Jewish on Their Own Terms: How Intermarried Couples are Changing American Judaism by Jennifer A. Thompson (review)

The bombastic claim that intermarriage poses the greatest threat to the American Jewish community is finally and cogently laid to rest by author Jennifer Thompson’s astute delineations between rhetoric and reality. Through her close examination of lived experiences, she is able to offer a new understanding of Jewish peoplehood and religious transformation, drawing on Emile Durkheim’s definition of religion as beliefs and practices that unite people into a single moral community. She asks: If common wisdom about intermarriage does not correspond to the lived experiences of intermarried Jews and their families, why is it “such a prominent part of American Jews’ conversation in public media, between pulpit and congregation, and among individual Jews?” (1).

In Jewish on Their Own Terms, Thompson persuasively argues that American Jews’ anxieties about assimilation (demographic breakdown, loss of distinctiveness, and disconnection from Jewish communities amid successful integration into mainstream culture) are essentially projected onto intermarried Jews so that these fears can be expressed and discussed without recognition of the fact that all Jews—not just the intermarried—face them. Thought-provoking insights about the discourse of discord abound between the covers of this book, illuminating how statistics about intermarriage, Jewish media representations, and communal leaders have consistently reinforced a narrative of intermarriage as assimilation, evoking much hand wringing in the process. This book should be considered a clarion call to look beyond conversations among Jewish institutional leaders and syncretic theories about intermarriage to the actual experiences of intermarried couples. Rabbinic informants use the same vocabulary to discuss intermarriage, disguising in the process their disagreement about the meanings of certain terms, while also perpetuating ideas that do not reflect the extent to which innovation is occurring.

In contrast to quantitative survey research, Thompson’s ethnographic approach enables her to place intermarried people at the center of an investigation into how traditional ideas about Judaism, Jewish identity, and Jewish community intersect with American ideals about individualism, universalism, and fairness. She analyzes interviews with thirty-six intermarried Jews and their spouses and more than fifty Jews and non-Jews affected by intermarriage (couples, rabbis, and educators). She was also a participant-observer in planned activities of the Mothers Circle, an educational support group for non-Jewish women raising Jewish children, the Dovetail Institute for Interfaith Family Resources, the Interfaith Families Project, and events sponsored by Jewish outreach organizations in Atlanta and Des Moines.

The result is an alternative narrative about intermarriage that turns the lens on interfaith families’ lives and choices to discover a uniquely American Judaism. Instead of simple decline, she finds complex and contradictory change. This pioneering fieldwork demonstrates that inter-married Jews have not rejected Judaism’s basic premises of the authority of Jewish law and peoplehood; instead they “conform to religious rules and traditions in their own ways, for reasons having to do with family and self rather than God” (164). According to Thompson, intermarried couples exhibit a wide range of self-understandings and practices shaped by two models of religious experience and self-understanding she calls universalist individualism and ethnic familialism. Universalist individualists consider having Jewish children a choice, the outcome of a negotiation between spouses, sometimes due to one spouse’s religious heritage and sometimes due to religious conviction. Ethnic familialists balance personal autonomy about Jewishly identified children and mutual obligation through loyalty to the Jewish people (165).

Although these terms may seem clunky to some non-academic readers, Thompson explains the ways in which her informants fit one or both of these categories to varying degrees, elucidating how they manage the contradictions that arise in the course of their efforts to be respectful toward their partners while also staying true to themselves.

Thompson’s ethnographic research findings illustrate conclusively that the differences social scientists clamor about existing between how intermarried couples experience Jewishness and how in-married couples do is actually negligible because they both have...