Continuity Through Transformation: American Jews, Judaism, and Intermarriage Open Access
Thompson, Jennifer Ann (2010)
Published
Abstract
Drawing on five years of ethnographic fieldwork in Atlanta,
Georgia, this study analyzes
how couples in which one spouse is Jewish and the other is not
Jewish understand their
religious lives. American Jewish discourse over the twentieth and
early twenty-first
centuries has framed intermarriage as a key indicator of Jews'
assimilation to American
society, and cast it as a threat to "Jewish continuity," meaning
the continuation of
Judaism as a distinct religious, cultural, and ethnic entity. My
ethnographic data show
that while American individualism is heavily influential in at
least some intermarried
Jews' lives, it functions in complex, subtle, and contradictory
ways.
My intermarried informants governed their families' religious lives
using discourses that
I call "ethnic familialism" and "universalist individualism."
Ethnic familialism draws on
nostalgia, ethnicity, and biogenetic kinship. Universalist
individualism emphasizes
individuals' duty to rationally choose their religious beliefs and
practices, and holds that
all religions teach the same values. Both of these languages shaped
my informants'
religious lives, as did traditional gender roles from American and
Jewish cultures,
whether my informants embraced or consciously rejected them.
Non-Jewish women
married to Jewish men often experienced the paradoxical demand to
take leadership roles
within the family in educating children to be Jews. In doing so,
they transformed
traditional religious boundaries while seeing themselves as
continuing those traditions.
Lastly, Atlanta rabbis whom I interviewed also struggled to
reconcile Jewish norms with
lay people's and their own understandings of personal autonomy.
Although intermarriage discourse demonstrates a great deal of
anxiety about the
assimilation of intermarried Jews, I argue that this discourse is a
proxy for a more painful
and difficult debate about personal autonomy and Jewish peoplehood
more generally.
The tensions of individualism and communal participation and
obligation are inevitable
for American Jews whether they are endogamous or intermarried. By
framing these
discourses in the contexts of American morality and religion, as
well as secularization
theory, these tensions are revealed to be part of the fabric of
contemporary American
Jewish experience. This contextualization also helps to depict
intermarried Jews and their
families in a more humanistic way.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Secularization and the Transformation of Jewishness
1-32
Chapter 2: "What do you stand for when you wish to remain
separate?" American Jewish Discourses on Intermarriage 33-57
Chapter 3: "Prophetic Outcasts": Individualism, Universalism, and
Community among Intermarried Couples 58-96
Chapter 4: Ethnic Familialism: Jewishness Refracted through Family
and Gender 97-140
Chapter 5: Balancing Families, Individuals, Covenant and Community
141-193
Chapter 6: The Adaptation of Jewishness to Modernity 194-215
References: 216-229
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