-- Michael Asheri, 1983, p. 332



"Two of the most overworked folk tales that are firmly believed
by Jews are that the overwhelmingy majority of Jewish
intermarriages involved non-Jewish females and Jewish males;
and that most of these non-Jewish females marry Jewish males
in order to better their lot socially and economically."
-- Rabbi David Max Eichhorn, 1974, p. 29

       While Adolf Hitler failed to destroy the Jews, many these days fear that they are in danger of accomplishing their own destruction via a younger generation's choice of extinction. Jews have always resisted surrendering their identity chauvinism to go the way of French-Americans, Italian-Americans, Greek-Americans and so many others have already done in completely assimilating into American society decades earlier. The American Jewish community -- more intensely than any other people -- has always resisted that dreaded curse: assimilation. "The hydra-headed monster of assimilation takes many forms," says Richard Gordis, "the 'most menacing' of which is intermarriage." [SILBERMAN, p. 285] "What centuries of persecution have been powerless to do," wrote Lewis S. Benjamin in 1907, "has been efficient in a score of years by friendly intercourse." [SILBERMAN, p. 286] "We have survived," says Alan Dershowitz, "-- sometimes by the skin of our teeth -- millennia of rape attempts against the Jewish body and soul by villains and monsters of every description. Efforts to convert us, assimilate us, and exterminate us by the sword have taken an enormous toll, but in the end they have failed. Now the dangers are more subtle: willing seduction, voluntary assimilation, deliberate abdication." [DERSHOWITZ, p. 354]  "On the one end of spectrum," remarks Henry Feingold, "is the danger of absorption into a benevolent society; on the other is the possibility of physical destruction ... It seems like both dangers require a conscious will to overcome. That may be the secret of Jewish survival." [FEINGOLD, p. 67]

      Intermarriage (marrying non-Jews), notes Egon Mayer, has always been "the cardinal social offense that an individual Jew can commit against his family and community." [SCHNEIDER, p. 334] "There are two main taboos laid upon the Jewish people," wrote Ann Roiphe in 1981, "The first and most important taboo is not to leave the tribe ... The taboo against intermarriage is really only an extension in practical matters of the first taboo. If you marry a stranger it will lead to your eventually leaving the tribe, and if you yourself do not, then your children and grandchildren will and so the body of Jewry will be depleted. Each loss is grieved and each time someone breaks the taboo the ranks close tighter behind him. They don't say (not relatives, friends or friends of relatives) good luck, Godspeed, they vilify and despise." [ROIPHE, 1981, p. 197]

    Kitty Dukakis, the wife of Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis, remembered being taken to the synagogue as a child by her grandmother:

     "I remember, too, being the subject of discussion among the

     mezzanine denizens. The ladies looked me over and mumbled, under

     their breath, 'shiksa.' I was about four and a half when I heard that

     term for the first time: It is Yiddish and means a non-Jewish girl.

     At the very word, my grandmother would turn excitedly and shush

     her friends. She'd purse her lips, look over to the side, and pretend

     to spit, saying something like 'p-tui, p-tui!' I learned, later, she was

     spitting to ward off the 'keenahori,' the evil eye. 'It's not true,' my

     grandmother cried vehemently. 'She's not a shiksa. She's Jewish on

     both sides!' My grandmother never knew my mother was only

     half-Jewish and that my sister and I had gentile blood. I think it

     would have killed her." [DUKAKIS, K., 1990, p. 55]

     Vickie Bane notes the case of famous radio talk show host "Dr. Laura" Schlessinger (whose father was Jewish, but mother not):

     "Laura told Ethnic Newswatch that their Jewish neighbors on Long Island
     were very 'unaccepting' of her mother because 'she was a shiksa [a non-Jewish
     woman] and because she was gorgeous ... A lot of problems came from the
     Jewish women. I got into fistfights because they called my mother a dirty
     refugee." [BANE, V., 1999, p. 25]

