Kesher Talk

Goyish Gal Seeks Jewish Man: This Forward story from a year ago looks at gentile girls would seek out Jewish mates.

JDate, the largest and best known of the online Jewish dating services, has more than 500,000 members worldwide. Of those, more than 5,000 members registered as "from another religious stream" — read: not Jewish.

Egon Mayer, a professor of sociology at Brooklyn College who has studied interfaith marriage, said that he is not surprised at the trend. But while he's not "aware that there are any segments of the non-Jewish population that are specifically seeking a Jewish partner," Mayer said that "Jews have a fairly good reputation as marriage material."

According to Mayer, the melting pot has a momentum of its own: "That people search for all sorts of dating possibilities on the Internet doesn't surprise me," Mayer said. "They cross all sorts of boundaries because it's so easy to cross them."

For Rabbi Adam Jacobs, managing director in New York of Aish HaTorah, an Orthodox outreach program, the trend is a mixed blessing at best. "Since intermarriage is one of the serious problems facing the Jewish community, I am concerned," he said. But "there's something complementary in it, that we're viewed as a valuable population."

posted by William @ 11/11/2003 10:58:07 AM