Mothering in Multiple Identities: American-Jews, Asian Americans, and the Possibilities for Fusion

• In Event: Relational Identity: The Formation and Expression of Raced and Gendered Modern North American Jewish Identity

Abstract

Jewish communal advice for interfaith families has traditionally advocated for excluding the traditions of the non-Jewish parent, who is usually assumed to be Christian. In these framings, the Christian parent, usually the mother, does the lion’s share of the work of raising Jewish children, creating both anxiety about whether she is correctly presenting “authentic” Jewish identity and whether she might “slip” some Christianity into the mix. This paper explores how the rules do, and do not, change when the non-Jewish parent is Asian. Drawing examples from Indian, Chinese, and Korean-Jewish families, I argue that Jewish communal life allows Jewish-Asian families more space to blend their traditions that is allowed for marriages between Ashkenazi Jews and Christians of European decent. In part, this flexibility is possible because Asian religious and culture practice is not as threating to American Jews as is European derived Christian culture, as it is separated from the history of oppression and assimilation that shapes Jewish-Christian relations in the West. This paper argues that the flexibility is also largely the result of a liberal American Jewish tendency to exoticize and even fetishize Asian cultures. As a result, as long as Asian members of Jewish families conform to certain Jewish (or Western) stereotypes of Asians as model minorities or as inheritors of a “mystical” and foreign culture, they may retain religious or cultural practices. In these scenarios, gender continues to shape parental responsibility for transmitting culture, with the mother being the primary conduit. Interestingly, and in part because of historical trends in immigration, the Asian parent is more likely to be the father than in the Jewish-Christian examples, but whether the mother is Asian or Jewish, she is allowed more leeway in combining traditions, and even supported in doing so, as compared to her white Christian counterparts (even if she is, herself, Christian). In addition, because religion is an inherently Christian category that maps imperfectly onto the range of Jewish and Asian experiences, looking at the blending of Jewish and Asian families also allows for a particularly fruitful consideration of how both communities marshal the terms “religion” and “cultural” to negotiate the practices combined in their blended families.

Author

• Samira Mehta, Albright College