Upon public announcement of the impending marriage between non-Jewish actress Debbie Reynolds and Jewish pop singer Eddie Fisher, Reynolds notes in the autobiography that:

"I also received a couple of hundred fan letters. Among them was a small, ordinary-looiking, white envelope with my name and address scrawled across the bottom. Inside, in the same blotchy-looking chicken-scratch was a note: 'Dear Deb. Thought you should know Eddies Father does NOT approve of him marrying a Gentile. Doesn't want him to be HURT. What YOU -- if you did? Does your Mother and Father want a half-Jew grandchild?' No signature, naturally. It was postmarked Hollywood, August 18. It was the first of many." [REYNOLDS, D., 1988, p. 104]

    In Peru, Israeli Elaine Karp is married to a popular 2001 presidential candidate, Alejandro Toledo. But her relations with the local Jewish community was strained, noted the Jewish Chronicle, "partly because of her high profile marriage to a non-Jew ... Her mixed marriage and her leftist views have caused some rejection." [PERELMAN, M., 4-20-01]

    In 1982, Earl Shorris noted the perspective of his Uncle Phillip about his son dating non-Jews:

    "When [my Uncle Phillip's] son, then a medical student, brought home a Gentile
      girl to meet his parents, Phillip is said to have addressed the boy as Tom, a
      subtle pun on a Hebrew word for wrong thinking. The young woman, confused
      at hearing her beau called by an unfamiliar name, asked my uncle, Do you always
      call him Tom? Only when he's with you." [SHORRIS, E., 1982, p. 53]

     Jews, writes Inge Lederer Gibel, "are desperately concerned with the ever-rising rate of intermarriage ... Even Jewish secularists ... often resist or withhold their approval when a child announces the intention to 'marry out.'" [GIBEL, p. 53-54] This situation inevitably leads to the standard Jewish 'universalist/particularist' contradiction and the hypocrisy of preaching one world view while practicing another. Gibel notes that

        "The bulk of Jewry [worries about] the high rate of intermarriage, and

         the dichotomy of teaching ones' children about universal values and the

         kinship of the human family while in the next breath saying,  'But you

         mustn't marry [a non-Jew]." [GIBEL, p. 54]

      Even Gibel, who decries Jewish racism and married a Black man, told her son, as she "told his sister: I don't care who you marry, what color, what nationality, as long as she is a good human being and willing to make a commitment to a Jewish home." [GIBEL, p. 65]

     A 1990 survey of the American Jewish community set off a blaze of Jewish worry and hysteria. 52% of all marriages by Jews in America today, the study revealed, were to non-Jews. (Some scholars have argued a more realistic figure is 40%, which is still -- for most Jews -- intolerably high). "This (52%) number," says J. J. Goldberg, "electrified Jewry from coast to coast. Within weeks it would spread by word of mouth and through newspaper headlines, impassioned sermons, and anguished editorials." [GOLDSTEIN, p. 66]

     Many talk about Jews marrying non-Jews as if it was the reincarnation of the Nazi gas chambers. "The intermarriage process will take everything Jewish in its wake," declared Rabbi Pincher Stolper, the Executive Vice President of the Orthodox Union, "it will grow until it engulfs the entire community. It is another Holocaust." [GOLDBERG, p. 66]  "Intermarriage," says Rabbi Sol Roth, "is a holocaust of our own making." [SILBERMAN, p. 286] "We will destroy ourselves," worried Rabbi Morris Shapiro, "not through the gas chambers but the love chambers." [RITTENBERG, p. 8] "There are no barking dogs and no Zyklon-B gas," declared Rabbi Ephraim Buchwald, founder of the National Jewish Outreach Program, "... but make no mistake: this is a spiritual Holocaust." [TOBIN, G., 1999, p. 1] In England, where Jews fight their own intermarriage battle, the United Synagogue Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks "reportedly said that intermarriage could complete the work of annihilation attempted by Hitler." [BAADEN, p. 7]  Paul Cowan recalls what his non-Jewish wife faced when they visited Israel: "Israelis and Jewish-American tourists accused her completing Hitler's work by marrying a Jew." [COWAN, P., 1987, p. 7] ("When I see those direct-mail envelopes screaming 'Another Holocaust ... here in America,'" says Zev Schwebel, "and then find inside an appeal for money to fight the 'holocaust' of intermarriage, it makes my blood boil. This is an obscenity ... How dare they equate the horror of a Nazi with a couple that intermarry? This sort of talk is morally reprehensible." [HALBERSTAM, p. 130] )

