Still Jewish: A History of Women and Intermarriage in America

2. Intermarriage in an Age of Domesticity

63 2 Intermarriage in an Age of Domesticity To be a Jew in the twentieth century Is to be offered a gift. If you refuse, Wishing to be invisible, you choose Death of the spirit, the stone insanity. Accepting, take full life. Full agonies: Your evening deep in labyrinthine blood Of those who resist, fail, and resist; and God Reduced to a hostage among hostages. —Muriel Rukeyser, 1944 The lives of ordinary Jewish women who intermarried between 1930 and 1960 have heretofore been invisible. Jews assumed that Jewish women who married non-Jews all but disappeared by rejecting their religion and ethnic group, and by severing their connections with the Jewish community.1 In other words, Jewish women who intermarried were considered no longer Jewish. However, a qualitative analysis of the meaning and published representation of intermarriage and gender suggests something different. Like their more famous, early-immigrant predecessors who intermarried, described in chapter 1, ordinary Jewish women selected their Gentile husbands in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Yet their histories illustrate the meaning of intermarriage for women whose lives did not warrant publicity and went unrecorded until now, rather than for the relatively few who married into prominent families. In contrast to the political activists already discussed, these women married during a Depression -era resurgence of public opinion that reinforced traditional gender roles and, with a temporary interlude “for the duration” of World War 64 Chapter 2 II, encouraged American wives to embrace domesticity and leave world affairs to men.2 Marrying “out” became more conceivable to some Jewish women as the twentieth century progressed, though not more acceptable within Jewish circles. The increasing visibility and, to some degree, acceptability of intermarriage in American society between 1930 and 1960 made it more plausible to defy the cultural imperative of religious endogamy. Marriage between Jews and Gentiles was relatively uncommon in the United States, as it was in the first three decades of the century. In Nazi Germany, by comparison , because of Jewish emigration, by 1939 approximately 25 percent of all existing marriages involving Jews were with non-Jews.3 However, the number of cross-faith marriages was growing in America. The Jewish intermarriage rate was 3 percent between 1931 and 1940. It increased to 6.7 percent between 1941 and 1950, and fluctuated between 6.4 and 5.9 percent between 1951 and 1960.4 The American culture of intermarriage changed markedly between 1930 and 1960. As marriages between Catholics and Protestants became more widespread, it eased the way for Jewish women to marry “out.” In 1931 a minister advised in his sermon: “It is best . . . for Americans to marry Americans, and Presbyterians Presbyterians, and Christians Christians, and Jews Jews.”5 By the late 1950s such rhetoric was outmoded in the mainstream press and intermarriage was commonly discussed . For example, in 1957, a New York Times author stated: “For some years it has seemed to many Americans narrow-minded, intolerant, almost un-American to raise objections to marriage on the basis of ‘creed.’”6 A new abundance of social science studies and lay and advice literature contributed to making intermarriage seem more common in American society at large, albeit still undesirable to organized religion and many parents. Jewish communities remained vigilantly opposed to interfaith unions despite the pervasive talk of intermarriage. Thus, although Jewish women who married non-Jews did so in an American society that slowly became somewhat more tolerant of intermarriage, most Jews continued to consider their actions as malevolent. American Jews, however, comprised a disproportionate number of the whites who married blacks in the late 1940s. Despite that interracial marriage remained uncommon, even outlawed, in many states, Jews who were involved in alternative politics including the Communist and Socialist Parties were more likely to meet prospective black spouses. Moreover, uncertainty about their own racial status as “white” may have made some Jews more inclined to consider crossing the color line.7 Intermarriage in an Age of Domesticity 65 American Jewry’s decreasing traditionalism, combined with Jewish women’s academic and labor pursuits, enabled intermarriage. The diminished public observance of religion, and assimilation, meaning the loss of distinctive ethnic characteristics, both created more leeway for marriagebound Jewish women. Women who were more “American” and less “Jewish ” in a traditional sense could more easily blend into non-Jewish environments . Further, the economic and social climate during World War II was particularly liberating for single women who...