The number of Jewish people living in the U.S. has declined by 5 percent in the last decade, and I think it might be my fault. News of the decline comes from the second National Jewish Population Survey, released in October. According to the survey’s preliminary results (the full findings haven’t been released yet), there are 5.2 million Jews living in the U.S., down 300,000 from a decade ago.
Evidence of my personal complicity can be found in the confluence of two facts: (1) I am, by cruel accident of birth, not a Jew, and (2) I am in love with a nice Jewish girl, and she with me. What’s worse, we’re getting married.
Let me start by saying that it was not my intention to reduce the Jewish population of the United States. I didn’t even know she was Jewish at first. By the time the subject came up, the fix was in, the stars were crossed and I had to start thinking about how attached I am to Christmas trees. (This year we went without, though not owing to some religio-cultural negotiated settlement. I’m just lazy.)
But you can’t argue with the facts, and the fact is that children of mixed marriages are much less likely to identify themselves as Jews than the children of Jewish parents. Many mainstream Jewish organizations went into crisis mode 12 years ago, when the first National Jewish Population Survey found that a whopping 52 percent of Jewish people married, well, people like me. The startling statistic sparked a wave of hand-wringing and self-examination, and many Jewish leaders worried publicly about the survival of the Jewish people in the face of, well, people like me.
When my fiance told her family about me, there was a hiccup of concern–a flurry of phone calls to relatives about what their mischievous little girl was up to, a few clipped conversations with her about what it means to build a Jewish home–before I was welcomed with open, loving arms. But the fact remains that for all the reasons her family had to, if only for a moment, blanch at her choice–my impecunious professional position, my smoking habit, my adolescent run-ins with the law–they chose one over which I have absolutely no control.
It could have been worse. A survey of Jewish opinion conducted in 2000 found that, while most Jews accept the idea of intermarriage, more than two-thirds nevertheless believed that Jews have “an obligation to urge Jews to marry Jews,” and more than 40 percent saw intermarriage as a greater threat to Jewish life than anti-Semitism–that is, 4 out of 10 Jews would apparently feel better about the future and security of the Jewish people, all things being equal, if I were out throwing rocks at synagogues rather than falling in love with one of their own.
Rabbi Michael Laxmeter of the congregation B’nai Munah in Skokie is one of them. Because I am perplexed by the notion that rigid ethnic and religious rules ought to govern affairs of the heart, and find it essentially medieval that anyone would really believe that my ethnicity, and my ethnicity alone, actually matters, he graciously agreed to lay out the case against intermarriage for me.
“It dilutes the Jewish people,” he said. “There are wonderful people in every area of human life on this planet, and to stereotype someone by their identity is a terrible thing. But we’re terribly concerned about our continuity.”
But how, I asked him, can anybody who has read “Romeo and Juliet”–or seen “The Fox and the Hound,” for that matter–ever really oppose a relationship armed with such flimsy reasoning as the notion that people ought to stick with their own kind?
“I don’t know,” he said cheerfully, “that I would decide matters of Jewish law by Shakespeare.”
The good rabbi’s concern for “continuity” is, at bottom, a concern for–pardon the term, but it is, regrettably, apt–cultural and ethnic purity.
No one would argue that the seemingly inexorable dwindling of the American Jewish community is a good thing, but we have to ask ourselves whether it is, in fact, noble to preserve a culture by urging its young men and women to keep to their own kind.
There is something deeply xenophobic about encouraging people to take ethnicity into account when making major decisions about their lives. That becomes quite clear when you reverse the equation. A Baptist preacher, say, who says gentiles shouldn’t marry Jews because they are Jews is undoubtedly a bigot. What, then, is a rabbi who says Jews shouldn’t marry gentiles?
“That is really a tough question,” said Rabbi Laxmeter when I put it to him. “I don’t know that the Baptist would be an anti-Semite. It might just be his taste for endogamous [meaning in-group] marriage.”
But when you think about it, what’s the difference?
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Send e-mail for John Cook to jjcook@tribune.com.
