Still Jewish

A History of Women and Intermarriage in America

Keren R. McGinity

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780814796344
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Over the last century, American Jews married outside their religion at increasing rates. By closely examining the intersection of intermarriage and gender across the twentieth century, Keren R. McGinity describes the lives of Jewish women who intermarried while placing their decisions in historical context. The first comprehensive history of these intermarried women, Still Jewish is a multigenerational study combining in-depth personal interviews and an astute analysis of how interfaith relationships and intermarriage were portrayed in the mass media, advice manuals, and religious community-generated literature.

Still Jewish dismantles assumptions that once a Jew intermarries, she becomes fully assimilated into the majority Christian population, religion, and culture. Rather than becoming "lost" to the Jewish community, women who intermarried later in the century were more likely to raise their children with strong ties to Judaism than women who intermarried earlier in the century. Bringing perennially controversial questions of Jewish identity, continuity, and survival to the forefront of the discussion, Still Jewish addresses topics of great resonance in the modern Jewish community and beyond.

1

Immigrant Jewesses Who Married “Out”

My grandchildren, for all I know, may have a graver task than I have set them. Perhaps they may have to testify that the faith of Israel is a heritage that no heir in the direct line has the power to alienate from his successors. Even I, with my limited perspective, think it doubtful if the conversion of the Jew to any alien belief or disbelief is ever thoroughly accomplished. What positive affirmation of the persistence of Judaism in the blood my descendants may have to make, I may not be present to hear.

—Mary Antin, The Promised Land, 1912

Immigrant Jewish women who intermarried in the early decades of the twentieth century were highly independent thinkers who refused religious conformity as a way of life. The Jewish women I consider here immigrated to this country between 1886 and 1894, and subsequently married Gentiles. Their Eastern European places of origin were similar, as were their Orthodox beginnings, and as activists they shared some political views and experiences. The lives of Mary Antin Grabau, Rose Pastor Stokes, and Anna Strunsky Walling illustrate freedom of choice and expression in the New World. These immigrant women who intermarried did not cease to self-identify as Jewish or to exemplify Jewish values as was presumed to be the case for those who married “out.” They contributed to a new subculture of modern American life that permitted intermarriage at a time when it was uncommon, without entirely forgetting their heritage. As Progressives during a period of bountiful public activism, they worked on behalf of the tired, the poor, and “the huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”¹ In some cases they formed new religious identities. All their experiences expanded what it meant to be a “Jewish woman” by illustrating the growing elasticity of religious identity in modern American culture. Each romance in its own way suggests something about the mechanics of intermarriage between Jewish women and Gentile men that defies conventional ideas about the influence of intermarriage on identity.

Antin, Pastor, and Strunsky are well-known historical figures because of their political activism and literary works. However, the personal details of life within their homes and marriages, and how their families responded to their marital choices, have received little attention to date. These three women are the focus here, because they became celebrities of sorts as a result of their ambitions, their professional accomplishments, and their marriages to prominent non-Jewish men. These women demonstrate that despite the lack of social acceptance that inhibited large-scale intermarriage—between less than 2 percent and 3.2 percent of Jews married non-Jews prior to 1930—for some Jewish women (and men) intermarriage was a way to join the dominant culture.² The American rate of Jewish intermarriage was significantly lower than in Germany where, by 1930, twenty out of one hundred Jewish marriages were interfaith.³ These women’s stories also shed light on the meaning of intermarriage by dismantling prior assumptions about the reasons for the failures of some mixed marriages.

