The first time my partner asked me to come home with him to meet the parents, I couldn’t have been happier. A relationship milestone so soon after we’d started dating held such promise. Plus, I had it on good authority that his previous girlfriend, whom he’d dated on and on-and-off for nearly two years, had never had the pleasure. So, when we packed our bags for that first Thanksgiving in Florida, I felt far more excited than nervous. Parents tend to like me. Except this time, it occurred to me, I already had one strike against me: I wasn’t Jewish.

When my partner and I began dating, I was only vaguely aware of his Jewish background. Unless the name ended in “Stein” or “Berg,” I didn’t have a clue. I’d grown up in a suburb of Buffalo, NY and I simply didn’t have a lot of exposure to Jewish people. Of course, it didn’t help that I’d attended Catholic schools from kindergarten through twelfth grade.

My friends and family were a bit taken aback when I announced that I was dating a Jewish guy from Long Island, given that my past serious relationships had been with men of African descent. Steve was short, funny (funnier than anyone I’d ever met) and extremely ambitious, and sometimes, when he grew animated, he’d adopt a Brooklyn accent, learned from his father and perhaps leftover from his first few years as a boy in that borough. I remember early on in our courtship a friend remarking that Jewish guys were great “because they really know how to treat a woman well.” I learned that they were also stereotypically regarded as ‘mama’s boys.’

I became fascinated by the all of the ways in which Jewish culture is characterized and defined—especially since some secular Jews offhandedly dismiss the religious component. My partner is not a serious practitioner of his faith, which I am grateful for, I suppose, not that I would’ve minding his going to temple regularly or seriously honoring the Jewish holidays or even fasting—though keeping a kosher kitchen would’ve been a big adjustment for me. Since I’m not a practicing Catholic, the two of us on the religious fence somehow seems more manageable than one or both of us strongly devout.

Eventually, as the relationship progressed—that first meeting of the parents behind us—we began speaking in earnest about our future. It had been clear early on that the relationship had legs, and as we both wanted to get married eventually, I started pressing him about what that would mean for us, a Jewish boy and a Catholic girl: What kind of ceremony would we have? Where would we do it? Would he want me to consider converting for him? I assumed I knew the answer to the last question—no—since my partner’s belief in a higher power is more muddled than my own fluid thoughts on the subject, but when we got to discussing how a non-denominational ceremony would affect our parents, he nonchalantly told me that on the day his sister had married her husband, who was raised Catholic like me, his mother had said, “Well, he’ll never be one of us.”

His mother, tiny and chatty and sweet, but not effusively so, could also, apparently, be quite cutting. I had spent little time with my partner’s family, but I hadn’t sensed anything odd or off about his brother-in-law’s interactions with the Jewish family he’d married into.

Anyway, what did that even mean? ‘Not one of us’? I reasoned that converting to Judaism was a moot point for me—for us—unless we decided to have kids, and neither of us wants children. In my few visits to Florida, I’d never received the cold shoulder from his mother, but neither had I gotten a sense that she was interested in me all that much either. Was she just waiting for him to settle down with a nice Jewish girl? Perhaps she saw me as temporary.

As it was obvious to both of us that I wasn’t going anywhere, I boldly broached the topic with my partner.

“So, were you supposed to marry a Jewish girl, or what? Did you parents ingrain that in you when you were growing up and started dating?”

Accustomed to my out-of-the-blue questions, he simply looked up from his laptop and said that although it wasn’t an issue that had been discussed directly, it was implied. “I don’t remember anybody saying this outright,” he admitted, “but it was definitely the model I grew up with.”

Uh huh. Seeing the confused (and, I don’t know, hurt?) expression on my face, he pulled me onto his lap and promised me that he didn’t care, that he wouldn’t be disowned or anything like that.

“You’re my little shiksa,” he said affectionately, and though I understood the root of the word to be derogatory, I heard it as a term of endearment.

I began to wonder if his mother had simply given up on his marrying one of his own, or if perhaps I was just fooling myself. While I was happy to celebrate Hanukkah with his family last year (when the first night of it happened to fall on Thanksgiving), I don’t really get it, nor, if I’m being honest, do I care to. And yet, maybe that was the exact problem. The not caring would certainly peg me as an outsider. If he were any more invested in his faith though and wanted me to take the same interest in it as his other passions—baseball, Marvel comic book movies, barbecue—I certainly would.

On Christmas Eve at my house, when my large, boisterous family partakes in a meatless Polish meal as is tradition on this holiday, and my meat-loving man says he thinks the pierogis should be stuffed with pork or beef and not just potato, cabbage, or cheese, I patiently try to explain that that’s our way. There’ll be a roast on Christmas day, I assure him. There, he’s the outsider, but it’s in such a small way and on a such a small, insignificant level (to us, at least) that I hardly think it matters or even really affects him.

My family has embraced him as far as I can see. There was a time when my parents would have been adamant about my marrying a Catholic man (or at least a Christian), but as time’s gone by, and my faith has lapsed, it’s been years since my father has threatened not to pay for a wedding if it’s not in the church. My sister, who married a Presbyterian three years ago, chose to have a traditional Catholic ceremony because she says, “Mom would’ve been crushed if I hadn’t.” It was just easier that way.

