They Sure Will Be of Minority Groups

Interfaith families that are also interracial are less able to seamlessly fit into “mainstream” American Jewish life, which is dominated by Ashkenazi culture and racially coded as white. On the one hand, this can make interactions in Jewish communities more challenging. On the other, these families are often given more freedom and flexibility for including traditions from the Christian side of the family than their white interfaith counterparts.

Living the Interfaith Family Life

In 4 case studies, Chapter 6 articulates a range of ways that interfaith families practice both religions: the largely secular home that connects to both Christian and Jewish heritage; a family that sees themselves as having Christian and Jewish heritage in the context of a shared Unitarian Universalist community and faith; a family that belongs to an intentional interfaith community, the Interfaith Family Project; and a family that belongs to both Jewish and Mormon religious communities and is educating their children in both. These case studies represent the 4 main approaches that interfaith families “doing both” have found to navigate those tensions. Each of these families has found a different approach for combining their traditions and a unique language for framing their choices, but they all do so in ways that minimize the cognitive differences between the two traditions, highlights their similarities, and creates a cohesive narrative of family identity.

Blended or Transcended

Chapter 2 argues that, with a couple of exceptions, popular depictions of interfaith families in the 1970s saw interfaith marriage as a social good, as long as it provided a path for assimilation to secular Protestant norms.

To Stem a Rising Tide

Chapter one analyses institutional responses to interfaith marriage, looking closely at the responses of Reform Judaism, the American Catholic Church, and the Protestant mainline. It reveals that while all three traditions framed the problem of intermarriage in theological terms, their different belief systems and social locations resulted in divergent and sometimes opposing responses to interfaith marriage.

For the Sake of the Children

The conclusion addresses the ultimate question posed by the debates about interfaith marriage: what about the kids? It draws from the range of religious identities with which adult children of interfaith marriage identify. Specifically, it articulates how those children understand their blended religious heritages and how their experiences do and do not likely predict the experiences of children growing up in such homes today.

One Roof, One Religion

Chapter 3 traces the tensions and contradictions inherent in attempts to create Jewish homes out of interfaith families, in the Reform movement’s initial responses to the rising interfaith marriage rate. It points to “religion” and “culture” as terms with ever shifting definitions, strategically deployed to permit particular kinds of familial practices. Through sources ranging from 1980 to 2000, Mehta tracks and interprets which Christian practices are labelled as “religious,” and therefore unacceptable, as opposed to “cultural” and therefore permissible. Analytically, the chapter uses practice theory to call into question the underlying assumption of the rhetoric about a Jewish home, which is that it is possible to have a religiously singular home if the parents are from different traditions.

Chrismukkah

Chapter 5 claims that in the 1990s, when the concepts of multiculturalism and optional ethnicity provided a new, multicultural model of interfaith family life, in which consumer culture and the stripping of theological content from Christian and Jewish practice allowed them to be combined in a myriad of ways. The depictions of this mode of combination appeared in children’s literature, coffee-table books, greeting cards, and an area of other forms of popular culture and turned on the assumption of an increasingly secular population.

Introduction

The introduction outlines broad themes of the book and provides a chapter summary.