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Distribution Agreement in Presenting This Thesis Or Dissertation As A Distribution Agreement In presenting this thesis or dissertation as a partial fulfillment of the requirements for an advanced degree from Emory University, I hereby grant to Emory University and its agents the non-exclusive license to archive, make accessible, and display my thesis or dissertation in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known, including display on the world wide web. I understand that I may select some access restrictions as part of the online submission of this thesis or dissertation. I retain all ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis or dissertation. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis or dissertation. Signature: _____________________________ ______________ Jennifer Thompson Date Continuity Through Transformation: American Jews, Judaism, and Intermarriage By Jennifer Thompson Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Division of Religion Ethics and Society _____________________________________________________ Don Seeman, Ph.D. Advisor _____________________________________________________ Eric Goldstein, Ph.D. Committee Member _____________________________________________________ Gary Laderman, Ph.D. Committee Member _____________________________________________________ Bradd Shore, Ph.D. Committee Member _____________________________________________________ Steven M. Tipton, Ph.D. Committee Member Accepted: _____________________________________________________ Lisa A. Tedesco, Ph.D. Dean of the James T. Laney School of Graduate Studies _____________________________________________________ Date Continuity Through Transformation: American Jews, Judaism, and Intermarriage By Jennifer Thompson M.T.S., Harvard Divinity School, 2000 Advisor: Don Seeman, Ph.D. An abstract of A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the James T. Laney School of Graduate Studies of Emory University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate Division of Religion Ethics and Society 2010 Abstract Continuity Through Transformation: American Jews, Judaism, and Intermarriage By Jennifer Thompson Drawing on five years of ethnographic fieldwork in Atlanta, Georgia, this study analyzes how couples in which one spouse is Jewish and the other is not Jewish understand their religious lives. American Jewish discourse over the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has framed intermarriage as a key indicator of Jews’ assimilation to American society, and cast it as a threat to “Jewish continuity,” meaning the continuation of Judaism as a distinct religious, cultural, and ethnic entity. My ethnographic data show that while American individualism is heavily influential in at least some intermarried Jews’ lives, it functions in complex, subtle, and contradictory ways. My intermarried informants governed their families’ religious lives using discourses that I call “ethnic familialism” and “universalist individualism.” Ethnic familialism draws on nostalgia, ethnicity, and biogenetic kinship. Universalist individualism emphasizes individuals’ duty to rationally choose their religious beliefs and practices, and holds that all religions teach the same values. Both of these languages shaped my informants’ religious lives, as did traditional gender roles from American and Jewish cultures, whether my informants embraced or consciously rejected them. Non-Jewish women married to Jewish men often experienced the paradoxical demand to take leadership roles within the family in educating children to be Jews. In doing so, they transformed traditional religious boundaries while seeing themselves as continuing those traditions. Lastly, Atlanta rabbis whom I interviewed also struggled to reconcile Jewish norms with lay people’s and their own understandings of personal autonomy. Although intermarriage discourse demonstrates a great deal of anxiety about the assimilation of intermarried Jews, I argue that this discourse is a proxy for a more painful and difficult debate about personal autonomy and Jewish peoplehood more generally. The tensions of individualism and communal participation and obligation are inevitable for American Jews whether they are endogamous or intermarried. By framing these discourses in the contexts of American morality and religion, as well as secularization theory, these tensions are revealed to be part of the fabric of contemporary American Jewish experience. This contextualization also helps to depict intermarried Jews and their families in a more humanistic way. Continuity Through Transformation: American Jews, Judaism, and Intermarriage By Jennifer Thompson M.T.S., Harvard Divinity School, 2000 Advisor: Don Seeman, Ph.D. A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the James T. Laney School of Graduate Studies of Emory University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate Division of Religion Ethics and Society 2010 Acknowledgements I want to express my sincere gratitude to the many people who have contributed to this project. My advisor, Don Seeman, and the members of my dissertation committee, Eric Goldstein, Gary Laderman, Bradd Shore, and Steve Tipton, helped me to examine the topic from many different angles. The participation of scholars of such divergent disciplines ensured that our discussions were always lively. I am also indebted to other faculty in the Graduate Division of Religion, including Nancy Eiesland, of blessed memory, who helped me to think through issues of methodology and framing. I am deeply grateful for the support of the Center for Myth and Ritual in American Life, a Sloan Center on Working Families, and my colleagues there, especially Donna Day, who provided invaluable logistical support. Thanks are also due to the Association for Jewish Studies and the Tam Institute for Jewish Studies at Emory, which have enabled me to present my work to other scholars and learn from them. I am also grateful to the Atlanta Coalition of Jewish Outreach Professionals for counting me among their colleagues. I also deeply appreciate the personal support I have received in completing this dissertation. Without Bernadette Brooten’s both practical and imaginative mentoring, I would not have attempted this project in the first place. My friends Heidi Tauscher, Wylin Dassie, and Andrea Greco provided moral support as well as fantastic home- cooked dinners. My parents, Ralph and Rita Thompson, and my sisters, Liz and Valerie Thompson, made sure that I persevered. My husband, Jeff Carr, single-handedly kept our house from falling down, and our son, Sam Thompson-Carr, was the best infant research assistant I have ever encountered. I am grateful to all of them. Lastly, I owe especially heartfelt thanks to the many men and women who shared their experiences with me. I hope that I have done justice to them. Continuity Through Transformation: American Jews, Judaism, and Intermarriage Jennifer Thompson Table of Contents Chapter 1 Secularization and the Transformation of Jewishness 1–32 Chapter 2 “What do you stand for when you wish to remain separate?” American Jewish Discourses on Intermarriage 33–57 Chapter 3 “Prophetic Outcasts”: Individualism, Universalism, and Community among Intermarried Couples 58–96 Chapter 4 Ethnic Familialism: Jewishness Refracted through Family and Gender 97–140 Chapter 5 Balancing Families, Individuals, Covenant and Community 141–193 Chapter 6 The Adaptation of Jewishness to Modernity 194–215 References 216–229 1 Chapter 1 Secularization and the Transformation of Jewishness “I felt like I would be forever alienated from my kid if he was in the Savior mode and I wasn’t.” “You do the traditions because that’s what you are, not because of what you believe.” “How can someone say that my son is not Jewish? They don’t know what’s in his heart.” Intermarried Jewish-Christian couples who raise their children as Jews contend with contradictions in their own understandings of Jewishness and their place in the American Jewish community. The intermarried couples whose experiences form the basis for this study grapple with complex issues of belonging, belief, religious practices, and autonomy, and they manage these issues in ways that correspond to their equally complex ideas about fairness and duty. This study uses participant-observation and interviews to examine the experiences and culture of people involved in intermarriage discourse, in order to understand conflicting interpretations of intermarriage and their significance. Using participant-observation in addition to interviews provides opportunities not only to hear how informants explain their feelings and thoughts, but also to observe their actions and silences. Over time, these observations gradually have revealed the cultural and personal contradictions in my informants’ experiences of Jewishness, i.e., Jewish religion and culture, and how they manage these contradictions. Much of the existing literature about Jewish intermarriage, preoccupied with the policy concerns of Jewish organizations, is blind to the experiences of actual intermarried couples and what really matters to them. But overlooking these dimensions disadvantages 2 both the intermarried couples whom the literature discusses and the Jewish communities whom the literature purports to serve by creating a distorted picture of their concerns and obscuring the contradictions of their experiences. Thus, this study explores what really matters to intermarried couples who choose Judaism to anchor their families’
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