      Roberta Farber called the large number of young Jews desiring to marry out of the Jewish community "devastating," suggested proposals be enacted to "thwart" it, and wondered how best to "retard" intermarriage." [FARBER, p. 14, 20] Stephen Whitfield notes that the rise in Jewish intermarriage "has been so dramatic that panic buttons have been pressed." [WHITFIELD, American, p. 19] Emma Klein suggests "communal" outreach programs to pull wayfaring Jews by birth back into the fold to "weather the threat of intermarriage." [KLEIN, p. 3] Norman Cantor bemoans "the racial suicide of a runaway rate of intermarriage." [CANTOR, p. 434] Michael Wechsler says that it has reached "alarming proportions." [WECHSLER, p. 275]

      "The current intermarriage scare," wrote J. J. Goldberg in 1996,"is having a subtle effect on the balance of power in Jewish life. It is putting liberals on the defensive, by raising doubts about the very idea of Jewish integration in an open society. Jewish institutions are devoting a growing share of their resources to shore up the Jewish community from within, and are backing away from their traditional role of trying to better American society ... Simply to say aloud that Jews should fight for the rights of all people -- once a universal view -- now invites public attack." [GOLDBERG, p. 64]  "The Jewish community is hysterical about Jews marrying non-Jews," noted Gary Tobin in 1999, "The language of tragedy and despair pervades analysis and discussion of what is called the 'intermarriage crisis' in America today. Denominations within Judaism have passed bellicose resolutions calling for prevention of intermarriage; and respected scholars, rabbinic leaders, and popular culture figures in Jewish life consistently liken intermarriage to disease, war, and genocide." [TOBIN, G., 1999, p. 1]

      "Part of me," says scholar Steven M. Cohen, the chief harbinger of the 52% intermarriage figure, "[sees] my friends who are intermarried and celebrating Christmas as renegades, as heretics, as a traitor of sorts, as missing a very important part of Judaism -- and I pity them." [COHEN, Discussion, p. 19] "Intermarriage is a violation of Jewish law," argued Blu Greenberg in a (1997 issue of the left-wing) Tikkun magazine roundtable discussion about the subject, "It's an abrogation of the covenantal concept of how one enters the Jewish community and peoplehood." [FIRESTONE, TIKKUN, p. 37]

    What other ethnic group in America could continuously, very publicly herald itself in such a way, with no fears of vehement criticism of its motivational core: naked racism? Any "white" group with a similar agenda is categorically deemed as ideological descendents of Nazi fascism. African-American groups with out-group marriage prohibitions are seen as Black versions of the Ku Klux Klan. But Jewry consistently resists confronting its own intrinsic racism in this matter. The Jewish Chosen People concept, by religious Jews or atheist Jews, is blurred, vaguely alluded to, as in this observation by Jewish author Gary Tobin:

     "Many Jews may not know much about Judaism, but we do know

     that we are somehow different because we are Jews -- whatever that

     means. And we know that other Jews are somehow connected to

     us." [TOBIN, G., 1999, p. 3]

     In the face of all the myths about the Jewish community's interethnic tolerance for other communities, Maurice Lamm's 1980 volume, The Jewish Way in Love and Marriage (Harper and Row, publishers) is based on Jewish religious law and advises the following:

      "Permit no interdating -- not once, not even in a group ... Make your

      child positively and absolutely aware of your horror at the prospect ...

