Transcript

Season 1: Episode 4

Mixed Blessings

Hosts: Gillian Frank & Lauren Gutterman

Guests and Additional Audio: Rabbi Simeon J. Maslin , Dr. Jack Mendelson, Dr. Keren McGinity, Dr. Samira Mehta, Rabbi Irwin Fishbein

[Music playing throughout]

[Audio clip from Bridget Loves Bernie plays 00:05 – 00:24]

Lauren Gutterman:     When the sitcom Bridget Loves Bernie premiered on CBS in the fall of 1972, it quickly became one of the top-rated shows on television, yet a few months later it had the distinction of being the highest-rated show ever to be canceled. Bridget Loves Bernie aired on Saturday nights, right after the hit sitcom All in the Family. The show focused on two newlyweds, Bridget, an Irish Catholic teacher played by Meredith Baxter, and Bernie, a Jewish cab driver played by David Bernie. Catholic leaders raised few objections to Bridget Loves Bernie, but leading rabbis from all three major Jewish movements called the sitcom dangerous to the Jewish faith. The Rabbinical Alliance of America, an Orthodox Jewish organization, declared, “We cannot accept this series’ encouragement of the spiritual genocide of American Jewry through intermarriage.” The Pacific Association of Reform Rabbis criticized the show for making flippant, undignified and incorrect portrayals of Jewish belief and practice. A number of other Jewish groups campaigned to get Bridget Loves Bernie taken off the air. They organized pickets, letter-writing campaigns and boycotts of corporations that advertised on the show.

American Jewish anxieties about interfaith marriage drove this backlash. A year before the show premiered one rabbi worried, “We’re likely to lose more Jews through intermarriage and assimilation in the decades to come than we’ve already lost through the pogroms and the Holocaust.” Interfaith marriage is certainly a far cry from genocide, but when it comes to the sexual politics of American Judaism, interfaith marriage has been treated as nothing short of a slow-motion extermination. I’m Lauren Gutterman.

Gillian Frank:             And I’m Gillian Frank. This is Sexing History, a podcast about the ways that the history of sexuality shapes our present. Though we often think of marriage in highly romantic terms, marriage represents much more than love and commitment. Marriage is also about community life. It brings two people into larger social and family networks. Same-faith marriage holds a privileged and fragile position in post-war American Jewish culture. Jewish institutions believe that Jews should marry other Jews and have Jewish babies in order to ensure the survival of Judaism. This reproductive mentality comes from the fact that Jews don’t seek out converts, which limits the growth of the Jewish community. Jewish debates about interfaith marriage are also debates about whether the children of that marriage will be Jewish. At its heart, interfaith marriage raises hard questions about the transmission of Jewish values and identities to the next generation.

                                    Bridget Loves Bernie premiered at a time of rising rates of Jewish-Christian intermarriage. Before the 1960s, the intermarriage rate stood at roughly six percent. By 1972, that rate had risen to 31.7 percent. Although these numbers are modest compared to today’s rates, which exceed 50 percent, the rapid rise in interfaith marriage inspired a panic.

Lauren Gutterman:     The social assimilation of Jews into American culture after World War II made the rising rates of interfaith marriage possible. Jewish urban neighborhoods dissolved as Jewish families headed to suburban neighborhoods that were ethnically mixed, though almost entirely white. Younger Jewish men and women seeking to assimilate into the mainstream of white, middle-class American culture came into greater contact with non-Jews in public schools, on college campuses and in the workplace. They found romantic possibilities with people who came from other religious backgrounds at a moment when antisemitism began to decline in the United States.

Rabbi Simeon J. Maslin:         Well, the fact that you’re living in a free society—uh, uh, assimilation is what Jews have been doing here in the United States, uh, ever since the middle of the 19th century. Uh, we’ve become more and more Americanized. I’m Rabbi Simeon J. Maslin. I’m, uh, the rabbi emeritus of, uh, Congregation Keneseth Israel of Philadelphia, and, uh, I was once, uh, president of the Central Conference of American Rabbis. Uh, once you send your kids to a college, uh, they’re going to meet, uh, people of - of all religions, uh, and, uh, all, uh, ethnic backgrounds. And it’s inevitable that they’re going to fall in love and marry. So, you know, when we were a closed society, everybody living, uh, in - in the shtetl or even in New York in the Lower East Side, uh, or - or, uh, in Borough Park, uh, there wasn’t such a great, uh, danger of - uh, of mixed marriage. But once, uh, we were, you know, completely assimilated and our kids were, uh, either in college or in the workplace mixing with people who were not Jewish, it was inevitable that, uh, they were going to marry.