Antin, Pastor, and Strunsky helped make intermarriage a topic suitable for public discussion. In the years following their marriages, other immigrants began voicing their personal concerns in the print media. Most immigrants had a humble outlet for their angst: the Jewish Daily Forward, a Yiddish newspaper in America started in 1897. It attracted many immigrant readers, became their confidant and adviser, and, by the early 1930s, had a circulation of a quarter-million. In 1906 Abraham Cahan, the Forward’s editor, began printing letters from readers and the paper’s responses in a column titled “A Bintel Brief” (A Bundle of Letters).⁴ The topics ranged considerably, including woes of unemployment, poverty, starvation, illness, husbands who deserted their families, protests about boss’s actions, complaints against family members, and issues related to intermarriage. Those who intermarried wrote some of the letters, as did their relatives. The topic of intermarriage was an issue of interest, whether or not the Forward ’s staff members fabricated any of the letters for their readers. “What is the matter with the Jewish girls and boys of the East Side?” asked the American Jewish Chronicle in a 1916 article titled “Intermarriage on the East Side.” In a thinly veiled reference to the Pastor-Stokes and Strunsky-Walling couples, the author alleged that the intermarriages that occurred some years earlier between certain social workers of a non-Jewish social center were the greatest impetus to intermarriage on the East Side.⁵ Although articles in the Jewish press may have exaggerated the influence of their marriages on people’s behavior, the articles illustrate that these immigrant Jewish women put intermarriage on the kitchen table.⁶

Yet other writers maintained that, although Jewish women and men might entertain the idea temporarily, they were unlikely to intermarry in large numbers. In a March 1925 interview with Der Tog (The Day) the advice columnist Beatrice Fairfax disclosed her readers’ perspectives. Commenting on the tensions between mothers and daughters, she wrote: “Way down deep the girls have a very strong traditional sense, and would not marry out of the fold at any price. Comparatively few of them do. They tell me so in their letters.” Fairfax also contended that Jewish boys’ involvement with non-Jewish girls should not be misconstrued to imply impending intermarriage. She argued, “What right has any Christian girl to think that a Jewish fellow takes her out for any other reason than to have some fun? And these boys write to me about these presumptuous Schickses who are annoying them because they misunderstood their intentions.”⁷ In her estimation, then, neither Jewish women nor Jewish men had any serious intentions of committing the unthinkable act of intermarriage. “Some fun,” as Fairfax described it, likely referred to the idea that Jewish men may have been willing to “experiment” and “learn” on Christian women but not to marry them. Jewish women, of course, did not have the converse implicit privilege with Christian men.⁸

In addition to being mentioned in the Jewish press, Pastor and Strunsky inspired quasi-autobiographical literature concerning intermarriage. A direct reference to Mrs. Walling and Mrs. Stokes suggests that their marriages fostered the creation of the 1926 book I Am a Woman—and a Jew.⁹ This work was hailed by the New York Times for its “utter frankness” and sincerity, for shedding original light on the cleavage between Jew and Gentile.¹⁰ The Hebrew Standard reported that the book revealed with sincerity how a woman, “by marrying a Gentile, became a stranger among her people” and that it should be viewed as a “composite autobiography.”¹¹ Similar to Antin, the protagonist’s aspirations reflected not so much a rejection of Judaism as an embrace of the ideology of modern womanhood that included delaying marriage so as to better preserve independence and individual fulfillment.¹² This intermarriage story about a woman’s struggle for a career and her belief that Jewishness was inescapably racial suggests how an immigrant Jewish woman who intermarried in the early twentieth century navigated the complications of being a Jew by birth and marrying a non-Jew. Her individuality was sacrificed at the marriage altar, but her Jewish inheritance clung to her without fail.

The high visibility of the Antin-Grabau, Pastor-Stokes, and Strunsky-Walling unions heightened awareness in the organized Jewish community that some Jewish women were leaving the fold. Initially, published letters regarding a Jewish man’s marriage, or prospective marriage, with a Gentile woman belied the existence of Jewish woman-Gentile man alliances. The author Harry Golden reinforced this idea in his commentary by pointing out that, “much has been written and said about the terrible scene that takes place in a Jewish home when a son marries a shikse— the parents sit shiva in mourning for the boy.”¹³ I did not find any letter regarding a Jewish woman who intermarried in the twentieth century prior to the three women I discuss in this chapter, each of whom married between 1901 and 1906. Beginning in 1905, however, letters and references to intermarriage in ethnic press articles, some of which allude to these women, indicate that concern about Jewish women marrying out increased as time went on.

