Jews for Jesus, Jews attending churches, low synagogue membership, astronomical rates of intermarriage — as complex as these issues are, there is at least one remarkably simple and inexpensive solution to encouraging Jewish participation. It\’s called a warm greeting.

A friendly smile, a warm greeting, an invitation to lunch. If you think that is silly and simplistic, think again. As part of their course work, I require my students to interview two Jews. Because many of them — all non-Jews, primarily from the South Bay — lead very narrow lives, they do not know how to find Jews and turn to familiar institutions, one of which is church. Lo and behold — as the most recent National Jewish Population Survey has finally shown — they find Jews there.