"At least when you marry an African-American, you're getting someone who already understands Passover"

Ta-Nehisi Coates and Jeff Goldberg are two of the top five reasons I'm proud to be associated with The Atlantic, * and the two of them, together, talking about interracial/interfaith dating - be still, my heart.

I'm vacillating on whether I feel deserving of or want Jeff Goldberg's pity, as a Jewish woman with a non-MOT ("member of the tribe," in Goldberg parlance) mate -

"I guess I felt sorry for the Jewish women who intermarried, because I sensed that they tried, and failed, to convince Jewish men that they weren't, in fact, their mothers, that they were intelligent and sexy and all the rest. Jewish men who go outside, I think - and this is not everyone, obviously - are looking beyond the tribe not because they really think they're going to end up marrying their mothers if they find a Jewish woman, but because they're scared of Jewish women, especially the intense sort my friends and I all seemed to marry."

- and ask whether the issue isn't the bigger, third-wave feminist question of exactly how many young men want to date "intense," ambitious young women, of any religion. My roommate and I talked at length on Monday, after her visit to her boyfriend's naval base, about this phenomenon among young military officers, among which Jewish men aren't exactly known for being overrepresented.

I do wonder if this point isn't more true among African-American couples, though. As Ta-Nehisi puts it, "there is, in the black mind, this stereotype that black dudes can somehow get away with more dealing with white women," and it's not difficult to envision how this might be true. It would be a lot easier, I think, for a non-Jewish girlfriend to give her Jewish mate a hard time for acting lazy or immature, for example, than it would for a white girlfriend to use those (racially loaded) terms with a black partner.

The most interesting part of the conversation, though, is whether it's become gauche in certain circles "to advocate for in-marriage." Jeff says yes among Jews, Ta-Nehisi says that it's geographical for blacks - no in Atlanta or DC, yes in New York or LA - which seems like a fascinating area to be mined on the matter of the black community in the North vs. in the South.

As far as my personal life goes, I think the nut of it is what Ta-Nehisi has articulated so well in the past:

"Look, it's hard enough to satisfy the basic carnal needs--it's even harder to satisfy those needs, and satisfy the basic emotional and mental ones too. There is a good chance that your long-term relationship will one day fail. A great way to up the chances of truly epic fail, hot grits, I'm talking hot grits fail, burn down the mansion fail, is to shrink the pool of your potential partners."

This is what I've found, at least (and what I'm always trying (unsuccessfully) to communicate to my grandmother): it's hard enough to find someone who shares your values, intellectual passions, and appreciation for LOLcats without artificially limiting the search to last names that end in -berg, -man, or -stein.



*Number one, as always, is Caitlan Flanagan. Go read her December issue piece on the Twilight phenomenon - her remarkable gift for collective psychoanalysis applied to girlhood narcissism and the insatiable appetitite for dramatic novels.