Lauren Gutterman:     Attitudes toward interfaith marriage also changed. By the 1960s, the Gallup Poll recorded growing public approval of Gentile marriage with Jews. Mainline Protestant marriage pamphlets no longer cautioned against intermarriage. Instead, they counseled couples about how to manage these relationships; however, most popular marriage advice manuals continued to urge readers to select a spouse from their own religious group in order to build a strong and successful marriage. The common refrain was, “A family that prays together stays together.”

Dr. Jack Mendelson:   Several times a month I talk with couples who are confronted with the dilemma we’re discussing here today.

Gillian Frank:             That’s Dr. Jack Mendelson, a Unitarian minister and a supporter of interfaith marriage, explaining in 1965 the view of those who opposed interfaith marriage.

Dr. Jack Mendelson:   And in a world which has grown small in many respects, where people of different faith and race and social class meet easily, they study side by side, they work together, they participate in common group activities of various kinds, it is inevitable that they’re going to be attracted to one another, that they’re going to fall in love, that they’re going to want to marry. And then suddenly they discover that they’re in a good deal of trouble. Very often, though their heart and their mind has said yes to this marriage, the church or the synagogue or society or family will say no. Now, this disapproval of interfaith, interracial, interclass marriages has, of course, a very long history, and it’s rooted partly in common sense. Marriage is one of the most important decisions an individual makes. To a great extent, it shapes the meaning and the future of his life. So, quite aside from any personal prejudices that they may have, priests and rabbis and ministers know that a common faith in a family, uh, is a source of strength and stability and that, conversely, differing or competing faiths may be a source of endless controversy.

Lauren Gutterman:     Young people disagreed. Fewer and fewer couples followed such advice. They increasingly valued other kinds of compatibility, including educational level, emotional connection and sexual attraction. All of these changes raised the stakes for a television show that portrayed a marriage between a Jewish man and a Catholic woman. Television historian Allison Perlman has noted that battles over television are battles over who and what is visible on the small screen in a multicultural society. The battle over Bridget Loves Bernie, like the debate over interfaith marriage, centered on what kinds of families would be publicly acceptable.

Gillian Frank:             In the 1960s, American Jews worried that rising rates of interfaith marriage threatened Jewish survival. Social scientists noted the increase in intermarriage and the decline in Jewish birth rates. They issued dismal forecasts about the future of the Jewish people as both an ethnic and a religious group. Articles with names like “The Vanishing American Jew” and “Is There a Jewish Future?” captured these feelings.

Dr. Keren McGinity:   “The Vanishing American Jew” was the title of an article that appeared in Look magazine. It was emblematic of the heightened communal concern about intermarriage, and it was all based on the assumption that once a Jew married out, so to speak, meaning outside of the Jewish fold or a person of another faith or cultural background, he or she would cease to identify Jewishly, be involved in the Jewish community or to raise Jewish children.

Gillian Frank:             That’s Keren McGinity, director of Interfaith Families Jewish Engagement at Hebrew College’s Shoolman Graduate School of Education.

Dr. Keren McGinity:   This idea of the vanishing American Jew kind of bemoaned the social freedom to marry whomever one chose, uh, and considered it a crisis that presented a threat to Jewish survival. It’s significant because it began the process of using intermarriage as a lightning rod for criticism that continues, uh, in the present day.

Gillian Frank:             The main issue for opponents of intermarriage was the future of the Jewish people. They assumed that any Jewish person who intermarried and their descendants would be lost to Judaism forever. In a 1971 letter to the Jewish Exponent, Rabbi C. Joseph Teichman described Jews who intermarried as having chosen voluntarily to uproot themselves from the tree of our tradition and who, by their act, also destroy future generations. Some rabbis believed that Jews who intermarried stopped being Jewish on their wedding day. They spoke of these marriages as the posthumous victory of Adolf Hitler. One newspaper article summarized this feeling in the following way: “Can it be that what centuries of persecution culminating in the Nazi Holocaust failed to accomplish will be brought to pass by the romantic impulse?”

