As a product of interfaith marriage, I am well aware of the
advantages and disadvantages of such a union. There are some generalizations
about why intermarriage is good or bad, but, for the most part, these marriages
are subject to the same individualities of every other marriage, and could
easily go well or go poorly, based solely on the human beings involved,
regardless of race, ethnicity, or religion. Today, intermarriage is certainly
easier than it was one hundred or even fifty years ago, but that is not to say
that intermarriage itself was a worse idea back then. It is simply that society
as a whole has become more accepting and laws regarding intermarriage have
changed. The marriages themselves have not.
When my parents got married in 1976, the U.S. Supreme
Court had already ruled that no states were allowed to have racially based
marriage laws, and none had ever really had religion based marriage laws (since
most weddings take place in a religious context, I suppose the state assumed
the religions would govern that themselves). Although some people in the
country continued to hold old fashioned ideas about segregation and keeping to
endogamy, more people were realizing that who married who really didn’t matter.
Between 1970 and 1979, the percentage of Jews marrying outside the faith jumped
from 13% to 28%. Although that made my father still a part of a minority, it
was a quickly growing minority, alongside a growing minority of Americans as a
whole marrying outside their cultures of origin, as the percentage of
interracial marriages in America in that time frame also doubled. They married
at a peak in pluralist rhetoric and desegregation efforts, making their
relationship surprisingly uncontroversial.
However, resistance against interfaith couples persisted,
and continues to persist today, at least within the religious communities.
Although trends show that interfaith marriages are becoming more common at a
much faster rate than interracial and interethnic marriage, strides toward
complete equality and a post-racial society have made speaking out against
interracial marriage completely unacceptable, whereas those who oppose
interfaith marriages still seem very comfortable doing so. Jewish institutions
worry about the future of the Jewish people if we continue to intermarry and neglect
to teach our children properly about their Judaism. This is not without basis.
Interfaith couples do have their work cut out for them in terms of raising
children. Only about one-third of children born into interfaith marriages are
raised Jewish.
Children of Jewish fathers and non-Jewish mothers, such as myself,
must be converted to be considered wholly Jewish, in addition to being part of
the one-third raised with Jewish values and education. Although the
Reconstructionist movement adopted a policy of accepting children of
patrilineal descent into their Jewish communities in 1968, and the Reform
movement followed suit in a much better-known resolution in 1983, the children
born and raised in these movements may still grow up and one day find that their
years of Hebrew school, Jewish camps, and internalized identity mean nothing to
Jews from more traditional backgrounds. These grown children of interfaith
couples may still find doors closed to them unless they are willing to
“convert,” which undermines their Jewish upbringing, and the commitment their
non-Jewish mothers made to raising Jewish children. It is a clear disadvantage
to such interfaith families.
Even children of Jewish mothers and non-Jewish fathers, whose
status as Jews is not questioned in the same way as patrilineal Jews, may still
find difficulties in connecting to Judaism and Jewish culture, knowing that
there is more to their heritage. It is up to the parents and the Jewish
community to be embracing and educational, to help the children of interfaith
marriages feel wholly Jewish. Otherwise, we do indeed risk erasing our own
heritage and tradition, as some vocal opponents to intermarriage suggest, more
effectively than the anti-Semites who tried to wipe us out violently.
Keren McGinity’s book, Still Jewish, shows that there
certainly are couples out there who are up for the challenge. In it, she shares
the data and anecdotal evidence of 46 Jewish women who chose to intermarry, and
most of them found that their intermarriages brought greatness into their
lives. Many of them were secularized Jews, without strong commitments to
everyday Jewish practices, until they married Gentiles, and suddenly felt the
urge to work harder to preserve their identities and heritages within the
intermarriage. For the most part, their husbands were incredibly supportive of
this. The marriages that did fail did so because of irreconcilable differences
in political worldviews, or due to infidelity, rarely because of anything
relating to the fact of intermarriage. These women were able to raise their
children Jewish, and some were even surprised to find that their children had
even stronger Jewish identities and richer Jewish educations than they
themselves had ever had.
Although the book only discussed the women who marry out, as a
child of a Jewish father and non-Jewish mother, and as a student rabbi of a
Reform congregation with a high population of interfaith families, I have seen
that the women who marry in have it in them to raise great Jewish children as well.
I mention the women who marry in rather than the Jewish men who married out,
because when it comes to the home religion and child-rearing, all the gender
equality we’ve established to date hasn’t managed to shift this still very
feminine domain. When it comes time to choose the family religion for an
interfaith family, often, the wife’s decision is canon. Although the Reform
movement made its decision seven years after my parents’ marriage, it is a good
thing they still managed to declare the children of Jewish fathers acceptable
to their Hebrew schools before my parents had children. Otherwise, I might be
arguing for interfaith marriages from a Unitarian Universalist perspective
right now, because my father sure wasn’t going to try to take us to the mikveh.
The decision came from my mother, so they needed a community that would accept
her and who we were because of her.
When it comes to interfaith marriages, there are some added
difficulties in child-rearing, and choosing a family religion to teach the
children. But for intermarriage as a whole, the largest disadvantage comes from
those within society who still hold old-fashioned prejudices and want to impose
them upon those couples and families. The marriages themselves are subject to
all the same advantages and disadvantages of all marriage: love and acceptance,
differing worldviews and growing apart, honesty and loyalty, distrust and infidelity.
These are not reasons to avoid intermarriage specifically, and they are not
reasons to judge or try to stop others from intermarrying. My parents come from
two different religions, and different ethnicities, but they have maintained a
healthy marriage for 37 years (this August), and raised two healthy
well-adjusted Jewish children, now grown and contributing to society, including
specifically Jewish society. Anyone who thinks intermarriage cannot be
sustainable need only look at our family to know that it can be, and then to
butt out. We did just fine, and so can the future intermarried families.
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