      Do not attend wedding receptions or receptions of intermarried

      friends ... You must not accept a mixed marriage at all ... Pull out

      every stop ... Of course it is heartbreaking to be severe with your

      own child, but not melt ... Interfaith-marriage is treason against

      the Jewish people, its Bible, its history, and its laws." [LAMM, p. 63-64]

      In a section entitled "The Rights of the Intermarried," Lamm notes that a non-Jewish marriage partner may not be buried in a Jewish cemetery, nor may an unconverted child of a non-Jewish woman. [LAMM, p. 54]  In the case of homosexuality, "the Halakhah decrees that the lesbian is not punished with death as the male homosexual would be, and is permitted to marry a priest. However, the transgression does warrant a disciplinary punishment -- flagellation." [LAMM, p. 67]

     (Despite these traditional perspectives about same sex love, Jewish homosexual Lev Raphael's views about marriage, in his youth, to non-Jews were kosher. "Beverly and I did not get married," he writes, "I knew more and more clearly that I could not marry a non-Jew, no matter how much I loved her. What pushed me over the edge? Imagining Christmas, so profoundly a part of Beverly's life, in 'our' house. I couldn't do it, nor could I ask her to give it up. I couldn't confuse myself or any children we might have. I wanted a Jewish home. No -- it wasn't that affirmative. I realized I couldn't have a non-Jewish home; that was as far as I got, and it meant much more to me than my subterranean attraction to men ... I wished my brother hadn't taken something away from the family by marrying a non-Jew." [RAPHAEL, L., 1996, p. 1213]

     Paul Cowan recalls a non-Jewish girlfriend he once had (he did marry a woman who converted to Judaism):

     "A few weeks after I got back from Israel, I invited my girlfriend, Beth, a
     Smith undergraduate, an Episcopalian-born poet from suburban
     Connecticut, whose literary ideas had influenced me, to spend time
     at my family's house on Martha's Vineyard. Ever since I had returned
     to America, I'd been toying with the idea of retaining the name Saul
     Cohen, since I thought that act would allow me to feel the same
     clear sense of my own identity as I had in Israel. It was a whimsical
     notion, of course, since it would plainly wound my father [who changed
     his name from Cohen] far more deeply than it would satisfy me. In
     fact, Beth was the only person to whom I ever mentioned the fantasy.
     Was I testing her? Probing for her innermost feeling about Jews?
     Probably. They came, in a rush, when she rubbed her hands in a
     Shylock-like gesture and said, 'Saul Cohen. That's not you. You
     don't want to go back to the ghetto.' It seemed like a flash of bigotry,
     and it bothered me so much that I never dated her again. When we
     discussed the episode, years later, she remembered it as vividly as
     I did. She had been sure that Iw as abandoning my identity as an
     American for a romantic illusion. The illusion might not have been
     so threatening if it had included her. But that night at supper my
     sister Holly had glanced toward Beth, then turned toward me and
     said, 'I feel proud to be a Jew. Don't you?' I nodded, Beth recalls.
     Then, later, when I tolkd Beth I was thinking of changing my name,
     she began to feel so excluded from my family's -- and my -- inner
     core that she went outside and wept. For years I remembered her
     as a latent anti-Semite. She remembered me as one of the chosen
     people, who secretly believed that everyonse else was inferior."
     [COWAN, P., 1982, p. 113]
    
     "I'm horrified by the attitude of so many Jews toward intermarriage," complained John-Paul Flintoff from Great Britain in 1998, "It's not just in Israel. You come across the same thing in Israel. Yes, my wife is Jewish." [FLINTOFF, J., 1--14-98]

    "Among the most vehemently opposed to the prospect of intermarriage," says Lena Romanoff, who surveyed over 500 members of a 'Jewish Converts Network,' "some [Jewish] parents are initially inclined to go to any lengths to end the relationship. Through outbursts, threats, and pleadings, the first stage in the sabotage plan is directed at the son or daughter. When that fails, and it usually does, discouragement is aimed at the non-Jewish partner through displays of indifference, coldness, or downright hostility." [ROMANOFF, p.81]

     Social worker Edwin Freedland noted in 1982 that:

