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2: State of the Question
- Rutgers University Press
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2 State of the Question In the aftermath of the Nazi genocide, the Yiddish poet Moshe Szulsztejn wrote: “Es veln nisht feln/di nemen nokh vemen [There will be no lack/ Of those to name after].” This deceptively simple couplet—da DA da da DA da/da DA da da DA da—is a reminder that for some time to come at least, Jewish generations will have been depleted, rather than perpetuated— that there will be more ancestors than descendants. Yet for any number of reasons—only some of which have to do with Jewishness—some Jewish families have many children, others few or none. Szulsztejn’s assertion certainly applied at a moment when the tenuous promise of future families—the marriages and new births in the immediate afterwar years— were still vastly outweighed by the collective losses of World War II. This postwar situation was an especially far cry from the experience of prewar East European Jewish generations. They witnessed, indeed, they literally gave birth to, an extraordinary growth in population in the nineteenth century that helps to explain the tendency to identify that particular Jewish world with Jewish culture in general. Another great Yiddish poet, Chaim Grade, began his first published volume of poetry after the end of World War II with the ringing (and, to be sure, highly gendered) affirmative injunction: “Yidishe mames, hot kinder!”—“Jewish mothers, have children!” These are poetic reminders of the ways in which World War II and the genocidal attacks on Jews that were at the heart of that war continue to mark the fundamentally changed situation of Jewish families in recent decades. Since World War II, and despite the depredations of Nazi and related antisemitisms, which feared precisely the integration of Jews into Western societies, we have also witnessed a seemingly continuous growth of possibilities for intermarriage between Jews and majority non-Jewish populations of various countries. The two phenomena of genocide and 63 intermarriage are sometimes linked in highly emotional appeals to the call for continued Jewish solidarity, for the maintenance of firm ethnic, genealogical, and sometimes religious boundaries in order to avoid “granting Hitler a posthumous victory.” Genocide and intermarriage may be alike inasmuch as both tend to lower the number of “countable” Jews. But they are, of course, vastly different phenomena. Since marriages are at least generally not coerced, openness toward intermarriage (toward exogamy, meaning here marriage outside the bounds of the group known as “Jews”) necessarily must be shared by the Jewish and non-Jewish partner. To be sure, their motivations may differ. Indeed, for many who think of themselves as Jews or are thought of as Jews by others, whether or not their potential spouse is Jewish may be an entirely trivial concern. For other Jewish individuals and communities, of course, “marrying Jewish” is simply non-negotiable. These are, by and large, those who have been raised in families that work hard to maintain strict social barriers between their members and non-Jews. In fact, certain Jewish communities are largely structured around the imperative of making sure that their members’ children marry not only fellow Jews, but Jews whose standards of behavior conform to that of the particular community. Thus, it seems there is an increasing cultural and social divide and, consequently, less interaction and less shared discourse between Jews located in different networks. We can place these various Jewish social networks very roughly, simplifying far more than perhaps we should, along a spectrum from most traditionalist or “religious” to most liberal or “secular.” Moreover, the differences in identity between the various networks is often sufficient to prevent “intermarriage” between different Jews. For the sake of completeness, it must be added that the existence of a Jewish state also shapes the state of the question of the Jewish family today. In Israel, unlike nominally secular Western states, not only is Jewish identity a central matter of state concern, but so is the Jewish family. As briefly discussed toward the end of chapter 1, the Israeli state regulates the marriages and divorces of its Jewish citizens in conformity with jewish families 64 [54.81.61.14] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 15:53 GMT) Jewish law. Through its social welfare policies, it affects the number of children that Jewish couples have. Kinship and politics are inevitably and publicly tied in Israel. But that does not mean that the family is simply a private matter elsewhere. I suggested in the introduction that there is a...