Still Jewish: A History of Women and Intermarriage in America

Introduction

1 Introduction I was born Jewish and I’ll die Jewish. I will always just be plain Jewish. —Intermarried Jewish Woman (2001) Hannah Noble met her husband in medical school. He moved in with her on their second date, and they named their future children. Though he was Methodist, Hannah, raised as a secular Jew, knew she wanted to marry him and did not think that their different backgrounds would generate problems: “I didn’t really think about having a Jewish life back then.” However, they discussed religion during their engagement; her betrothed refused to raise his children as atheists and Hannah refused to raise them as anything but Jews. As a result, what had been a non-issue when they first met and later wed in 1992 became a new way of life: “I’m much more Jewish, now . . . than I was then. . . . My parents think I’m a religious fanatic now because I say the prayers on Friday night.”1 Hannah ’s comment about her parents illustrates a common phenomenon in the recent history of Jewish women, namely, that daughters become more observant than their parents. The couple joined the Jewish Community Center, researched which temple to join, and began having Shabbat dinners with friends. Hannah’s story is not unique. This book is the first history of American Jewish women who intermarried during the twentieth century.2 The history of intermarriage has largely been the history of men, written by men about men. This trend is not to say that women did not intermarry—for most certainly they did— but the vast majority of work has neglected to consider gender. The few studies that mentioned women did so only cursorily. They pointed out that fewer Jewish women intermarried compared to Jewish men, and that 2 Introduction the gender gap decreased late in the century. In this book I seek to answer three main questions: What did intermarriage mean to and for women who were Jewish at the time they married Gentile men?3 In what ways did Jewish women shed or retain their ethnic and religious heritage despite marrying “out”? And how was intermarriage portrayed by the mass media and religious activists? This endeavor strives to understand how women’s lives changed over time according to their exogamous marriage choices and whether they further integrated into non-Jewish society or contributed to Jewish continuity by self-identifying as Jews and raising Jewish children. In this book I discern how assimilation or transformation has occurred among Jewish women by “entering” their homes to assess the influence of intermarriage on their lives. By looking at the intersection of intermarriage and gender across the twentieth century, I describe the lives of Jewish women who intermarried by taking into account historical factors. To date, Jewish-Gentile intermarriage has been a topic studied largely by sociologists, whose scholarship brought the topic of intermarriage out of the family closet and into public discourse. My analysis uses this body of work as evidence while integrating the variable of change over approximately one hundred years to contextualize the historical significance of several dozen intermarried Jewish women. Although the issue of intermarriage has intrigued scholars and concerned the Jewish community nearly since permanent Jewish settlers arrived on America’s shores in 1654, sociologists became fascinated by the topic only in the twentieth century.4 Melting pot observers generated a plethora of social science research about intermarriage as a barometer of assimilation. Prior to 1930, the only large-scale study of American intermarriage was by Julius Drachsler in New York City, covering the years from 1908 to 1912. Drachsler wrote, “The subtle interplay in mixed marriages of different types of mind and culture has thus far almost completely eluded the observation of the scientific student.5 Scholars devoted unprecedented attention to marriages between different groups of people beginning in the 1930s, following the great “wave” of immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe, and interest continued during the 1940s and 1950s. Intermarriage studies focused on rates and factors leading to marriage between groups, characteristics of both intermarriage and those who intermarried, and marital adjustments and outcomes. Many of the studies incorporated rhetoric concerned with biological and cultural mixing between groups, illustrating the social preoccupation with assimilation Introduction 3 and amalgamation.6 Some scholars in the 1940s and 1950s advanced a “triple melting pot” hypothesis that intermarriage occurred across ethnic lines more often than across religious ones...