Book Review : The Challenges of Interfaith Marriage

Intermarriage: The Challenge of Living With Differences by Susan Weidman Schneider (The Free Press/Macmillan: $19.95, 274 pages)

When the “nice Jewish boy” finally brought himself to call his mother and tell her that he was marrying a non-Jewish woman, he expected the worst. To his surprise, his mother promptly replied: “So you and your bride will come live in my apartment.”

“Ma, I’m glad you’re taking the news so well,” the son said. “But we wouldn’t think of putting such a burden on you. After all, three people living in one small apartment. . . .”

“What burden?” shrugged the mother. “As soon as we hang up, I’m putting my head in the oven.”

You won’t hear that old joke much anymore--most Jews are too familiar with intermarriage nowadays, too comfortable with it, for the punch line to strike a spark against the old anxieties. As Susan Weidman Schneider points out in “Intermarriage,” the intermarriage rate for American Jews is already between 25% and 30%, and as high as 60% in some places. As many as half of all Jews who marry in the year ahead, she reports, will marry a non-Jew.

Troubling Prospect

Still, Schneider concedes that intermarriage remains a troubling prospect for many Jews--and so the joke still resonates with the persistent feeling that marrying outside the faith is equivalent to death. Simple demographics, as Schneider points out, explain why intermarriage is regarded as a kind of catastrophe among many Jews--with 6 million Jews and more than 250 million Christians in America, each intermarriage represents the further erosion of an already small and increasingly assimilated community.

One of Schneider’s messages, however, is that intermarriage no longer means assimilation: “The salient feature in the domestic lives of most interfaith couples introduced here is the desire of each partner to remain in contact with aspects of his or her birth culture,” she writes at the outset of her book, “and to transmit something of it to the next generation.”

Reaching Accommodation

A great deal of Schneider’s book is devoted to helping men and women of different faiths reach an understanding--and an accommodation--of each other’s religious identities and practices: “First of all, it is necessary to detoxify the subject of religious and cultural differences,” she writes. Schneider explores the actual experiences of interfaith couples, both their successes and their failures, and she manages to do so without the wooden, one-dimensional portrayals that are found in so much “pop” sociology and psychology.

She confronts the hard problems of the interfaith couple--how to conduct the wedding, how to raise the children, how to handle “the December dilemma” of Christmas and Hanukkah, how to deal with the parents--and she suggests some practical solutions to these problems. Schneider even offers a useful list of resources for intermarried couples, including counseling centers, conversion programs and interfaith congregations.

Some Difficult Insights

But “Intermarriage” goes much deeper. Schneider offers some shocking (but always wise and well-tempered) insights into the most intimate and secret fears of the intermarried couple. Above all, she writes with striking candor about the self-doubt and even the self-hatred that may afflict the Jewish spouse. In that sense, “Intermarriage” is really a book about the crisis of identity in the Jewish community in America, a crisis that helps to explain the accelerating rate of intermarriage.

Schneider, editor of the Jewish feminist quarterly Lilith and author of “Jewish and Female,” brings an impressive knowledge of Jewish culture--and Jewish religious and sexual politics--to her work. Her sources range from the Book of Ruth to the sociological studies of Egon Mayer, from Queen Esther to Erica Jong. And, in pondering why Jews marry outside their faith, she has arrived at some controversial observations that apply to all Jews in America today, whether or not they are intermarried.

For example, Schneider has thought deeply about the challenges that Judaism presents to Jewish men and women who have not been raised in observant homes--and she attributes at least some of the impulse toward intermarriage to the low morale of the Jew who is not comfortable or competent in his or her Jewishness. The male in an observant Jewish family, she points out, must be “familiar enough, competent enough, and confident enough” to perform the basic rituals of the faith in the home and the synagogue: “For Jews who feel uneasy about their skills,” she observes, “it may be easier to opt out and not have to be the competent male in a Jewish household.”

A Demoralizing Ignorance

Ignorance of Jewish history, Schneider reminds us, can also be demoralizing--too many Jews know a great deal about the Holocaust and almost nothing about the richness and splendor of Jewish history and culture. “Pained by the historical oppression of Jews, and perhaps knowing little else about Judaism, many Jews are afraid of identifying too closely with a suffering people,” she writes. “Some may even have married a non-Jew as a way of escaping from a collective Jewish past that they think has consisted only of pogroms, enforced exiles and death camps.”

What’s more, “Intermarriage” is an important contemplation of how Jewish men and women perceive themselves, and how they are perceived by others. Schneider confronts what she correctly calls “essentially anti-Semitic and misogynistic images” that many Jews have imposed on themselves--the Jewish woman as “Jewish-American-Princess,” the Jewish man as a victim of “a nebbishy Woody Allen-like neurotic dependency.” Schneider suggests that these appalling self-images only encourage the Jewish man or woman to seek a non-Jewish spouse.

So “Intermarriage” is much, much more than a handbook for interfaith couples. Rather, it is a book about what it means to be Jewish in America today. In that sense, the book’s title is far too narrow--”Intermarriage” is a book for every thoughtful Jewish reader who has questioned his or her identity as a Jew, and every reader--Jewish or non-Jewish--who is curious about the destiny of the Jews in America.