{"id":209,"date":"2010-04-19T16:32:53","date_gmt":"2010-04-19T20:32:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/web.colby.edu\/jewsinmaine\/?page_id=209"},"modified":"2011-02-11T13:15:35","modified_gmt":"2011-02-11T18:15:35","slug":"intermarriage","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/jewsinmaine\/kennebec\/dating-marriage\/intermarriage\/","title":{"rendered":"Intermarriage"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have seen these same Jewish girls go with gentile fellows and it is nothing but if any other girl goes with a gentile, why they are considered the worst girls in town.<\/span><\/p>\n

– Excerpt from a letter to Teddy Levine from Molly Zeitman, Feb. 25, 1912<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Throughout the 20th<\/sup> century, there is a noticeable rise in intermarriages that may be attributed to four specific factors.\u00a0 The first is a stress on assimilation.\u00a0 Since Eastern European Jews felt anti-Semitism upon their entrance into the United States, they worked doubly hard to assimilate into American society.\u00a0 Some of the most prominent methods of assimilation were schools and clubs that introduced genteel ideas to Jewish children.\u00a0 Secondly, Jewish communities attempted to work closely with the gentile community and this increased interaction between Jewish and gentile children.\u00a0 With increased interaction came relationships between Jews and gentiles that ranged from friendship to courtship.\u00a0 Also, as Jewish youth found out, the small communities where children were being raised meant that there were few eligible partners for two important reasons: 1) many of the children were related and 2) since the children grew up together, they had no interest in dating each other.\u00a0 Finally the generational divide created a community more conducive to intermarriage.\u00a0 While the first generation Jews often did not approve of their children marrying outside the faith, the second generation Jews were much more accepting of interfaith partnerships.<\/span><\/p>\n

Of course, there were still families that were extremely and unwaveringly against intermarriage under any circumstances.\u00a0 For some Jewish families, intermarriage was comparable to death and as a result some Jewish families sat shivah for a family member who intermarried.\u00a0 Other reactions to intermarriage were severe ostracism and avoidance of the couple.\u00a0 Judith Goldstein remarks in Crossing Lines <\/em>that \u201cJews could abandon other aspects of Jewish observance–the Sabbath, kosher rules, wearing a hat or yarmulke all the time–but never intermarriage.\u201d\u00a0 Goldstein goes on to tell the story of future Maine senator William Cohen, whose parents were intermarried: his mother was Irish and his father was Jewish.\u00a0 The synagogue in Bangor refused him a bar mitzvah ceremony because his mother had not converted to Judaism.\u00a0\u00a0 Instances of discrimination such as Cohen\u2019s story were common during the first half of the 20th<\/sup> century.<\/span><\/p>\n

With more interfaith participation, the occurrences of Jewish\/Gentile relationships increased.\u00a0 Since within a small town, residential and social proximity tends to backfire in the sense that it turns off youth from eligible marriage partners within their own community, intermarriage became a much more acceptable institution.\u00a0 Small communities also displayed a trend towards intermarriage because they began to recognize the lack of a dating population within their own community and, as Peter Rose points out in Strangers in their Midst<\/em>, small town Jews were more apt to approve of a great deal of social interaction with non-Jews for their children because \u201cdue to the nature of small-town living, the lack of opportunity to have day-to-day contact with Jews coupled with close proximity to non-Jewish neighbors would lead to intimate socializing to a degree unparalleled in larger communities.\u201d\u00a0 Therefore, the communities and families were forced to become more progressive as a result of the realization that small-town life did not provide adequate opportunities for dating and marriage.<\/span><\/p>\n

Fore more information on intermarriage in Jewish communities see: John Mayer\u2019s Jewish-Gentile Courtships<\/em>, Karen McGinity\u2019s A History of Women and Intermarriage in America, <\/em> and Peter Rose\u2019s Strangers in their Midst<\/em>. Consider as well the following statements by Jews who grew up in small communities in Maine.<\/span><\/p>\n

