Intermarriage: Can Anything Be Done?

By Jack Wertheimer for Mosaic

The battle is over; or so we’re told. A half-century after the rate of intermarriage began its rapid ascent in the United States, reaching just under 50 percent by the late 1990s, many communal spokesmen appear to have resigned themselves to the inevitable.

Some speak in tones of sorrow and defeat. Encouraging endogamy, they say, has become a fool’s errand; few Jews are receptive to the message, and short of a wholesale retreat into the ghetto, no prophylactic measure will prevent them from marrying non-Jews. For others, the battle is over because it should be over. Not only, they say, are high rates of intermarriage inevitable in an open society, but they constitute glorious proof of just how fully Jews have been accepted in today’s America. The real threat, according to this view, emanates from those who stigmatize intermarried families as somehow deficient; with a less judgmental and more hospitable attitude on the part of communal institutions, many more intermarried families would be casting their lot with the Jewish people.1

To anyone familiar with Jewish history, these views must sound novel in the extreme. For Jews, after all, intermarriage has been a taboo since antiquity. First enshrined in biblical texts prohibiting Israelites from marrying into the surrounding nations, the ban was later expanded in the rabbinic period to encompass all non-Jews. Nor, contrary to the fevered imaginings of anti-Semites, are Jewish endogamy norms the product of clannishness or misanthropy. Rather, they were introduced as a means of insuring Judaism’s transmission—by born Jews as well as by the converts to whom Judaism has almost always been open—from one generation to the next.

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