Double or Nothing? Jewish Families and Mixed Marriage
by Sylvia Barack Fishman
Brandeis. 196 pp. $24.95
For more than a decade, the American Jewish community has been preoccupied with what has come to be known as the “continuity crisis”—that is, the question of whether Jews in the U.S. are perpetuating themselves and their traditions. The precipitating event for these communal worries was the 1990 National Jewish Population Survey (NJPS), which found that about half of American Jews were now marrying non-Jews, defying a taboo that (along with anti-Semitic prejudice) had helped ensure for generations that American Jewish parents could look forward to having Jewish grandchildren.
True, not every segment of the Jewish community has seen this unprecedented rate of intermarriage as a threat. As Sylvia Barack Fish-man reports in Double or Nothing?, a number of communal leaders and other observers have argued that the weakening of Jewish endogamy is actually a benign, even a positive, development. On this view, intermarriage represents not a fallingaway from the Jewish people but an encouraging addition to the number of American households with Jews in them. Could it be that intermarriage is a blessing in disguise?
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Fishman, a professor of Jewish studies at Brandeis, has addressed this subject before. Indeed, Double or Nothing? is essentially an expanded version of a study, based on more than 200 interviews with both intermarried and “inmarried” couples, that she conducted for the American Jewish Committee in 2001.
In the first part of the book, Fish-man lays out the patterns she discovered among her interviewees. The “vast majority” of intermarried couples consist of individuals, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, who perceive themselves as “independent” or “different” from the community in which they grew up; they tend to be people who in childhood received little or no religious education, who considered their parents religiously “hypocritical,” and who found their own religious traditions irrational or repressive. The Jewish partners in such marriages often describe childhood homes that were “too materialistic,” while their Gentile spouses speak of parents who themselves had changed their religious affiliation.
Many of these young people, according to Fishman, first attempted to please their parents by dating or even marrying someone from their own religious background. Often, though, they would “sabotage [these] in-faith relationships by picking a person they could never be happy with, and then, predictably, ending that relationship.” For the Jewish partners in particular, she writes, “Being romantically involved with a non-Jew” was “a powerful tool for expressing individuation and separation from parents.”
The second part of the book describes how intermarriage works out in practice, particularly on the religious front. Such couples, Fishman found, are more likely to incorporate Jewish activities into their daily lives if they have encountered, often in the context of the birth of their children, a “rabbi-mentor.” Nevertheless, there are dramatic differences between even those intermarried families who identify themselves as Jewish and “inmarried” households—that is, those in which both husband and wife are Jewish. Among the latter, only about 6 percent report having a Christmas tree; among the former, some 60 percent do. Fishman also discovered a strong tendency for Christian observances to increase over time, despite agreements made before or in the early stages of the marriage. Jewish spouses often feel guilty about “winning” the discussion over religion, and also say that, over time, Christian celebrations become less alien to them.
In the final third of the book, Fishman examines the broader American cultural context for intermarriage. Starting with films as early as The Jazz Singer (1927) and extending to Annie Hall (1977) and beyond, she traces the inexorable message of the entertainment industry. In countless movies, plays, and novels—most of them created by Jews—“the ability of minority groups to marry persons from the mainstream culture” has been presented, she writes, “as a test of whether democratic ideals reign in American lives.”
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Fishman shows admirable calm in discussing this charged and emotional topic, and she tries to do justice to the various attempts to put intermarriage in a positive light. Though the broad-minded tolerance of modern America has been a chief engine of intermarriage, it has also helped to spark, she recognizes, an “extraordinary revitalization” of ethnic cultures, not the least of them being traditional Judaism. As she writes, “a substantial portion of American Jews has become newly engaged by Jewish culture, history, and religious expression.”
Nor does Fishman dismiss out of hand the arguments of groups like the Jewish Outreach Institute (JOI), which openly welcomes interfaith couples. As she notes, the JOI understands itself to be bowing not just to social reality but to the demands of Jewish tradition. In the words of the group’s executive director, instructions for “loving the stranger” are repeated throughout the Torah, “more often than any other commandment.”
Yet, as Fishman understands, it is one thing to welcome the stranger on your own terms, within existing boundaries, and quite another to blur those boundaries beyond recognition. Just as biblical Judaism insisted on “the differences between men, women, slaves, and animals,” she writes, so too did it refuse to “obliterate the status demarcations between Israelite and resident stranger.” Indeed, Jewish survival over the centuries has depended in large measure on such separateness and on what Fishman calls “the efficacy of quotidian Jewish behavior codes.” As the writer Ahad Ha’am famously put it, “more than the Jews have kept the Sabbath, the Sabbath has kept the Jews.”
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Where Fishman’s account disappoints is in her treatment of demographic questions. It is not that she ignores the gloomy prospects suggested by the high rate of intermarriage among American Jews. Citing the work of the historian Jonathan Sarna, she notes the rapid disappearance through intermarriage of the ancient Jewish community of Kaifeng in China and of the French Huguenots of 18th-century New York City. “These historical models,” she writes, suggest that American Jews, like other ethnic Americans, are fast on their way to losing any connection to “the rich and complex religious and cultural traditions they are heirs to.”
As for hard demographic data, Fishman provides glimpses of the key numbers from the 1990 and 2000 National Jewish Population Surveys throughout her text and in an appendix. Sobering as these are, they reveal only part of the story.
In an NJPS chart reproduced in part by Fishman, the intermarriage rate is broken down by sex, region, Jewish education, and parental religion. Two factors leap out as dramatically correlated with whether or not a Jew marries another Jew: home life and education. Thus, among Jews who have received yeshiva or day-school education, only 7 percent choose non-Jewish spouses. Conversely, among those born to intermarried parents, fully 75 percent are themselves intermarried. In brief, if Judaism is not a central and ongoing part of life, young people are unlikely to consider it important enough to influence their choice of a spouse.
Also missing from Fishman’s account—as from virtually every major discussion of this subject sponsored by the organized Jewish community—is the most basic of demographic tools: the population projection. The summary report of the most recent NJPS bravely points to “a significant stabilization of the intermarriage rate since 1985-90.” This is true, as far as it goes. But what does it conceal? After zooming up from 13 percent before 1970 to 43 percent in 1985-1990, the intermarriage rate stayed the same in 1991-1995 and climbed to “only” 47 percent in 1996-2001. This hardly seems a cause for complacency.
It does not take great statistical imagination to extrapolate from the findings of the NJPS. If roughly half of American Jews are intermarrying, and if three quarters of the children of the intermarried will also intermarry, and if fewer than one third of the children of the intermarried consider themselves Jews, the trajectory can only point in one direction. As the demographer Sergio Della Pergola of Hebrew University concluded, using data from the 1990 NJPS, the American Jewish community is on course to shrink by 59 percent by 2080—from 5.5 million to about 2.3 million. (On the basis of the 2000 survey, Della Pergola has lately revised his projections slightly upward.)
Such long-term projections are of course notoriously prone to being disproved. But the short-term outlook is bad enough. Lightly as Sylvia Barack Fishman may tread, the seemingly inescapable conclusion of Double or Nothing? is that many American Jews are living in a world of delusion, abashed by the political incorrectness of opposing intermarriage and yet certain that Jewish life in America will somehow continue into the indefinite future. But there is no avoiding the alternatives posed by Fishman’s title: if it is ridiculous to say that intermarriage has brought about a “doubling” of American Jewry, the likelier truth is that the non-traditional sectors of the community are barreling, however obliviously, toward nothingness.
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