Volunteering and Intermarriage

There’s an interesting story in the Jewish Week, Is Volunteering Jewish?. Repair the World commissioned a “first of its kind” study of the attitudes and behaviors of young Jewish adults when it comes to volunteering. What jumped out to us was the rare finding in studies of this sort of something positive about intermarriage: “children of intermarriage are more likely than are the children of two Jewish parents to volunteer.”

One of the study authors, Fern Chertok from the Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies at Brandeis University, speculates:

“We spent some time thinking about why that might be,” says Chertok. “It could be that having a non-Jewish parent and non-Jewish family members leads you to see that your needs and those of people from very different groups are not so different,” she says. “As a result, your sense of obligation is more expansive.

Another possibility is that intermarried parents who want to encourage religious and moral development may see volunteering as something that is easy to agree on and to encourage their kids to do, she says. “It’s a nonreligious avenue to encourage passion about moral responsibility. Helping others — that’s in every religion.”

A key finding of the report is that young Jewish adults do not have a strong Jewish perspective on volunteering — they don’t see it as an extension of Jewish values and shy away from volunteering with or through Jewish organizations. Children of intermarriage reportedly are less likely to have a strong Jewish perspective on volunteering. I’m still glad to see more volunteering with less Jewish perspective by children of intermarriage, than the alternative.

This post originally appeared on www.interfaithfamily.com and is reprinted with permission.