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Jewish Intermarriage Around the World, edited by Shulamit Reinharz and Sergio DellaPergola. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2009. 221pp. $44.95 cloth. ISBN: 9781412810166.
In this highly readable and compact edited volume, the editors and authors offer a very convincing argument that the study of global patterns of intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews is important to scholars and researchers beyond the community of social scientists of Judaism and Jewish policy-planners. While all the essays are written from the specific perspective of Jewish out-marriage, each reflects and provokes a set of questions about a wide and complex set of changes in the meaning and measure of ethnic, religious and secular identity within contemporary ethno-religious communities. Bypassing local idiosyncrasies, this first global effort to compare intermarriage statistics and patterns across Jewish ethno-religious communities, outlines several directions in the debates about Jewish out-marriage: (1) clarifying definitions and measurement techniques, (2) making explicit competing paradigms about the effects of out-marriage as either a signal of Jewish assimilation/ erosion or of Jewish resilience /revival, and (3) the consideration of policy choices by the organized Jewish community.
While the rates of out-marriage may vary by the respective circumstances of Jewish history, socio-economic status, urban or exurban density, migration patterns, and changes in marriage rates and the family, every country covered in this collection reflects a steady trend toward Jewish outmarriage. Not without good cause, fears of extinction as captured in the not-so-subtle subtitle of one of Simon Rawidowicz's books, Essays on the Ever-Dying People, are prevalent in...