There’s parents who, when their child marry, gain a new child. There’s some who lose a child. Which one is which is always influenced by multiple factors and can even change with time: my parents married “to” her hometown of Barcelona (at which point my paternal grandparents knew they could at best hope to see that son once a year), but later moved to his hometown, and which point it was her family who knew they would be seeing her only rarely. If it hadn’t been for modern transportation, they simply wouldn’t have seen each other again. And as recently as three centuries back (which is forever from the American perspective, yesterday for a Catholic and this same afternoon for a Jew), changing religion meant changing legal systems, jobs to which you had access… it was a very, very radical change.
A fairly large part of that red tape, however, probably had nothing to do with an interfaith marriage. It had to do with an international marriage happening in the home country of one of the parties ( since I presume by Polish Catholic you mean someone who is a citizen of Poland rather than someone of Polish ancestry). That can be far more complex than an interfaith marriage - I married my American-born , Buddhist (at the time ) husband in a Catholic ceremony and it required no red tape at all really. There was a standard request for a dispensation which was basically rubber-stamped. My Christian niece married her Israeli husband in the US (couldn’t get married in Israel because she’s not Jewish) - no hassle from the rabbi who officiated, but plenty of coordination with the immigration lawyer regarding when to hold the wedding with respect to the visa application/issuance.
Depends on the community/denomination. My Conservative synagogue is very LGBTQ friendly, and I think that’s fairly common in the Conservative movement these days. We’re egalitarian, so there are no issues with gender–everyone is the same, ritually speaking. We definitely have a number of active members who are gay, trans, or gender non-binary.
A recent (within the last decade or so) decision by the denomination’s law committee basically leaves it up to the local rabbi as to whether they will perform gay weddings, though it is still grounds for expulsion from the Rabbinical Assembly for Conservative rabbis to perform weddings between a Jew and a non-Jew. We do have many Jew/non-Jew couples who are members of the community, and they are most welcome (with ritual restrictions on the non-Jewish spouse), but none of them were married by a Conservative rabbi.
I think the Reform/Reconstructionist/Renewal denominations have been openly LGBTQ friendly for many, many years, and are less dogmatic about the performance of mixed marriages under their auspices. Orthodox Judaism, on the other hand, is definitely still very much heteronormative and traditional-gender-role based.
Strangely, both Conservative and Orthodox Jews would consider you a Jew based on matrilineal descent, but the Reform movement might not without some Jewish education and practice, if you weren’t raised as a Jew.
Hell, my parents belonged to the same parish - still considered mixed because one was Italian and the other Austrian
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Except Jews have always accepted converts, even if they weren’t encouraged. Once converted, you are a full Jew, with no distinctions based on your status at birth.
I never found a good explanation for it but -------- that was almost a common thing for a long time. I dated a lot and while my mother never liked any of them the only one she hated was because that particular young lady was Methodist and mother was/is former-Lutheran-turned-RC-by-20. Even a couple interracial relationships didn’t get the flak from her that one did. (early 70s) What it was between Methodists and Catholics back then I don’t know; but in a lot of regions it was quite real.
Yeah, Jews are mutts - compare my own blue eyes and blond hair to, say, your average Yemenite or Ethiopian Jew, and there’s no way you can argue for any sort of “genetic purity.” That horse has sailed.
Instead, Jews have opposed interfaith marriage because ultimately, it means fewer Jews, and as far as many Jews are concerned, there aren’t nearly enough of us as it is. It’s a personnel issue. Jews are supposed to look out for each other, and if children of a mixed marriage aren’t raised as Jews - and they usually aren’t - then they won’t be there for other Jews.
I don’t think my conservative North Carolina Methodist grandmother was hugely upset by her youngest son marrying an Irish-Bohemian Catholic, (even if she referred to my mother as a “Roman”); when Dad brought her home to meet the family, Grandmother took everyone out to a seafood restaurant for dinner. Because it was a Friday, and the one thing she knew about Catholics was that they ate fish on Fridays.
No, what bothered Grandmother more was that Mom was a Yankee. I know this because when Mom had firmly established herself in Grandmother’s esteem, Grandmother made sure that all her friends and neighbors knew that “[Mom] is a Midwesterner”.
You’d think so, (I did too) but actually as much paperwork as we had to fill out for the Polish government to apply for a marriage licence due to my not being Polish (as well as having to appear in front of a judge, which neccesitated my providing a court-certified translater at my own expense, which cost a small fortune by Polish standards for 45 minutes of work) actually that was a walk in the park compared to the hoops I had to jump thru to get married in a Catholic ceremony, which was apparently made much more of an issue because officially, Mormons are not considered Christians, even though thanks to the help of a really nice Polish Mormon church leader here in Krakow I was able to provide a certificate stating (in Polish) I had been baptized in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit (which was a Really Big Deal for the Catholic priest, who was actually a really lovely man who went to bat for us in appealling to the Cardinal of Krakow, his “Boss” who initially didn’t want to let us get married) but eventually they held a ceremony called a “Concordance” meaning our Catholic ceremony was legally binding, so there was no need for a second civil ceremony.
Anyways, enough of the hijack, but I was more than a little surprised how the Catholic church was so reluctant to allow a non-Catholic to marry, even though I vowed to raise any children we have as Catholics (I am 49, Ania is 45, we are not holding our breath…;))
I never said there hadn’t been modifications for convenience along the way. But I didn’t know that when it counted. I was sitting in the lunch room with friends, including my future wife but I didn’t know that yet. A beautiful Jewess walked by and greeted me for the first time ever. After she passed I said I should ask her out. FW said, “She’ll never go out with you.”
“Why not?”
“You’re not Jewish.”
“I could convert.”
“It doesn’t work that way.”
Your honor, it was purest entrapment. I didn’t stand a chance.
Point of info: In the US at least, this designation is widely seen as at least slightly pejorative, somewhere between “Negress” and “authoress”. There does seem to be something of a generational movement among younger observant Jewish women to “reclaim” the term. But I don’t think that’s going to weather the decidedly derogatory usage of “Jewess” by today’s alt-right movement.
I don’t know why Methodists might have been more anti-Catholic than other Protestants, but when you look at John Wesley’s Articles of Religion from 1784, which even today’s Methodists still technically profess as their foundation, you notice things that strongly imply, “We aren’t Catholic,” particularly this doozy in Article XV.
Primitive church? Which Christian religion was holding public prayer in 1784 in a tongue not understood by the people. Take a guess.
Yeah, one Orthodox former co-worker of mine, when discussing another former co-worker of ours (a non-Jew who had married a Jew), said that intermarriage was going to accomplish what even Hitler couldn’t.
(Sometime I should tell the story of what happened when Tom Scud, who is not Jewish, had just moved in with me - we’ve now been married almost 10 years - and she called my apartment one day to chat and he answered the phone when I wasn’t there. It was…awkward.)
Not that I am remotely religious anyway, and I haven’t been in my entire adult life. And we don’t have kids, which is something I never really had much interest in doing anyway, so I wouldn’t have been producing more baby Jews in any case.
Eva Luna, Loser Jew (whose Ancestry DNA results just came back as 100% European Jewish, blonde and blue-eyed grandmother be damned).
