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It started out as a very serious movement. That's why there's a lot of very faithful Reform Jews amongst the elderly (65+) normally, and even one generation down (although less). The problem was that they put too much emphasis on assimilation and it worked a little too well. The grandkids just don't care. And the parents don't care enough to force them when they're young. And it's easy to just slip into a stream of feel-good, liberal politics and an empty, questing "spiritualism" rather than a true faith. The great grandkids won't be Jewish. Maybe there will be some cultural residue, or maybe it will be an ethnic thing to an extent, but they won't really be Jewish in any true sense. At least, I don't think so.

As I've said before, I'd rather have some Christian evangelicals at my side, than Reform JINOs at my back. The former I know aren't gonna cut and run, and many of them are armed. The latter, well, they might sell me for the price of political correctness and a good speech about neo-colonialism and the imperialism of the Christian Reich (it's a such a clever twist on "Right" don't you see... /yawn)

My bridge partner is 50 years old, and is raising his two adopted kids in the Jewish religion. Attack those if you choose to, who think that evangelical Christians are a threat to the American pluralistic civil society, or "liberalism" qua "liberalism" is a sacrament of some sort, whether they be Jews or someone else, but don't attack a religious affiliation as in and of itself, execrable, per se. It tends to distort the lens of truth, rather than clarify it. It is an overbroad, crude, and simplistic generalization. I dissent.

The legacy of elderly reform Jews:

"They [American Jews] did next to nothing to save the Jews of Europe, and worse, they demonized the Jews and Christians who gave their all to turn FDR. Ben Hecht and Peter Bergson were the Jews who led the fight to save the Jews of Europe. They went after FDR with great advertisements in the press in an effort to awaken the nation to the conspiracy of silence that was burying the Jews.

"The court Jews, led by Rabbi Stephen Wise, FDR’s great buddy, went after Hecht and Bergson, told the Jews of America that ‘these guys’ were the enemies of Jews…. Wise was aided in this endeavor by The New York Times and The Washington Post, both papers owned by Jews. And by one of the top Jews in Congress, Sol Bloom.

"What bothers me as a Jew is the chutzpah of the Jewish leaders. Let them look into their own archives, let them examine what their ancestors didn’t do to save the Jews of Europe. And the same for the Israelis, who have plenty to answer for."

Sidney Zion, columnist for the Daily News. Source: Daily News, March 30, 1998