ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes the cultural shifts that have occurred around religious faith and intermarriage in America, with a focus on American Jewry, in order to understand what intermarriage means today and how individual couples and institutions are trying to meet the challenges inherent in the new shifts of affiliation. The paper addresses several key questions: Assuming no conversion to one religion or another occurs for the sake of harmony or unity, to whom and to what “tribe” does “the other” belong? What about identity formation for the children and grandchildren of these often-fragmented affiliations? How does the new interfaith world that is emerging speak to the fluidity of religious relationships in the opening decades of the twenty-first century? And how can these hybrid identities, their flow, and the need for negotiation and complexity they foster relate to the nature of belonging to a given faith in the years ahead?
