Ta-Nehisi Coates pulls together some numbers on interracial marriage between blacks and Jews and proclaims the end of the black-Jewish alliance:
19 percent of blacks “oppose” or “strongly oppose” a relative marrying someone Jewish, while 31 percent favor or “favor” or “strongly favor” the unions. The remaining 50 percent of blacks don’t care.
38 percent of Jews either “oppose” or “strongly oppose” one of their relatives marrying someone black. 22 percent “favor” or “strongly favor” the unions. 23 percent of Jews don’t care.
I think these numbers need to be looked at with some caveats. Because of anxiety over interreligious marriage pushing the population of Jews into decline, a fairer question to ask the Jews in the survey would be “are you opposed to a relative marrying a black person who is also Jewish?” Prior to my parents getting married, my mother and my father’s mother had a memorable smackdown over my mom converting which finally ended with the compromise that my mother would raise her children as Jews. (Mom eventually converted anyway.)
In any case, that still might not change the numbers all that much. When I saw Art Spiegelman speak a few years ago, he reflected on the controversy that the above New Yorker cover caused. He said a local rabbi tried to explain to him that the cover wasn’t offensive because of the interracial romance, but rather because the woman the man was kissing wasn’t Jewish.
I remember Spiegelman saying he replied, “How do you know she isn’t Jewish? She’s Ethiopian!”*
— A. Serwer