WHEN VICTIMS RULE

A Critique of Jewish Pre-eminence in America

All Pictures Added by Gnostic Liberation Front

Page IV

15. Assimilation/Intermarriage/Conversion to Judaism [89 Kilobytes] [about 15 paper pages] Traditional Jewish resistance to intermarriage (marriage to a non-Jew); recent Jewish alarm at high rates of intermarriage; Gentile spouses' conversion to Judaism; Jewish spouses' intense connection to Jewish identity; popular Jewish rejection of converts to Judaism; centrality of Jewish racial belief that real Jews are born that way.

16. The Jewish Self-Conception of Intellectual, Moral, and Spiritual Superiority [85 Kilobytes] [about 11 paper pages] The Jewish celebration of Jewish Nobel prize winners; Jewish celebration of alleged Jewish superiority in intelligence over other peoples; racist arguments that Jews are genetically more intelligent than others; Jewish arrogance as a solicitation of non-Jewish hostility; Jewish chutzpah -- pushiness, nerviness; Jewish claims to superiority as part of Chosen People ethnocentrism.

17. Other Jewish Contributions to Modern Racist Currents [53 Kilobytes] [about 20 paper pages] Prominent Jewish racial theorists in the early 1900s; the Jew as "genius"; Jewish superiority claims based upon Ashkenazi (European Jewish) models -- not the Sephardim (Jews from the Middle East); Jewish genetic diseases from centuries of interbreeding; genetic myths of Jewish identity.

18 (In two parts)
The Holocaust and Genocide (pt. 1) [501 Kilobytes] [about 93 paper pages] The Nazi persecutors' inadvertent rejuvenation of Jewish identity; early Israeli shame of Holocaust survivors, and today's heroizing of them; creation of the secular Holocaust theology in the 1960s; Israel's "redemptive" 1967 victory over the Arabs as a milestone in Jewish Holocaust cosmology; the Holocaust and Israel as cores of modern Jewish identity; German fascism's Master Race ideology as an echo of Jewry's Chosen People claim; precedents for Nazi-inspired genocide (and other racist policies) in original Jewish teachings; the reification of such material in some Jewish quarters today; Holocaust-centeredness throughout the western mass media; Jewish religious tenets and anti-Black racism; the importance of the symbol of Amalek in Jewish tradition, the injunction that he should be eternally hated, and the continuous call for his extermination; the Holocaust in the forgotten context of World War II; Nazi intention to exterminate Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, and others; the undercurrent of Chosen People racism in the idea that murdered Jews are more important than anyone else murdered; modern Jewish defamation of Poles, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Russians and other Eastern Europeans; Jewish exclusionism and separatism in pre-World War II Eastern Europe; the lack of Jewish resistance to the Nazis; Jewish collaborators with German fascists; Jewish domination of postwar communist secret police organizations and concentration camps; Jewish double standards for World War II era history: one standard for Jews, and another for non-Jews; mainstream Jewry's resistance to the facts of World War II-era history.

18 (In two parts)
The Holocaust and Genocide (pt. 2) [543 Kilobytes] [about 124 paper pages] Jewish and western world obsession with the Holocaust; Jewish insistence that the "Holocaust was unique"; Holocaust uniqueness as part of the traditional Chosen People concept; the importance of Jewish Old Testament-sanctioned genocide in understanding the Holocaust; the invention of the Jewish dead as heroes and martyrs for the Jewish cause; the proliferation of worldwide Holocaust museums as Judeo-centric and Israeli propaganda posts; the usurping of distinctly American patriotic sites beneath the Jewish martyrological flag; the Holocaust as Big Business; the proliferation of Judeocentric Holocaust classes in American schools; international Jewish aspects of the world Holocaust history scene; the Auschwitz convent controversy; popular mass media renditions of the Holocaust: Shoah, Maus, Schindler's List; the trial of John Demjanjuk, accused mass murderer.

15
ASSIMILATION, INTERMARRIAGE AND CONVERSION TO JUDAISM

 

 

 

     "Marrying a Gentile is totally forbidden [in traditional Jewish law]."

-- Michael Asheri, 1983, p. 332



"Two of the most overworked folk tales that are firmly believed
by Jews are that the overwhelmingly majority of Jewish
intermarriages involved non-Jewish females and Jewish males;
and that most of these non-Jewish females marry Jewish males
in order to better their lot socially and economically."
-- Rabbi David Max Eichhorn, 1974, p. 29

 

 

 

       While Adolf Hitler failed to destroy the Jews, many these days fear that they are in danger of accomplishing their own destruction via a younger generation's choice of extinction. Jews have always resisted surrendering their identity chauvinism to go the way of French-Americans, Italian-Americans, Greek-Americans and so many others have already done in completely assimilating into American society decades earlier. The American Jewish community -- more intensely than any other people -- has always resisted that dreaded curse: assimilation. "The hydra-headed monster of assimilation takes many forms," says Richard Gordis, "the 'most menacing' of which is intermarriage." [SILBERMAN, p. 285] "What centuries of persecution have been powerless to do," wrote Lewis S. Benjamin in 1907, "has been efficient in a score of years by friendly intercourse." [SILBERMAN, p. 286] "We have survived," says Alan Dershowitz, "-- sometimes by the skin of our teeth -- millennia of rape attempts against the Jewish body and soul by villains and monsters of every description. Efforts to convert us, assimilate us, and exterminate us by the sword have taken an enormous toll, but in the end they have failed. Now the dangers are more subtle: willing seduction, voluntary assimilation, deliberate abdication." [DERSHOWITZ, p. 354]  "On the one end of spectrum," remarks Henry Feingold, "is the danger of absorption into a benevolent society; on the other is the possibility of physical destruction ... It seems like both dangers require a conscious will to overcome. That may be the secret of Jewish survival." [FEINGOLD, p. 67]

 

      Intermarriage (marrying non-Jews), notes Egon Mayer, has always been "the cardinal social offense that an individual Jew can commit against his family and community." [SCHNEIDER, p. 334] "There are two main taboos laid upon the Jewish people," wrote Ann Roiphe in 1981, "The first and most important taboo is not to leave the tribe ... The taboo against intermarriage is really only an extension in practical matters of the first taboo. If you marry a stranger it will lead to your eventually leaving the tribe, and if you yourself do not, then your children and grandchildren will and so the body of Jewry will be depleted. Each loss is grieved and each time someone breaks the taboo the ranks close tighter behind him. They don't say (not relatives, friends or friends of relatives) good luck, Godspeed, they vilify and despise." [ROIPHE, 1981, p. 197]

 

    Kitty Dukakis, the wife of Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis, remembered being taken to the synagogue as a child by her grandmother:

 

     "I remember, too, being the subject of discussion among the

     mezzanine denizens. The ladies looked me over and mumbled, under

     their breath, 'shiksa.' I was about four and a half when I heard that

     term for the first time: It is Yiddish and means a non-Jewish girl.

     At the very word, my grandmother would turn excitedly and shush

     her friends. She'd purse her lips, look over to the side, and pretend

     to spit, saying something like 'p-tui, p-tui!' I learned, later, she was

     spitting to ward off the 'keenahori,' the evil eye. 'It's not true,' my

     grandmother cried vehemently. 'She's not a shiksa. She's Jewish on

     both sides!' My grandmother never knew my mother was only

     half-Jewish and that my sister and I had gentile blood. I think it

     would have killed her." [DUKAKIS, K., 1990, p. 55]

     Vickie Bane notes the case of famous radio talk show host "Dr. Laura" Schlessinger (whose father was Jewish, but mother not):

     "Laura told Ethnic Newswatch that their Jewish neighbors on Long Island
     were very 'un-accepting' of her mother because 'she was a shiksa [a non-Jewish
     woman] and because she was gorgeous ... A lot of problems came from the
     Jewish women. I got into fistfights because they called my mother a dirty
     refugee." [BANE, V., 1999, p. 25]

Upon public announcement of the impending marriage between non-Jewish actress Debbie Reynolds and Jewish pop singer Eddie Fisher, Reynolds notes in the autobiography that:

"I also received a couple of hundred fan letters. Among them was a small, ordinary-looking, white envelope with my name and address scrawled across the bottom. Inside, in the same blotchy-looking chicken-scratch was a note: 'Dear Deb. Thought you should know Eddies Father does NOT approve of him marrying a Gentile. Doesn't want him to be HURT. What YOU -- if you did? Does your Mother and Father want a half-Jew grandchild?' No signature, naturally. It was postmarked Hollywood, August 18. It was the first of many." [REYNOLDS, D., 1988, p. 104]

