Still Jewish: A History of Women and Intermarriage in America

Conclusion

197 Conclusion We were a hybrid couple . . . We were an expression of love. We were an expression of Judaism. We had to be, because I’m Jewish. We, and others like us, were part of a Judaism that no one had yet named. —Lisa Schiffman, generation j, 1999 America’s paradox of pluralism enabled the Jewish women in my study to marry Gentile men while also forcing the women to determine in what ways they integrated into the American population and how they retained their ethnic and religious heritage despite intermarrying. As I have described, America’s religious freedom, ethnic diversity, and marital opportunities offered Jewish women the chance to choose their own spouses and how they would self-identify. The meaning of religious identity thereby became increasingly personal and individualistic, as it did for many moderately affiliated American Jews.1 The intrinsic struggle between the selection of a Gentile husband and the maintenance of a Jewish self evolved over the past hundred or so years, as American women gained more political rights and personal power within their marriages. The democratic culture made blending into the mainstream possible, and some Jewish women did when they intermarried, but it also increasingly encouraged them to assert their Jewishness. As the literary scholar Ruth R. Wisse, quoted in the introduction, observed: American Jews are in a tough position: they have to accept America’s generous welcome without being obliterated by it.2 Jewish women who intermarried were in the toughest position of all, because they brought America’s hospitality into their hearts and beds. One intermarried woman wrote in her autobiography: “I had signed on with a man who was a ticket to freedom from my insular Jewish background. 198 Conclusion Now I was fighting the very freedom he had brought me.”3 The increasing incidence of intermarriage between Jewish women and non-Jewish men symbolized the mutual love between Jews and America that signaled both freedom and challenge. The journalist Samuel G. Freedman wrote in 2004: “The thoroughgoing assimilation of postwar America, the emergence of Jewishness as just another brand of white ethnicity that can be halved or quartered, attests most profoundly to Oscar Wilde’s aphorism to be careful what you wish for, because you might get it.”4 The intermarried Jewish women discussed in this book epitomized both the liberty to live as one wished and the challenge to define the meaning of being Jewish in a society where interfaith marriage, by the first years of the twentyfirst century, had become “as American as apple pie.”5 Yet, their histories illustrate that intermarriage was not an adversary to Jewish continuity; rather, it was an opportunity for self-reflection and personal growth. In the words of the late Egon Mayer, sociology professor and director of the Center for Jewish Studies at the Graduate School of the City University of New York, intermarried women with accentuated Jewish identities “took advantage of cultural pluralism not by blending into the majority but by absorbing” Gentile members of the majority.6 In addition, Sarah Coleman, an intermarried, third-wave Jewish feminist, pointed out that “in forming partnerships with non-Jews, we intermarrieds are spreading Jewish values and culture into the population at large.”7 I wrote this book with the belief that Jewish women’s intermarriage experiences were nuanced, and therefore that the gendered meaning of intermarriage was more complex than quantitative studies have suggested. I was also convinced that to understand the significance of intermarriage today, one needed to look at how its meanings and representations evolved over an entire century during which American women’s lives and the status of Jews and of Judaism were affected by two world wars and several social movements. After analyzing a wide range of sources over time, I understood that intermarriage for Jewish women was not part of a linear continuum toward absolute assimilation. Indeed, quite the opposite was true. Change over Time The meaning and representation of gender and intermarriage changed dramatically over the twentieth century for Jewish women in America. Prior to the First World War, when the rate of Jewish intermarriage was Conclusion 199 at its lowest, the immigrant Jewish women Mary Antin, Rose Pastor, and Anna Strunsky intermarried and moved out of the Jewish fold and into the circles of their Gentile husbands and mainstream society. Although the few immigrant Jewish women whom we know intermarried between 1900 and 1929 did...