Converting to Judaism, however, would not be so cut and dry. The little I’ve read on the subject is enough to tell me that it would require a great amount of discipline and education, not to mention a renunciation of the religion I’ve been immersed in since I had water pored over my head in a baptismal ceremony 33 years ago.

When the time comes for us to take that next step, we’ll have to take a united front. Our wedding will probably be in Brooklyn—not in my hometown or in his family’s current place of residence, but in our home. The slight sting of not being “one of them” according to his mother may always be felt, but as long as my partner’s on my side, it won’t matter.

Stacey Gawronski is an editor at Refinery29. Her work has appeared in The Huffington Post, New York Family, Yahoo Shine!, The Billfold, xojane, and more. She lives in Brooklyn with her partner and their dog, Odie.

Related: I Hid My Non-Jewish Boyfriend From My Family For Over A Year

(Image: The OC‘s Seth and Summer, one of the most famous interfaith couples of all time.)

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It was my sophomore year and a group of us were gathered in a dorm room, teenage bodies splayed across beds and chairs and floor. I don’t recall exactly what prompted the conversation, but someone asked a dorm mate, an Indian national, to talk about the possibility of arranged marriage.

“That’s crazy,” complained one of my friends. “To assume that the person you are meant to be with happens to be from your ethnic group. You could find him anywhere. It’s racist.”

Well, that stopped me in my tracks. Since hiding in that tiny, crowded room wasn’t really an option, I just sat still, hoping no one would notice me. And it might have worked, if not for my close friend who announced to my horror, “Leah will only date and marry Jews.” Despite all of my attempts to be seen as a left-leaning, color blind, student of the world, I had just been called out as a bigot. Awesome.

I grew up in a Jewish bubble. Day school, Jewish camps, Israel, shul every shabbat. When I got to public high school, it was in a town that was more than fifty percent Jewish. During our senior year, an Episcopalian friend described what it was like having her first non-Jewish boyfriend: “I feel a little guilty,” she said.

I went on one of the first ever teen trips to Poland and Israel, where we were constantly reminded that we were personally responsible for keeping the Jewish people alive. For some, I imagine, it was a lot of pressure. Not for me. The rules about dating in my house were clear. Date Jewish boys. Marry a Jewish man. End of rules. I was a good girl, and I never questioned them.

And then I got to college.

I found a home at Hillel and in other Jewish organizations, but in my dorm, I was one of only a few members of the tribe. For the first time in my life, most of my friends were decidedly not like me. This was no accident. I had chosen my university over others closer to home because I had watched as friends and relatives went off to Columbia or Barnard and then came home every other weekend. Or they went to Brandeis with a cohort of fifty of their closest friends from summer camp. I made a conscious decision to go where my Judaism would have to be my choice and my responsibility.

If left to my own devices, would I still choose to keep Shabbat? To keep kosher? To only date Jews? That last question turned out to be the hardest one to figure out. I was spending my time studying languages and African history, living in an International Studies dorm where diverse backgrounds and cultural experiences were the norm. I was, and remain, an unabashed liberal who prides herself on valuing difference and tolerance. How could I shut myself off in the most intimate of ways just because of religious difference? Did my Jewish commitments make me a racist?

During my senior year, I got a strange request from my Hillel rabbi. I often babysat his sweet, plump-cheeked little girls, and he knew I could hang with kids. Now he had a favor to ask of me. A family had called him. They had no connection to the Jewish community, but had suddenly decided they needed a private Jewish tutor to ensure that their children wouldn’t intermarry. Freshly returned from a year in Jerusalem, I was filled with the confidence of someone who had navigated third-year Russian classes conducted in Hebrew, long days in the Interior Ministry, and ongoing battles with an Iraqi plumber. I could handle anything.

Or so I thought. Because when I got to their big, sprawling, suburban home—which bore no evidence of their Jewishness—I was less sure. And when their little boy blurted out that he wanted to be Christian because they had presents, and Jews (in his experience) had nothing—I quietly told them I would not be their tutor, and that they needed to find a community. And I started to think seriously about the kind of parent I wanted to be someday. Why did this family even care if their children intermarried? Would they have had an answer for those dorm mates of mine, staring me down like I was waving a confederate flag?

After college I dated a number of different Jewish guys and started to hone in on what was truly important to me. A nice looking Israeli asked me out in line at the kosher bakery. After a couple of dates, it was clear that his personal religion involved serious worship of cash. Then an old friend suggested I go out with her boyfriend’s brother. He was handsome and articulate and I thought maybe it could lead to something. But then I discovered a problem: Kissing a boy who had just eaten a non-kosher burger? Startlingly unappealing.

