Beyond Chrismukkah: The Christian-Jewish Interfaith Family in the United States by Samira K. Mehta (review)

In 2016, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life released a study demonstrating that twenty percent of American adults had grown up in interfaith homes. As we know, in the last decades even more young people are joining their ranks. What was once an unusual or even transgressive option is now the reality for a significant portion of our country's families. Thus, Samira Mehta's book, based on her doctoral dissertation at Emory University, takes on a topic of central importance to anyone interested in religious life in America. Moreover, the phenomenon of intermarriage provides a window into rich and evolving conversations regarding "identity," "faith," "culture," "tradition," "ethnicity," and more.

In deciding upon the scope of her study, Mehta made the choice to focus on one particular variety of intermarriage, Christian-Jewish interfaith marriage. Christian-Jewish marriage is not the most common kind of interfaith relationship in America. Although over fifty percent of Jews who marry today marry non-Jews, Jews account for less than two percent of the American population. Nevertheless, Mehta argues that studying this type of family makes sense, writing in her introduction that "[t]hese are the mixed marriages that dominate the American imagination … the archetypal kind" (3). In her conclusion, Mehta considers how the Christian-Jewish example offers insight into other forms of interfaith family life.

Mehta's methodology is a hybrid, part cultural history and part original ethnographic research. She studied and analyzed materials from popular culture and from institutional policies (focusing on the Reform movement in Judaism, the Catholic Church and the Protestant mainline), children's literature, and advice columns, as well as conducted her own field work and oral history interviews of fifty families and religious professionals. Her interest was primarily in "how interfaith nuclear families are imagined, policed, and innovated" (7). She comes to this issue in her role as a scholar of religion in America. Unlike others who have treated interfaith marriage from a predetermined opinion, Mehta is truly able to view the landscape with curiosity and openness. She is not constricted by either/or dichotomies or by reactivity to the breaking of taboos. Like the families she studies, she does not establish arbitrary boundaries between religion and culture or between sacred and profane. Her commitment is not to any community but to a greater understanding of what religious pluralism and multiculturalism might mean when they become features of the intimate space of a family's home. One of the most valuable aspects of Mehta's work is her focus on practices. While interfaith dialogue in the public sphere often centers on matters of belief, in the home, what ends up being at issue are the daily, weekly and annual negotiations around practice. Mehta's study suggests that imaginative, morally sensitive and robust creativity is happening in the privacy of these interfaith homes.

As a rabbi, a Jewish seminary professor, and an interfaith educator, my own understanding of this issue has evolved since the early 1980s when I began my career. At the time, I was in the vanguard of progressive rabbis who would agree to perform interfaith weddings with the understanding that the couple made a commitment to create a Jewish home and raise Jewish children. For years, I promoted Rachel and Paul Cowan's book Mixed Blessings: Overcoming the Stumbling Blocks to Interfaith Marriage (1987), believing one owes it to one's children to choose "one religion." I would encourage couples to do so and would support them in whatever choice they made. If the choice was for Judaism, I could preside. If not, I would bless their decision to be married in another faith. This was considered an extremely liberal position.

Looking back through the lens of the learning in Mehta's book and my own experience over the years, including becoming the grandmother of children in an interfaith family, I see that...