    In Peru, Israeli Elaine Karp is married to a popular 2001 presidential candidate, Alejandro Toledo. But her relations with the local Jewish community was strained, noted the Jewish Chronicle, "partly because of her high profile marriage to a non-Jew ... Her mixed marriage and her leftist views have caused some rejection." [PERELMAN, M., 4-20-01]

    In 1982, Earl Shorris noted the perspective of his Uncle Phillip about his son dating non-Jews:

     "When [my Uncle Phillip's] son, then a medical student, brought home a Gentile
      girl to meet his parents, Phillip is said to have addressed the boy as Tom, a
      subtle pun on a Hebrew word for wrong thinking. The young woman, confused
      at hearing her beau called by an unfamiliar name, asked my uncle, Do you always
      call him Tom? Only when he's with you." [SHORRIS, E., 1982, p. 53]
 

 

     Jews, writes Inge Lederer Gibel, "are desperately concerned with the ever-rising rate of intermarriage ... Even Jewish secularists ... often resist or withhold their approval when a child announces the intention to 'marry out.'" [GIBEL, p. 53-54] This situation inevitably leads to the standard Jewish 'universalist/particularist' contradiction and the hypocrisy of preaching one world view while practicing another. Gibel notes that

 

        "The bulk of Jewry [worries about] the high rate of intermarriage, and

         the dichotomy of teaching ones' children about universal values and the

         kinship of the human family while in the next breath saying,  'But you

         mustn't marry [a non-Jew]." [GIBEL, p. 54]

 

      Even Gibel, who decries Jewish racism and married a Black man, told her son, as she "told his sister: I don't care who you marry, what color, what nationality, as long as she is a good human being and willing to make a commitment to a Jewish home." [GIBEL, p. 65]

 

     A 1990 survey of the American Jewish community set off a blaze of Jewish worry and hysteria. 52% of all marriages by Jews in America today, the study revealed, were to non-Jews. (Some scholars have argued a more realistic figure is 40%, which is still -- for most Jews -- intolerably high). "This (52%) number," says J. J. Goldberg, "electrified Jewry from coast to coast. Within weeks it would spread by word of mouth and through newspaper headlines, impassioned sermons, and anguished editorials." [GOLDSTEIN, p. 66]

 

     Many talk about Jews marrying non-Jews as if it was the reincarnation of the Nazi gas chambers. "The intermarriage process will take everything Jewish in its wake," declared Rabbi Pincher Stolper, the Executive Vice President of the Orthodox Union, "it will grow until it engulfs the entire community. It is another Holocaust." [GOLDBERG, p. 66]  "Intermarriage," says Rabbi Sol Roth, "is a holocaust of our own making." [SILBERMAN, p. 286] "We will destroy ourselves," worried Rabbi Morris Shapiro, "not through the gas chambers but the love chambers." [RITTENBERG, p. 8] "There are no barking dogs and no Zyklon-B gas," declared Rabbi Ephraim Buchwald, founder of the National Jewish Outreach Program, "... but make no mistake: this is a spiritual Holocaust." [TOBIN, G., 1999, p. 1] In England, where Jews fight their own intermarriage battle, the United Synagogue Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks "reportedly said that intermarriage could complete the work of annihilation attempted by Hitler." [BAADEN, p. 7]  Paul Cowan recalls what his non-Jewish wife faced when they visited Israel: "Israelis and Jewish-American tourists accused her completing Hitler's work by marrying a Jew." [COWAN, P., 1987, p. 7] ("When I see those direct-mail envelopes screaming 'Another Holocaust ... here in America,'" says Zev Schwebel, "and then find inside an appeal for money to fight the 'holocaust' of intermarriage, it makes my blood boil. This is an obscenity ... How dare they equate the horror of a Nazi with a couple that intermarry? This sort of talk is morally reprehensible." [HALBERSTAM, p. 130] )

 

      Roberta Farber called the large number of young Jews desiring to marry out of the Jewish community "devastating," suggested proposals be enacted to "thwart" it, and wondered how best to "retard" intermarriage." [FARBER, p. 14, 20] Stephen Whitfield notes that the rise in Jewish intermarriage "has been so dramatic that panic buttons have been pressed." [WHITFIELD, American, p. 19] Emma Klein suggests "communal" outreach programs to pull wayfaring Jews by birth back into the fold to "weather the threat of intermarriage." [KLEIN, p. 3] Norman Cantor bemoans "the racial suicide of a runaway rate of intermarriage." [CANTOR, p. 434] Michael Wechsler says that it has reached "alarming proportions." [WECHSLER, p. 275]

 

      "The current intermarriage scare," wrote J. J. Goldberg in 1996,"is having a subtle effect on the balance of power in Jewish life. It is putting liberals on the defensive, by raising doubts about the very idea of Jewish integration in an open society. Jewish institutions are devoting a growing share of their resources to shore up the Jewish community from within, and are backing away from their traditional role of trying to better American society ... Simply to say aloud that Jews should fight for the rights of all people -- once a universal view -- now invites public attack." [GOLDBERG, p. 64]  "The Jewish community is hysterical about Jews marrying non-Jews," noted Gary Tobin in 1999, "The language of tragedy and despair pervades analysis and discussion of what is called the 'intermarriage crisis' in America today. Denominations within Judaism have passed bellicose resolutions calling for prevention of intermarriage; and respected scholars, rabbinic leaders, and popular culture figures in Jewish life consistently liken intermarriage to disease, war, and genocide." [TOBIN, G., 1999, p. 1]

 

      "Part of me," says scholar Steven M. Cohen, the chief harbinger of the 52% intermarriage figure, "[sees] my friends who are intermarried and celebrating Christmas as renegades, as heretics, as a traitor of sorts, as missing a very important part of Judaism -- and I pity them." [COHEN, Discussion, p. 19] "Intermarriage is a violation of Jewish law," argued Blu Greenberg in a (1997 issue of the left-wing) Tikkun magazine roundtable discussion about the subject, "It's an abrogation of the covenantal concept of how one enters the Jewish community and peoplehood." [FIRESTONE, TIKKUN, p. 37]

 

    What other ethnic group in America could continuously, very publicly herald itself in such a way, with no fears of vehement criticism of its motivational core: naked racism? Any "white" group with a similar agenda is categorically deemed as ideological descendents of Nazi fascism. African-American groups with out-group marriage prohibitions are seen as Black versions of the Ku Klux Klan. But Jewry consistently resists confronting its own intrinsic racism in this matter. The Jewish Chosen People concept, by religious Jews or atheist Jews, is blurred, vaguely alluded to, as in this observation by Jewish author Gary Tobin:

 

     "Many Jews may not know much about Judaism, but we do know

     that we are somehow different because we are Jews -- whatever that

     means. And we know that other Jews are somehow connected to

     us." [TOBIN, G., 1999, p. 3]

 

     In the face of all the myths about the Jewish community's interethnic tolerance for other communities, Maurice Lamm's 1980 volume, The Jewish Way in Love and Marriage (Harper and Row, publishers) is based on Jewish religious law and advises the following:

 

      "Permit no inter-dating -- not once, not even in a group ... Make your

      child positively and absolutely aware of your horror at the prospect ...

      Do not attend wedding receptions or receptions of intermarried

      friends ... You must not accept a mixed marriage at all ... Pull out

      every stop ... Of course it is heartbreaking to be severe with your

      own child, but not melt ... Interfaith-marriage is treason against

      the Jewish people, its Bible, its history, and its laws." [LAMM, p. 63-64]

 

      In a section entitled "The Rights of the Intermarried," Lamm notes that a non-Jewish marriage partner may not be buried in a Jewish cemetery, nor may an unconverted child of a non-Jewish woman. [LAMM, p. 54]  In the case of homosexuality, "the Halakhah decrees that the lesbian is not punished with death as the male homosexual would be, and is permitted to marry a priest. However, the transgression does warrant a disciplinary punishment -- flagellation." [LAMM, p. 67]

     (Despite these traditional perspectives about same sex love, Jewish homosexual Lev Raphael's views about marriage, in his youth, to non-Jews were kosher. "Beverly and I did not get married," he writes, "I knew more and more clearly that I could not marry a non-Jew, no matter how much I loved her. What pushed me over the edge? Imagining Christmas, so profoundly a part of Beverly's life, in 'our' house. I couldn't do it, nor could I ask her to give it up. I couldn't confuse myself or any children we might have. I wanted a Jewish home. No -- it wasn't that affirmative. I realized I couldn't have a non-Jewish home; that was as far as I got, and it meant much more to me than my subterranean attraction to men ... I wished my brother hadn't taken something away from the family by marrying a non-Jew." [RAPHAEL, L., 1996, p. 1213]

