America's Jewish Women: A History from Colonial Times to Today by Pamela S. Nadell

Author:Pamela S. Nadell [Nadell, Pamela S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non-Fiction, History, Jewish, Feminism, Religion, United States
ISBN: 9780393651249
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2019-03-05T00:00:00+00:00

“A shande my daughter should marry a shaygetz.”

IF LOVE was a foreign country, sometimes it led, not to the states of China or Connecticut, but to the land of Christianity. One Sabbath eve in 1939, a Chicago rabbi denounced a recent spate of intermarriages. But the Jewish intermarriage rate in the 1930s was scarcely 3 percent. In the next decade, it began to rise when, during the war, young Jewish women and men went places, did things, and met people they never would have met before. As more young Jewish men married out than their sisters, rabbis blamed Jewish daughters’ materialism for driving their brothers into gentile arms. Nevertheless, by 1950, just 6.7 percent of Jews had intermarried.33

Rabbis were not the only ones concerned about mixed marriage. Social scientists produced mounds of research proving that, when two people from different backgrounds wed, their marriages were far more likely to fail. For these experts, nothing doomed a marriage like religious difference. The housewife Rebecca Mack’s expertise came not from a survey but from living in “that valley of tears caused by intermarriage.” In her memoir, she warned the guileless about to follow in her sad footsteps that sooner or later their husbands would curse “You God-damn Jew,” and that their children would pay the price, as had her four, of growing up in a family warring over two religions.34

But young Jewish women had no need to look to rabbis or experts to hear that like should marry like. They just had to listen to their mothers. Scholar Keren McGinity, whose own prenup, in the early 1990s, with her Irish Catholic ex-husband had stipulated that their future children would be raised as Jews, interviewed Jewish women who intermarried decades before. Half a century later, they painfully recalled the wars their mothers waged against their marriages. Sarah Pene fell in love with a Catholic who, oddly enough, worked in a Jewish bakery. He agreed to convert, but her mother sent him packing, telling him to go find a nice Italian girl. Defying her mother, Sarah married her sweetheart but in secret, just as Phila Franks had done nearly two centuries before. When Sarah’s mother found out, she threw her daughter out of the house. It was three years before they would speak again.35

Eleanor Hatkin fell in love with Charlie Greco. Charlie’s Italian mother showed her how to make eggplant parmesan just as she had taught her Jewish sister-in-law. But Eleanor’s mother, Rose, who had brought home that inkwell from her own honeymoon, was an indomitable force. To Charlie, she said, “You not marry my daughter.” To Eleanor: “A shande my daughter should marry a shaygetz,” a disgrace that she would marry a gentile. The day the pair announced that they would wed, Rose threatened, “If you do it, I jump off the roof.” Rose didn’t. Instead Eleanor broke her engagement. A year later she married Lenny Schulman. Charlie wed Selma Rubenstein.36

While the intermarriage rate remained low in America, intermarriage was, as Rose Hatkin’s threat made clear, a family crisis.

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