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  • The Changing Jewish Family:Jewish Communal Responses to Interfaith and Same-Sex Marriage1
  • Samira K. Mehta (bio) and Brett Krutzsch (bio)

In the final three decades of the twentieth century, American Judaism, particularly its non-Orthodox movements, found itself struggling to address two new challenges to longstanding conceptions of the Jewish home: interfaith marriage and same-gender relationships.2 While initially inclined to condemn both, at the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries Jewish groups wrestled with their understanding of both intermarrying Jews and gay3 Jews, ultimately coming to accept [End Page 553] more completely the latter than the former. This occurred despite the fact that the Reform movement, the largest Jewish religious movement in the United States, invested heavily in welcoming and attracting interfaith families, while only some Reform congregations focused on outreach to gay Jews.

Jewish communal responses, particularly in the Reform, Reconstructionist, and Conservative moments, to these changes in Jewish family life demonstrate that the issue at stake was primarily Jewish continuity. The rising rates of interfaith marriage (from approximately ten percent of American Jews in 1970 to approximately fifty percent of American Jews in the 1990s) and the resultant continuity "crisis" occurred simultaneously with the rise of gay rights as a public and clearly defined social movement. In this article, we track changes in communal responses to both interfaith families and gay political struggles over the past fifty years, connecting those changes to trends in interfaith family life, gay liberation politics and rhetoric, and the shifting goals of Jewish communities.

While initially opposed to religiously sanctioning same-gender relationships in the 1970s and much of the 1980s, support among Reform, Reconstructionist, and Conservative Jewish institutions for gay Jews increased as lesbians and gay men throughout the country insisted publicly that they were equal to straights and, especially among Conservative institutions, as "marriage equality" became the public face of the gay rights movement. Simultaneously, while many synagogues increased their resources for interfaith families, they also continued to frame interfaith marriage as a problem to combat. Currently, all non-Orthodox movements allow gay rabbinic ordination. But only the Renewal and Reconstructionist movements allow Jews in interfaith marriages to be ordained, with the former setting a precedent in the 1990s and the latter in 2015.4 This article accounts for these formal policies in light of the reality that many synagogues are more comfortable spaces for heterosexual interfaith couples and their families than they are for gay Jews, in or outside of family structures.

By historicizing the trajectories of communal responses to these two groups, we argue that Jewish institutional responses were shaped primarily by two realities. First, the movement for marriage equality and calls for gay rights are broad political issues on the national stage, [End Page 554] whereas interfaith family issues are not. We contend that as the national temperature shifted on same-gender relationships, American Jews shifted with those trends. Interfaith marriage, however, has not been part of a national political debate, and therefore, no outside forces shifted Jewish attitudes and policies accordingly. Additionally, since the 1970s, Jewish continuity has been one of the abiding preoccupations of communal Jewish life. When gay activists focused on marriage equality and the concomitant possibility of creating homes on a heteronormative model, and as protections for children were increasingly foregrounded in those debates, the rhetoric of gay rights shifted such that it lined up with Jewish communal goals around continuity. In other words, by not focusing on expansive sexual freedoms, the movement for marriage equality meant gay Jews were interested in upholding traditional Jewish institutions, not subverting them. Same-sex marriage offered the possibility of creating appropriately Jewish homes and provided a pathway for the acceptance of gay Jews more broadly, while no similar trajectory occurred for interfaith marriage.

Interfaith marriage advocates, meanwhile, have pressed against many of the restrictions placed upon them by Jewish communal organizations and have included Christmas in their homes, taken their children to church, and found other ways to include Christian traditions in their families. Additionally, though many interfaith couples have joined Jewish communities, many Jewish communal leaders continue to see and frame interfaith marriage as a serious...

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