Lauren Gutterman:     In particular, Jewish leaders worried about Jewish men marrying and having children with non-Jewish women. This fear had some basis in reality. Before the 1970s, Jewish men were more likely than Jewish women to marry outside the faith. Within Jewish culture, non-Jewish women were stereotyped as more sexually available and less emotionally demanding than Jewish women. The shiksa, as these non-Jewish women were derogatorily called, were imagined as capable of luring Jewish men away from Jewish women in the Jewish community. Intermarriage with non-Jewish women was a particular threat to the Jewish community for another reason. Most Jews subscribed to the idea that a child’s religion is determined by the religion of the mother, not the father. According to Jewish law, children of Jewish mothers and non-Jewish fathers are still technically Jewish; however, the children of Jewish fathers and non-Jewish mothers are not Jewish unless they formally convert.

Dr. Samira Mehta:      Matrilineal descent has a longstanding history in Judaism. It’s also then combining with an American aesthetic of religion being the purview of women and the home. My name is Samira Mehta. I am an assistant professor of religious studies at Albright College and the author of the forthcoming Beyond Chrismukkah: Christian-Jewish Interfaith Families in the United States. So, a household that doesn’t have a Jewish mother in it is a source of concern, in part because of the Jewish law, in part because, Halachically, you need matrilineal descent for someone to be Jewish. But everyone also accepts that in the American context, the women are the people doing the primary work of childrearing. If the mother isn’t on board with creating Jewish identity, will the children have meaningful Jewish identity? And that means a couple of things. If she’s doing it but is resentful of it, will the children pick up on her resentment? If she’s doing it but also doing Christmas or other markers of Christianity, will she do the traditions from her family with a lot more enthusiasm than the traditions from her in-laws? And, lastly, can she even adequately do the traditions from her in-laws’ family?

Gillian Frank:             Many families and communities shunned Jews who intermarried. Some families sat Shiva, the traditional seven days of ritual mourning. Sometimes the father of a Jew who intermarried would recite the Kaddish, the Hebrew prayer for the dead. Some synagogues expelled members who intermarried and denied them the right to be buried in Jewish cemeteries. In the Jewish community, the message to marry within the faith was everywhere. It was literally written onto post-war Jewish life. In 1972, travelers driving along Route 42 to the famed Jewish vacation destination the Catskills could even see a billboard that read “Intermarriage: Stop It.”

Lauren Gutterman:     During the 1960s and ‘70s, rabbis from the three major branches of American Judaism debated how to respond to interfaith marriages. While there are numerous Jewish traditions, American Jewry can be broadly divided into three groups: Orthodox, Conservative and Reform. Orthodox Judaism claims to be the most traditional. Reform has created a modernized Judaism, and Conservatism, with its motto of tradition and change, straddles a middle ground between them. Orthodox rabbis, keeping with the letter of rabbinic tradition, regularly excluded intermarried congregants. Until 1963, it was the official position of the Rabbinical Assembly, the Conservative rabbis’ union, that people who intermarried should be excluded from membership of their synagogues. But even while this policy remained in place, a few conservative rabbis and congregations began to find ways to include interfaith couples as intermarriage rates rose.

The leaders of the Reform movement were the most accommodating to interfaith couples. For Reform rabbis, the debate wasn’t over whether, but how, to include interfaith couples. And while they did not encourage interfaith marriages and debated whether rabbis should officiate them, the Reform movement invited interfaith couples to take part in their congregations’ activities. Whether you were Orthodox, Conservative or Reform, interfaith marriage was a powder keg, and Bridget Loves Bernie acted as a spark.

Gillian Frank:             The fury that Bridget Loves Bernie provoked in 1972 is all the more notable given that the show recreated the plot of a much-loved play, a play that premiered 50 years earlier.

