The first Friday of November I sat in a deli chatting with a friend about two things. The first was the place itself. A sign behind the counter claimed they sell both chicken noodle and matzo ball soup, but neither I nor my friend believed these were really different products. Situated in a not-particularly-Jewish part of St.Louis, the owner of this particular Jewish deli had hidden the Dr. Brown’s so that only someone in the know could ask for a can of Cel-Ray.
The second topic we got into, cutting each other off so often it would have been impossible to transcribe, was how she was going to make it through Thanksgiving. Her father was bent on making her brother’s girlfriend of nine years convert. What she couldn’t understand is why her father, who theoretically supports patrilineal Jews, was so dead set on conversion when they’d already decided the kids will be raised Jewish and their home rabbi had agreed to perform the ceremony. Intermarriage seemed to only be an issue because of tradition.
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Discussion around “intermarriage” has always seemed strange to me since no one who ever inquired into my Jewish lineage cared that my parents never married. The fact is that a lack of ceremony or ketubah changes nothing when someone decides to rant to me about how I am an exception to their rule that “quarter-Jews” are not involved in Jewish life. “Intermarriage” has become a stand-in for anxieties around continuing the Jewish people. Fear of outsiders leading children astray and insistence on maintaining “correct” bloodlines have certainly existed for centuries, but somehow they still pervade supposedly progressive communities even today.
Continued demonization of intermarriage impacts children well before they are thinking about chuppas. “My status as a child of intermarriage, especially with a non-Jewish mother, has always made me feel as somewhat of an outcast in the Jewish community. Even my own family will comment on it from time to time,” said Hannah Robbins, a student at UC Berkeley. Stigma around having less-than-whole Jewish heritage is something close to half of US Jews under thirty have had to deal with their entire lives as they navigate Jewish spaces. “I think it’s incredibly harmful and cuts people off from their heritage and culture. I find it interesting, as I know so many non-practicing full Jews, but nobody seems to see a problem with that. However, even my religious friends who are half Jewish are targets of rude comments and exclusion.”
Robbins wouldn’t exist, let alone be a part of her Jewish community today, if her father had listened to the same condemnations she hears now. “My parents have one of the most loving, positive relationships I have ever seen and they are going on 33 years together. If the idea of intermarriage had kept them apart I truly believe they would have missed out on the love of their life,” she said.
For other students, their parents’ intermarriage isn’t an issue in their lives as much as who they themselves choose to date. One such example is Emily Fox, a first year at WashU Law, whose boyfriend of several years is not Jewish, a fact which has brought on prying eyes. “My choice to marry a catholic man does not impact my next door neighbor, does not impact the state, does not impact the church or the synagogue because I’m still going to be a member of the synagogue,” she said. “I don’t really understand why there needs to be such a volatile reaction from some camps when two people are in love.”
Fox plans to be a part of the majority of US Jews today marrying non-Jews, who still find themselves fighting off what seems to be a minority opinion.
Often overlooked in the majority of conversations on intermarriage is a generational change in attitude towards the institution of marriage, which may be heading towards irrelevance. Noah Liebowitz, a master’s student at the University of Rochester, thinks marriage is oversold. “Especially as a gay man, the marriage decision was only 6 years ago, I do wonder for queer people if it’s really just an institution,” he said.
While Liebowitz acknowledges many queer couples fought for years to participate in this particular social institution and celebrate marriage equality, he wonders if queer marriages are more an act of protest against those still objecting, “a big middle finger to the people who think that shouldn’t happen.” He reflects this sentiment himself, saying: “I personally would get satisfaction out of that, I’m not going to lie to you. Knowing that there are some people who don’t love this, but guess what, I’m doing it anyways.”
He describes his background as “very much fitting the tri-state area Jewish family stereotype”, having dutifully spent his childhood in Hebrew school, bar mitzvah classes, and other staples of Jewish life. So, it can’t be said that Jewish education is the prescription for his differing view on marriage from the traditional. Rather, his existence as a queer man is beyond what traditional frameworks are prepared to deal with; it’s the framing that needs to change.
Whether engaging in the institution of marriage or not, queer Jews face larger issues with family structures. Leaving behind the heteronormative assumption of reproduction, a large set of challenges await Jews considering fostering, adoption, or surrogacy.
“I think being gay, Jewish, and wanting kids is hard to reconcile,” said Charlie Tribble, a cis gay student at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. “Since Judaism is passed down by the mother, I think it’s hard to have kids that would be recognized as Jewish. I would want my kids to be raised Jewish, but my own sexuality feels like a barrier to that.”
Since parenting children for Tribble is likely to be separate from a genealogical connection, he is right to recognize that his household will face additional barriers in the racialized setting of American Jewish life. His approach to continuing the Jewish people will again necessarily differ from the traditional framework of matrilineal descent and heterosexual parenting.
Even those with positive views on the institution of marriage and those who hold more traditional concerns on Jewish continuity are conceding that “intermarriage” isn’t necessarily as problematic as presented. Stephanie*, a student at Purdue from a more traditionally observant community in Brazil, says she is partial to the institution of marriage but she centers the individual. “I understand why there is a pressure for us to not marry someone who’s not Jewish. I understand both sides but we can’t control who we fall in love with,” she said.“We don’t live in a perfect world and we don’t control our feelings. If a Jewish person is really in love with someone who’s not Jewish, I think that they would still make every effort to include their children in religious teachings.” A person’s feelings are outside of a community’s control, but a community can change how it reacts.
