Inside Intermarriage: Personal Histories

Lipman, Eugene J.

BOOKS Inside Intermarriage: Personal Histories Mixed Blessings by Paul Cowan with Rachel Cowan DouMOKr, 1987 275 pp. S !895 Reviewed by Eugene J. Lipmsn Paul Cowan was a respected journalist...

...Were reliable evidence available, which is doubtful, I suspect it would show that most intermarried couples in that period raised their children as undefined Americans, How often Jews who married non-Jews during the last decades or the 19th century did so consciously to "obliterate all traces of their Jewish identity" is also more problematic than the authors indicate (p...
...34) (2) Reform and Reconstructionist synagogues have made the children of intermarriages eligible for bar and bat mitzvah—and presumably for Jewish marriage as well...
...Too general, (p...
...some have not...
...after that agency had sponsored an extensive series of such workshops...
...Shortly before the publication of An Orphan in History, the Cowans were invited to meet with Jewish and Christian students in Philadelphia for "free discussion...
...5) (2) Sixty million Catholics in the United States...
...I have no particular negative or positive reaction to the first section...
...What year...
...Who knows...
...Mixed Blessings, is in part the result of what they heard and experienced in those workshops...
...She is now a rabbinical student at the New York school of the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion...
...With the exception I've already-noted, the Cowans don't miss much in the spectrum of people who are intermarrying and what happens to them before and during these marriages...
...Never believe figures published by churches or synagogues about themselves, (p...
...Some have...
...As the Talmud says, gufa (to get back to the subject)1 The part of the long exposition of workshops and their participants entitled "Some resolutions" is less effective than the descriptions of the workshops themselves...
...the formulas may not work as well for couple bet as for couple alef...
...But all couples, and many others, can benefit from the reading...
...He married a kindred spirit—a univcrsalislic political activist, the WASPiest ofWASPs, with a classic New England background stretching back in time to the Mayflower...
...when An Orphan in History was published...
...The material is useful for young people, for their parents, for professionals in Jewish social agencies and for rabbis...
...S !895 Reviewed by Eugene J. Lipmsn Paul Cowan was a respected journalist writing Tor The Village Voice, until 1982...
...The book touched something in a lot of Jews, Jews spanning two generations...
...The second part of the first section begins with two "case studies" and is entitled "American Turnbleweeds...
...35) (3) The percentage of Jews who call themselves Orthodox or Conservative (40-45%), Reform or Reconstructionist (more than 35...
...Unfortunately this isn't always (rue...
...A nechtigen log [literally "yesterday's day," i.e...
...b Overstatements and overgeneral-izations: (1) The Christian world barely notices intermarriage...
...4) More than 10,000 people a year are choosing to convert to Judaism...
...stuff and nonsense] and halavai [if only it would happen...
...For example, the CCAR resolution says that it is up to the individual rabbis to decide what, if any, ritual acts—possibly including conversion—must be undertaken by the child of a non-Jewish mother and a Jewish father in order to be considered a Jew...
...Learn with them and do with them— and they won't intermarry...
...That's too bad, even though this view is widely believed and preached from pulpits of all streams of Jewish religious institutions: "Give your kids a lot of Jewish experiences at home, in the synagogue, in the Jewish community...
...But these are nigglings that do not destroy what is essentially a worthwhile book to read and ponder...
...I suspect that some of these workshops occurred without publicity many years ago...
...Now for the nigglings: a. Suspicious statistics: (1) 30,000-50,000 intermarriages a year in the United States...
...A few nits can be picked and I shall do so, but they are only nits in a treasury of cogent and honest stuff...
...Their new book...
...But the first public professional description of these experiences was given at a meeting of the Association of Jewish Communal Workers in 1977 by Mervin Moss, then with the Jewish Social Service Agency of Washington, D.C...
...249...
...I regret that the Cowans included the chapter entitled "Advice from Some Children of Intermarriage...
...Paul writes in the first person and he writes well...
...The reader might get the impression, probably unintended by the authors, that the Cowans invented the interfaith couples workshop program...
...Occasionally, he makes a portentous generalization that reads as though God revealed it at Sinai, and I can quarrel with a few factual details (see the nigglings at the end of this review), but, generally speaking, this is an interesting yam about a couple of good people .mil [heii odysscy into serious Jewish living...
...They have Jed such workshops in a number of communities...
...In fact, a book about the children of intermarriage might be extremely significant, and the Cowans should consider writing it...
...36) c. Factual errors: "Reform and Reconstructionist Jews assert that if either parent is a Jew, the child is a Jew if he or she is raised as one" (p...
...We get the impression that these rootless types are the ones who intermarry...
...Other communities followed suit...
...Eugene J. Lipman is president of the Central Conference of American Rabbis and is rabbi emeritus of Temple Sinai, Washington, D C This book may be ordered through the MOMENT Bookstore, p. 39...
...Paul Cowan then discovered his Jewishness and it became a central focus of his life...
...The resolutions tend to be a bit simplistic...
...The book is divided into three parts: (!) a recap or the Cowan family's history, {2} a combination of historical data and narrative about intermarriage in the American Jewish community and (3) the narratives and data from their workshops...
...True, they are not as preoccupied as we Jews are—but notice they do...
...The section of the book on the historical evolution of intermarriage on the American Jewish scene is fascinating, even though 1 question some of the assertions in it...
...See #2...
...One demurrer for the sake of historical accuracy...
...His wife Rachel gradually discovered her own need for spiritual roots and eventually converted to Judaism...
...It was about an assimilated Jew growing up in a prosperous family—no Jewish education, virtually no Jewish experiences...
...The stories of Emma Lazarus's family...
...Then they organized a series of workshops for intermarried couples and couples planning to intermarry...
...The Cowans live with a different Christian world from mine My Christian world notices Jewish-Christian marriages, Protestant-Catholic marriages, Baptist-Episcopal marriages...
...He is still a respected journalist and still writes for The Village Voice, but his life is not the same...
...The subject is too important for the unintegrated, jerky, superficial treatment it gets...
...This impression carries through many of the other situations introduced in the book...
...See #1...
...Though the Cowans make it clear in this book that intermarriage is a deeply complex phenomenon, their selection of "case" materials doesn't include enough solidly educated Jews from solidly Jewish homes of solid Jewish communal leaders, who intermarry for all kinds of reasons of which they're often unaware and which don't always emerge in eight-session workshops or even in 300 hours of analytic psychotherapy...
...I would need to see evidence that until 1960, "most Jews who married Christians agreed that their children could be raised in their spouse's faith" (p...
...Every rabbi could point to examples like theirs, except for Rachel's decision to become a rabbi...
...The most important part of the book is the long section on intermarriage today...
...The resolutions of the Central Conference of American Rabbis and of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association are much more complex than this simple statement, which makes the quoted statement a distortion of the facts...
...Max Lerncr's family and the Tcnenbaum-Auletta marriage are of great interest even though they carry forward the book's tendency to concentrate on people who were Jews in name only as they grew up...

Vol. 12 • January 1988 • No. 10


 
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