Immigrant Jewish women who intermarried had similar ideals about married life as immigrant women who married coreligionists. The historian Susan Glenn, in her book Daughters of the Shtetl: Life and Labor in the Immigrant Generation, contended that Jewish working women’s involvement in two overlapping contexts, urban mass culture and political activism in the garment industry, eased constraints on female behavior. Their involvement in these contexts fostered women’s optimism about relationships with the opposite sex based more on a partnership model, not necessarily equal but certainly more collaborative than Orthodox Jewish cultural patterns. Paradoxically, girls entered the workforce and became involved in union activities, thus expanding the traditional female sphere. Once they married, however, they settled back into domestic life. As Glenn wrote, “One image emphasized women’s ability to fight side by side with men to help earn a living and to struggle for workers’ rights. The other stressed the respectability and romantic promise that women sought in the role of modern wife-companion.” Moreover, “[for those involved in labor unions] gender equality was never as important as working-class equality.” If women gained some modicum of social equality it was the result of their radical activities rather than agitation specifically about women’s needs.¹⁴

This Jewish version of New Womanhood, which combined socializing with the opposite sex and political activism, prompted those who intermarried, as well as those who in-married, to seek companionate marriages but not necessarily equality with their husbands. And if they did strive for gender equality in theory, it was unattainable in practice. American family social values opposed women’s full emancipation as individuals by maintaining a hierarchy of domesticity that viewed women as having a special nature as wives and mothers. By the early twentieth century the new justification for suffrage was that women had a special contribution to make to society because they were different from men, and not as a way of securing political expression for women’s self-interests. Moreover, women were classified as physically weaker than men. In 1908, for example, the Supreme Court ruled in Muller v. Oregon that protective labor legislation for women was constitutional; restricting women’s factory employment to ten-hour days in an effort to preserve women’s health was, in the justices’ unanimous opinion, “an object of public interest.” By 1917 nearly all states limited women’s hours of employment.¹⁵ Politics and voting became extensions of the home; the responsibility for its upkeep and the care of children were women’s and not shared equally with their male companions.¹⁶

Like their immigrant sisters, Jewish women who married non-Jews chose their mates rather than accept arranged marriages, evidence of the growing individualism in modern America. The New World presented many new opportunities for immigrant Jewish women, among them the ability to earn their own living and, with it, the potential to select their own spouse. Certainly some immigrants still utilized the shadkhen (marriage broker) to help them secure an appropriate marriage partner, but they were increasingly in the minority. The rising “price of husbands” also made the old dowry arrangement an unaffordable luxury for some immigrant families.¹⁷ Although parental approval remained a factor, young Jewish women, shortly after they began to earn an income, married and began raising families.¹⁸ While earning potential replaced the role of the matchmaker and the dowry, a middle-class ideal of respectability pervaded immigrant and American culture alike. Women were expected to stop working for wages after marriage. In the words of the historian Elizabeth Ewen: “Both middle-class American culture and immigrant men in particular, considered it demeaning for women to work outside the home after marriage. It was assumed that husbands who allowed this were incapable of supporting their families on their own.”¹⁹

Antin, Pastor, and Strunsky succeeded in attaining contemporary marriage standards of a less-than-equal partnership, notwithstanding criticism for intermarrying and their in-laws’ mixed-emotional responses. Marriage in America was defined by specific characteristics. As the historian Nancy Cott wrote in Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation, “Political and legal authorities endorsed and aimed to perpetuate nationally a particular marriage model: lifelong, faithful monogamy, formed by the mutual consent of a man and a woman, bearing the impress of the Christian religion and the English common law in its expectations for the husband to be the family head and economic provider, his wife the dependent partner.”²⁰ The male breadwinner ethic was clearly evident in Jewish women’s intermarriages, often causing strife between spouses. By selecting husbands sufficiently well off so as not to require their wives’ incomes, immig...