A few weeks ago, someone wrote a singles column that reverberated coast to coast. And it wasn’t me. (Here endeth the jealousy and continueth the discussion.) Over at the Jewish Journal, Rob Eshman wrote about the fact that he knows “too many beautiful, brilliant single Jewish women in their 30s and 40s.”

I hear too many stories about the lack of available Jewish men, the first dates who are too lost or too pathetic, the fights over marriage and children that end the relationship and send the woman, now a bit older, diving back into the ever more shallow pool. But I don’t blame these women, of course not. I blame rabbis.

Rob suggests that rabbis need to lift the restriction on dating and marrying non-Jews, so that the Jewish women facing their 40s can go ahead and have children if they want to, without the stigma of having “married out.”

And if you thought the column was incendiary stuff, check out the letters to the editor that came the next week.

Gentile women don’t seem to find a shortage of Jewish men, one person notes. Although a statement like that–and a conversation with a friend who converted to marry a girlfriend of mine, in which he revealed that his conversion class was more than 90 percent female–makes me wonder if its the other way around.

There’s a lot of anger out there. And it’s damaging us all, maybe to the point of no return, whatever that is. But with a sentiment like that from a Jewish male, boiling down all his dating problems to the women who were “holding out for an Adonis with a heavy wallet,” I have to admit, I’m fighting an urge not to look at him and generalize him as the problem. What’s helping me is the fact that this person has no name. Well, I suppose he does, but here, it’s “Name Withheld By Request,” a common name for people responding to this column. No one wants to go on record about this stuff, and I don’t blame them. I really wonder sometimes what JDaters Anonymous or my column would look like if it were totally anonymous–with the fetters of self-identification removed, might I fall into the same sharp language, the same accusatory tones? I could choose to believe that I’d be a better person than that, but I know I’d be lying to myself.

The question of who’s to blame is not a productive one. What we all need to be is kinder, more open-minded, when regarding the people around us and that familiar-looking stranger in the mirror.

To read How to Solve the Singles Crisis, Part 1, click here.