Rattling the Cage: Nice Jewish boy, nice Asian girl

While “Googling” for Asian American news, I came across this interesting column in the The Jerusalem Post, titled, “Rattling the Cage: Nice Jewish boy, nice Asian girl“:

“Two American Jewish sons, two Asian-American daughters-in-law (or one, going on two). Is this a coincidence? I don’t think so. The simplest reason it’s not is that both couples met at UCLA, a gigantic university loaded with Jewish and Asian students. The less simple reason is that my friend’s two sons received an old-fashioned, secular, unrich Jewish upbringing in America, and for people like them, there aren’t many American Jews of similar background and outlook to marry anymore. For people like them, there are more opportunities to find suitable spouses among Asians and other studious, hard-working, family-oriented American immigrants than there are among American Jews. THIS IS not a cautionary tale about intermarriage, not by any means; if my own two sons want to marry non-Jews when they grow up, that is 100% fine with me. What I’m writing about is how American Jewry has changed, and not for the better, but also about how there are ways, traditional and untraditional, to recapture some of the old spirit.”

One of my Jewish business school classmates commented when I posted this to Facebook, “Best article on Jews and intermarriage I’ve seen in forever – I sent that article to my whole family. Good stuff.” Some of my high school friends also discussed this article, about some of the Jewish stereotypes out there.

I wonder, do Jewish women complain as much as Asian American men about the out-dating, out-marriage of their male counterparts? I have to imagine probably not as much. Not being Jewish, I have to imagine though that physically, both Jewish men and women “blend” into the still predominate white majority more easily in the United States and that this visibility is not as much as Asian American men and women out-dating and out-marriage.