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Double or Nothing? by Sylvia Barack Fishman
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Keeping Faith? Double or Nothing? Jewish Families and Mixed Marriage by Sylvia Barack Fishman Brandeis. 196 pp. $24.95 Reviewed by Saul Singer For more than a decade, theAmerican Jewish community has been preoccupied with what has come to be known as the “continuity crisis”—that is, the question of whether Jews in the U.S. are perpetuating themselves and their traditions. The precipitating event for these communal worries was the 1990 National Jewish Population Survey (NJPS), which found that about half of American Jews were now marrying non-Jews, defying a taboo that (along with anti-Semitic prejudice) had helped ensure for generations that American Jewish parents could look forward to having Jewish grandchildren.
True, not every segment of the Jewish community has seen this unprecedented rate of intermarriage as a threat. As Sylvia Barack Fishman reports in Double or Nothing?, a number of communal leaders and other observers have argued that the weakening of Jewish endogamy is actually a benign, even a positive, development. On this view, intermarriage represents not a falling-away from the Jewish people but an encouraging addition to the number of American households with Jews in them. Could it be that intermarriage is a blessing in disguise? Fishman, a professor of Jewish studies at Brandeis, has addressed this subject before. Indeed, Double or Nothing? is essentially an expanded version of a study, based on more than 200 interviews with both intermarried and “inmarried” couples, that she conducted for the American Jewish Committee in 2001. In the first part of the book, Fishman lays out the patterns she discovered among her interviewees. The “vast majority” of intermarried couples consist of individuals, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, who perceive themselves as “independent” or “different” from the community in which they grew up; they tend to be people who in childhood received little or no religious education, who considered their parents religiously “hypocritical,” and who found their own religious traditions irrational or repressive
About the Author
Saul Singer is a columnist for and the editorial page editor of the Jerusalem Post.
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