Jewish Religious Intermarriage in Canada 68 Robert Brym and Rhonda Lenton / Jewish Religious Intermarriage in Canada

Canadian Jewish Studies / Études juives canadiennes, vol. 30, 2020 67 Robert Brym and Rhonda Lenton Jewish Religious Intermarriage in Canada 68 Robert Brym and Rhonda Lenton / Jewish Religious Intermarriage in Canada Abstract Drawing on secondary literature, this paper first identifies trends in Jewish religious intermarriage in Canada—including variation over time, gender, age and community size. It then critically examines results from the 2018 Survey of Jews in Canada to explore factors associated with intermarriage. Binary logistic regression demonstrates that intermarriage is significantly and independently associated with residing in cities other than Montreal and Toronto, relative youth, male gender, having little Jewish secondary socialization outside the family and having both parents born in Canada. The statistically positive effect of having intermarried parents on children’s likelihood of intermarriage falls if children attend full-time Jewish school and summer camp with Jewish content. The effect disappears if at least one parent is an immigrant. These findings imply that the rising rate of intermarriage can be significantly mitigated if the Jewish community finds the means to increase the proportion of children who undergo intensive Jewish secondary socialization and the proportion of immigrants in the Jewish community. The paper concludes by discussing policies that could facilitate this outcome. Résumé En s’appuyant sur la littérature secondaire, cet article identifie d’abord les ten- dances des mariages interreligieux juifs au Canada, y compris les variations dans le temps, le sexe, l’âge et la taille des communautés. Il examine ensuite de manière critique les résultats de l’enquête de 2018 sur les Juifs au Canada afin d’étudier les facteurs associés aux mariages mixtes. La régression logistique binaire démontre que les mariages mixtes sont associés de manière significative et indépendante à la résidence dans des villes autres que Montréal et Toronto, à la jeunesse relative, au sexe masculin, à une faible socialisation secondaire juive en dehors de la famille et au fait que les deux parents sont nés au Canada. L’effet statistiquement positif du fait d’avoir des parents mariés à des non-Juifs sur la probabilité de mariage mixte diminue si les enfants fréquentent une école juive à temps plein et un camp d’été à contenu juif. L’effet disparait si au moins un des parents est un immigrant. Ces ré- sultats impliquent que le taux croissant de mariages mixtes peut être considérable- ment atténué si la communauté juive trouve les moyens d’augmenter la proportion d’enfants qui poursuivent une socialisation secondaire juive intensive et la proportion d’immigrants dans la communauté juive. L’article conclut en discutant des politiques qui pourraient faciliter ce résultat. Canadian Jewish Studies / Études juives canadiennes, vol. 30, 2020 69 Trends Four trends characterize Jewish religious intermarriage in Canada.1 It has increased over time. It is more common among men than among women, although the difference has narrowed in recent years. It is more common among younger Jews than older Jews. And the intermarriage rate tends to be inversely proportional to the size of the community in which it occurs—that is, it tends to be lower in areas with relatively large Jewish populations. Figure 1 illustrates some of these trends. Up to the late 1980s, provincial governments collected and published annual data on the religious affiliation of newlyweds recorded on their marriage license applications. These data show that, until the late 1940s, the combined intermarriage rate for Jewish women and men never exceeded five percent. That is, in a given year, of all marriages that involved at least one Jewish spouse, no more than one in twenty involved a non-Jewish spouse. The 1950s saw an appreciable increase in the intermarriage rate. By 1987, the annual intermarriage rate for newlyweds had risen to 27 percent. In the late 1980s, some provincial governments stopped recording the religious affiliation of newlyweds. Researchers then turned to the national census as a source of information on intermarriage because the census asks Canadians to report their religious identification and marital status every decade. The 2011 National Household Survey (NHS) followed suit.2 From both the national census and 2011 NHS microdata files, it is possible to link couples who are married or are in common-law partner- ships and thus to determine the religious identification of each spouse or partner. Canadian adults of all ages, not just newlyweds, are included in the census and the 2011 NHS. Because newlyweds tend to be relatively young, and intermarriage is less common among older Canadians, the census- and NHS-based estimates of the intermarriage rate are necessarily lower than the rate estimated from marriage license applications. As Figure 1 shows, it was about 18 percentage points lower in 1981. Nonetheless, the cross-time trend noted earlier persists: according to the census, the Jewish intermarriage rate increased about 11 percentage points between 1981 and 2011.3 The most recent estimate of the Jewish intermarriage rate in Canada—25 percent—comes from the 2018 Survey of Jews in Canada. 