JDaters Anonymous

Apparently, end-of-year resolutions are inspiring celebrity moves. Some are moving forward with their relationships, by cementing them with marriage, while others are calling it quits, and giving relationships a pair of cement shoes before tossing them in the river. (Yes, I’m done watching the Sopranos.)

The Fantastic Two? Jessica Alba became engaged to the father of her baby-to-be, director’s assistant Cash Warren. She met him on the set of Fantastic Four. So we’re all glad something good came out of that movie.

Will they honeymoon in “Vegas”? Not letting their relationship take any humps, Josh Duhamel and Fergie (not the Duchess, but the Dutchess) are also engaged.

“As You Wish…” Sean Penn and wife of eleven years Robin Wright Penn have called it quits.

“Married With Children?” I’m sure there’s a joke there, but it’s no laughing matter to the erstwhile Bud Bundy (David Faustino) whose divorce was recently finalized after a two-year separation from his wife.

And in case anyone ever looked at the hottest rock star coupling in Israel and said, I wish I could date [insert name of half-couple here], you’ll be glad to know that Rita and Rami Kleinstein are splitting up, so any theoretical chance that you might have had before the couple got together twenty years ago is now yours again. Theoretically.

What is chivalry? Alive? Dead? Undefinable? Necessary? Obsolete?

Once, I went out with this guy who was really traditional — not Jewishly, but when it came to dating. He believed in chivalry: If we drove somewhere, he would always run around to my side and open the door, even though it took longer and I was perfectly capable of opening it myself. I used to worry about encountering a mud puddle, anxious that he might try to put his coat over it and encourage me to walk on it, resulting in an extremely well-intentioned disaster for both me and the coat. He also insisted on walking between me and the curb, because he said that was the tradition in days of old, to protect the woman from the dangers of the road. “But what if someone comes at me from the other side and pulls me into an alley?” I wondered. (We’re not together anymore.)

Read the rest of my newest column at the Jewish Week and feel free to comment here.

Because all of the archive links at the Jewish Week are broken or messed up, some of you have asked me to see this piece that’s causing all the discussion, both on this blog, and over at Facebook. So here you are. May our conversations be respectful and productive.

The Intermarriage Artist
By Esther D. Kustanowitz

I recently came back from a West Coast tour of sorts, which included participation at an L.A.-based conference for Jewish leaders in their 20s and 30s. The Professional Leaders Project (PLP) called participants “talent,” in perhaps an intentional evocation of “the industry.” But our talents were celebrated and cultivated in a very un-Hollywood-like way: through intensive peer leadership, networking and professional mentoring. No casting couch required.

An entrepreneurial nonprofit founded with the mission of turning Jewish leadership over to the next generation, PLP gave “talent” the chance to live up to the name, as “session artists” or “thought leaders.” One so-designated “thought leader” remarked that this sounded extremely Orwellian, although perhaps in a good way. Apparently not yet a thought leader, I had an opportunity that a writer-yet-without-a-book doesn’t often have: to read aloud something I’d written and observe the response. I had been designated as the artist for “Intermarriage and Interdating: Still the Third Rail?”

Burying the Kafkaesque implications of what being an “intermarriage artist” might entail, I read a piece from my book-in-perpetual-progress, a chapter considering whether it would matter if I intermarried: if my babies would always be Jewish, maybe it paid to expand the dating pool and be more open-minded. (To ruin the ending, I decided intermarriage wasn’t for me, and to this day restrict my dating pool to Jews who are interested in living a traditionally Jewish life.)

In all modesty, I thought the piece was a sensitive, personal consideration of all of the issues involved and hoped it also brought some humor to the table. OK, maybe that wasn’t all that modest. Still, I was pretty sure it was balanced. But even with all the writing and reading I’ve done on the subject, I underestimated just how personally everyone in the room would react. While people were polite, challenging me respectfully and non-confrontationally, afterwards I became aware that some offense had been taken. Some people—themselves intermarried or children of intermarriages—had heard my personal exploration as a condemnation of their (or their parents’) choices. Maybe it was that I said that I found it slightly sad when a Jewish man “marries out”—not for national reasons, like those who believe intermarriage dooms the Jewish people to extinction, but for utterly selfish ones: it means that there’s one less Jewish man in my dating pool.

I want to marry a Jew. Not because I hate non-Jewish people or think they have nothing to offer me in terms of love, personality, humor, advice or life experience, God forbid. But because having a Jewish life is important to me—it’s a lifestyle and perspective that I find personally resonant and think is worth having in the world. Nearly all of my friends are engaged in Jewish work, or are—either formally or informally—affiliated with the Jewish community. Almost every paycheck I receive is from an organization or publication with the word “Jewish” in its name. I pepper my daily speech with Hebrew (which my two-year-old nephew is also learning to speak) and email Israel constantly. How could I commit to a life with someone who didn’t find all of those things compelling and meaningful? And would that person ever feel like he was part of my intensely Jewish world?

