Ebooks for the Classroom+Faculty

Still Jewish: A History of Women and Intermarriage in America
ISBN: 9780814759615
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / NYU Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Intermarriage -- United States; Jewish women; Jews -- United States -- Identity; Jews -- Cultural assimilation;

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 a diverse America.

Keren R. McGinity, Ph.D. is Associate Research Scientist at the Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies at Brandeis University, Scholar-in-Residence at the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, and Visiting Scholar at the University of Michigan's Frankel Center for Judaic Studies.