Dating outside the tribe

BY JULIA ALLISON | Special to amNewYork

July 31, 2006

The Boyfriend and I have spent much of our dating lives in inter-faith relationships -- him with a predilection for Catholics, me leaning towards Jews -- so it seemed very appropriate to take him to see "Jewtopia" for our anniversary last week.

Written and performed by the hysterical team of Bryan Fogel and Sam Wolfson, "Jewtopia," is a brilliant off-Broadway comedic play about inter-faith relationships between Jews and Gentiles. Specifically, it centers on two guy friends -- one Jewish, one Christian -- who each want to date and marry outside of their religion, much to the other's confusion. ("I like Jewish girls," says one. "WHY?" sputters the other incredulously.)

The play, which rehashes -- hilariously, I might add -- every stereotype known to Jewish culture (My favorite? The Top Ten List of Traits that will Immediately Identify You as a Gentile, including Tobacco Dipping, Clubs Involving Lions or Elks, Taking Less Than an Hour to Say Goodbye, NASCAR and Being in Perfect Health) -- certainly captures the zeitgeist of today's faith-mixing mating scene.

There's hardly a person in New York who hasn't at one point or another dated, or even married, outside their faith. In fact, according to the National Jewish Population Survey, 47% of Jews wed non-Jews in the years 1996-2001, up from 13% before 1970.

Despite that trend, doing so still isn't celebrated in some households -- a fact that "Jewtopia" highlights through humorous send-ups of the typical Jewish family pressure to marry "within the tribe."

To wit: "I'm a Jewish man ... Do you have any idea the kind of pressure my family puts me under to marry a Jewish girl? I'm getting 10 to 20 phone calls a week, from my mother and my bubbee ... and do you know why they're calling me? Because they all know someone who's got a daughter or a granddaughter that they want to set me up with! They will stop at nothing! Last week my mother set me up on a blind date with her gynecologist! That is wrong!"

I suppose it's not surprising then, that my very first "real" relationship -- with a Jew, of course -- didn't go over well with his Israeli-born parents. Never mind that I was 16 and not even remotely looking to get hitched, let alone breed half-Jews.

And never mind that although I was raised Protestant, I'm 50%, 25% or 0% Jewish, depending upon who you talk with in my family. None of that mattered. I wasn't a true Jew, and they didn't want their son contributing to the demise of a watered-down Jewish civilization.

Of course, eight years later their son is on his fourth blonde-haired, blue-eyed Aryan girlfriend, and I'm with a guy who was bar-mitzvah'd at the Hotel Bel-Air and loves to get out of household chores by insisting that "I'm a Jew. I write checks." Sigh.

Email Julia@JuliaAllison.com