[“Abie’s Irish Rose” by Anne Nichols plays]

                                    Abie’s Irish Rose by Anne Nichols opened in New York in 1922. It told the story of Abie Levy, a veteran of World War I, who returns home with a new bride in tow, Rosemary Murphy, an Irish Catholic nurse. Abie allows his father to believe that Rosemary is in fact Rose Murpheski, a Jewish woman. Rosemary informs her father that she is marrying an Irish Catholic man named Michael McGee, not Abie Levy. When the fathers meet and learn the truth, they are upset and outraged. By the time the final curtain falls, in typical Broadway musical fashion, Abie and Rosemary have made amends with their families, who together celebrate the couple and the birth of their twin children.

                                    Theater critics did not like Abie’s Irish Rose, but the play was a commercial success. It ran for more than 2,000 performances on Broadway, making it one of the longest-running shows in history. Abie’s Irish Rose inspired many adaptations. It was published as a novel, ran as a radio series and adapted for the movies twice. In the 1960s, Abie’s Irish Rose was reincarnated again in the comedy routines of Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, who dubbed themselves the real-life versions of Abie’s Irish Rose.

[Audio clip plays 16:57 – 17:35]

Lauren Gutterman:     By the time it premiered in 1972, Bridget Loves Bernie was treading well-covered comedic territory. One television critic even remarked, “This is Abie’s Irish Rose 50 years later.” From the stock jokes and stock characters, you’d gather nothing much has changed on the religious front in the last half-century. But in terms of context, the changing rates of intermarriage made all the difference to viewers. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, there was an ethnic revival on television. Television in the 1950s and early 1960s had largely avoided emphasizing ethnic or religious differences. There were some shows like The Goldbergs, which portrayed Jewish family life, but in the world of Leave It to Beaver, such images were exceptional.

                                    The television landscape was also changing. In response to the heightened racial tensions of the civil-rights movement and black nationalist politics, many white Americans increasingly celebrated their ethnic roots. They underscored their identities as Italian-Americans, Irish-Americans, Jewish-Americans and so on. This new ethnic consciousness was evident in a number of sitcoms, which explored, celebrated, bemoaned and lampooned the many ethnic and religious differences in American culture. In the 1970s, Jewish television viewers, like other ethnic groups, became increasingly invested in how they were portrayed on television. They believed that television was a powerful medium that could influence Jewish life and also how Gentiles viewed their community.

Gillian Frank:             Television audiences actively fought about representations of people they imagined to be like or unlike themselves. For Jewish audiences, Bridget Loves Bernie was a story being told about them and their families. But the nature of that story, whether it was a comedy or a tragedy, was fiercely debated. When the Canadian-born television writer Bernard Slade created Bridget Loves Bernie, he based the pilot episode on the experiences of actress Marlo Thomas. Thomas, who is Catholic, once dated Lenny Goldberg, a television executive. Marlo and Lenny tried unsuccessfully to convince Lenny’s mother that Marlo was Jewish. In her autobiography, Thomas recalls the memorable and disastrous experience at the Goldbergs’ Passover Seder.

Lauren Gutterman:     I love Seders. I love the songs, the prayers, the candles, hiding the matzo and all the food, everything but the gefilte fish. It’s a smelly, dewy lump, an acquired taste that I never acquired. The day of the dinner, when he and his dad were picking up items for the evening meal, Lenny pulled his father aside. “Please tell Mom not to push the gefilte fish on Marlo,” he said. “She doesn’t like it. She’s had it a few times, but she didn’t grow up with it like we did.”

Gillian Frank:             Lenny explained to his father that Marlo was Catholic, not Jewish.

Lauren Gutterman:     Mr. Goldberg replied in a hushed tone, “Don’t tell your mother. It’ll ruin her evening.” The dinner table was covered with every imaginable food for the holiday. I happily devoured the brisket and potato pancakes and then, with a deep breath, stuffed in the dreaded fish, smothered with hot horseradish, and washed it down with an enormous glass of water. Suddenly, his mother jumped up from the table, crying, and ran into the next room, slamming the door behind her. Her husband ran after her, but I could hear her through the wall, “His children will come to my house wearing crosses,” she wailed. It was a terrible moment, and I’d already eaten the damn fish. Lenny looked at me apologetically. Obviously his father had tipped off his wife that I was a shiksa. Mrs. Goldberg came back to the table and tried to be gracious, but the elephant was in the room. On the way home in the car, I vomited up the gefilte fish.

