Intermarried Couples Can Still Build Jewishly Engaged Families

My husband is Episcopalian, but together we have created a committed Jewish family and stayed part of the Jewish community

By Jane Larkin for Tablet Magazine

When I was growing up in New Jersey, my family wasn’t particularly engaged in Jewish life. We weren’t ritually observant, and no one in our house read the Jewish press. But there was one thing I knew for sure: that intermarriage threatened the Jewish community. I don’t recall exactly how I knew this. Maybe I heard the disappointment in the voices of the adults in my family when they spoke about my uncle and cousins who had married outside the faith, or maybe it was the topic of a High Holiday sermon at our Reform synagogue. Whatever the source, the message was clear.

Nonetheless, during my teen years I mostly dated non-Jewish guys. It’s not that I made a conscious decision to defy my parents or my community; I just didn’t have many choices—I lived in a mostly non-Jewish town. When I went away to Syracuse University, which had a student body at the time that was 15 to 20 percent Jewish, my mother assumed I’d find a large pool of Jews to date. I didn’t.

Still, while most of my boyfriends were not Jewish, I never envisioned myself actually marrying a non-Jew. I knew in-marriage was important to my family, observant or not, and I assumed I eventually would marry another Jew. By the time I reached my mid-20s, though, I still had been seriously involved with just a few Jewish guys. So, when one of them proposed, I accepted. Given my dating history, I wasn’t certain I would get another opportunity to achieve what I perceived as the ultimate milestone: a Jewish marriage.

Choosing a partner because of his religion proved to be a poor basis for a sustainable relationship. After two years, our marriage fell apart, thankfully before there were any children. My husband was the right religion, but I wasn’t in love with him.

While my divorce was pending, I found love—this time, with a non-Jew. Falling in love with him forced me to think about my Jewishness and evaluate my feelings about the faith. Only when I was confronted with the possibility of intermarrying and all I thought that entailed—giving up my Jewish identity, and my future children not having a connection to the Jewish people—did I realize just how important Judaism was to me.

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