NY Times devotes article to Jewish concerns re Chelsea Clinton interfaith marriage [View All]

When Steven Cohn, a Chicago-area lawyer, looked at photographs of Marc Mezvinsky, outfitted with a yarmulke and a prayer shawl, and Chelsea Clinton, luminous in a strapless gown and a 100-watt smile, he recalled his own interfaith marriage 30 years ago to Loreli Fritz-Cohn, a Methodist, on her grandmother’s farm in Ohio. He, too, wore a prayer shawl — though he recalled how hard it had been to find a Reform rabbi to perform the ceremony.

From the evidence of his own gratifying marriage, he considered the Clinton-Mezvinsky union a decisive plus for the vitality of his faith. “Loreli has joined the Jewish community,” he said. “She goes to synagogue with me.” And, he said, “Our children have stayed involved with the Jewish community.”

“They shouldn’t look at it as a loss,” he added, referring to statements made in the past week by Jewish organizations and their leaders. “Although there is that risk, there’s also the possibility of gain, which it has been for us.”

Nonetheless, the seemingly incandescent wedding of Ms. Clinton and Mr. Mezvinsky has churned up ambivalent reactions among the nation’s almost six million Jews.

There is a clannish pride that after a history of exclusion and prejudice, the grandson of a Jewish Iowa grocer could marry into what passes for political royalty in the United States.

But some Jews fear that the societal openness confirmed by high-profile intermarriages like that of Ms. Clinton and Mr. Mezvinsky, or Caroline Kennedy and Edwin A. Schlossberg in 1986, prod more Jews to marry out of their faith. That, they worry, could threaten the vitality of a group that represents no more than 2 percent of the American population.