     Paul Cowan recalls a non-Jewish girlfriend he once had (he did marry a woman who converted to Judaism):

     "A few weeks after I got back from Israel, I invited my girlfriend, Beth, a
     Smith undergraduate, an Episcopalian-born poet from suburban
     Connecticut, whose literary ideas had influenced me, to spend time
     at my family's house on Martha's Vineyard. Ever since I had returned
     to America, I'd been toying with the idea of retaining the name Saul
     Cohen, since I thought that act would allow me to feel the same
     clear sense of my own identity as I had in Israel. It was a whimsical
     notion, of course, since it would plainly wound my father [who changed
     his name from Cohen] far more deeply than it would satisfy me. In
     fact, Beth was the only person to whom I ever mentioned the fantasy.
     Was I testing her? Probing for her innermost feeling about Jews?
     Probably. They came, in a rush, when she rubbed her hands in a
     Shylock-like gesture and said, 'Saul Cohen. That's not you. You
     don't want to go back to the ghetto.' It seemed like a flash of bigotry,
     and it bothered me so much that I never dated her again. When we
     discussed the episode, years later, she remembered it as vividly as
     I did. She had been sure that I was abandoning my identity as an
     American for a romantic illusion. The illusion might not have been
     so threatening if it had included her. But that night at supper my
     sister Holly had glanced toward Beth, then turned toward me and
     said, 'I feel proud to be a Jew. Don't you?' I nodded, Beth recalls.
     Then, later, when I told Beth I was thinking of changing my name,
     she began to feel so excluded from my family's -- and my -- inner
     core that she went outside and wept. For years I remembered her
     as a latent anti-Semite. She remembered me as one of the chosen
     people, who secretly believed that everyone else was inferior."
     [COWAN, P., 1982, p. 113]
    
     "I'm horrified by the attitude of so many Jews toward intermarriage," complained John-Paul Flintoff from Great Britain in 1998, "It's not just in Israel. You come across the same thing in Israel. Yes, my wife is Jewish." [FLINTOFF, J., 1--14-98]
 

 

    "Among the most vehemently opposed to the prospect of intermarriage," says Lena Romanoff, who surveyed over 500 members of a 'Jewish Converts Network,' "some [Jewish] parents are initially inclined to go to any lengths to end the relationship. Through outbursts, threats, and pleadings, the first stage in the sabotage plan is directed at the son or daughter. When that fails, and it usually does, discouragement is aimed at the non-Jewish partner through displays of indifference, coldness, or downright hostility." [ROMANOFF, p.81]

 

     Social worker Edwin Freedland noted in 1982 that:

 

       "When some Jewish parents realize that they might have a non-Jewish in-

       law the reactions can be severe. I have seen Jewish mothers threaten

       suicide and Jewish fathers go into severe states of depression. I have of

       threats to cut children off emotionally and financially and to get the child

       kicked out of medical school! I have witnessed harassment in the form

       of daily letters or phone calls. I have seen parents resort to arguing the

       Jewish partner out of the potential marriage, and I have seen the effort

       made with the non-Jewish partner. Whatever form the reaction takes,

       however, the rationale is usually phrased in terms of, or accompanied

       by comments on, the survival of the Jewish people. 'How can you do

       this to us?' is usually mixed with 'Remember the Holocaust.'"

       [FREEDLAND, p. 509]

 

     Alan Adelson's book about the radical left-wing Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) notes that "one Jewish SDSer's parents took their son's emergence as a communist fairly placidly, but when he told them he was dating a Catholic girl, his mother gravely informed him: 'Son, you're killing us slowly.'" [ADELSON, p. 135]

 

     A 1985 survey of American Jewry revealed that 43% of Jewish fathers and 50% of Jewish mothers were opposed to Jews dating non-Jews. Comparatively, only 16% of Christian fathers and 19% of Christian mothers opposed inter-dating. 59% of Jewish fathers and 62% of Jewish mothers opposed Jewish marriage to non-Jews, while only 29% of Christian fathers and 33% of Christian mothers opposed Christian marriages to non-Christians. [FORSTER, p. 69] Another study found that while 80% of the parents of non-Jewish spouses of Jews had positive attitudes about Jewish people, only a quarter of the Jewish parents of a child married to a non-Jew had positive attitudes towards Gentiles. [FORSTER, p. 110] What group of people seem to be narrow-minded bigots here? Why is this aspect of the "champions of liberalism" and "fighters against intolerance" never highlighted?

 

        Jewish isolationism of course has deep and ancient roots, and even in America Jewish fears of, and hostility to, intermarriage are not new. In 1912, one survey noted that only seven of 100 rabbis surveyed in America had ever performed a mixed marriage. A 1909 resolution of the Central Council of American Rabbis declared that "mixed marriages are contrary to the tradition of the Jewish religion and should be discouraged by the American rabbinate." As late as the 1970s, even among Reform (generally considered to be a very liberal branch of Judaism) rabbis, "virtually all" of them opposed mixed marriages on principle and a majority refused to officiate such weddings. [MACDONALD, p. 98]  "Most Jewish parents want their children to maintain Jewish contacts," wrote Albert Gordon in 1959, "They do not favor the idea of intermarriage, primarily because it is their desire to perpetuate the Jewish people and the 'religion of their father,' however they may define that religion ... Intensification of efforts to counter this situation, which Jews must regard as critical, must therefore occupy the most prominent place among the concerns of American Jews." [GORDON, A., p. 245]

 

     While for decades in American popular society a parent's resistance to his or her child marrying someone of another race or religious faith has been the bottom line gauge of a bigot,  "the battle against intermarriage," said Arthur Hertzberg in 1964, "... is conducted among Jews more bitterly and with relatively more success than any other group in America. It makes no difference whether Jews believe or do not believe in any version of the Jewish tradition; they battle with equal fervor against the threat of intermarriage of their children. Certainly one would be shocked to discover non-believers of Catholic or Protestant extraction fighting comparably with their own children." [HERTZBERG, p. 291]

 

     In 1999, an American Jewish Congress-sponsored reprint article quoted an excerpt from a letter of a post-World War II era Jewish woman in Poland who cut off her relationship with the non-Jewish man she loved. Why? "My beloved, my darling," she wrote, "my dearest! What do you know about me? ... You will never be able to understand me, or the sufferings of my [Jewish] nation. And now I'll tell you everything. I'll tell you the most important thing: I am Jewish. I am not for you. You are not for me." [KOZMINSKA-FREJLAK, p. 12]

 

       In 1972, Rabbi Louis Bernstein noted the "frightening increase in intermarriage" and the Rabbinical Council of America set up a National Commission on Jewish Survival to fight it. [COX, p. 185] In 1977 Elihu Bergman, the Assistant Director of the Harvard Center for Population Studies, started seeing the dam leaking and worried that "a disaster is in the making." [SILBERMAN, p. 275] In 1987 a New York-area Conservative Judaism Rabbi Association passed a resolution banning rabbis who perform intermarriages. "Any rabbi who officiates [at an intermarriage] is approving it. It will destroy the character, the uniqueness of the Jewish people, which we are obligated to perpetuate." [RITTBERG, p. 8] Still in June of 1997, Rabbi Eric Yoffie, described as "a, if not the, leading spokesperson for Reform Judaism"  (the most liberal strand of formal Jewish faith) and head of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, said: "I do not perform interfaith marriages. I personally do not believe that rabbis should marry Jews and non-Jews." [SHANKS, p. 47] (Yoffie, by the way, rose to power in the ranks of the Association of Reform Zionists of America). "No Judaism, halikhic or otherwise," said Rabbi Jonathan Sacks in 1993, "sanctions marriage between Jews and non Jews without threatening Jewish continuity at its foundations. Such, however, is the rate of intermarriage in highly acculturated Jewish communities that exclusion of the outmarried can equally be perceived as a demographic disaster." [SACKS, J., p. 160-161]

 

     This opinion is an ancient one. Centuries before Christ, "the principle of the Jewish master race, founded upon the myth of racial purity," notes Old Testament scholar John Allegro, "was being jeopardized by intermarriage on an increasing scale." [Allegro, p. 52] In the Torah/Old Testament, Nehemiah even declared that

 

     "I saw the Jews who had married women of Ashdod, Ammon, and

     Moab; and half of their children spoke the language of Ashdod, and

     they could not speak their own language. And I contended with them

     and cursed them and beat some of them and pulled out their hair...

