Syndication
Intermarriage and Identity: Who Is Gathered Around the Seder Table?
Ha’aretz’s U.S. correspondent Shmuel Rosner uses Passover as an opportunity to explain the contentious intercommunal debate over intermarriage to readers of the online magazine Slate.
Rosner, the rare Israeli who is genuinely fascinated by American Jewish life (sort of a 21st-century Israeli de Tocqueville), seems to be more sympathetic to the beleaguered pessimists, discussing at length the views of researcher Steven Cohen, who has established himself as a leading voice of gloom when it comes to the Jewish identities of the intermarried.
Lurking behind the debate over intermarriage, of course, are different ways of understanding Jewish identity: Some see choice as central to Jewish identity. Just as one chooses a marriage partner, one chooses whether or not to identify with Judaism, whether one has two Jewish parents or one Jewish parent (or even no Jewish parent). Adherents to this strain of thought, unsurprisingly, tend to be more optimistic about the possibility of successfully engaging the intermarried. Simply make Judaism a welcoming and attractive choice, and people will opt to identify as Jews. Indeed, some argue that intermarriage, rather than being a problem, represents an opportunity to increase Jewish numbers.
For others, the Jews are primarily (though not exclusively) understood as a community of putative common descent. Jewish identity is the result of an inheritance passed down by our ancestors from time immemorial. In this understanding, a heritage that belonged to only half of one’s ancestors tends (as a general rule, though certainly not in every case) to exert less of a hold on one’s loyalties and imagination. A high rate of intermarriage, therefore, is cause for concern about Jewish continuity.
In America, with its smorgasbord of spiritual choices, and where Jews are often considered a religious group, akin to Methodists or Muslims, the former model looms large in our self-understanding. In Israel, where Jewishness is defined as an ethno-national identity — and the notion of common descent is the tie that binds (however tenuously) secular and religious alike — the latter model holds sway.
My sympathies tend more toward the second view. That’s why I think Rosner hits the nail on the head when he writes:
Passover, more than any other Jewish holy day, is the one in which Jews celebrate not their religion but this strange concept of becoming a people. This idea, of Jewish people-hood—the historic fact that Jews, for generations, didn’t see themselves as just sharing their faith, but also their national fate—will be the one most challenged by the influx of people from other religions into the Jewish community.
Comments
Hayyim Nahman Bialik The poem , Levadi (Alone") goes on to introduce the Shekhinah, first, as a protecting, mothering bird, and ultimately, as a trembling, fearful fledgling Bialik writes: She has been driven away from every corner. Only one desolate small nook remains: The House of Study, where in deep shadow Hidden I share her pains. She feels as abandoned as he does. He lost his friends; she lost her children. They share their loneliness. Bialik draws on the mystical Jewish personification of God's love for His people in the image of the beautiful feminine aspect of the deity called the Shekhinah. Thus, the poet expresses his personal struggle with fear and loneliness. On another level, Bialik comments on the precarious position of the nation's losing its distinctive protection because of the abandonment of the House of Study. The poem rises to the universal plane also by evoking the trepidation one feels when the inner world and its certainties disintegrate.
The assimilation of the Jews in Diaspora is the second holocaust. What a shame. What a cowardly. What an escape from responsibility. What treason in themselves. What treason in their brothers that left them fewer, weaker in their struggle to survival. I DESPISE YOU.
I DESPISE THE JEWS THAT ARE ASSIMILATORS.
What are the reasons to the facts that Richard Feynman and Murray Gell-Mann have hostility to Judaism, Israel and to the fact that they, themselves, are Jews?
Quotations from the article "The Elvis Presley of Science". Book review by Yuval Ne'eman published in the Ha'aretz (October 8, 1999) "The Meaning of It All," by Richard Feynman, Perseus Press, 133 pages. " Feynman's Sunday school days apparently left him with a rather distorted picture of Judaism, and even after spending several days in the company of a group of rabbinical school students - described quite favorably in "You Must Be Joking, Mr. Feynman" - the achievements of 3,500 years of Judaism were lost on him. When I left Caltech for a week in October 1964 for the dedication of the Tel Aviv University campus, Feynman, Gell-Mann and I had dinner together and the subject of Israel and the Jews came up. "Why preserve this fossil?" Feynman asked me at the table, referring to the Jewish people. "Wouldn't it be better to speed up assimilation?" As I tried to list the many contributions Jews had made to humanity, including achievements in modern science, he cut me off. "Jews in science? Compare that with the Hungarians! Look what an impact they've had!" To which Gell-Mann responded: "Don't you know that all those Hungarians were Jews?" And apparently, he didn't."…. "I invited Feynman to visit Israel on many occasions, but he always turned me down. He seemed to have had this fear of over-identification with the Jewish people, although he never said as much. He went all over the world - but never set foot in the Jewish state. Once, though, I did see a different Feynman. We were at a physics conference in Rochester, New York in September 1967, three months after the Six-Day War, something shook him out of his customary neutrality. He spent the whole evening dispensing astute advice based on his analysis of the situation. He predicted, for example, that because the Arabs could not defeat us in an ordinary war, they would now concentrate mainly on terrorism, and Israel would do well to prepare itself