For a long time now, the way American Jews talk about intermarriage has served as one of the foundations of an ethno-national idea of "Judaism," or "Jewishness." There is nothing inherently racist about a person hoping to marry someone who shares their heritage; people want to build homes with those who know their practices, songs, stories, and jokes. But is "Jewish," unmodified, a single heritage? What do all Jews have in common? Anti-intermarriage discourse often slides into a realm that posits that all Jews, across all differences, carry some intrinsic, pure essence that must be protected from outside incursions.
This discourse around intermarriage usually elides two distinctions. One is between personal preference and institutional enforcement: one person hoping to marry within their tradition, versus a communal world that funds, measures, defines, and polices that practice. The second is between individual similarity and imagined racial continuity. Personally preferring a partner who shares your practices and commitments is different from believing Jews must marry Jews, regardless of their practices and commitments, to keep Jewish lineage intact. Blur them, and the conversation slides into the racial program the American Jewish institutional world has spent decades funding.
Defenders of this ethno-national program like to point out that plenty of minority groups marry within their own communities as a way to survive or maintain traditions. Jews have a wide variety of communities with vibrantly differing languages, customs, practices, and self-understandings. Individual Jews choosing to try to maintain their particular Judaism through marrying people who also subscribe to it is a legitimate choice. A national network of federations, seminaries and philanthropies that funds in-marriage, tracks its rate, and polices rabbis, students, and congregants who cross the line creates an entirely different valence than one of simple preference.
As early as 1967, the philosopher Emil Fackenheim declared a “614th commandment” forbidding Jews to hand Hitler posthumous victories, a principle that, as Jewish Currents has noted, came to be widely read as a ban on marrying non-Jews. In 1973, Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, then president of the American Jewish Congress, described the American Jew waking each morning with two worries: the news from Israel, and "Was my daughter sleeping with a goy on the college campus last night?" The twin commitments of Jewish nationalism, Zionism and the generational reproduction of American Jews, have been the core of Jewish institutional life for decades, often referred to collectively as "continuity." Fackenheim and Hertzberg were early voices in what the anthropologist Michal Kravel-Tovi calls Jewish biopolitics, in which "Jewish life" "depend[s] on the biological reproduction of individual Jews" and the Jewish population becomes "a target for scientific enumeration, social intervention, and modern forms of power." Jews were to be counted, managed and reproduced. Her clearest example is Birthright, whose success is measured in "the making of more Jews, of the right kind," including higher rates of in-marriage among its alumni.
The objectifying, misogynistic burden of biological reproduction, of course, falls upon women. As the historians Lila Corwin Berman, Kate Rosenblatt and Ronit Stahl have shown, the continuity project rested on the proposition “that women were meant to be vessels for the Jewish future, and that women’s wombs mattered more than women’s autonomy.” Pushing back against the idea that Jews, and particularly Jewish women, are obligated to reproduce themselves biologically in as "pure" a form as possible is an ongoing fight inside American Jewish institutions. Ari Brostoff and Noah Kulwin have described a Jewish philanthropic world that has spent years trying to "engineer reproductive behavior within the community."
Only recently did the Reform seminary, HUC-JIR, drop its rule that students in relationships with non-Jews could be expelled. Conservative seminaries like JTS and Ziegler School of Rabbinical Studies still hold to these rules. For non-Orthodox Jews, intermarriage is significantly more the norm than endogamy. Over the past few decades, many of my colleagues in the Reform rabbinate have come to accept officiating at weddings between Jews and non-Jews as a compromise they have to make to remain relevant. Many of them will still only do it if the couple first promises to raise a Jewish, and only Jewish, family. The promise is absurd on its face, and it makes a couple's celebration of their love under the chuppah dependent upon children who do not yet, and may never, exist. Further, as any parent will tell you, raising a child Jewishly, or with any other set of traditions, does not determine who that child will become. Our children are growing up in a world that is multifaith and multiethnic in every direction. Demanding a vow that is almost impossible to commit to as the price of entry taints one of the most beautiful moments in Jewish life with a rank commitment to anti-miscegenation. Many couples decide, in the end, that Jewish community has no place for them. I have heard this from couple after couple.
The second distinction, between similarity and continuity, matters just as much. The entirety of this enterprise avoids clearly defining what we mean when we say "Jewish." People can convert, of course, and for many in the institutional world conversion has served as the tidy suggested "solution" to the intermarriage crisis. Anyone who has spent time inside Jewish institutions knows how little it solves, particularly those who have converted. They are often met with suspicion, whispered about as not "really" Jewish, and alienated in ways both subtle and open. These experiences betray the unspoken belief that Jewishness is about biology.
