the same tribalistic and ethno-obsessed community leaders Mr. Wertheimer apparently believes should be our model.

I would like to know whether Mr. Wertheimer would tell these birthright alumni, so many of whom are children and grandchildren of intermarriage, that "intermarriage is a disaster for the Jewish people." Unless Mr. Wertheimer believes it's a good thing that 25,000 people are going on these trips ONLY if once they come home, they all convert (by Conservative or Orthodox parameters, of course), and then adopt the same ethno-obsessed philosophies that have been so successful for a tiny, self-ghettoized and self-satisfied minority of the Jewish people.

There's nothing necessarily wrong with Mr. Wertheimer's philosophy, although in practice it comes across as creepily offensive to people for whom Judaism is not strictly a religion or a bloodline, and to people who value the multihued diversity of contemporary life. The problem is that a Judaism based on exclusion and inreach is successful only at maintaining a minority of the most religiously devout -- and often the most virulently xenophobic -- members of the community. One reason there are so many unaffiliated Jews is that in every generation, large numbers of formerly Orthodox and Conservative Jews join their ranks. There's a reason they leave the fold.