The key drivers of European Jewish population decline are the Holocaust, forcible assimilation, and the exodus of USSR/Iron Curtain Jewry.

What we see is the results of those state-sponsored policies. I encourage American Jews getting worked up by this to learn more about it. https://twitter.com/JTAnews/status/1319278819543404551

The challenges various European Jewish communities face differ considerably from those of America.

To give an example, in my hometown of Bobruisk, Belarus a Jewish day school was opened. Most children sent to it were from intermarried families, because that's who stayed.

Many of those who embraced Jewish identity and practice enthusiastically left for Israel or other large Jewish diaspora communities.

It's hard to rebuild and sustain a community when your most enthusiastic members leave. This challenge exists in many ex-communist countries.

In places like France, the historic Jewish communities were devastated by the Holocaust. Would you be surprised to learn that today these communities are composed of a plurality or a majority of Jews who fled persecution in North Africa? Reform Judaism is not their tradition.

So I would ask that before you object to descriptions of European Jewish realities because they touch on issues American Jews face in wildly different circumstances, to give them the breathing room to be discussed on their own terms, not American ones.