Then I got a call from someone I had met at a party. He was newly religious, and a prominent right-wing Republican. For a few dates, I managed to avoid politics—maybe I could have avoided it for a long time. But the moment I knew we were done? Sitting in a kosher restaurant he was explaining to me how women don’t have the arrogance necessary to represent the congregation before God. And that’s when I stood up. “Really? I didn’t know you needed arrogance for that. I thought you needed humility.” And I walked out, leaving him with the check. Apparently I was more intolerant than I thought.

When I met the man I would eventually marry, before we even went out on our first real date, we found ourselves discussing what we wanted our homes to be like someday. We talked about electricity on Shabbat, day school, Israel. Not romantic? What about “love will find a way”? To me, though—to us—these imaginings were the most powerful aphrodisiac. To know, to be sure, that we shared each other’s vision of what our little bubble would look like. It was such a relief. I could feel myself exhale.

When our eldest son was in third grade, he was obsessed with religions. Next to the computer, he left a stack of notecards with facts about Zoroastrianism, Islam, the Navajo. It was really incredible to watch. Walking to shul on Shabbat, as he asked his eleventh question about the Baha’i, his siblings rolled their eyes. I worried a little that all his studies would pull him to explore those exotic other cultures from the inside. Now that he’s approaching his Bar Mitzvah, his interests have continued to expand. He pushes and strains against the bubble we have created. But recently, his answer to the question, “When have you felt God’s presence?” was telling. “When we daven Kabbalat Shabbat together, as a family,” he said.

But what about that worried girl, desperate to disappear from that dorm room confrontation? A racist? I didn’t know what to say. I sat, tongue-tied, as each face in the room turned toward me in horror. I was saved, though, by my knight in shining armor—the very friend who had exposed my Jewish dating habits moments earlier. He was a newly-out 19-year-old, always on the lookout for subtle (and not so subtle) homophobia, and by extension, all kinds of discrimination. I really couldn’t have anticipated what he was going to say next.

“Have you even met Leah?” he practically shouted, “Have you seen how she never misses Shabbat services? Do you realize that she always offers to be responsible for the food for our parties so she can make sure there will be something for her to eat? How she made endless batches of latkes for the entire dorm on her single electric burner? Who should she choose to make a home with?”

I very much want that to be the dream for my own kids as well. But I don’t tell them that they need to marry a Jew to replace the people who died in the Shoah, or so our grandmothers don’t turn over in their graves, or to bolster our survey numbers. It feels like staying Jewish on a dare. All I can hope is that they continue to find flashes of the divine, enveloped in the bubble we call home.

Leah Bieler is a freelance journalist, teacher of Talmud and mom of four. Follow her on Twitter @LeahBieler, or on her blog radicallyconventional.com.

(Image via Shutterstock.)

Related: I Hid My Non-Jewish Boyfriend From My Family For Over A Year
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It’s the million shekel question every Jewish parent, teacher, and communal leader wants the answer to: how do you get your kids—and their kids, and their kids—to keep the faith and remain in the tribe?

Vern L. Bengston, a former Evangelical Christian, is the man with the answers. Over at the Times, Mark Oppenheimer has a fascinating piece about the 72-year-old social work professor, who has spent over 50 years studying faith, families, and religious attrition rates. Bengston’s findings—the results of interviews with over 350 families from 1969-2008—were recently published in Families and Faith: How Religion is Passed Down across Generations.

So what’s the secret to inculcating a love of religion and tradition in your offspring? Well, it’s important that parents model endogamy, piety, and non-hypocritical observance. (Piece of cake, huh?) But more than that, it’s about Dads cultivating positive relationships with their kids. (Which pretty much explains Mitt Romney.) “For religious transmission,” says Bengston, “having a close bond with one’s father matters even more than a close relationship with one’s mother.”

But here’s the twist: with Jewish families—perhaps because of the tradition of matrilineal descent—the mother’s influence matters more. Writes Oppenheimer: “Among Jews with a close maternal bond, 90 percent considered themselves Jewish, versus only 60 percent of those who weren’t close to their mothers.”

Whatever you’re doing, Jewish moms, keep doing it.

Read the full story here.

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For all the happily intermarried couples out there, there’s a creepy and nosy new effort to obstruct your way of life. The Lehava group created a hotline that allows callers to report Arab-Israeli couples and work to break them up, to “save the daughters of Israel.” The hotline also provides names and phone numbers of Arab men dating Jewish women. Bentzi Gupstein, the chairman of the Lehava organization said that each report is acted on as “a matter of life and death,” the Times of Israel reports.

He said that the hotline provides the names and numbers of Arab men, so that “every person can explain in his own way to the Arab man that he is better off dating Fatima from the village rather than Yael or Einat [Israeli women’s names].”

Not surprisingly, the service has sparked debate from those who see it as xenophobic and those who think there should be thousands of services more like it.

(Photo by kuponjabah/shutterstock)

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Kosher Salt is Jewcy’s monthly comic about life as a blonde-haired, green-eyed, tattooed Jew.

Get your Kosher Salt fix: A Very Jewish Christmas
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Elizabeth Simins is a compulsive doodler living in New York. She splits her time between making paintings, being a production designer, and playing pretentious indie video games. She tweets here.

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