     Shall we then listen to you and do all this great evil and act

     treacherously against our God by marrying foreign women?"

     [NEHEMIAH 13:23-27; in Allegro, p. 52]

     In Jewish tradition, notes Dan Rottenberg, even among Jews,

     "there were complex rules regarding who could marry whom, for the groups
     constituted a distinct social pecking order, as follows, starting at the top:

     (1) Kohanim (priests) -- male descendants of Aaron, who was a brother of Moses
          and a descendant of Levi.
     (2) Levites -- other male descendants of Levi, who served as assistants to the
          Kohanim.
     (3) Israelites -- all other Jews of unblemished heritage (that is, descendants of
          Jacob who had not intermarried with non-Jews).
     (4) Halalim -- offspring of some forbidden marriages entered into by priests.
     (5) Gerim -- converts to Judaism.
     (6) Harurim -- freed slaves.
     (7) Mamzerim -- bastards.
     (8) Netinim -- descendants of the Gibbeonites, who were circumcised at the time
          of Joshua (1200 BC?) and were not regarded as full Jews because their
          conversion was effected by trickery.
     (9) Shetukim -- persons unable to identify their father.
     (10) Persons unable to identify either their father or their mother.

     Not included in this list were gentiles and slaves, who had no legal status at all
     in Jewish law at the time, since Jewish law applied only to Jews." [ROTTENBERG,
     D., 1977, p. 60]
 

 

        "Being Jewish," as we have so often seen, has always been packed with a range of contradictions and paradoxes; the subject of intermarriage -- so deeply entwined in the strange genetic, ethnic, and nationalist maze of "Jewish identity" -- is no different. While Jewish mythology traditionally makes implicit claims of a direct genetic lineage to the Israelite patriarch Abraham, and various rabbis throughout the centuries have legislated against marrying non-Jews, a quick scan of ancient Jewish history reveals that a number of preeminent Israelite historical characters had married out of the community.

 

      The original patriarch himself, Abraham, cohabitated with Hagar, an Egyptian; Joseph married Asenath, an Egyptian; Moses married Zipporah, a Midianite; King David's mother was a Moabite as was his great grandmother, Ruth; and, as far as King Solomon goes (whose mother was a Hittite), "he loved many strange women, including the daughter of Pharaoh, women of Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, Zidonians, and Hittites." [KOESTLER, p. 235] (King Solomon was reputed to have hundreds, if not thousands of wives).

 

     Even such seminal modern Zionist heroes like Theodore Herzl, Chaim Weizmann, and Ben Gurion all had children who married non-Jews. [SCHNEIDER, p. 339]  Max Nordeau, one of the foremost Zionist pioneers, was married to a Christian. Even Israeli right wing prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu's first marriage was to a woman whose mother was not Jewish.

 

       Yet Moses himself cautioned against exogamy (DEUTERONOMY 7: 34) and "the promises of Isaiah and the injunctions of Ezra in matters of separation," noted J. O. Hertzler in 1942, "are as valid today among the Orthodox as at the hour of their supposed utterance ... A generation or two ago, among many Jews, a father would say kaddish (a prayer for the dead) over the child who was intermarried, as if he had died. Intermarriage was an unforgivable sin, more sinister and dangerous than religious apostates." [HERTZLER, p. 79]
 

 

     Such injunctions still hold firm in Jewish Orthodox communities today in America (6% of the United States Jewish population, 14% of the New York Jewish population). The rate of intermarriage in the Orthodox community, according to two Jewish researchers on the subject, is "virtually nil." [FARBER, p. 17] (In 1991 a study even showed that 85% of all Jews in New York married other Jews.) [FARBER, p. 16]

 

         By 1990, however, with so many young Jews (or divorcees taking on second or third marriages) marrying out of the Jewish community across America, "religious and communal leaders," says Edward Shapiro, "could no longer hurl jeremiads against exogamy or berate the intermarried, particularly when often their children and closest acquaintances had intermarried." [SHAPIRO, p. 5]   "The non-Orthodox ... walk a tightrope," says Lena Romanoff, "Although they do not want to encourage intermarriage, they also do not want to alienate young Jews who, with or without approval from their rabbis or parents are increasingly likely to become involved in intermarriage." [ROMANOFF, p. 6] Hence, since about the 1960s, Jewish communities (except the Orthodox who ban it) have had no choice but to slowly shift from an intolerance of intermarriage to damage control:  it was time to swallow their convictions and make strong efforts to keep the children of mixed marriages Jewish.

 

      Outreach programs or not, there is a strong tendency to keep the children of mixed marriages Jewish anyway. Given traditional Jewish identity  (with its obsessive root and intolerant view of Christians), it should be no surprise that Jews in mixed marriages are far less willing to give up links to their heritage than Gentile spouses. In a 1980s New York area demographic study, for example, the results suggested that three-quarters of Jewish women who marry Gentiles planned to raise their children as Jews. [SILBERMAN, p. 303] Calvin Goldscheider notes that "usually the Jewish partner remains attached to the Jewish community and in many cases the partner not born Jewish becomes attached to the Jewish community through friends, family, neighbors, organizations, secular and religious. Most of the friends of the intermarried are Jewish; most support the state of Israel; most identify themselves as Jews." [GOLDSCHEIDER, p. 139]  "In my experience," says social worker Edwin Freedman, "it is far more likely that when Jews and non-Jews marry it will generally be the non-Jewish partner who is influenced away from his or her origins. When the focus is confined to those marriages in which the Jewish partner is female, then I have to add that I have almost never seen such a union where the non-Jewish male will be the less adaptive partner in family matters." [FREEDLAND, E., 1982, p. 503]  "If half the children [of mixed marriages] are raised as Jews," notes a hopeful Charles Silberman, "there will be no net reduction in the number of Jews, no matter how high the intermarriage is." [Silberman's emphasis] [SILBERMAN, p. 303]

    Take the case of actress Debbie Reynolds' attitude when she married pop singer Eddie Fisher in 1958:
"[Fisher's] entire family had a party for us at his mother's house. I was the only Gentile. I felt as if I were in another country ... They all called Eddie 'Sonny-boy.' They shocked that Sonny-boy was marrying a shiksa, but they thought I was friendly and cute ... I found my visit to Eddie's family fascinating. I decided that I would learn about the Jewish culture. I had no intention of converting, but if none day one of our children wanted to be part of the Jewish faith, I wanted to understand it. There were a lot of people who felt that Eddie should marry a nice Jewish girl who would stay home and raise the children to be nice Jewish children. I wanted to be able to do that for him." [REYNOLDS, D., 1988, p. 107]
 

 

      Faced with a younger Jewish generation that is more inclined to exogamy, some liberal community leaders, rather than lose Jews en masse, have faced the "disaster" with controversial, non-traditional, emergency remedies. While not proselytizing, some Jewish leaders are exploring conversion to Judaism by non-Jewish spouses as an option to keep a dedicated Jewish lineage and identity. (By 1990 there were about 190,000 formal converts to Judaism in America, the overwhelming majority married to born Jews).  [EPSTEIN, p. 38] If, for instance, the non-Jewish marriage partner converts to Judaism, the chances of the union's children being raised as Jews is much higher. While 75% of mixed married children remained Jewish when the non-Jewish partner converted to Judaism, likewise 75% of the children were not raised Jewish in non-converted households. [EPSTEIN, p. 40]

 

      For many converts, their new Jewish identity has some unexpected aspects.

