Prom Date Kosher?
Wed Jun 29, 2005 at 10:23:10 PM PDT
I live in Westchester County, New York. I grew up in Maplewood, New Jersey, which at the time had (and still has, although there has been a large increase in the population of African-Americans) a sizeable Jewish population.
I am a nonfundamentalist Christian of ecumenical bent. My friends, my social circle throughout my life has been pretty mixed. Mostly white, yes, but heavily Jewish (as perhaps 40% of my schoolmates were Jews) and Italian. I'm a half-southern white boy. My wife's a bad-tempered Italian girl. (Well, the phrase is mildly redundant). One of my kid's Vietnamese.
OK, here in Westchester we have a private, Jewish day school known as Solomon Schechter. It's affiliated with the United synagogue of Conservative Judaism, which strongly disapproves of Jews marrying non-Jews.
These issues are seen, I suspect, differently from traditionally small, persecuted minority populations than by us majority, or anyway plurality white-Anglo-Christian types. My daughters, and this was something I insisted on, attend a well-mixed school. Yes, it's a religious school (Catholic) but as many, many of our family friends are Jews, my daughters do not want for Jewish friends and associations. And their schoolmates, if we can lump white Hispanics, in Merka for not more than a generation, as "minorities," the school is roughly half "minority" (black, Latino, South Asian, a smattering of East Asians, including of course my daughter).
As we are irregular churchgoers -- although perhaps a shade more orthodox than I thought I might turn out to be -- we expect that when it comes to marrying (assuming our daughters will be so inclined in the first place) we will, I expect, ask them to ask themselves how important their Christian beliefs (if they retain them as grownups) are to them, and to give some thought to whether marriage to someone of the same, or a significantly different persuasion -- a Muslim, an atheist, whatever -- might be wise/unwise. But what we have to say about their choices will, I greatly hope, be addressed to issues of character, common aspirations, whether the attraction is not merely sexual, and so forth. I am divorced and remarried, but I hope for my daughters to have marriages that last, as I think most of us -- and nearly always, our children -- are better off for it.
As regards the ethnicity or skin color of any lovers or prospective mates, I hope to have nothing to say at all.
That's just me. It's a big world, I think, and there is room in that world both for people who think that one should marry within one's own religious group/ethnic group or whatever, and people who don't give a hoot.
Hackles are being raised, however, because Solomon Schechter (although it graciusly permits non-Jews to attend school functions such as basketball games) is banning its (all) Jewish students from bringing non-Jewish dates to the prom.
I don't condemn a Jewish parent who prefers, even strongly prefers, that his or her child marry another Jew -- although I don't approve at all of the Orthodox practice of disowning entirely children who do so, and it baffles me, to some extent, that an ethnic Jew who wants nothing at all to do with God, or with Torah, would (as some do) get all huffy about "Israel" (in the ethnic, not the Middle-Eastern state sense). If you're militantly non-religious, IMHO, it would seem to me that getting very exercised about your child's choice of mate based on ethnicity, just their being non-Jewish, comes down to mere snobbery.
But prom dates aren't prospective husbands or wives (I know one person who married his prom date) (she left him, took their daughter to Florida, and married a much richer guy) and, even if the strategy is to get your kid to marry Within the Faith, it's probably a bad strategy to strictly forbid inter-religious dating.
My wife has a Jewish childhood friend, whose husband is pretty rabid, to the point that their college-age daughter's long-time boyfriend -- as it happens, his little sister is a schoolmate of my 12-year-old -- is forbidden entry to the parents' home, because he's non-Jewish. His parents are terrific, upstanding Central American immigrants. The Jewish parents -- it's the husband, actually, but the wife acquiesces in the ban -- succeed in humiliating and alienating their daughter, but she's been sleeping with this nice Latino guy since she was 17, and shows no inclination to cease doing so.
I must remark there would be hell to pay if a Catholic high school said that a pupil who brings a Jew to the prom would be turned away at the door. Even in a religious school, is it the role of the school to enforce such a ban? Should it not be the role of the parents, if they are so inclined?
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