As some of my single sisters approach fertility’s danger zone, they consider their own talent: their children will be Jewish, and maybe that’s enough, if not ideal. Some religious authorities advise that these women just marry, even without love for the Jewish bachelor-in-question; they’ll be happier once they have Jewish children. A few, even some of the more affiliated ones, are beginning to drift toward other options.

You may not find intermarriage personally acceptable or nationally responsible. But that doesn’t erase the issue. We no longer live in Anatevka, where running off with non-Jewish Fyedka or (perhaps even worse!) secular liberal activist Perchik results in our parents cutting us off. We all deal with non-Jews, most of whom aren’t Cossacks. And so, intermarriage happens; we need to figure out how to deal with it, artfully and more artistically than I was apparently able to.

But in concentrating energies on re-engaging the intermarried, we also should keep in mind those who haven’t taken that road and are still hoping to find someone of the faith. In five or ten or fifteen years, the theoretically still single thirty- or forty-something may adopt a more inclusive dating policy. And who could blame them? While that question should be rhetorical, we all know that somewhere, someone will.

Esther D. Kustanowitz takes her status as an artist seriously, and now edits in red, green and purple pen. You can email her at jdatersanonymous@gmail.com.

JTA reports that Modern Orthodoxy continues its much-needed push toward modernity with the establishment of a new program designed to teach women to become counselors for couples who are getting married. These kallah (bridal) teachers will speak to both men and women and will be recruited by the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance, and co-sponsors of the program are Drisha and Yeshivat Chovevei Torah (YCT).

In addition to learning the relevant marriage laws, participants in the four-day pilot course must be comfortable with the idea of talking about sexual intimacy to groups of both men and women.

This is a great first step. But I can’t help but think that maybe it’s too little, too late. While it’s great for concerned, engaged couples to learn about these laws, shouldn’t there be classes for the “mikvah-curious”? Or a discussion of the anecdotally large number of on-the-books Orthodoxish singles in their 20s or 30s who are not “waiting for marriage” but may want to engage in some of the rituals? Maybe someday, Orthodoxy will establish a real sexual education curriculum, especially in high schools, so that students could know what’s going on with their bodies when the actual changes are occurring. I know it’s a potentially controversial topic, what with the concern over how information might lead to dancing. But what I recall from my “health” or “family purity” classes was a trip to see a mikvah and a lecture on why we shouldn’t engage in interfaith dating when we got to college and “Chris” asked us out to a movie. Actual information about sex? Even within a conveyed expectation of waiting for marriage? Not present. Thank God for television and movies, or none of us would know anything.

The all-expenses-paid workshop will be held March 2-5 in New York. Application forms are available at www.jofa.org and must be submitted by Dec. 31. Please, if you apply and end up going, please feel free to write in with your experiences.

What are you looking for?

People have called the 20s-40s generation spoiled, that we always expect things to be tailored to our needs. But this quest for something better and more personalized doesn’t come from a sense of entitlement; it comes from a central repository of independent spirit and innovation. We live like technology, not in ever-fixed marks, but in desktops and lifestyles that can be customized hourly, down to the last icon. If we need something that doesn’t exist, we take our acquired skills, purchase a domain name and invent it on our own. If we don’t have the skills, we comb our networks for the people who do, or for the places that can teach them to us.

It’s revolution, not with ‘60s-style sit-ins and student takeovers of campus administration buildings, but with modular movement, creativity and gumption. It’s a declaration of independence not from spirituality, prayer, tradition or community, but from the structures that restrict more personal connections with those ideas. It’s a search for community intimacy, aided by Google.
The S3K/Hadar study indicates that 45 percent of the rabbi-led emergent communities and an astounding 81 percent of independent minyanim consist of people under 40. Two-thirds of the members of such communities are female. And while the oft-cited National Jewish Population Study of 2000-2001 indicated that 68 percent of synagogue members are married, the percentage is much lower in emergent communities: in independent minyanim, it’s 51 percent; in rabbi-led emergent communities, 64 percent; and in alternative emergent communities, 27 percent.

What might the amateur singles anthropologist unscientifically glean from this survey and these numbers? That people under 40 are looking for something smaller, a way to discern the substance from all of the other stimuli in their lives? That women are more likely to commit to community intimacy than men? That after singles “play the field” with other synagogues and multiple memberships, they reach a point when it’s time to settle down? That today’s synagogues may not be as “under-40-friendly” as they might imagine they are?

Read the whole article here.