 

     "Virtually every Jew by choice to whom I spoke," says researcher Charles Silberman, "told me that conversion involves a transformation in identity ... 'All of a sudden you feel labeled and vulnerable,' a Denver convert told me ... A New Yorker put it more graphically: 'I feel much more of that 'when will those goyim get me?' syndrome than I expected." [SILBERMAN, p. 317]  More demanding than any religious allegiance, one study found that 71% of converts to Judaism felt that support for Israel was important; 70% even felt it important to visit the Jewish nation. (Two-thirds of the converts married to Jews earned $75,000 a year or more). [FORSTER, p. 97]

 

     "As a new Jew," counsels Laurence Epstein in his book for converts, "the convert needs to identify with the Jewish community so deeply that the community's concerns are absorbed by the convert. The Jewish community cares about the survival and security of Israel. So must the convert. The Jewish community cares about preserving the memory of the Holocaust so as to firm its resolve to fight anti-Semitism. So must the convert." [EPSTEIN, p. 198]

 

     In 1973 the Reform and Conservative rabbinates decided to deal with the unpleasant situation of increasing intermarriage by creating a formal course for converts to Judaism (i.e., mostly non-Jews who sought to marry Jews) "in order to preserve a Jewish identity in the home to retain the next generation (as Jews)." [FORSTER, p. 55] It was agreed not to publicize the course, however, for fear of encouraging intermarriage (as well as the program's inevitably controversial nature in Orthodox circles); "students" were selected by rabbis. The course addressed a wide range of "Jewishness" -- "highlights of Jewish history includ[ed] the Holocaust and the establishment of the state of Israel." [FORSTER, p. 56]

 

     The overwhelming majority of conversions in America are performed under the auspices of Reform or Conservative rabbinates. In Israel, which is deeply, and increasingly, influenced by Orthodox dictate, these conversions are not recognized as being legitimate. Jewish Orthodoxy formally dominates the Israeli religious (and, to some degree, secular) system. "It has long been known," wrote Uri Huppert in 1988, "that Reform and Conservative rabbis are not authorized to officiate at ceremonies for their own congregants. They can neither marry, nor divorce, nor bury them." [HUPPERT, U., 1988, p. 51]

 

     Many converts to Judaism in America have a rude and unexpected awakening when they visit Israel and find that there they are not Jews after all. "More than one convert," says Laurence Epstein, "has told me they wished they had known of these disputes [between Reform and Conservative Judaism and Orthodoxy] before they converted." [EPSTEIN, p. 44]  Rabbi Jonathan Sacks notes that "some hundreds of thousands of individuals who have received Reform conversions or patri-lineal Jewish identity [i.e., only the father is Jewish], or are the children of women who have [converted to Judaism], consider themselves Jewish and halakhically are not." [SACKS, J., p. 186]

 

      In 1998 this experience befell Andrea Kinkel, the daughter of Germany's foreign minister, who married an Israeli citizen and converted to Orthodox Judaism in the United States. The Israeli Foreign Ministry rejected her conversion when she and her husband moved to Israel. [DEUTSCH-PRESS] Similar is the case of Abraham Elhiany, born and raised in Louisiana. His father was Jewish, his mother was not. Upon moving to Israel, his various papers testifying to his "Jewishness" were decided to be forgeries by the Israeli rabbinate (although he was told by one clerk that the matter could be settled for $1,000). [ARNOLD, p. A1] Even if a Gentile jumps through all the hoops of rigorous year-long study (and, for males, a circumcision rite) to be an Orthodox Jew in Israel, the conversion is only valid in that country.

 

     By traditional Jewish law, not only are non-Orthodox conversions to Judaism unacceptable. Any Jew who divorced and remarries without getting a specially Orthodox "bill of divorce" will thereby have children who are automatically considered by the Orthodox to be mamzerim, illegitimate, no matter who the Jewish parent remarries. Mamzerim are children born of incestuous or adulterous unions. "They carry a stigma with tragic consequences," notes Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. "[By Orthodox decree] they may not marry a legitimate Jew. The Reform abandonment of halikhic divorce thus creates a halakhic fact of illegitimacy ... The potential for human grief is enormous." [SACKS, J., p. 183-184]

 

        For those who do successfully become converts under strict Orthodox observance in Israel, in 1985 the Israeli Interior Ministry afforded them still another slap in the face, highlighting their status as "second-class Jews." All converts to Judaism were henceforth to have their Israeli identity cards stamped with "convert" next to the word Jew. [JEWISH WEEK, 7-4-86, p. 3]

 

     This issue of "conversion to Judaism" and its attendant paradoxes and incongruities demands scrutiny. The Encyclopedia Judaica uses this alleged Jewish openness to conversion as evidence against the worst racist implications of the "Chosen People" mythology:

 

     "[The Chosen People] concept has been the object of criticism,

      misinterpretation, and attack from within and without. The anti-Semite

      has seized upon it as an unveiled claim to Jewish superiority, and

      caricatures it by maintaining that it is the basis of a program of world

      domination ... Judaism has always been open to the proselyte who -- by

      accepting it -- becomes part of the Chosen People. This fact is often

      cited to refute charges of 'racial' exclusiveness."

                               [ENCYCLOPEDIA JUDAICA, p. 502]

 

      What about the opportunity for anyone to convert to Judaism, which "refutes" the charges of an intolerant "racial exclusiveness" as bedrock to the faith?

 

       The main reason some liberalizing strands of Judaism have begrudgingly warmed to the idea of conversion is not because of any intrinsic openness in the faith, but because younger, secularized, and assimilating Jews are increasingly marrying non-Jews. If Jewish parents have to swallow poison, they would -- as the lesser of evils -- at least get the poison to convert to Judaism.

 

      Because most people who convert to Judaism have a romantic involvement with a Jewish partner (over 90%) [FORSTER, p. xi], conversion to Judaism and intermarriage is highly related. Many conversions of course are merely expeditious. According to a 1979 study, 47% of the converts become Jews because of pressure from the spouses-in-law, or for the sake of their children. In a 1987 study 40.6 per cent of Jews married to non-Jews were unhappy that their spouses were not Jewish; only 14.4% of the corresponding Gentile partners were unhappy their spouses were not Christian.  Gentile spouses were found to be likely to convert to Judaism if requested to do so by Jewish in-laws. [FORSTER, p. 76] Likewise, Jewish spouses "preferred that their partners take on Judaism rather than become involved in Christianity themselves, because they wanted to retain their Jewish connection and identity, and they felt uncomfortable affirming Christian beliefs. They tended to actively encourage their partner's conversion." [FORSTER, p. 118]

 

        One such study found that 98% of Jewish parents and their children married to non-Jews favored conversion (of the Gentile spouses); 58% of Jews married to Gentiles "actively encouraged conversion of their mate." [FORSTER, p. 135]

 

      "When Yehuda insisted I have an Orthodox conversion," says Margaret Morrison, a Gentile married to an Israeli Jew, "so that we and our children would be fully accepted in Israel, I was shocked."

 

     "Eric [Goldberg] and I dated for two years," says another Gentile woman who married him, "and the only thing Jewish I ever knew about him was his name ... There was not one Jewish book or article in his apartment, and we never discussed Jewish issues. Was I shocked during our first real discussion about marriage when he practically demanded that I convert to Judaism and insisted we be married in a synagogue by his rabbi." [ROMANOFF, p. 63]

 

     Jacob Kramer simply told his non-Jewish girlfriend: "I'm not a particularly knowledgeable or a religious Jew, but deep down I feel Jewish, and I want you to consider sharing that feeling with me. Let's explore together." [ROMANOFF, p. 64] Ronald Maislin's "major, and not uncommon, dilemma, was whether he should first ask Debbie to marry him, then to convert, or vice versa. "I didn't want her to think I was blackmailing her into an answer," he says, "But the fact was I probably would not have married her without conversion." [ROMANOFF, p. 66] Madeline Plotnick told her would-be husband: "Al, I want our children to be Jewish, not just because I'm Jewish but because they would share a common religion with us. I want you to become a Jew so we can share everything together." Michael Hart wrote a letter to his girlfriend: "I asked her to consider my proposal seriously but ended by saying that if she could not convert or at least consider it as a future option then I did not want her to respond to my letter. [ROMANOFF, p. 67]

 

     "After only a few months of being together," says Yossi Klein Halevi,

     "I couldn't imagine life without [non-Jewish] Lynn. And though I tried to forget

     the future, I dreaded a choice between Lynn and Jewish loyalty. I wanted her

     to covert to Judaism, to share with me the quest of how to be a Jew in this time.
     But I knew that could work only she fell in love with the Jewish people."
     [HALEVI, MEMOIRS, p. 210]

 

      Insisting that Lynn move with him to Israel, she eventually complained that "It's all on me. I'm the one who has to make the big changes. Fall in love with Judaism, fall in love with Israel. I feel like an appendage to you. It's a setup." "You're right," replied Halevi, "but what's the alternative?" [HALEVI, MEMOIRS, p. 228]

     Paul Cowan explains common obsessions with Jewish identity in an intermarriage:

        "Usually even the most disaffected Jews want to raise their children as Jews.
     Many are aware that, according to sociologists and demographers, increasing
     numbers of Jews who marry in the 1980s are choosing gentiles as their
     spouses. Even though they themselves are intermarrying, they often are
     afraid that their children will be assimilated into Christian culture. They
     fear that if they don't insist on maintaining Judaism in their homes they
     will betray more than four thousand years of proud history and deprive
     their children of a valued legacy.
         It is often impossible for their gentile partners to understand the intensity
     of these feelings. They wonder why so many Jews who marry Christians
     insist on celebrating Jewish holidays and ignoring Christmas; on sending
     children to Hebrew school and keeping them out of churches. Why are they
     insensitive to some of the deepest feelings of the gentiles that they love?
     Why, the Christians wonder, are Jews so stubborn?
        Why, some Jews respond, are the gentiles unable to understand the
     depth of their loyalty to their heritage and their people?" [COWAN, P.
     1987, p. x]
     
 

 

     "Many Jews in modern America believe it is enough to feel Jewish," says Lena Romanoff, "to be a gastronomic or cultural Jew, perhaps with the notion that, as inexplicable as it is, they have little "J" cells in their blood.... When it comes time to encouraging conversion [in their Gentile partners] these Jews understandably find it difficult to explain this seemingly inexplicable commitment to their partners." [ROMANOFF, p. 64]

 

      And how are converts to Judaism accepted in the Jewish community?

