Inside Intermarriage

Intermarriage and the Friendship of Peoples examines the racialization of identities and its impact on mixed couples and families in Soviet Central Asia. In marked contrast to its Cold War rivals, the Soviet Union celebrated mixed marriages among its diverse ethnic groups as a sign of the unbreakable friendship of peoples and the imminent emergence of a single "Soviet people." Yet the official Soviet view of ethnic nationality became increasingly primordial and even racialized in the USSR's final decades. In this context, Adrienne Edgar argues, mixed families and individuals found it impossible to transcend ethnicity, fully embrace their complex identities, and become simply "Soviet." Looking back on their lives in the Soviet Union, ethnically mixed people often reported that the "official" nationality in their identity documents did not match their subjective feelings of identity, that they were unable to speak "their own" native language, and that their ambiguous physical appearance prevented them from claiming the nationality with which they most identified. In all these ways, mixed couples and families were acutely and painfully affected by the growth of ethnic primordialism and by the tensions between the national and supranational projects in the Soviet Union. Intermarriage and the Friendship of Peoples is based on more than eighty in-depth oral history interviews with members of mixed families in Kazakhstan and Tajikistan, along with published and unpublished Soviet documents, scholarly and popular articles from the Soviet press, memoirs and films, and interviews with Soviet-era sociologists and ethnographers.

Intermarriage is more than a problem--it's an epidemic in the Jewish nation, and we must do all we can to stem the tide. This practical, down-to-earth book is designed to help parents stop their children from intermarrying. It explores the entire gamut of questions, issues, and hot points for parents who face the possibility of their children marrying out of the Jewish faith, and offers much wisdom and many important suggestions. The author, Rabbi Packouz, has spoken on national radio and television on the topic of intermarriage and Jewish survival. He is the director of Aish HaTorah Jerusalem Fund in Miami.

Therapists who work with couples will find valuable background information on some of the major ethnic groups who intermarry in the United States--black, Chinese, Japanese, Mexican, Korean, Philippino, and Caucasian. Intermarriage in the United States presents A thorough compilation of information on issues of interracial and intercultural marriage in the United States, focusing particularly on the difficulties and failures of the marriages. This unique and much-needed volume focuses on the psychological conditions of the marriage partners, intermarriage as an indicator of social assimilation and integration, hypergamy, including both caste and class hypergamy, and much more.

Explore the challenges and blessings of interfaith families. For couples of different faiths, navigating issues of marriage and child-rearing add a layer of complexity on the road to happily ever after. Inside Intermarriage is Jim Keen's personal journal as the Christian partner in an interfaith marriage. From deciding to have a Jewish wedding, to raising his children Jewish, to learning about a new culture while maintaining his own religious identity, Keen's candid exploration of the challenges and opportunities offers comfort and strategies to couples starting down a similar road. Complete with stories of other interfaith families, and a discussion guide to help couples consider how to resolve dilemmas around holiday celebrations and family relationships, Inside Intermarriage offers a warm, humorous, and ultimately hopeful message about the power of family connection.

Intergroup friendships and marriages are regarded as the most important indicators of immigrants’ social integration, as they represent the most intimate ties that can exist between minority and majority group members. Drawing on unique, large-scale, cross-national survey data, encompassing natives as well as Turkish, Moroccan, Pakistani and ex-Yugoslav migrants across several Western European countries, this book offers extensive analyses of intermarriage, as well as attitudes towards intermarriage and intergroup dating in general. Conceptualising the willingness or otherwise to marry outside one’s ethnic or religious group in terms of social distance, Social Integration and Intermarriage in Europe provides new evidence that different conceptions of family life, gender relations and religiosity are crucial for understanding why individuals can be reluctant to engage in intergroup relationships. With attention to the question of the role played by state policies in explaining immigrant social integration, the book explores differences across Western Europe and the ways in which each state regulates immigration and the accommodation of Islam. A detailed and rigorous study of attitudes to intermarriage, social integration and the role of the state, Social Integration and Intermarriage in Europe will appeal to policy makers and scholars of within the social sciences, with interests in migration, interethnic relations and social integration.

This book examines the experiences of couples with different language backgrounds and different cultural origins as they negotiate love, partnership and parenting. It is based on the author’s doctoral research into the attitudes and experiences of the English-speaking background (ESB) partners of non-English-speaking background (NESB) migrants in Sydney, Australia. In particular, it seeks to understand how these English speakers negotiate being in a romantic relationship with someone who has a different first language. It explores how those from an ESB reconcile the negative perspectives of Anglophone culture towards “other” languages, with their desire to be a good partner who respects the linguistic differences in their relationship. The book is organised into six chapters, which move from a focus on the language of the individual, to the languages of the couple, and then to the wider family. The main finding is that although ESB partners had very different beliefs and attitudes towards language learning to their migrant partners, they attempted to compensate for these differences in various ways. It will be of particular interest to students and scholars in the fields of language education, minority languages, and language policy and planning.

Evan Burr Bukey explores the experience of intermarried couples - marriages with Jewish and non-Jewish partners - and their children in Vienna after Germany's seizure of Austria in 1938. These families coped with changing regulations that disrupted family life, pitted relatives against each other, and raised profound questions about religious, ethnic, and national identity. Bukey finds that although intermarried couples lived in a state of fear and anxiety, many managed to mitigate, delay, or even escape Nazi sanctions. Drawing on extensive archival research, his study reveals how hundreds of them pursued ingenious strategies to preserve their assets, to improve their 'racial' status, and above all to safeguard the position of their children. It also analyzes cases of intermarried partners who chose divorce as well as persons involved in illicit liaisons with non-Jews. Jews and Intermarriage in Nazi Austria concludes that although most of Vienna's intermarried Jews survived the Holocaust, several hundred Jewish partners were deported to their deaths and children of such couples were frequently subjected to Gestapo harassment.