Barry and Suzanne asked if they could speak to me... They had been married for 7 years. He was Jewish from NY. She was from a Catholic family who grew up in the Midwest. They had met after college in NY. Suzanne had gone to school in the Midwest and after graduation ventured out to NY to work in the fashion industry. She was very hip, a great designer and actually fit into NY pretty well. A little less assertive than most but definitely had style. Barry worked on Wall Street and they both had real promising careers. It was all going great for them, and here comes the but... except for her parents. Barry had been good to them, always treated them very well and genuinely liked them. He thought they liked him too until the last visit when it came to a head... They had been talking about some of their new purchases both had been excited to buy. Some of the items included  art work for their brownstone in Manhattan. Suzanne’s dad Bill asked Barry about the art work, “Boy it all  looks real expensive but I bet you jewed ‘em down” like you people always do”. At that moment it all became clear, all the little comments about money and world economy and our “dam involvement in the war cause of them over there”. Barry at that point felt alone. He became terribly insecure wondering first why he always felt bad deep down around his in laws and then even more concerned if Suzanne felt that way. He  reflected deeply and could not come up with any instances where he had ever heard any comments from his wife before.  They had a lot of Jewish friends in NY and Suzanne’s best friend Ellen was Jewish... He knew she felt close and comfortable with her. She had reminded her parents that when they would visit them not to serve pork products. They just brushed it off the ignorance when Mom said she forgot and made ham for dinner one night. But he still was concerned confronting her with her dad’s comments. Would she deny it, make him out to be the bad guy not just being understanding or would she equally be outraged… After all it was her father. This issue never came up as they began to put their lives together. Neither of them saw it coming, although Suzanne said she had heard these comments but never considered her parents prejudice. They also were more aware of the response of Barry’s parent’s that he was maryring a shikse. This was almost standard Jewish rhetoric, not necessarily prejudice but more concerned for the assimilation of Jewish people. Barry’s parents did like Suzanne and felt more assured as the couple decided to raise their children in a Jewish home.

Prejudice runs deep in people’s souls. Anti-Semitism is one form of extreme prejudices and   although it’s an uncomfortable topic to bring up it is another area of hard truth that couples thinking about intermarriage must address. It may not be coming from your partner but it may be a part of their extended family system... 

Rabbi Arthur Blecher reminds us in his recent book The New American Judaism that Jews have been intermarrying for thousands of years and that the Torah, the central document of Jewish law, does not contain a universal prohibition of intermarriage:

Intermarriage is as old as the Jewish people. Of the 613 commandments in the Torah, the first five books of Scripture that form the core of Jewish law, no commandment categorically forbids a Jew to marry a gentile. In fact, in Exodus 2:21, the Hebrew Bible recounts that Moses married the daughter of a Midianite priest. Even though she was of a different religion, their son, Gershon, was without question one of the Children of Israel. The Torah completely accepts the legitimacy of Moses’ relationship with this non-Israelite woman and takes for granted the Israelites status of their offspring. A later passage in the Torah (Numbers 12:1) tells that Moses married an Ethiopian woman. Elsewhere (Ruth 4:10-17) the Bible describes the marriage between the Moabite woman Ruth and the Israelite man Boaz as an ordinary fact of daily life. The descendent of that mixed marriage, David, became the king of Israel (pp. 164-165).

There is an intermarriage prohibition in the Bible. However, this prohibition is not universal – it prohibits Jews from intermarrying with people from the seven nations of Canaan (Deut 7:1-4; Exod 34:15-16). Since there were other peoples with whom the Israelites came into contact – Egyptians, Edomites, Moabites, Midianites, etc. – one must assume that intermarriage was not forbidden with these neighboring peoples or the more distant nations. Shaye Cohen, Professor of Hebrew Literature and Philosophy at Harvard University, concurs in his book The Beginnings of Jewishness:

Does this prohibition apply to all gentiles or only to the seven Canaanite nations? The answer is clearly the latter. Moses commands the Israelites to destroy the seven Canaanite nations because they threaten Israelite religious identity and live on the land that the Israelites will conquer. Intermarriage with them is prohibited. The Ammonites and Moabites, somewhat more distant and therefore somewhat less dangerous, were not consigned to destruction and isolation; they were merely prohibited from entering the congregation (Deut. 23:4). The Egyptians and Edomites were even permitted to enter the congregation after three generations (Deut. 23:8-9). The meaning of the prohibition of “entering the congregation” is not at all clear, as I shall discuss below, but I presume that originally, at least, it was not a prohibition of intermarriage. Other nations, even further removed from the Israelite horizon, were presumably not subject to any prohibition. Internal biblical evidence confirms this narrow interpretation of Deut. 7:3-4 (pp. 242-43).

Though there is not a universal commandment in the Torah prohibiting intermarriage, there is an underlying assumption throughout the Torah that a Jew should marry someone (from within the nation or without) who affirms the covenant God made with Israel. Both spouses in an intermarriage should be committed to upholding the covenant responsibilities incumbent upon members of the nation of Israel, which includes raising children to express their love for God by living out these responsibilities. 

Intermarriage often leads to assimilation but it does not have to. Sometimes the Gentile Christian spouse is more committed to keeping a Jewish home and raising Jewish children than the Jewish spouse.