 

     "The Jewish community as a whole," says Brenda Forster and Joseph Tabachnik, "still evidences great suspicion towards converts ... Since Jews know of their own Marranos who faked being Christians for centuries, they have historical grounds for being suspicious." [FORSTER, p. 74]  "The Jewish community's is a shamefully ambivalent attitude," complained Rabbi Laurence Kushner in 1997, "even down right hostile toward people who want to join us. It is based on a narrow, ethnic definition of what it means to be a Jew, and has no basis in present social reality." [FIRESTONE, TIKKUN, p. 37]

 

      Even those few Gentiles who convert to Judaism with no attendant romantic interest in a Jew find their sincerity demeaned in the Jewish community. "It is assumed by those of a negative bent," says Brenda Forster, "even when the facts are known to be otherwise, that ... converts ... have convert[ed] for utilitarian reasons." [FORSTER, p. 76]  Jewish identity, Laurence Epstein warns would-be converts, "... is something of an ethnocentric nature, such as the view that converts are not really Jewish, that only someone born Jewish could truly understand how a Jew feels." [EPSTEIN, p. 52]

 

     "Rejection," says convert Lena Romanoff, "from all corners of Jewish society, is nothing new for a convert ... It points to one of the most serious problems facing all converts: lack of acceptance by other Jews ... Despite my obvious commitment, the consensus in my [Jewish in-law] family was that it would be better if my "past" was not made public knowledge ... I began to think I was walking around with a disease of some sort." [ROMANOFF, p. 128-129]

 

      "Unlike Christians," says Brenda Forster, "who open their arms and doors in great warmth, concern, and support for converts, Jews are generally suspicious ... Jews by choice [converts] are surprised and hurt by evidence of non-acceptance from Jews that continues for years ... Recent figures (1985) put the Jewish-Gentile divorce rate at 55%, with the Jewish-Jewish rate at 10% ... Negative reactions [to Gentile spouses] by Jewish in-laws, by Jewish leaders, and by the Jewish community may eventually take their toll." [FORSTER, p. 133-134]

 

        "Sadly enough," says Lena Romanoff, "some born Jews disregard the level of commitment and sincerity of the convert. In their eyes a convert is a convert and will always be a convert ... I especially found it ironic when I hear Jewish parents say that they would rather their child marry a secular, assimilated Jew than a convert. In these cases, the convert is greeted with hostility or suspicion, whereas those same parents would never pass such judgment on the uncommitted Jew." [ROMANOFF, p. ]   As Nahum Goldmann notes, "the Talmud says that a ger, a convert, is as hard to bear as a sore." [GOLDMANN, N., 1978, p. 65]

 

     "Jews are born, not made," insisted Marty Ross, the father-in-law of a convert, "The Jewish people fought long and hard to survive the ravages of history. Why should an outsider, after a few months of study, be entitled to claim our inheritance?" [ROMANOFF, p. 130] "To be a Jew," says Jewish scholar Nicholas de Lange, "is thus to acknowledge an attachment to this historic experience. Conversion to Judaism is often conceived in religious terms, but religion is only one aspect of Jewish identity. One cannot become a Jew through subscribing to a set of religious beliefs, any more than one ceases to be a Jew by losing one's religion. (We do not speak of a 'lapsed Jew.') Hence converts are normally spoken of not as converts but as proselytes, a Greek term which originally meant 'immigrants.' To become a Jew is essentially to join a people." [DE LANGE, N., 1987, p. 20]

 

     "Four thousand years of Jewish history," observes Lena Romanoff, "have cast a unique perspective of the world on many Jews -- a perspective that above all emphasizes the uniqueness of a people who have triumphed over repeated periods of persecution, alienation, aloneness. For some the sense of uniqueness is threatened by one who tries to 'join the club.' This belonging is seen as a birthright, not something that can be learned or transferred." [ROMANOFF, p. 131]

 

     Elected as "sisterhood president" at her local synagogue, when it was revealed that Romanoff was only a convert, and not a born Jew, she was informed that she "was no longer sisterhood president because one of the members does not think that a convert is a real Jew." [ROMANOFF, p. 129, 1990] Anita Gray also converted to Judaism, married a Jew, and eventually became a "national vice chair of the United Jewish Appeal, a board member of the Council of Jewish Federations, a leader in the Cleveland Jewish community, and an active participant in the North American Jewish Forum." She recounts her horrible experience at a conference about Jewish identity in Israel when she admitted that she wasn't born Jewish:

 

     "They had not met people like me -- converts. It was as if I had two

     heads. An Israeli Lubavitcher [Hasidic] rebbe [rabbi] jumps up yelling,

     'A Jew knows a Jew through the eye.' Then an aide to [prime minister

     Menachem] Begin stands up, points a finger at me, and declares, 'You're

     a tainted woman. Your children will not be able to play with my children.'

     I was devastated." [STARR, J., 1990, p. 208]

 

    In 1991, a newly appointed executive director of a Jewish education program drew strong criticism, particularly from the Orthodox and Conservative communities because she was married to a non-Jew. Jewish defenders of Judith Greenberg called the attacks "shocking" and her critics "bigots." About twenty letters of protest had come to the Jewish Education Service of North America, not including others directed to Greenberg personally, "from people trying to force her out." Rabbi Marc Angel, President of the Rabbinical Council of America, objected to Greenberg, calling her a "bad role model ... [for] Jewish values." [AIN, 4-19-91, p. 4]  And in 1995, Jonathan Tobin, executive editor of the Connecticut Jewish Ledger made national news for consistently refusing to publish interfaith wedding and engagement notices in his newspaper.  [LIEBERMAN, p. 14-15]

 

     When Nan Fink (who "as a girl felt inexplicably connected to the victims of the Holocaust") tried to convert to Judaism, "vicious letters and middle of the night telephone calls threatened the Conservative rabbi with whom Fink initially studied for conversion. At her local Orthodox shul no one would even speak to her. When referred to an Orthodox rabbi in Jerusalem, he informed her that conversion would cost 'only $8,000, a real bargain.'" [PFEFFERMAN, Do We, p. 8]  Fink, the former wife of Tikkun editor Michael Lerner (left-wing harbinger of "Jewish values") notes that:

 

      "I was ... having a difficult time in the Orthodox shul, where I have been

       going to services with Michael and his teenage son for the last few

       months. I had hoped to find friends in this community, hardly anyone

       would speak to me.  It was not my imagination. One day an anonymous

       letter arrived, scrawled on light blue note paper, telling me that I didn't

       belong at the shul. Shocked, I quickly tore the letter to shreds. This was

       only a preview of what would come. A few weeks later one of the

       women congregants beckoned me to the side of the room after the

       service. I had seen her before, but we hadn’t spoken.  'Nobody wants

       you here,' she said in a stern voice. 'People are too polite to tell you

       directly, but that's how they feel. You're not welcome. Do you

       understand?' I left the shul weeping." [PFEFFERMAN, Do We, p. 10]

 

      In Fink's conversion case, noted the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles, "sometimes Fink even 'caught herself buying into the implicit racism,' musing that a particularly non-Jewish friend was 'goyishly'' bland or restrained." [PFEFFERMAN, Do We, p. 8]

     Louisa Gibson, also married to a Jew, notes her own hellious road towards conversion to Orthodox Judaism:

     "This was a Blakeian period for me. A transition from innocense to experience. I
     was coming from a strong Catholic family, convent educated, sheltered. My
     parents did not teach us to judge people on the basis of their race or religion.
     I knew that bigotry and racism existed but had never felt it. It shocked me, and,
     like a person in shock, it took a while to understand that I was victim of these
     attitudes. I was an outsider ... Everyone knows the convert has to be rejected.
     Little else about conversion is generally spoken about ... Why do so many Jews
     believe their personal response to a convert must also be one of rejection?"
     [GIBSON, L., 2000, p. 24]

 

      A convert to Judaism in 1958 told Jewish sociologist Herbert Gans "of becoming disturbed over a discussion at an informal party, the subject being how to inculcate Judaism into their children 'keep them away from the goyim -- the non-Jews.' This resident was very active in the Jewish community and feared the consequences of revealing his origin. Nevertheless, he felt the time had come to announce that he had been born and raised a Christian. The declaration broke up the party, and shocked some people. He said afterwards: 'From now on, they'll be on their guard about me in their presence. They've lost their liberty of expression, they don't express themselves without restriction now. At party if anybody says something, everybody looks to see if I've been offended and people are taken into a corner and explained about me.'" [GANS, p. 229]

 

     That same year scholars George Eaton Simpson and J. Milton Yinger noted that

 

      "Intermarriage is opposed by some Jews even when the non-Jew

      joins the Jewish group because 'an alien element is introduced.'

