Still Jewish: A history of women and intermarriage in America.

This study of intermarriage and gender, and how the meaning of both was socially constructed and depicted culturally, marks the first history of American Jewish women who intermarried during the twentieth century. It explores three main questions: What did intermarriage mean to and for women who were Jewish at the time that they married non-Jewish men? In what ways did Jewish women shed or retain their ethnic and religious heritage despite marrying "out"? And how was intermarriage portrayed?This is a multigenerational history, beginning with women who immigrated to the United States in the early twentieth century, using two methodological techniques. The first technique involves collecting women's self-reports to describe the experience and meaning of intermarriage. These oral history narratives enable me to discern what intermarriage meant to and for Jewish women within their particular social milieus and how this changed across time. I augment interviews with letters, memoirs, biographies, and novels about women. I consider how contextual factors such as immigration trends, World Wars, the Depression, antisemitism, and the civil rights and feminist movements influenced intermarriage. The second technique is to integrate throughout my study an analysis of how interfaith relationships and intermarriage were portrayed in the mass media, advice manuals and religious community-generated literature to situate women's self-representations within the larger discursive contexts.My findings suggest that the meaning and representation of gender and intermarriage changed dramatically. While the few immigrant Jewish women we know intermarried before 1929 did not explicitly renounce their Jewish identities, they joined their husbands' larger non-sectarian circles. Likewise, Jewish women in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s often merged into the dominant culture through intermarriage. Whereas their predecessors were sometimes influenced by prejudice in who they married and how the identified, the political liberalism, ecumenism, and feminism of the 1960s and 1970s enabled an increasing number of Jewish women to intermarry and, ironically, to more proactively identify as Jews. The multiculturalism combined with secularism in general American society enabled women of Jewish heritage who intermarried between 1980 and 2000 to marry men without religious faith and, paradoxically, to become considerably more Jewish.Thesis (Ph.D.)--Brown University, 2005.School code: 0024

Remembering the Dead: Agency, Authority, and Mortuary Practices in Interreligious Families in the United States

This chapter asks how cultural rules for treatment of the body and spirit of the deceased and for memorialization are adapted in mortuary ritual in a pluralistic society. Social and technological changes in the United States have challenged customary religious practices in which the nature of the dead and the authority of the clergy were established. New ideologies give increased agency to the deceased to express individual preferences. That agency extends to the expectation that as moral obligation to the deceased, family and friends will represent after death who the person was in life. The expression of ethics to honor the dead may be accomplished through modifications of ritual practice and the use of new technologies that democratize the sociocultural process of creating the meaning and memory of the deceased person