Gillian Frank:             Lenny Goldberg later had lunch with comedy writer Bernard Slade and told him the story of the family Seder. Slade found the story hilarious and quickly created a pilot for Bridget Loves Bernie. The show, set in New York City, tells the story of how Bernie Steinberg, a taxicab driver and aspiring writer, and Bridget Fitzgerald, and Irish Catholic schoolteacher, fall in love and sustain their relationship. The show features Bridget and Bernie’s parents, along with Bridget’s brother, who is a Catholic priest, and Bernie’s Uncle Mo.

 Dr. Samira Mehta:     So, that is the setup for the show. The pilot shows Bridget and Bernie going to talk to Bridget’s brother, a priest named Father Mike, about their marriage, and it sets up the dynamic in which the entire younger generation, including Father Mike, thinks that this marriage is a good thing. They love each other. They’re compatible. They’re committed to each other, and the parental generation thinks that the marriage is an absolute shanda, which is Yiddish for shame, and the Jewish parents and Bernie’s Uncle Mo, who lives with them, become increasingly ethnic, at least in Bernie’s eyes by comparison, and Bridget’s parents, who are not working-class Irish Catholics but Kennedy-era upper-class Camelot Catholics, are very upset both about the Judaism and about the lower-class qualities of Bernie’s family. And each sitcom’s dynamics play on these tensions. It’s very rare that there are any problems between the couple. There are usually problems involving the broader extended family.

Gillian Frank:             For many families, the show’s humor raised painful questions about interfaith relationships. Whose rituals, traditions and values get included? What gets excluded? How can two people blend their different traditions so that they actually mix? And what about the children?

Lauren Gutterman:     Though Bridget Loves Bernie’s tone was light, the reaction it inspired from the Jewish community was anything but. Leaders of major Jewish organizations argued that the show stereotyped Jewish people, mocked Judaism and downplayed the challenges facing mixed-faith couples. More worrisome for them was television’s ability to encourage and to legitimize interfaith marriage. The show’s portrayal of a mixed-faith wedding ceremony was a sticking point. The New York Times summarized the episode this way: “The bride was Roman Catholic and the groom Jewish. They wanted a religious wedding, so they hit on a compromise that would show that religions can live in harmony with religions. A priest conducted the saying of vows. A rabbi led them in the giving of rings. Both clergymen gave blessings, and in a final gesture of bubbling interfaith goodwill, the entire wedding party gathered in a circle with their hands together.” Life, however, did not immediately imitate art. Organized opposition to the show began among Conservative and Orthodox rabbis in New York City.

Dr. Samira Mehta:      In addition, your average Jewish viewer objected, and one of the primary venues for objection seems to have been letters to the editor of The New York Times. One person wrote in suggesting that the sitcom would make Jewish young - um, young adults think that it was, quote, “romantic and chic” to marry non-Jews. Another writer compared Bridget Loves Bernie to, quote, “a series about the merry adventures of a Jewish family on their way to the gas chambers.” It - but it echoes these fears that intermarriage is the liberal American version of the Holocaust.

Gillian Frank:             Jewish viewers threatened to boycott the show’s corporate sponsors. Some viewers picketed CBS’s headquarters. A few even attempted to intimidate members of the show. Meredith Baxter recalled that in the spring of 1973, two members of the Jewish Defense League, a right-wing group, showed up at her house hoping to convince her to change the show. Another Jewish Defense League member repeatedly called the show’s producer and threatened his life.

Lauren Gutterman:     As Bridget Loves Bernie played on CBS, a debate over whether to officiate interfaith marriage played out among Reform Jews, the only branch of American Judaism to consider permitting it. Even as Orthodox and Conservative leaders took a hardline stance against officiating mixed marriages, Reform rabbis engaged in a heated debate over whether to officiate interfaith marriage. Rabbi David Max Eichhorn, a leading reform rabbi who officiated interfaith marriages, explained, “If I take the so-called traditional position and refuse to have anything to do with the marriage, what will I accomplish? There’s a good possibility that I’ll drive a Jew away from Judaism. I’ll also probably destroy whatever possibility there may have been for the conversion of the non-Jew to Judaism and the recreation by this couple of an acceptable Jewish family life. As Jews were worrying about the effect of Bridget Loves Bernie on their community, the Organization of Reform Rabbis adopted a resolution that declared its opposition to participation by its members in any ceremony which solemnizes mixed marriage. It also called upon its members to continue to welcome couples who’d already intermarried and foster Jewish education for their children.