      According to [S.E.] Goldstein, the feeling that this element is 'a

      source of weakness and danger' has become stronger in recent

      years owing to the spread of a nationalist spirit among Jewish

      people." [SIMPSON/YINGER, p. 569]

 

      "If the notion of [a giant extended Jewish] family is taken seriously," note Charles Liebman and Steve Cohen, "it affirms a biological affinity. No amount of religious mystification can make biological Jews of converts." [LIEBMAN/COHEN, p. 24]  Even if a non-Jew converts to Judaism, explained Nathan, a Jewish senior citizen, to researcher Barbara Myerhoff,  "that won't make him a Jew. You could say a broche [blessing] over a chicken, but that won't make him a fish." [MYERHOFF, p. 79]

 

     "The most insidious and persuasive barrier to a convert's full integration into the Jewish community," noted Gary Tobin in 1999,

 

     "derives from the passionate and often heated who-is-a-Jew debate.

      Underlying many of the arguments swirling around in this discussion

      is the (secret) conviction that true membership in the Jewish

      community can only be achieved by birth. All other comers can

      never be like us, not really, not in their hearts. But we cannot say

      this out loud." [original author's parenthesis: TOBIN, G., 1999, p. 99]

 

      "There is a debilitating hesitancy," wrote Raphael Baaden, a Jew by birth, in 1996,

 

      "around the question of conversion [to Judaism]. It cannot be

      positively encouraged [by Jews] ... because, well, it can't. Instead,

      it seems we should concentrate on exhorting Jews to marry Jews --

      that is (although it's usually not stated in these terms) born Jews ...

      A halakhic ruling about the inclusion of certain Jews -- namely those

      with Jewish mothers and non-Jewish fathers [i.e., the classical religious

      ruling of who is a Jew] seems to have been fashioned within a discourse

      of racial purity into a threatening statement of exclusion. This discourse

      of racial purity clouds our thoughts continuously, in particular when the

      question of conversion arises." [BAADEN, p. 11]

16
THE JEWISH SELF-CONCEPTION OF INTELLECTUAL, MORAL,
AND SPIRITUAL SUPERIORITY

"Jewish intelligence, integrity and intellect, as a matter
of record, predominates in all branches of scientific discoveries,
modern advancements and commercial enterprises, in all parts of the world,
swaying destinies of various people and conducting the affairs of numerous nations,
guiding opinions and sentiments in the press, pulpit, rostrum, cathedra,
reducing or increasing the instrumentality of exchanges, bourses, money
markets and financial operations ..."

--Nachman Heller, 1928, p. 23
 

 

 

 

         While Orthodox Jews still bluntly claim God's unabashed favoritism, more secular Jews' self-congratulation repeatedly highlights a disproportionate number of Jewish Nobel prize winners, as well as other ambitious and famous scientists, philosophers, writers, and their attendant legion of achievers, not as an expression of a self-promotive ethic, culturally-cultivated ambition, tradition of scholarship, nepotistic networks, or strong communal and personal economic base in support of self-advancement, but of a smug Jewish intellectual "essence." "Nearly a fourth of the Nobel prizes in physiology and medicine," writes Jewish author Miles Storfer, "have been awarded to people of Jewish faith or heritage ... and more than a fifth of the prizes in physics have been awarded to people of Jewish descent." [STORFER, p. 322] "Pointing to the high proportion of Jewish Nobel Laureates," says Joshua Halberstam, "... is a custom practiced around Jewish tables everywhere." [HALBERSTAM, p. 55]

 

     "Now American Jewish culture basically comes down to 'anything produced by a Jew is Jewish,'" complains Leon Wieseltier," This is an insult to the intelligence. It is also not far from the Nazi idea." [BERSHTEL, p. 118] In Russia, in the late 1970s, a Jew from Odessa told the American Jewish Congress that "it was kind of a hobby [among Jews] to collect the names of famous Jews who hide their identity [in the Soviet Union]." [ROTHCHILD, 1985, p. 38]

 

      Albert Einstein, for instance (whose virtuous image was sourly damaged with the revelation of some particularly degrading and dictatorial letters to his non-Jewish wife) is always trotted out as the quintessential genius Jew. No doubt such people are talented, among a world of talent. Such parading of Jewish brain scions, however, avoids the behind-the-scenes fact that the formal recognition of Nobel, Pulitzer, and other "prized" individuals as the current "best" in any given field inevitably has at least as much to do with competitive networking, connections, hustling, power, self-promotion, visibility, class, status, and/or academic cliques as they do with talent.

 

     The Nobel Prize system  -- whatever else it is -- is an elitist enterprise: a network, a self-referential club that favors those with particular socio-economic advantages. It parallels in structure the incestuous traditional self-promotive Jewish model.  In a 1977 study of American Nobel Prize winners (laureates) in science, Harriet Zuckerman determined that:

  

     * 82% of Nobel winners had fathers who were professionals, managers,

        or proprietors. [p. 65]

     * Nobel winners were twice as likely as losers to have come from a

        "professional" families, and a bit more likely than others to "have

        fathers in business." [p. 65]

     * Only 15% of the winners came from "blue-collar or white collar"

        families. [p. 65]

     * More than half of the 92 Nobel laureates surveyed "had worked as

        students, post doctorates, or junior collaborators under older laureates.

        [p. 116]

     * There was a "fair amount of intermarriage between laureates and the kin

        of laureates." [p. 97]

     * Six laureates shared the prize with their mentors. [p. 116]

     * Laureates tend to come from elite universities. [p. 116]

     * "Elite masters [Nobel laureates] can mobilize resources for their

        apprentices [future laureates]," including fellowships, grants, jobs,

        and publication possibilities in influential journals. [p. 132]

     * The prestige of the Nobel Prize has been used to "confer legitimacy"

        upon "ideological, political, commercial, and military" ventures. [p. 23]

 

      Zuckerman even devotes sections of her book to "Self-confidence" and "Upward Mobility in Academe" to help explain Nobel victories. For Albert Einstein's part, notes Robert Schulman (Director of the Einstein Papers Project, some 43,000 letters, notes, papers, and other documents the scientist left behind): "In these pages we can closely observe Einstein and his solitary path to the [theory of] general relativity, and which personal relations are sometimes callously sacrificed in the name of scientific ambition." [OVERBYE, p. 11]  Einstein also left Germany during World War I "to dodge military service," had an illegitimate daughter, and "considered breaking off his engagement to his cousin Elisa Einstein and marrying her 20-year old daughter, Ilse, instead." Einstein's executor, Otto Nathan, "protective on Einstein's public image," delayed for years the public release of the papers by filing a lawsuit to control their handling. [OVERBYE, p. 11]

 

      An embittered African critic dismisses entirely the Nobel prize system, and its "peace prize," as nothing but a status and political game for the powerful:

 

             "One does not win the Nobel; it is bestowed upon one. All we

              hear is an announcement that some Scandinavian cabal, in its

              mysterious wisdom, has decided thus and thus. All that the

              public is admitted to is the ceremony held for the alleged

              winners in a contest whose rules and venues and officials

              are shadowy." [BLACK WORLD, p. 8]

 

     Edward Epstein's 1996 expose of the fraudulent life of Armand Hammer, in an entire chapter notes the Jewish billionaire's heavy lobbying in the last year of his life to win the top Nobel award, finally getting Israel's prime minister, Menachem Begin, "to be Hammer's sponsor for the peace prize." [EPSTEIN, 1996, p. 332-343] That year's try was unsuccessful, and he died before he could attempt it again.

