Intermarriage and Modern Jewish Success

When I was eight years old I found out for the first time that I wasn’t like the other kids at my Jewish elementary school. We were talking about what our families did for Hanukkah, and I told the other kids that because my dad wasn’t Jewish, we had a Christmas tree in our house in addition to the Menorah. The other kids at the table were stunned. Someone asked me if that meant I was only half-Jewish, very strongly emphasising the ‘only’. I didn’t know what to say. I had never considered that a person could be half-Jewish. On the way home that day I asked my mom if I was “half-Jewish” and she didn’t skip a beat, asking me “well do you believe half in Christianity and half in Judaism?” I said no, and she said “well if you believe 100% in Judaism then you aren’t half-Jewish are you?” This made perfect sense to me. I did not consider that something that felt so logically sound could be as complicated or controversial as it is. The last year of Hebrew school at my synagogue is for 15 to 16-year-olds. The goal is to help them maintain their Jewish beliefs and practices when they leave their family homes to go out into the secular world. I was always late for these classes as my synagogue was an hour away from my high school and I had to fight the director of my school musical to let me skip rehearsals on Wednesdays in order to attend. One particular day, as I walked into the class the rabbi greeted me saying, “Laura you’re just in time, I was telling everyone how your family is a rare example of a successful interfaith family”. I don’t remember much from the lesson that day, which was focused on intermarriages. All I know is I could hear my heart beating in my ears. The one point I remember with perfect clarity, which felt like yet another stab in the back, was the rabbi discouraging me and my peers from marrying non-Jews because the Conservative Rabbinic Council prohibited their rabbis from officiating these marriages, and he wouldn’t be able to perform our weddings. This was probably the most poignant argument he could have given. Our Hebrew school class had the rabbi’s son in it. He’d gone to preschool and all of Hebrew school with us, many had playdates at his house, a few of us had even been at summer camp together, and we’d been B’nai Mitzvah’d in the same year, all by the same rabbi. This rabbi was not just a distant authority figure to us, he was a parent of one of our classmates, someone that had been a part of our lives for as long as we remembered. I had honestly assumed that he would probably perform most of our weddings. What I found especially interesting was that the week before we had learned about how in 2006 the decision was made that Conservative Rabbis were allowed to perform gay marriages, on the basis that disallowing gay marriage denied LGBTQ+ people their dignity, and that maintaining human dignity in this case “requires suspension of the rabbinic level prohibitions” (Dorff, Nevins and Reisner, 2012). Being bisexual, I was thrilled to know gender would not be an area of concern when I found a person I wanted to marry. But now I had another question to worry over: how the dignity of marrying the partner of your choice is somehow not afforded when a person wants to marry a non-Jew. In all honesty, due to the complex na- ture of Jewish religious argument, I cannot begin to claim that I currently have the experience it takes to craft a religious argument that holds air.

The most pressing concern to myself and many others in educational settings and casual discussions of this topic, is the concern that intermarriage leads to assimilation. Assimilation is a legitimate concern to have considering the meagre size of the world’s Jewish population in comparison to major religious and ethnic groups. We’re a small group and losing numbers can mean losing traditions.

In a poll from 2021 of Jews in the US, the Pew Research Center found that 60% of Jewish respondents who had gotten married in the past decade had married a non-Jew, compared to 45% between 2000 and 2009. This mirrors a 20% decrease in American Jews identifying as Jewish by religion over the same time period. Additionally, only 28% of intermarried American Jews say they’ll raise their children Jewish by religion, compared to 93% of married couples that are both Jewish (Pew Research Center, 2021 and Liu, 2013).

This data can be scary sounding and seems like it should be damning evidence that intermarriage is linked to assimilation, and plenty of rabbinic authorities treat it as such. However, there are holes in this argument that they fail to consider.

A major point that this argument fails to account for is the retention rate by generation. According to a Pew Research poll in 2013, 25% of those 65 and older with intermarried parents still identify as Jewish, but of adults 30 and younger with intermarried parents, 59% still identify as Jewish (Cooperman and Smith, 2013). Simply put, as time goes on, people with only one Jewish parent are growing more likely to retain their connection to Judaism.

We don’t have a lot of data on why this is, but I have an idea. It’s a common trope of the Jewish mother or grandmother demanding that their child meet a nice Jewish partner from a nice Jewish family. I know it was the first question my grandmother asked me about my partner: is he Jewish? The push to marry a Jew is very strong in most Jewish families. So if a person doesn’t feel like their partner is accepted by the Jewish community, and maybe this familial tension taints how a person feels about their Jewish identity, it only makes sense that they might start to think maybe Judaism isn’t for them. As time goes on though the Jewish community is more open to a lot of social movements, and marrying a nonJew has become more standard over time. Not only does this make it more possible for intermarried people to be accepted in Jewish communities, but it makes it more likely that their children will have positive experiences in Jewish spaces, and continue to identify with it. So, I would argue that the problem isn’t necessarily that interfaith marriage causes assimilation, but that fear of assimilation by intermarriage has historically pushed intermarried Jews out of the Jewish community. But times are changing. If 59% of adults below 30 with intermarried parents identify as Jewish, then what makes me the “rare” success that my rabbi called me? Well, let’s look at my life. Jewish preschool, Jewish elementary school, Jewish middle school, Jewish high school. I was the only person attending

Jewish high school in my Hebrew school class, and I got all A’s in my Jewish classes (I was by no means a straight-A student). I’m the co-leader of my University’s Jewish Society, and I will talk to anyone who stands still long enough about the exact texts I studied throughout my life that make me love Judaism or how Jewish theatre made me love theatre. When we light the candles on Hanukkah my family makes me lead the prayers because I’m the “professional Jew” of the family. The flat, where I live with my partner (who is not Jewish) has a mezuzah on the door, a menorah on the mantle, and a bookshelf with a section devoted to Jewish books. None of this was a fluke. I am not a rare success of intermarriage. I am a success story of my mother and the Jewish education that my mother pushed for me to have. Why did she push for me to have it? Because she would not have her child be half-Jewish, or feel cast to the edges of Jewish culture. I could not be who I am today if I was born at a time when having a non-Jewish father would discount me from Jewish life and learning. If anything I am a rare success in modern Jewish life, which accepted my nontraditional family and gave a girl the same chances as it would the boys. Born in a time when human dignity mattered, and where Jews of all kinds found more acceptance in the Jewish community. Born at a time when 64% of American Jews think rabbis should perform interfaith marriages (Pew Research Center, 2021). This new time is beautiful, and so much of the Jewish community is moving with it. In turn, it’s time for Conservative rabbis to change this rule, so that their congregants can be married by their rabbis without fuss, and not be talked about like “the good ones” of a bad bunch. I pray I will someday have the rabbi who performed my Bat Mitzvah officiate my wedding, that my partner will smash the glass and that all of us in the newest generation of Jews will see days where we are Jewish for everything we are, not the things we are not.