Esther Kustanowitz

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.

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.

People who follow this blog or my column and reactions to both already know that I have an issue with people who are too picky (even though there are others who think that I myself, as representative of all Upper West Side singles, am too picky, which is another conversation).

But I wanted to share this letter that went to the Jewish Press from a lonely, 37-year-old religious single woman who wants to get married, but found herself dating a man she describes as “a nerd” to whom she “can’t relate romantically.”

There’s more to it that that. Reading it will reveal some of the problems that many of us have noticed about the (let’s call it “moderately observant”) Jewish singles world: shadchanim (matchmakers) who operate through what they’d consider “tough love” but which hurts singles tremendously by criticizing personal appearance; men who date but are reluctant to commit; a posse of friends that becomes family and may in fact hinder progress toward finding a partner; the power problem when a woman’s profession makes a man feel threatened; the challenge of looking at a person in totality as opposed to just on a superficial level; the specter of a previous relationship tainting future romantic expectations; a ticking biological clock; an acknowledgment of one’s own flaws and perhaps a hesitation to accept the flaws of others; whether religious shidduchim operate on a different level than those that aren’t Orthodox; communal pressure both in the US and in Israel to have children to increase Jewish demographics, etc…enough to fuel years of singles columns in multiple newspapers.

This letter, however, is not the only such letter that column has received. In fact, it was written in response to a similar letter, also printed by the Jewish Press and written by a 36 year old woman who was faced with a choice: marry someone you don’t love but have children or stay single and childless forever. (Because those are apparently the only two choices.)

(more…)

The Harvard Crimson reported that a recent Hillel event about sexuality, titled “Jewbilation” and featuring a Jeopardy! style quiz show on facts related to Judaism and sexuality, brought only two more bodies in attendance than a minyan would have.

The trivia game addressed a variety of Jewish idiosyncrasies, from famous Jewish director Woody Allen’s views on sex­ to the need to immerse oneself in the mikvah, a purifying bath, after touching a lizard. “That’s not a euphemism—actually a lizard,” [Harvard Hillel’s Conservative Minyan’s rabbinic advisor Ethan] Linden said. Game-show questions were divided into three categories: “Distance Learning,” “Different Strokes for Different Folks,” and “I ‘Know’ You, Biblical relations.”

What does this lack of interest mean? Are Jews at Harvard too busy studying or did the subject of Jewish approaches to sex strip the subject of any interest? And which one of these is “worse for the Jews”? And does it matter, now that the birth rate among Israeli Jewish women is rising?