 

     The traditional Jewish fixation upon intellectual activities as the foremost expression of superiority (as distinct from the "earthy" and "physical") is reflected in this description of East European Jewry by Zborowski and Herzog:

 

     "Because the head is the container of brains, it is treated with tender

      care ... The symbolism is pervasive. The head of the table, the head

      of the bed, the head of the fish which the approving husband presents

      to his wife, each carries its honorific connotations ... One part of the

      body that comes close to disgust is the feet, especially the toes. They

      are furthest from the head, lowest, and nearest to the ground."

      [ZBOROWSKI, p. 359]

 

    Traditional Yiddish folklore often reflects on the Jewish self-conception of marked intelligence:

 

     "Jews never have enough of anything except brains." [KUMOVE, S.,

     1985, p. 140]

      

      "God protect us from Jewish chutspeh [pushiness], Jewish mouths,

      and Jewish brains." [KUMOVE, S., 1985, p. 44]

 

      "Better the little Jewish brain than the big Goyish head." [KUMOVE, S.,

      1985, p. 104]

 

     Two Jewish co-authors created a term to describe Jewry through the ages: "intellectual gladiators." "We [Americans]," write Stephen Slavin and Mary Pradt, "define any job demanding considerable intelligence as 'Jewish work.'" [SLAVIN, p. 60]  With so many brilliant Jews in Europe before the Holocaust, Joshua Halberstam thinks that "it is likely that were it not for Auschwitz we would now have a cure for cancer." [HALBERSTAM, p. 48]  Myths of Jewish superiority are also noted by Susan Schneider from a feminist perspective:

 

      "Jewish women have always assured themselves that they were different;

      yet even with the tenderness and emotional expression many Jewish men

      permit themselves there is another kind of male feeling of superiority at

      work -- this time a superiority based on precisely the spiritual and

      intellectual capacity that Jewish men declared as their specialty ...

      Intellectual rather than physical prowess is the determinant value of the

      Jewish male's value on his place in the pecking order." [SCHNEIDER, p.

      294]

 

      In a search for charitable aid from the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies to help Jewish mentally handicapped children at an institution called Willowbrook that was being phased out, two researchers were perturbed by the Jewish organization's formal response. David and Sheila Rothman wrote that

 

      "Troubled by the plight of Willowbrook's Jewish residents, the

       Federation did appoint a committee to explore why Jews who were

       generally in the foreground in providing services [were].... in this

       area .... behind other faiths. (The answer came back that 'the emphasis

       in Judaism on intellectual achievement tends to set off Jewish retardates

       more sharply from other Jews.'") [original author's parenthesis:

       ROTHMAN, p. 159]

 

     "It is extraordinarily difficult for American Jews," says American Jewish scholar Charles Silberman, "to expunge [their] sense of superiority ... however much they may try to suppress it." [SILBERMAN, p. 80] "Jews still possess a feeling of superiority," wrote Marshall Sklare, "although more in the moral and intellectual realms now than in the area of spiritual affairs ... Leaving the (Jewish identity) group becomes a psychological threat: such a move is viewed not as an advancement but as cutting oneself off from a claim of superiority." [SILBERMAN, p. 81]

 

     "The Jew who has cut off his traditional religion," wrote J. O. Hertzler, "... and has become an agnostic or atheist, is still considered to be a Jew and probably still, unconsciously, holds to the tribal spirit of superiority even though he no longer observes the ceremonial minutiae." [HERTZLER, p. 68] In a study of native-born Jews in modern Israel, Herbert Russcol and Margarit Banai note traditional Jewish self-identity in the widespread haughty arrogance among those of the Jewish state:

     "But there is a deeper reason, perhaps for his chauvinism: the inbred, self-congratulatory
     Jewish sense of superiority. Real or imagined, this superiority always infuriates
     the gentile. Denied a homeland, vilified, the Jew turned his vision inward and fed
     on his spiritual arrogance. He huddled in ghettos and rejoiced in his four
     thousand years of apartness, of uniqueness." [RUSSCOL/BANAI, 1970, p. 173]
 

 

      In 1984, Mordechai Nisan, a lecturer at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, published an article in Kivvunim, the journal of the World     Zionist Congress. Nisan proclaimed that

 

       "While it is true that the Jews are a particular people, they nonetheless

       are designated as a 'light unto the nations.' This function is imposed

       on the Jews who strive to be a living aristocracy among the nations,

       a nation that has deeper historical roots, greater spiritual obligation,

       higher moral standards, and more powerful intellectual capacities than

       others. This vision which diverges from the widely accepted

       egalitarianism approach, is not at all based on an arbitrary hostility

       towards non-Jews, but rather on a fundamental existential understanding

       of the quality of Jewish peoplehood." [HARKABI, p. 153]

 

     "Thus," says Yehoshafat Harkabi, "the concept of the 'Chosen People' as an aristocracy provides sanction for the unequal and discriminatory treatment of non-Jews." [HARKABI, p. 153]

 

      Alan Dershowitz notes his feelings about his Jewish identity when he was a Yale law student:

 

       "When I went home for the Jewish holidays, I told my parents about the

       brilliant teachers at Yale: Goldstein, Pollack, Bickel, Skolnick, Schwartz.

       Then I told them about the most brilliant of my teachers: Calabresi.

       Without missing a beat, my mother asked, 'Is he an Italian Jew?' Angrily

       I said, 'Don't be so parochial. He's an Italian Catholic. Not all smart

       people have to have Jewish blood.' Several months later, I learned that

       Guido Calabresi was in fact descended from Italian Jews."

       [DERSHOWTIZ, p. 50]

 

      Ronald Brauner, also Jewish, notes his feelings after reading a book by Dr. Oliver Sacks: "Truth be told, as I read, my chauvinism also kicked in, as it always does. This guy is terrific! His book is one of the best I have ever read! The insights and sensitivities are remarkable! How could any one person be so brilliant, so on-target, so profound? ... he must be Jewish! (that happens to you, too, sometimes, doesn't it?)  ... [But] ultimately, sublime talent, insight and ability notwithstanding, a person doesn't 'have it all together' until his Jewish component is also integrated into his work. Somehow, some way, each of us is bound to reflect our Jewishness in what we do." [BRAUNER, R., p. 35]

 

      Virginia Dominguez, an American visiting professor in Israel, wrote in 1989 that

 

        "Who is Jewish matters. I doubt very much that I am the only non-Jew

        who discovered only while visiting or living in Israel that many

        internationally known figures like movie stars, artists, writers, scientists,

        and athletes whose religious and ethnic identity I had never thought

        about are Jewish. The Israeli media points to their Jewish identity with

        few exceptions, in interviews with them or stories about them. This

        tendency to point out the Jewishness of such figures jars with the

        sense outside Israel that a similar reference in a non-Jewish newspaper

        invites the charge of anti-Semitism." [DOMINGUEZ, p. 127]

 

      Norman Cantor, a New York University professor, claims -- with breathtaking arrogance -- on his dedication page for The Jewish Experience (1996) that a "world without Jews is a world devoid of humanity." This insult to anyone not Jewish -- ascribing to all non-Jews a lack of "humanity" -- is reiterated in his later insistence in the same book that Jews are "a uniquely superior group with an indomitable drive for creativity and accomplishment," (CANTOR, p. 311) and that "the time may be coming when the genetic superiority of Jews can be calmly discussed ... " (p. 312)

 

      In his other recent volume, The Sacred Chain (1994), a history of Jews, Cantor continually reiterates his narcissistic thesis for understanding his own people, and certainly himself:  their genetic superiority over others.

 

          "Once the Jews were emancipated, too many younger Jews of

          superior capability could not find places in society and the

          economy that were adequate for the exercise of their talents." [p. 277]

 

          "The Jews, once emancipated and given opportunity for mobility,

          were genetically so superior that market capitalism could not

          accommodate some of this superior species ... " [p. 277]

 

          "The Jews are a superior people intellectually and as long as Jewish

          genes exist, the extraordinary impact Jews have had in the twentieth

          century will continue indefinitely." [p. 423]

 

          "Although millions of Jews had carried their Eastern European

           impoverishment with them to the West, their literary, native

           intelligence, religion-controlled moral disciples and super genetic

           quality made them excellent prospects for upward mobility in

           Western society." [p. 232]

 

           "The genetic superiority of the Jews will be extended and as long

        &nb