As mentioned in the Jewish Impact section, Jews had a huge impact on the communities in which they lived. Part of what allowed them to help develop these communities was their willingness to assimilate. As a result, intermarriage was frequent and more accepted by Jewish families in these small Southern communities than it was in larger Southern cities and in the North. In contrast to this acceptance of intermarriage, most Jewish communities in other areas of the United States considered an intermarried child as dead, and the child’s parents would even sit Shiva for him or her.
Non-Jewish families here were also more accepting of intermarriage than they were in other regions, because the Jews in these communities often had high economic status.
Reasons for high rates of intermarriage in these small towns stems from the low number of Jewish children to interact with each other. Since Jews in small towns comprise less than 0.5% of the population, it is not surprising that there were only one or two Jewish students in their high schools. As a result, Jewish children had more interactions with non-Jewish students than Jewish students, increasing the chance of developing relationships with them.
Whereas an intermarried Jew in the North would often leave the Jewish faith, intermarried Jews in these Southern towns found that their spouse actually turned to Judaism instead. In one instance, non-Jewish wife urged her husband to be a better Jew, stating that he “was not as good a Jew as he ought to be” (Schoenfeld) and “that she would have been much happier if he had attended services more often” (Schoenfeld).
In contrast to these Jews who continued to observe Judaism and maintain their Jewish identity despite intermarriage, there were other southern inhabitant that used intermarriage as a solution to dissolve the loneliness which accompanied being one of the only Jews in a town. Celia Starnes, for example, married a Baptist man. She no longer goes to synagogue, but wears a gold necklace with her name in Hebrew and considers herself a Jew in her heart, despite not practicing Judaism.
Photo Source: NY BLUEPRINT: The Urban Jewish Event Guide Source: Schoenfeld, Eugen. "Intermarriage and the Small Town: The Jewish Case." Journal of Marriage and the Family 31.1 (1969): 61-64. Web. Source: Applebome, Peter. "Small-Town South Clings to Jewish History." The New York Times. The New York Times, 28 Sept. 1991. Web. 21 Apr. 2017.