70 Robert Brym and Rhonda Lenton / Jewish Religious Intermarriage in Canada Note: The 2018 intermarriage rate takes into account the 95 percent of Jews who identified as Jewish re- ligiously but not the 5 percent who identified as Jewish or Partially Jewish by criteria other than religion. Sources: Basavarajappa, K. G., Norris, M L. & Halli, S. 1988. Spouse Selection in Canada, 1921-78: An Examination by Age, Sex, and Religion. Journal of Biosocial Science 20 (2): 211-23; Brym, R., Neuman, K. & Lenton, R. 2019a. 2018 Survey of Jews in Canada. Toronto: Environics Institute; Larson, L.E. & Munro, B. 1985. Religious Intermarriage in Canada, 1974-1982. International Journal of Sociology of the Family 15 (1/2): 31-49; Larson, L. E. & Munro, B. 1990. Religious Intermarriage in Canada in the 1980s. Journal of Comparative Family Studies 21 (2): 239-50; Lee, S. M., Hou, F., Edmonston, B. & Wu, Z. 2017 Religious Intermarriage in Canada, 1981 to 2011. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 56 (3): 667-77. The main reason for the upward trend in the Jewish intermarriage rate over time is so well established by research it is almost self-evident. As the authors of a report on the 2018 Survey of Canadian Jews wrote: As late as the first half of the 20th century, Canadian Jews experienced a high lev- el of discrimination in accommodation, employment, property ownership, and everyday interaction. Despite these impediments, they proved to be highly re- silient. They achieved rapid upward mobility and made many important contri- butions to Canadian medicine, jurisprudence, science, education, government, the economy, and the arts. Upward mobility and increasing acceptance on the part of the Canadian mainstream have had what many community members regard as a downside: these social processes heightened the prospect of cultural assimilation, loss of traditional languages, and intermarriage.4 The lowering of residential, educational, occupational and other social barriers sep- arating Jews from non-Jews that began haltingly in the 1950s accelerated in the fol- lowing decades. This circumstance accounts for the fact that Jewish Canadians born in recent decades are less constrained to remain within the boundaries of the community than were members of older generations. Canadian Jewish Studies / Études juives canadiennes, vol. 30, 2020 71 An analogous process affected Jewish women in particular. Until the 1950s, domes- ticity and traditionalism were the dominant themes in the socialization of most Ca- nadian Jewish women. On average, they attained fewer years of formal education than did Jewish men, and before marriage they were expected to remain tied to family life more than men were—preparing meals, babysitting and so on. Their stints in the paid labour force were comparatively brief and typically ended with marriage. Jewish women thus had relatively little exposure to social settings in which they could meet, date and mate with non-Jews. This situation helps to explain the fact that, in the mid-1950s, Jewish women were more than five percentage points less likely to intermarry than were Jewish men. However, the gap began to shrink in subsequent decades with the weakening of traditional socialization patterns and an increasingly large proportion of Jewish women who sought higher education and entered the paid labour force to pursue careers. In 2001 and 2011, there was less than 1 percentage point difference between the male and female intermarriage rates for Jews between the ages of 18 and 34.5 Table 1, based on the 2018 Survey of Canadian Jews, illustrates the fourth and final trend that characterizes the pattern of Jewish intermarriage in Canada—the ten- dency for intermarriage to be most widespread in small communities and least common in larger ones. This finding replicates the results of earlier research on Jewish intermarriage in Canada using either provinces or metropolitan urban areas as units of analysis—and of Jewish and non-Jewish intermarriage more generally.6 Table 1 Jewish population and intermarriage rate by city City Population, 2011 Intermarriage, 2018 (%) Toronto 188,710 22 Montreal 90,780 26 Winnipeg 13,690 49 Vancouver 26,255 60 Note: Column 2 tallies responses to the question, “And what is your spouse’s religion, if any?” (Jewish). Based on the 2011 National Household Survey, Shahar and his associates provide national and city intermarriage rates that differ from, but are in line with, those of the 2018 Survey of Jews in Canada: Canada, 26.3 percent; Montreal, 16.7 percent; Toronto, 18.1 percent; Winnipeg, 25.4 percent; and Vancouver, 43.4 percent. The differences are likely due to different sampling methodologies, different definitions of “Jewish” and a lapse of seven years between the two surveys.7 Why are relatively high Jewish intermarriage rates typically associated with small Jewish communities? Simply because there are relatively few potential mates in small communities.

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