Ken Slosberg (b. 1944, Gardiner):<\/span><\/p>\n

My town was so small that, I know just in general, the big fear was intermarriage. It\u2019s what parents didn\u2019t want to happen, you know. They didn\u2019t want their kids dating non-Jews and if they did date non-Jews they were very nervous that something serious might develop. So, seems like we started dating in sixth grade, fifth or sixth grade, we had boy-girl parties, real dates maybe in junior high. And I know that my mother always referred to it as, it seemed like when I dated non-Jewish girls they were always, \u201cKen\u2019s little friends,\u201d \u201cKenny\u2019s little friends,\u201d \u201clittle girlfriends.\u201d\u00a0 I dunno, it was some kind of way of putting them down I thought. And she was always a little less enthusiastic about greeting them and hosting them when they came over than if they were Jewish. But in my high school I didn\u2019t date any Jewish girls, so the only dating of Jewish girls that I did was through that Center Youth organization\u2026 In general, I think that probably the Jews in general in Gardiner dated less because of our parents\u2019 fears of intermarriage. And I know that I always heard stories from kids in Portland about how they would always sneak around to date non-Jews\u2026<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Irene Friedman (b. 1931, Augusta and Bath):<\/span><\/p>\n

My grandmother\u2019s family, my mother\u2019s mother, had a sister in Gardiner whose husband was my grandfather\u2019s brother. It was two first cousins marrying two first cousins. I doubt if they would allow that today. But, in those days there were a lot of cousins marrying cousins, because I guess they wanted to make sure that they stayed within the faith. That was very important to them\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n

So we got a touch, a good touch of Jewishness, but we didn\u2019t know a great deal about the religion. In fact, we always thought that it was a crime to marry out, because that is the way we were made to feel. No Jewish person would marry out in those days. And of course, this went for every town in Maine\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n

But the one thing that really stuck with us and stuck us, to be very honest about it, was when we were old enough to date and to go out. Jewish boys, that I knew in my school\u2014this is when I got to high school\u2014didn\u2019t date Jewish girls. And therefore you went out with non-Jewish guys, if you went out at all. Now its true, the Greek girls didn\u2019t go out, and most of the Jewish girls didn\u2019t go out. But we did occasionally go out, and I did meet a young man, who to this day I still hear from and see occasionally at class reunions. The religious thing became a very, very sore spot with me. Everyone told us that there was no such thing as conversion to Judaism. That\u2019s how we grew up. We were told that nobody married out. If they married out they were excommunicated from the community. We have a distant cousin who lived in Augusta all her life and she was a dancing school teacher. And I must tell you that we went to dancing school. She went around with a non-Jewish fellow for years and finally married him, and had a daughter. I don\u2019t know what her life was like. You see must of us who grew up there didn\u2019t have a lot of religion. We had it only in the home and three days a year at the synagogue. So that it was a thorn in our sides when we learned that if we brought home anyone who wasn\u2019t Jewish (and here my father was Americanized, he was born and raised, like both my parents, in this country) but this was a taboo that you couldn\u2019t touch. And I once read a book called Crossing Borders<\/em> about Penobscot County where he lived as a young kid, and it was the same thing there.\u00a0 It was Maine. Every small town had the same problem and intermarriage was a taboo. And I think what really bothered me was when I grew up and found out that one could convert to Judaism. And here I\u2019d told this young man there was no such thing. When he said to me, \u201cI\u2019ll convert,\u201d I said, \u201cyou can\u2019t, there\u2019s no such thing as conversion.\u201d It bothered me that I didn\u2019t know my religion. And it bothered me that it had this taboo, even though I understood why and I still understand why and I can see that it was a necessary thing. But it was done in such a way that it was really an abomination. And I know that I\u2019m not the only one in that town that grew up and felt that way. Although most of us married Jewish people, but we had to leave Maine in order to do it.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Return to main “Dating and marriage” page<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have seen these same Jewish girls go with gentile fellows and it is nothing but if any other girl goes with a gentile, why they are considered the worst girls in town. – Excerpt from a letter to Teddy Levine from Molly Zeitman, Feb. 25, 1912 Throughout the 20th century, there is a noticeable…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1764,"featured_media":0,"parent":187,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/jewsinmaine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/209"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/jewsinmaine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/jewsinmaine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/jewsinmaine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1764"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/jewsinmaine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=209"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/jewsinmaine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/209\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":384,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/jewsinmaine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/209\/revisions\/384"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/jewsinmaine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/187"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/jewsinmaine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=209"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}