Ever since the Pew Report was released in late 2013, intermarriage has been a constant topic of Jewish conversation.
It’s been over two years and it hasn’t stopped. Since the report was released, there have been any number of blog posts, op-eds, and long-form pieces on the best ways to counter and combat intermarriage, and the ways in which some of the mainstays of today’s Jewish institutions either deter or promote intermarriage. Their argument is typically that intermarriage is the way in which Jews are most easily funneled out of Jewishness. This argument only became more pronounced when the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College decided to ordain clergy in interfaith relationships.
So many of our conversations seem to focus on the “problems” of intermarriage — but few, if any, provide solutions to those problems. And while both of my parents are Jewish, I know as a queer person what it feels like to have my status in the community questioned, and to be told that my family is less ideal than the “normal” Jewish family. My discomfort with the ways we talk about intermarriage today stems in large part from that fact.
Assimilation is a problem. The loss of a collective Jewish identity is a problem. Intermarriage, however, isn’t the problem — the problem is a general sense of malaise with a Jewish community ill-equipped to handle those who are in interfaith relationships. Much of this stems from the fact that we have learned to deeply correlate intermarriage and assimilation, which allows us to wash our hands of our responsibility to those who need a place in our community.
The first step we must take — especially those of us in more conservative Jewish communities — is to stop looking at intermarriage with abject terror. If the problem of intermarriage is that the resulting children are unlikely to identify as Jewish, then as a Jewish community we need a clear plan to ensure that interfaith families are given access to positive Jewish communities and experiences.
The solution is not to work toward preventing intermarriage, but to give the children of interfaith relationships — and indeed all Jewish children — reason to remain Jewish and as actively engaged as other members of the wider Jewish community. The main goal of the Jewish institutional apparatus that we’ve created in the United States should be not preventing intermarriage, but instead creating meaningful experiences for all in the Jewish community.
Indeed, this might bring us back to some of the roots of intermarriage. Far from just being a symptom of assimilation and upward socioeconomic mobility, intermarriage can be seen as a symptom in a general American disengagement with Jewishness — but even this view is complicated by the fact that there are many intermarried Jews and their children who are active in the Jewish community but nevertheless relegated to second-class status.
The Jewish communal structures we have today aren’t giving young Jews the avenues they need to find meaning in Judaism. Intermarriage and lack of identification with Jewish culture and religion can be — but doesn’t have to be — the result of disillusionment. Said disillusionment is not just a (or the) cause of increasing intermarriage, but the effect is the same. A large part of our community has been left behind because we’ve synonymized disengagement with intermarriage, a correlation that will only fully come true if we continue to limit the opportunities that Jews in interfaith relationships and their children have.
Intermarriage should not lead to automatic disengagement. If we always speak of Jews in interfaith relationships and their children as automatically disengaged, then we excuse ourselves from the obligation of creating a space for them to engage constructively with Jewishness. This narrative that we have constructed of the disengaged, intermarried Jew doesn’t fit many Jews in interfaith relationships — we’ve just decided as a community to write them off. The rejection of Jews who don’t fit into those prescribed narratives is what actually leads to assimilation and disengagement, not the other way around.
If we want to “solve” the “problem” of intermarriage, we need to find a new way to talk about intermarriage. We need to stop seeing “disengagement” and “intermarriage” as synonymous. If we want to talk about disengagement, then we should be doing that. However, we have a responsibility to Jews in interfaith relationships who want to engage. This means we have to go beyond just being welcoming to creating authentic, meaningful Jewish experiences that fully incorporate this large group in our community.
Engagement is useless if we don’t give those who don’t already have them the opportunities to lead meaningful Jewish lives. Those of us who make the decision to remain actively engaged as members of the Jewish community, whether motivated by choice or obligation, have already found something compelling in Judaism. At some point, we found a way and a reason to be Jewishly engaged; now our responsibility is to not close the door to Jewish life on those whose family structures differ from ours.
Some initiatives, like one pioneered by Hillel and another by Hebrew College, have already begun to find new avenues for engaging interfaith families in Jewish life. However, for this change to be effective, it needs to be far more systemic so as to allow Jews in interfaith relationships and their children to engage with Jewishness and the wider Jewish community as their full selves. Our community will benefit from the perspectives and experiences that Jews with non-traditional family structures have to offer — if we make the conscious effort to make them full members of our community. And if our community is in as much of a demographic crisis as our leaders suggest, then shutting off the avenues to meaningful Jewish life for those who want them will only take the grim expectations of the future of Jewish demography and make them reality.
None of this will happen, however, if we don’t first move away from the ineffective and harmful discourse about the “problems of intermarriage.”
Amram Altzman is a student at List College.