       "When some Jewish parents realize that they might have a non-Jewish in-

       law the reactions can be severe. I have seen Jewish mothers threaten

       suicide and Jewish fathers go into severe states of depression. I have of

       threats to cut children off emotionally and financially and to get the child

       kicked out of medical school! I have witnessed harassment in the form

       of daily letters or phone calls. I have seen parents resort to arguing the

       Jewish partner out of the potential marriage, and I have seen the effort

       made with the non-Jewish partner. Whatever form the reaction takes,

       however, the rationale is usually phrased in terms of, or accompanied

       by comments on, the survival of the Jewish people. 'How can you do

       this to us?' is usually mixed with 'Remember the Holocaust.'"

       [FREEDLAND, p. 509]

     Alan Adelson's book about the radical left-wing Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) notes that "one Jewish SDSer's parents took their son's emergence as a communist fairly placidly, but when he told them he was dating a Catholic girl, his mother gravely informed him: 'Son, you're killing us slowly.'" [ADELSON, p. 135]

     A 1985 survey of American Jewry revealed that 43% of Jewish fathers and 50% of Jewish mothers were opposed to Jews dating non-Jews. Comparatively, only 16% of Christian fathers and 19% of Christian mothers opposed interdating. 59% of Jewish fathers and 62% of Jewish mothers opposed Jewish marriage to non-Jews, while only 29% of Christian fathers and 33% of Christian mothers opposed Christian marriages to non-Christians. [FORSTER, p. 69] Another study found that while 80% of the parents of non-Jewish spouses of Jews had positive attitudes about Jewish people, only a quarter of the Jewish parents of a child married to a non-Jew had positive attitudes towards Gentiles. [FORSTER, p. 110] What group of people seem to be narrow-minded bigots here? Why is this aspect of the "champions of liberalism" and "fighters against intolerance" never highlighted?

        Jewish isolationism of course has deep and ancient roots, and even in America Jewish fears of, and hostility to, intermarriage are not new. In 1912, one survey noted that only seven of 100 rabbis surveyed in America had ever performed a mixed marriage. A 1909 resolution of the Central Council of American Rabbis declared that "mixed marriages are contrary to the tradition of the Jewish religion and should be discouraged by the American rabbinate." As late as the 1970s, even among Reform (generally considered to be a very liberal branch of Judaism) rabbis, "virtually all" of them opposed mixed marriages on principle and a majority refused to officiate such weddings. [MACDONALD, p. 98]  "Most Jewish parents want their children to maintain Jewish contacts," wrote Albert Gordon in 1959, "They do not favor the idea of intermarriage, primarily because it is their desire to perpetuate the Jewish people and the 'religion of their father,' however they may define that religion ... Intensification of efforts to counter this situation, which Jews must regard as critical, must therefore occupy the most prominent place among the concerns of American Jews." [GORDON, A., p. 245]

     While for decades in American popular society a parent's resistance to his or her child marrying someone of another race or religious faith has been the bottom line gauge of a bigot,  "the battle against intermarriage," said Arthur Hertzberg in 1964, "... is conducted among Jews more bitterly and with relatively more success than any other group in America. It makes no difference whether Jews believe or do not believe in any version of the Jewish tradition; they battle with equal fervor against the threat of intermarriage of their children. Certainly one would be shocked to discover non-believers of Catholic or Protestant extraction fighting comparably with their own children." [HERTZBERG, p. 291]

     In 1999, an American Jewish Congress-sponsored reprint article quoted an excerpt from a letter of a post-World War II era Jewish woman in Poland who cut off her relationship with the non-Jewish man she loved. Why? "My beloved, my darling," she wrote, "my dearest! What do you know about me? ... You will never be able to understand me, or the sufferings of my [Jewish] nation. And now I'll tell you everything. I'll tell you the most important thing: I am Jewish. I am not for you. You are not for me." [KOZMINSKA-FREJLAK, p. 12]