It’s not just a hypothetical that a Jewish person with a non-Jewish partner might make every effort to include their family in Jewish life: they often do. One student** in the UK who regularly leads services for two London-based communities is a prime example. Although she feels she may be “marrying out” with her current non-Jewish partner, she isn’t planning on letting her children’s Jewish connection wash away. “I was to go to cantorial school, so it would be slightly odd if my children weren’t involved within my/our community. I want to raise a Jewish home and children and elicit the Jewish connection that I have in my children. I want to pass family traditions down through generation to generation and I want to make my family proud of the woman I have become.”
What seems clear is that young Jews today do not see intermarriage as a real problem in their lives but as a problem of tradition which does not fit their lived experience. “I’ve thrown the traditional marriage and family thing out the window so I don’t care,” Leibowitz said when asked what he thought on discourse around intermarriage. “I don’t know how else to say it, I just don’t care. I’m going to be married to a man, children will definitely be adopted. Everything ‘nontraditional’ that could happen with a family is likely going to happen, so why should I hyperfixate on the details of having a traditional family and traditional XYZ? I’m already considered so nontraditional, I shouldn’t worry myself with those details.”
Concerns for the future of the Jewish community are still present, even among Jews who fiercely defend intermarriage. Robbins does not mince words on the matter. “I think if Jewish religious leaders wanted to focus on bringing people back to the religion, they would try to figure out why less young people are religious instead of going after ‘intermarriage,’” she said. Looking to larger social changes, she added: “As the world globalizes, intermarriage will continue and I believe leaders will only hurt the strength of Jewish communities by excluding half Jewish people that are enthusiastic about participating in Jewish life.”
We can already see the impact of Jewish institutions requiring specific views for participation in Jewish community. Jake*, a senior at WashU who will soon be searching for a new, post-graduation Jewish community in December, says that the demand for conformity has made him hesitant to get involved in Jewish life. “Strong views on intermarriage kind of push me away from Jewish community. It was something that when I first realized it was such a prevalent thing it kind of caught me off guard,” he said. “Judaism shouldn’t be exclusive, it should be inclusive. By limiting yourself to only people with only specific viewpoints on hot-button issues or by pushing certain beliefs on those issues you are going to limit who is in that group.”
Jake isn’t put off from Jewish community entirely though, thanks in part to the continuing presence of Jews who, like him, disagree with the institutions claiming to represent the community. “I think it is somewhat institutional. You have to remember that all the people I was talking to [who led to the hesitation] were a part of the Jewish community back home. If you polled a broader sample of Jewish people in general I think you’d get a different result. I think part of it is just selection bias, but I also think that speaks to the institutionalized nature of it.”
In the midst of all the talk on intermarriage, Robbins points to a more sinister biological essentialism underlying parts of public discourse. The belief that there is such a thing as “Jewish blood” is scientifically false, but narratives within Jewish spaces surrounding common descent and insularity perpetuate the misconception. Even under traditional views supporting matrilineal descent, it is not blood that is Jewish but the soul. Views of Jewishness as a bloodborne trait connect stigmas surrounding intermarriage with discrimination against Jews of color and the continued otherization of converts. As Jewish organizations seek to combat these issues amid a renewed emphasis on diversity, equity, and inclusion, they should look to combat the misunderstanding of what it means to be Jewish which lies at the root of the problem.
Brushing up against the constructs built by previous generations is an essential coming of age. In each generation, young Jews are always in a process of unlearning that which was pushed onto them, making room for their own emergence as Jewish adults. Whether they’re from almost stereotypical tri-state area nuclear Jewish families like some or only stepped into a synagogue once before college like myself, marriages and bloodlines increasingly aren’t what draw us towards community. There is no Jewish gene which pulls someone towards the bimah or creates national loyalty. Today’s emerging generation of Jews isn’t going to pretend otherwise.
The hostility some people hold towards those advocating for a more inclusive community is materially damaging, pushing even some of the people quoted here to request anonymity. If community leaders want to address the fact that less than one third of intermarried couples are raising their children religiously, the solution is not to condemn the majority of Jewish marriages but to make changes in how we treat the majority of Jews. We cannot continue to condemn intermarriage and the children of intermarriage if we want to continue the Jewish community, which is really what we talk about when we talk about “intermarriage”.
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Back at the deli, over pastrami and knishes, we continued to discuss how Thanksgiving would go. Would she mention her mother’s conversion? What about the people on campus who didn’t respect that conversion because it was Reform? Would she ask if it would have mattered if her own new boyfriend wasn’t Jewish?
The handful of other patrons quietly enjoying their lunches seemed to have had enough of our possibly-too-loud conversation. We both got up from the table, mutually baffled that her dad will die on the hill of intermarriage. I had to wonder what he thought of me, as a quarter-Jew with unwed parents. The way I see it, I never broke any rules, his or the rabbis’; but his rules break when they meet me.
*Last names excluded out of fear of community backlash.
**Name excluded upon request out of fear of community backlash.
