Philip Weiss makes a shrewd (and I think correct) point about Jews marrying non-Jews:
A lot of meritocratic Jews like me were hoist on the petard of superiority. If you bought into the ideology of intellectual excellence–the ideology of the meritocracy, which we Jews helped to build so we could get into the good schools (and which the WASPs then helped us to festoon with prestige, to disguise the fact that none of us would have to actually serve in Iraq)–then you would inevitably look around for smart people to socialize with, and most of them turned out to be gentiles. See, it’s my family’s fault [that I married a non-Jew].
Weiss went to Harvard. “Ideology of the meritocracy” is a good phrase. Richard Herrnstein, the late Harvard professor of psychology and Bell Curve co-author, was indeed meritocratic — in a narrow way. (Which is the trouble with ideologies.) When I was a graduate student, he gave a talk at my school (Brown) and several graduate students, including me, had lunch with him. He was on the Harvard admissions board. During lunch, he said that some kid was the perfect candidate: “800′s on his SATs, plays football, plays the flute.” He was serious. Surely the best candidates should be less easily described, I thought.
I think Weiss was pointing out that anti-semitism had two effects: (a) excluded Jews; (b) kept Jews together.
I’ve never actually met a man who played football and the flute…..interesting dynamic.
I had no inkling of that which is Jewish culture until I majored in music at Michigan and suddenly BAM!, it was like the coolest club ever.
I once heard a would-be conductor friend quip, “well, I’m not Jewish or gay; I’ve been thinking I ought to work on changing one of the two to help my career along……no, really.”
The ethos at Maimo (Noah’s school) is very different from the secular Jewish meritocracy that Weiss describes.
Maimo was founded by the symbol and leader of American Modern Orthodoxy Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, who immigrated to the US before the war. Soloveichik’s ideology is that it’s possible to be a Harvard PhD and a committed religious Jew learning Talmud regularly: success in the New World while maintaining Old World standards. The school pushes its students to advance the ideology: cynically, they want to prove to the Ultra-Orthodox that education isn’t religiously dangerous and to other Jews that religion isn’t educationally detrimental.
That the top Talmud student from the exemplar yeshiva high school could intermarry is hardly new — there are examples of similar even in the Talmud itself — but he is an example of why the Ultra-Orthodox are suspicious of secular education and becoming more so.