       In 1972, Rabbi Louis Bernstein noted the "frightening increase in intermarriage" and the Rabbinical Council of America set up a National Commission on Jewish Survival to fight it. [COX, p. 185] In 1977 Elihu Bergman, the Assistant Director of the Harvard Center for Population Studies, started seeing the dam leaking and worried that "a disaster is in the making." [SILBERMAN, p. 275] In 1987 a New York-area Conservative Judaism Rabbi Association passed a resolution banning rabbis who perform intermarriages. "Any rabbi who officiates [at an intermarriage] is approving it. It will destroy the character, the uniqueness of the Jewish people, which we are obligated to perpetuate." [RITTBERG, p. 8] Still in June of 1997, Rabbi Eric Yoffie, described as "a, if not the, leading spokesperson for Reform Judaism"  (the most liberal strand of formal Jewish faith) and head of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, said: "I do not perform interfaith marriages. I personally do not believe that rabbis should marry Jews and non-Jews." [SHANKS, p. 47] (Yoffie, by the way, rose to power in the ranks of the Association of Reform Zionists of America). "No Judaism, halikhic or otherwise," said Rabbi Jonathan Sacks in 1993, "sanctions marriage between Jews and non Jews without threatening Jewish continuity at its foundations. Such, however, is the rate of intermarriage in highly acculturated Jewish communities that exclusion of the outmarried can equally be perceived as a demographic disaster." [SACKS, J., p. 160-161]

     This opinion is an ancient one. Centuries before Christ, "the principle of the Jewish master race, founded upon the myth of racial purity," notes Old Testament scholar John Allegro, "was being jeopardized by intermarriage on an increasing scale." [Allegro, p. 52] In the Torah/Old Testament, Nehemiah even declared that

     "I saw the Jews who had married women of Ashdod, Ammon, and

     Moab; and half of their children spoke the language of Ashdod, and

     they could not speak their own language. And I contended with them

     and cursed them and beat some of them and pulled out their hair...

     Shall we then listen to you and do all this great evil and act

     treacherously against our God by marrying foreign women?"

     [NEHEMIAH 13:23-27; in Allegro, p. 52]

     In Jewish tradition, notes Dan Rottenberg, even among Jews,

     "there were complex rules regarding who could marry whom, for the groups
     constituted a distinct social pecking order, as follows, starting at the top:

     (1) Kohanim (priests) -- male descendants of Aaron, who was a brother of Moses
          and a descendant of Levi.
     (2) Levites -- other male descendants of Levi, who served as assistants to the
          Kohanim.
     (3) Israelites -- all other Jews of unblemished heritage (that is, descendants of
          Jacob who had not intermarried with non-Jews).
     (4) Halalim -- offspring of some forbidden marriages entered into by priests.
     (5) Gerim -- converts to Judaism.
     (6) Harurim -- freed slaves.
     (7) Mamzerim -- bastards.
     (8) Netinim -- descendants of the Gibbeonites, who were circumcised at the time
          of Joshua (1200 BC?) and were not regarded as full Jews because their
          conversion was effected by trickery.
    (9) Shetukim -- persons unable to identify their father.
    (10) Persons unable to identify either their father or their mother.

     Not included in this list were gentiles and slaves, who had no legal status at all
     in Jewish law at the time, since Jewish law applied only to Jews." [ROTTENBERG,
     D., 1977, p. 60]

        "Being Jewish," as we have so often seen, has always been packed with a range of contradictions and paradoxes; the subject of intermarriage -- so deeply entwined in the strange genetic, ethnic, and nationalist maze of "Jewish identity" -- is no different. While Jewish mythology traditionally makes implicit claims of a direct genetic lineage to the Israelite patriarch Abraham, and various rabbis throughout the centuries have legislated against marrying non-Jews, a quick scan of ancient Jewish history reveals that a number of preeminent Israelite historical characters had married out of the community.