Rabbi Simeon J. Maslin:         We felt that a rabbi should not officiate at a wedding, uh, where one of the partners to the wedding was not Jewish and therefore didn’t believe in the things that was said in the marriage ceremony. Uh, my advice and members of my congregation when they came to me at that time, was, if you’re going to have an interfaith marriage, then you should not demean either the religion of one or the other, but rather you should go to a justice of the peace or a judge and have him officiate at the marriage, that the only marriage that a rabbi could, uh, legitimately officiate at would be a marriage between two Jews who believed, uh, what the ceremony says that in the ceremony, when you put the ring on the finger of your partner, uh, you say that, “I - I’m giving you this ring according to the laws of Moses and Israel.” And the laws of Moses and Israel do not include the idea of a Jew marrying a non-Jew, one who cannot accept the laws of Moses and Israel.

                                    On the other hand, uh, it became a principle of the, uh, Reform movement in the ‘60s and ‘70s that once a couple was married that they should be accepted into the congregation and welcomed in the hopes that they would, uh, create a Jewish family, with the hope that, uh, the children of that marriage would, uh, identify with the Jewish community.

Lauren Gutterman:     In response to this 1973 resolution against interfaith marriage, a group of 60 Reform rabbis formed an organization to preserve their right to perform mixed marriage. Rabbi Irwin Fishbein of Westfield, New Jersey, a member of the dissenting group on the Mixed Marriage Committee, said, “We cannot compel Jews to marry Jews any more than we can compel Jews to be Jews.” He argued that refusal to officiate at weddings would alienate these couples and would do irreparable harm to the cause of Jewish survival. In 1973, Rabbi Irwin Fishbein founded the Rabbinic Center for Research and Counseling and curated a list of rabbis who would officiate interfaith marriage. Fishbein’s own family experience motivated him to support interfaith couples.

Rabbi Irwin Fishbein :           It was the grandmother and the great-grandfather that couldn’t be told about it, and the grandmother was my uncle’s mother—couldn’t be told about the fact that my uncle, her son, had intermarried ‘cause it would break their heart; it would kill them. I kept telling my uncle, “You’ve got to stand up to the family.”

Gillian Frank:             One woman recalled her attempts to find a rabbi to officiate her interfaith wedding, “It made us feel as if we were looking for a doctor to do an illegal abortion, not a rabbi to officiate at a wedding.” The couple vowed never to enter a Jewish house of worship again. Fishbein sought to help interfaith couples like this one overcome the obstacles they faced when trying to find a rabbi to officiate their weddings.

Lauren Gutterman:     Although Bridget Loves Bernie was among the top 10 TV shows in the 1972-’73 season, with a reported 35 million weekly viewers, CBS canceled it. In the spring of 1973, Robert D. Wood, CBS TV’s network president, denied that pressure from the Jewish community had played any role in the network’s decision. He claimed that the show was underperforming. Network insiders noted that the issue was audience members. Whereas 55 percent of all television viewers watched CBS from 8:00 to 8:30 p.m., when All in the Family aired, by 8:31 p.m., when Bridget Loves Bernie came on, that number dropped by 20 percent. Bridget Loves Bernie star Meredith Baxter and the show’s creator, Bernard Slade, both believed that CBS had caved under pressure. In her autobiography, Baxter wrote, “I didn’t understand why they pretended that there was any other reason we went off the air but this: A small but articulate group of detractors didn’t like the message of our series, and CBS blinked.” Meanwhile, Jewish leaders heralded the end of Bridget Loves Bernie as a victory.