Intermarried couples who raise their children as Jews meet the same suspicion. I have officiated many weddings between Jews and non-Jews and taught many of their children in Hebrew school. From my own childhood on, I have listened to people describe being "half" or "part" Jewish, I have listened to Jews dismiss other Jews on those same grounds, even if the non-Jewish parent converted, and as a rabbi I have sat with adults still struggling with who they are because of it. The Reform movement tried to address this by recognizing patrilineal descent. This change in many ways reinforced the logic of biological Judaism. For most institutions, most individuals, and most of the sociological studies that shape communal policy, the question has become one of blood, not halachah. Halachah does trace Jewishness through the mother, but it also holds the door open to anyone who converts, and the Talmud teaches that a convert is like a newborn child (Yevamot 22a).
Jewish Studies scholarship has absorbed many of the same assumptions. Gilah Kletenik and Rafael Rachel Neis have written about how Jewish Studies research fixes its attention on "the numbers of bodies that 'count' as Jewish," and they hear "the legacies of scientific racism" echoing in the very words we use: "intermarriage," "in-marriage," "out-marriage."
What, then, do Jews have in common that would lead us to favor marrying each other? If the answer is descent, a requirement to marry "a Jew" posits that I share more with a random Jewish stranger from the other side of the globe whose life is lived in a world almost entirely foreign to mine, than with a non-Jewish neighbor whose life looks so much like my own. Wanting to build a life with someone who shares your religious, cultural, ethical, and moral commitments is a matter of preferring certain similarities with a partner. The trouble starts when the requirement is a category of biology or birth, an imagined racial continuity.
The sociologists Michael Omi and Howard Winant note that nationalist thinking treats race as a metonym for "primordial peoplehood": in that frame, the two ideas stand in for each other. To make that notion the measure of who is "truly" Jewish is to lean on the same essentializing logic that sustains every other project of racial purity. It relies upon the assertion that there is an essential Jewish bond via biological descent (the ethno- in the common "ethno-religious" phrasing) that transcends the differences in our Judaism and links us as one unit across every age, place and culture. Defenders of peoplehood may say they mean shared history and culture, but the Jewish institutional world measures it through parentage, in-marriage rates, and who is allowed to participate in and benefit from various programs. Understood in that way, peoplehood is a racialized nationalist understanding of Jewishness, with little relationship to the actual lives Jews live.
Omi and Winant describe racialization as "the extension of racial meaning to a previously racially unclassified relationship, social practice, or group." That form of meaning has, in America, become attached to Jewishness and built into Jewish institutional life, a process Omi and Winant call a racial project: "an interpretation, representation, or explanation of racial identities and meanings, and an effort to organize and distribute resources (economic, political, cultural) along particular racial lines."
The "interpretation, representation, or explanation" is the imagined racialized continuity; the "effort to organize and distribute resources" is the institutional enforcement. The template is an American one, and it has been institutionally applied to Jews. Omi and Winant say a racial project becomes racist when it "creates or reproduces structures of domination based on racial significations and identities." Seminaries that expel students for whom they love, a rabbinical body that disciplines rabbis for officiating intermarriages, clergy who make a wedding conditional on a vow about unborn children, and constant racist policing of Jews of color's status are structures of domination in that sense. As Kletenik and Neis write, "Racism is discernible in the construction of an idea of 'Jewishness' as inherently distinct from and preferable to other groups."
Jews share texts we have argued over for centuries and practices we choose to take up, and we have always built Jewish life alongside non-Jews who join us, marry us, and bring their own traditions into our homes. This has led to many different Judaisms and Jewish communities all over the world, many of which have more in common with their non-Jewish neighbors than with Jews from other communities. I have stood under the chuppah with couples of all kinds, named their babies, and buried their parents. None of what binds us is in our blood. Eight centuries ago, a convert named Ovadiah asked Maimonides whether he could pray to the "God of our fathers." Maimonides told him he could, because Abraham is the father of everyone who follows in his ways. The institutionalized, enforced argument against intermarriage is an adoption of an American racial project, and it should be rejected, along with the imagined racial continuity it was built to protect. Intermarriage has enriched Judaism and Jewish communities wherever they are, and it will keep doing so.
