"While we didn't get everything we wanted, this is a great day for Jewish mothers everywhere," said MAIM president, Sophie Berkowitz, who tragically lost her daughter to a marriage with a Southern Baptist fireman in Houston seven years ago and hasn't heard from her since. "The court has gone a long way toward removing the stigma against Jews marrying Jews."
While not quite illegal, marriages between Jews of the opposite sex are so rare that they've become an underground activity, facing a larger culture that scorns and discriminates against Jewish couples who are determined -- against all odds -- to marry each other. Their weddings are often furtively held inside secret meeting-places known as "temples" and involve ancient rites peculiar to their subculture, such as stepping on a glass at the end of the ceremony or placing the couple's gift registry at Nieman-Marcus.
Still, some Jewish couples are finally willing to go public with their forbidden love for each other. "We're tired of being treated like second-class citizens," notes Paul Daviwitz, 34, of Richmond, Virginia, who married his wife Ruth after a 10-year search for a Jewish woman he felt comfortable marrying. "We didn't settle for each other; I happen to like women with frizzy hair. Do you got a problem with that?" Now, following by a few days the Massachusetts court ruling upholding the right of gay marriages, Jews who marry Jews are also finding vindication in the California court decision.
Even so, tremendous cultural and demographic barriers remain before Jewish same-religion marriages become commonplace or widely accepted. Perhaps the major obstacle facing proponents of intra-Jewish marriages is the frequency with which Jewish men and women are attracted to good-looking people of other faiths.
As Groucho Marx stated years ago, "It always seemed to me that making love to a Jewish girl was like making love to your sister." That sort of deeply-held belief is hard to break, experts note. (They also say that Jewish women are governed by their own set of stereotypes, all too often preferring handsome non-Jewish athletes to the prototypical "shlub.")