Gillian Frank:             The same year CBS canceled Bridget Loves Bernie amidst fears that children of intermarriage were becoming non-Jewish, the Council of Jewish Federations and Welfare Funds published the first comprehensive study on interfaith marriage. This study suggested that Jewish fears of the vanishing American Jew were just that: fears. The study found that a large majority of intermarried couples were bringing up their children and educating them as Jewish. It noted that even without formal conversion, nearly one-half of non-Jewish spouses identified as Jewish subsequent to marriage, and conversions out of Judaism, the study reported, were few, suggesting a positive balance in favor of conversion into, rather than conversion out of, Judaism.

                                    The study’s authors worried that regardless of whether a couple was same-faith or interfaith, their participation in organized Jewish life in synagogues and in Jewish institutions, was the exception and not the rule. Judaism, the study showed, was more complex than religious practice, and many Jews understood and lived out their Jewish identities separately from official Jewish institutions.

Lauren Gutterman:     These debates over interfaith marriage have never really gone away. Each time a demographic survey comes out describing intermarriage rates, now at over 50 percent, waves of panic and recrimination ripple through the Jewish community. And yet, the most recent Pew Research Center survey of American Jews in 2013 reported that the number of Jewish people is actually growing and that most children of intermarriage continue to identify as Jewish. Jewish study scholar Martin Kavka notes, “The history of Jews in America is a story in which Jews refuse to heed authorities telling them how they must perform their Judaism and/or Jewishness.” This story played out in 1973, when 1/5 of Reform rabbis were willing to perform interfaith marriages without conditions, a number that’s now risen to 50 percent. It’s playing out today among Conservative Jews who are passionately debating whether to allow its rabbis to officiate such marriages. Over the past two decades, interfaith couples have also populated the television landscape. Thirtysomething, Sex and the City, Seventh Heaven, Once and Again, the Nanny—

Gillian Frank:             Dharma and Greg, Mad About You, Friends, One Life to Live—

Lauren Gutterman:     - Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Commish, Everwood have all portrayed the varied experiences of being in interfaith relationships.

Gillian Frank:             A number of children’s books also address this topic, many of them aimed at helping families negotiate Christmas and Hanukkah. December’s Gift, Light the Lights and Eight Candles and a Tree are just three of the many titles available for young families. What’s clear is that the meaning of Judaism and what counts as Jewish continues to evolve, even as the Jewish population in the United States itself transforms. As for the vanishing American Jew, Keren McGinity underscores that Jewish people still exist, and they are vibrant in the United States. Look magazine, however, which first coined the phrase “vanishing American Jew” in 1963, no longer exists.

                                    Sexing History is produced by Rebecca Davis, Saniya Lee Ghanoui, Devin McGeehan Muchmore, Lauren Gutterman and me. If you’re enjoying our show and wanna help us grow, please review us on iTunes. We’d love to hear from you. And if you like an episode, please share it on Facebook and Twitter.

Lauren Gutterman:     Sexing History is made possible with generous funding from Allen Zwickler of the Phil Zwickler Charitable and Memorial Foundation. Created in honor of the journalist, filmmaker, poet and gay activist, Phil Zwickler, the foundation seeks to promote human rights, education, health and the arts, specifically with respect to gay and lesbian community and generally with regard to those individuals and groups who need assistance to survive and be heard. Visit them at PZFoundation.org.

Gillian Frank:             Many thanks to our guests, Keren McGinity and Samira Mehta, for spending time with us. Please visit our Web site, SexingHistory.com, for links to their wonderful books. Our sincere appreciation to Rabbi Simeon Maslin and Irwin Fishbein for sharing their stories with us.

Lauren Gutterman:     And before we go, we have a very happy announcement. Gil has a co-edited book of essays coming out. It’s called Devotions and Desires: Histories of Sexuality and Religion in the 20th Century United States. The book is published by UNC Press and contains essays by leading historians of religion and sexuality. With topics like yoga, pornography, rabbinical seminaries, abortion, Catholic schools, polyamory, pagan communities, birth control and African-American missions, the book reveals how religion and sexuality play a fascinating and important role in American history. And we have a special offer for you. If you visit the Sexing History Web site, we’ll provide a link to the book and a discount code that will get you 40 percent off. I’m Lauren Gutterman.

Gillian Frank:             I’m Gillian Frank. This is Sexing History.

[Music fades]

[End of Audio]