      The original patriarch himself, Abraham, cohabitated with Hagar, an Egyptian; Joseph married Asenath, an Egyptian; Moses married Zipporah, a Midianite; King David's mother was a Moabite as was his great grandmother, Ruth; and, as far as King Solomon goes (whose mother was a Hittite), "he loved many strange women, including the daughter of Pharaoh, women of Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, Zidonians, and Hittites." [KOESTLER, p. 235] (King Solomon was reputed to have hundreds, if not thousands of wives).

     Even such seminal modern Zionist heroes like Theodore Herzl, Chaim Weizmann, and Ben Gurion all had children who married non-Jews. [SCHNEIDER, p. 339]  Max Nordeau, one of the foremost Zionist pioneers, was married to a Christian. Even Israeli right wing prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu's first marriage was to a woman whose mother was not Jewish.

       Yet Moses himself cautioned against exogamy (DEUTERONOMY 7: 34) and "the promises of Isiah and the injunctions of Ezra in matters of separation," noted J. O. Hertzler in 1942, "are as valid today among the Orthodox as at the hour of their supposed utterance ... A generation or two ago, among many Jews, a father would say kaddish (a prayer for the dead) over the child who was intermarried, as if he had died. Intermarriage was an unforgivable sin, more sinister and dangerous than religious apostates." [HERTZLER, p. 79]

     Such injunctions still hold firm in Jewish Orthodox communities today in America (6% of the United States Jewish population, 14% of the New York Jewish population). The rate of intermarriage in the Orthodox community, according to two Jewish researchers on the subject, is "virtually nil." [FARBER, p. 17] (In 1991 a study even showed that 85% of all Jews in New York married other Jews.) [FARBER, p. 16]

         By 1990, however, with so many young Jews (or divorcees taking on second or third marriages) marrying out of the Jewish community across America, "religious and communal leaders," says Edward Shapiro, "could no longer hurl jeremiads against exogamy or berate the intermarried, particularly when often their children and closest acquaintances had intermarried." [SHAPIRO, p. 5]   "The non-Orthodox ... walk a tightrope," says Lena Romanoff, "Although they do not want to encourage intermarriage, they also do not want to alienate young Jews who, with or without approval from their rabbis or parents are increasingly likely to become involved in intermarriage." [ROMANOFF, p. 6] Hence, since about the 1960s, Jewish communities (except the Orthodox who ban it) have had no choice but to slowly shift from an intolerance of intermarriage to damage control:  it was time to swallow their convictions and make strong efforts to keep the children of mixed marriages Jewish.

      Outreach programs or not, there is a strong tendency to keep the children of mixed marriages Jewish anyway. Given traditional Jewish identity  (with its obsessive root and intolerant view of Christians), it should be no surprise that Jews in mixed marriages are far less willing to give up links to their heritage than Gentile spouses. In a 1980s New York area demographic study, for example, the results suggested that three-quarters of Jewish women who marry Gentiles planned to raise their children as Jews. [SILBERMAN, p. 303] Calvin Goldscheider notes that "usually the Jewish partner remains attached to the Jewish community and in many cases the partner not born Jewish becomes attached to the Jewish community through friends, family, neighbors, organizations, secular and religious. Most of the friends of the intermarried are Jewish; most support the state of Israel; most identify themselves as Jews." [GOLDSCHEIDER, p. 139]  "In my experience," says social worker Edwin Freedman, "it is far more likely that when Jews and non-Jews marry it will generally be the non-Jewish partner who is influenced away from his or her origins. When the focus is confined to those marriages in which the Jewish partner is female, then I have to add that I have almost never seen such a union where the non-Jewish male will be the less adaptive partner in family matters." [FREEDLAND, E., 1982, p. 503]  "If half the children [of mixed marriages] are raised as Jews," notes a hopeful Charles Silberman, "there will be no net reduction in the number of Jews, no matter how high the intermarriage is." [Silberman's emphasis] [SILBERMAN, p. 303]

    Take the case of actress Debbie Reynolds' attitude when she married pop singer Eddie Fisher in 1958:
"[Fisher's] entire family had a party for us at his mother's house. I was the only