I was raised a white-boy Mormon in Salt Lake City in the 1960s. It was a good place to grow up, except that everybody looked like me, and almost everybody practiced the same religion. The only “exotic” person I knew was my best friend in junior high, Barney Josephson. He was Jewish, but he stood out only because he was six feet tall at age 13.
When I graduated from high school, I joined the Air Force. It turned out to be a good idea because, (a) I met about every example of humankind available, and (b) I was dispatched to Madrid for a two-year tour.
During my second summer there, I met a nice Jewish girl from Philadelphia named Diane who’d come to study Spanish literature at the University of Madrid. She was petite, smart and pretty. We soon began dating on a regular basis.
It seemed like kismet, because for more than a year I’d immersed myself in Judaica. It started with Exodus and progressed to everything from Andre Schwarz-Bart to Rabbi Zadok of Lublin. I was thinking about a Reform conversion because it embraced only one dogma, “… the Lord is our God, the Lord is One.” I could question and argue just about anything, and nobody was going to condemn me to hell.
We fell in love and made an “understanding” that was to become official when we got back to the United States. We spent a wonderful, romantic 10 months together before she returned to Philly. I was discharged at a base in South Jersey where she met me. Diane looked gorgeous and I thought, life is good. We drove to her parents’ home in suburban Philadelphia, where I was to spend two weeks getting to know her family and they me. *Kumbaya.
The house was a large colonial. Diane’s mother, an attractive middle-aged woman, met us at the door. She spoke the perfunctory we’ve-heard-so-much-about-you hooey before proceeding to the family room, where Diane’s father sat watching the moon landing on television. He shook my hand without rising while giving me the glare a cobra would give an intruding mongoose. It went downhill from there.
As I met other kinfolk and neighbors, I began to feel like lobster bisque at a Seder. It struck me as anti-goyism and it hurt. Their reaction to me made some sense, given that Christians had not acted in a very Christian way toward Jews over the centuries. Even so, I didn’t like being in the despised minority, and it taught me some empathy for those who are scorned because of their race or ethnicity.
Diane assured me that, with time, her parents would accept me and I believed her until the day before I went home. My prospective mother-in-law asked Diane and me to have a sit-down. The get-together ended with her mom begging us, through tears and sobs, not to marry, because nothing good could come of it. I was nice, but I wasn’t a Jew, and the cultural gap was impassable.
I was shaken. Discomfort with our difference in faiths was one thing, but her parents were having a nervous breakdown because their daughter wanted to marry me. I went from bemusement to humiliation to anger.
Then, when I got home, I suffered whiplash. My parents were unhappy that I was marrying outside the faith, even though they knew I’d left it years before. They warned me, “Those Jews are all about money” and other blather. It was rank antisemitism, and I was appalled.
Things got better with my intended in-laws when I announced I had begun the conversion process in a Conservative synagogue. Then Diane came to Salt Lake City at Christmas. Ma and Pa amazed me by being perfect hosts. And then there was Grandpa. He was a scholar/theologian who loved a good argument and my intended gave him several. He fell in love with her and that was that. My grandsire’s word was law in my family.
We married and settled in Philadelphia, but perhaps my in-laws were psychic, because after 12 years, our marriage ended. The reasons had nothing to do with religion. I left my wife and daughter for an old flame — a shiksa, which makes me a shmuck.
I remain a Jew — I’m not religious, but it’s who I am. I married another Yidishe Meydl and settled in New York City.
My daughter married a Jew. I’m happy for her, but even if she’d brought home a Baptist, a Catholic or even a Mormon, I wouldn’t have cared. Religion didn’t matter, her happiness did.
Diane remarried, too, this time to a Scotch-Irish Protestant fellow and settled in Charlotte, N.C., not exactly a hotbed of Judaica. Who nu?
John Purchase is a freelance writer living in New York City’s Greenwich Village.
