Every few years, a new survey about Jewish Intermarriage rates leads to hand wringing in the Jewish press. Low Marriage Rates and Intermarriage Threaten Future of U.S. Jewry!

Yet, despite panic-inducing headlines, the real “interfaith marriage” crisis in the North American Jewish community isn’t the fact that Jewish people are marrying non-Jews. The crisis is the hostile way that many communities treat interfaith families. The real problem is the widespread, dangerous culture of policing Jewish people’s romantic, sexual, and reproductive lives as vehicles for “preserving the Jewish line.”

My 80-year-old grandma is one of the few people during my childhood who actually talked about God or the importance of prayer in her life. She was cheering me on to become a Rabbi long before my parents stopped asking, “But, what about law school?” She’s a devoted feminist, an Eagles fan—and a proud, church-going Methodist. In a family full of scientists, my Christian grandmother is one of my favorite people to talk to about religion and faith. So it was natural that, during one of my visits to Pennsylvania, we decided to go together to a Jewish short-film festival in a nearby town.

That day, we saw a series of short films—some funny, some sad. But one of the films, “Killing the Fiddler,” had me squirming in my seat. The director, Barak Barkan, describes the film:

A comedy about how Adam, a Jewish man, five minutes before he marries a non-Jewish woman, is confronted by photographs of his ancestors who come to life in order to prevent this “unholy” matrimony.

The seven-minute film relies on cheap laughs off of its fairly predictable plot. As the main character reveals his plans to marry a non-Jewish woman, the photographs of his ancestors on a nearby wall kvetch: “Oy gevalt!” “Who is this shiksa?” “What happened to Rachel Levinson!?!” The camera flashes to the family of Adam’s fiancé, Vicky Chung. Her parents complain in Chinese, “He’s a fucking Jew! So cheap!” I raised an eyebrow at my grandma, who gave a half-hearted smile in return. One of the photographs makes a racist comment about “Asians and Jews being related.” Yikes.

In the panel afterwards, one leader of the local synagogue raved about the humor with which “Killing the Fiddler” dealt with intermarriage, “the biggest risk to our Jewish community.” Someone else piped up: “Exactly. We need to deal with intermarriage before it destroys the Jewish people.” Tentatively, I raised my hand. “Frankly,” I said, “I thought this film was full of cheap, racist humor. If we’re concerned about the future of the Jewish community, we should be worried about events that push young Jews away and shame them for who they are.” I shrunk into my seat, cheeks burning.

In the car, I apologized to my grandmother for the way the crowd had been talking about non-Jews. I thought back to all the times I’ve witnessed that sort of shame in a Jewish space. The time last year I heard a rabbi tell a mixed-faith group of bar-mitzvah guests that, “Jews celebrating Halloween is a slippery slope to celebrating Christmas.” The times older members of my community have told me that intermarriage is “finishing Hitler’s work.” The culture of shame around “belonging” runs thick in many Jewish spaces; I could understand how this would make Jews from interfaith families run for the hills.

A pervasive culture of hostility toward interfaith/multifaith families is also entangled with pervasive racism from white Jews. Jews of color often face invasive questions about their families when they enter Jewish spaces, such as assumptions that they or their parents converted to Judaism. Invasive questions like these—which are, by the way, forbidden by Jewish law—create a stigma of shame around conversion and interfaith families while hinting that Jews of color are not “fully” Jewish.

The concern with intermarriage and having Jewish “blood” is used disproportionately to target and harass Jews of color. I’ve heard white Jews ask Jews of color who they barely know “how they know all the prayers” or “how did your family become Jewish.” In Nylah Burton’s series of interviews about anti-Blackness in synagogues, she describes this constant questioning as part of a crisis of intra-community racism:

They told me how that exhaustion greatly altered their participation in Jewish community and their own Jewish identities. They spoke of feeling drained, mentally scarred, and depressed when they leave synagogues. People cannot thrive in communities that intrinsically sees them as outsiders. So they leave.

Jewish communities should be investing resources in anti-racism trainings and in educational resources that represent and celebrate Jews of color; we shouldn’t tolerate racist probes and shaming questions about Jewish identity.

Last year, I went to a panel with the researchers of the 2017 Pew Research study on intermarriage. I was surprised to learn that the biggest predictor of whether a child stays engaged in Judaism as an adult wasn’t the number of Jewish parents in their home. Rather, it was the amount of involvement they had and the positive relationships they built: summer camps, youth groups, Hebrew school, etc. In other words, a kid who has two Jewish parents but no exposure to Jewish holidays or community spaces is less likely to stay involved than a kid who has one Jewish parent but regularly attends Friday night services and has a basketball team with a group of Jewish friends. Needless to say, kids from interfaith families who feel ashamed and harassed—who hear from grown-ups that their family structure is “bad” or who are shamed for loving Christmas with their cousins—cannot be expected to be deeply involved or to build lifelong relationships.

The good news is many Jewish communities around the country are starting to adopt a strategy of welcoming interfaith families. Rabbi Edmund Case writes that intermarriage can be good for Jewish communities as a whole:

[Interfaith couples] report that they cannot take their Jewish involvement for granted; they really have to think about it. I think that is a good thing because when you have to think about Judaism, it becomes a great source of meaning and value. Non-Jewish partners often become very engaged in and bring new insights and energy to the Jewish community.

Increased efforts to welcome interfaith families, like training clergy and investing in summer camps, youth groups, and intergenerational Jewish education, have started to show positive results. Since the 1990s, the number of children from interfaith families who continue to be engaged in Judaism has increased from 25% to over 60%. In cities where Jewish organizations made a particular effort to welcome interfaith families, that number is even higher.

The real challenge to the North American Jewish community is not intermarriage, but the culture of shame and hostility that surround it. To create vibrant, long-lasting Jewish communities, we need to welcome all Jewish families.

Photo by Sandy Millar on Unsplash