Racial Intermarriage and Racial Survival

Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush speaks to students and faculty at Bob Jones University Feb. 2. The fundamentalist Christian university has scrapped a ban on inter-racial dating between students.

Recently, Republican presidential hopeful George W. Bush was widely criticized because he spoke at Bob Jones University, a college which has a policy against interracial dating. He eventually expressed regret for not speaking out against `racial intolerance” during his visit to the South Carolina institution.

This whole uproar underscores a prevalent hypocritical double standard in our society. Namely, it is socially and morally acceptable for Jewish groups to condemn interracial dating and marriage between Jews and non-Jews, but it is positively “evil and immoral” for non-Jewish, Euro-Americans to do the same. For the moment, let us examine the Jewish community’s views on this matter.

In 1989 Carol Diament was the National Director of Jewish Education at Hadassah, the Woman’s Zionist Organization of America (and she may still hold that position). She was quoted as saying “. . . we [the Jews] are not imparting to our children the responsibility to marry Jews.”] She also stated that “the greatest threat of all to the future of Diaspora Jewry is intermarriage.’ ²

Norman Lamm, president of (Modern Orthodox) Yeshiva University has said that intermarriage between Jews and non- Jews will result in “another Holocaust.” Herewith: “With a diminishing [Jewish] birth rate, an intermarriage rate exceeding 40%, Jewish illiteracy gaining ascendance daily–who says that the Holocaust is over? . . . The monster has assumed a different and more benign form.” ³

Texas Gov. George W. Bush dons a yarmulke Monday during a ceremony at the Simon Wiesenthal Center and Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles.

Indeed, as Jewish historian Peter Novick has recently shown, the Holocaust ideology is used by major Jewish groups to teach fellow Jews the need to preserve Jewish continuity in the face of increasing intermarriage. ⁴ In a word, the Holocaust is suppose to impart to Jews the need to marry fellow Jews.

According to a Religious News Service press release of December 3, 1991, “The Conservative movement of Judaism, the largest Branch of the faith, is stressing standards for members in an effort to stem the tide of intermarriage and strengthen Jewish identity. . . The group also established a commission on intermarriage. The commission’s charge is to devise ways to discourage unmarried Jews from marrying out of the faith.”

Further on the article states, “Steven Bayme, director of Jewish communal affairs for the American Jewish Committee, said emphasizing standards of belief and practice is a necessary element of efforts to resist the trend toward intermarriage.

The intermarriage commission will seek to communicate the message that it is possible to accept others without `giving up ones s identity.”‘ ⁵

Keep in mind that Conservative Judaism’s discouragement of intermarriage between Jews and Gentiles is an official policy. But here is where our society’s hypocritical double standard comes in to play. Governor Bush was widely criticized for speaking at a predominantly white Christian university which opposes interracial dating, but no mainstream newspaper or politician would dare criticize any presidential hopeful who spoke at a Conservative Jewish synagogue where it is official policy to oppose intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews.

International law grants all races and cultures the right to self-determination and self-preservation. Culture to a large extent is a product of the genetic makeup of the people which created and propagates the culture. Consequently, it should be the right of every people to work to preserve the unique genetic makeup of the people which created the culture. Discouraging interracial marriage is one way in which a people can work to preserve their unique identity.

Don’t misunderstand me. We live in America where each individual has the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, which means of course that, if for example, a White wants to marry a Black, he/she has the right to do so. Laws forbidding interracial marriage would violate an individual’s right to freedom of choice in marital matters. However, for those groups which are concerned about the survival of their own peoplehood, interracial marriage should be discouraged as a matter of policy. The problem is of course that Jewish Americans are granted the right to do this, but Gentiles are denied such a right. Hypocrisy abounds.

FOOTNOTES

1. THE JEWISH BOOK NEWS, 7 September 1989, p.12.
2. Ibid., p.9.
3. Quoted in Peter Novick, THE HOLOCAUST IN AMERICAN LIFE (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1999), p.185.
4. Peter Novick, THE HOLOCAUST IN AMERICAN LIFE.
5. Printed in THE CHRISTIAN NEWS, Dec. 16, 1991, p.15.