The Forward welcomes reader comments in order to promote thoughtful discussion on issues of importance to the Jewish community. In the interest of maintaining a civil forum, the Forward requires that all commenters be appropriately respectful toward our writers, other commenters and the subjects of the articles. Vigorous debate and reasoned critique are welcome; name-calling and personal invective are not. While we generally do not seek to edit or actively moderate comments, the Forward reserves the right to remove comments for any reason.
To post a comment, click to login:
Copyright © 2012, Forward Association, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
John Purchase seems to think that "Jewish" is "religion". Many Jews in America (born as Jews) seem to think so as well. There is not a clue in this whole article that he understands the peoplehood aspect of the Jewish experience. The Jews are an ancient people. Somehow, this simple fact of history has been forgotten in post-assimilation America.
Actually, John, there are 5 or 6 synagogues in Charlotte. When I moved to Charlottesville, VA, in the mid-1970s, there was only 1 synagogue, but it was getting ready to celebrate its centennial!
We don't think of the South as having much of a Jewish prescence, but when I first went to Richmond, VA, in 1980, I was pleasantly surprised to find at least a half-dozen large congregations while there were only about 3 or 4 in the Arlington-Alexandria area. Now we have far more shuls in Northern Virginia, including a Lubovicher community and several chavurot.
Best to you and all your mishpucha,
Sandi Steinberg Arlington, VA
Interesting story. It doesn't surprise me that Mr Purchase's first wife married out the second time around. My feeling is that most Jews who are not particularly observant, may not marry "out" based upon deference to their parents. Divorce and remarrying often allows for individuation from the parents' spell. There is a sense of liberation which allows for marrying someone regardless of that person's background. This may not please those who are trying to stop intermarriage at all costs but so it goes.
Mr. Purchase:
Leaving your wife and daughter for anyone, Jewish or otherwise, is the issue.
John Purchase, you say you remain a Jew but are not religious? Are you also a Mormon but not religious in the company of Mormons?
Be courageous and stick to a belief. Religion does matter, it is the basis of human happiness.
Seconding Sandi, I would like to point out that Charlotte is, comparatively speaking, a hotbed of Judaica, at least in North Carolina. In addition to its synagogues and day school, it is home to the only kosher restaurant and (functioning) kosher supermarket in the state. For good reasons, it was recently spotlighted in Hadassah magazine's Jewish Travel section.
"The Jews are an ancient people" is right as far as it goes - but the founder of that ancient people, Abraham, was born of non-Jewish parents. The reason he became father of a new people was because of belief. Belief is also why Paul, born a Jew, became father of the Christian religion. The door in and out of Judaism is never and has never been a closed one.
What a pile of hooey...Mr.Purchase, you don't convert because you want to marry a Jewish woman, you convert because you crave to be a Jew, it's something that drives you deep in your soul...You take the fact that your Daughter married a Jewish guy as a "whatever" kind of situation..Your daughter has defied an out of control assimilation rate..You should be very proud of her, as for your ex-wife, she sounds like she is in some serious need of professional help in regards to the choices she is making, and why she's making them....ps...Good for you for marrying in the faith also, hope you don't run into any more old flames....
thank you for sharing, Mr. Purchase. although i am a Jew-by-birth, i've always been fascinated by the topic of conversion and those who choose to undergo the path to Judaism in spite of its overwhelming and bumpy road. but i must admit that i feel a sense of awkwardness everytime i hear stories about individuals whose conversion stems from the Jewish parents' uneasiness and once they decide to go through with it, the parents all the sudden do a 180 and become warm and welcoming. this process is not something that can be decided so easily, and parents who utilize pressure to convert are only doing a disservice. this doesn't mean that it shouldn't be discussed, but it does mean that sometimes parents need to take s step back and realize that these things take time and shouldn't be hurried just to have a halachically Jewish wedding. besides, couples can always re-new their vows post-conversion. i hope to read more of your stories at a later date.