A Jewish-Asian Couple’s Union Leads to a Scholarly Interest in Intermarriage |
A Jewish-Asian Couple’s Union Leads to a Scholarly Interest in Intermarriage
The New York Times
2012-06-15
Samuel G. Freedman, Professor of Journalism
Columbia University, New York, New York
One weekend night 15 years ago, a group of graduate students at the University of Chicago decided to interrupt their research long enough for a dinner party. Helen K. Kim made a chocolate tart with ginger cream filling. Her classmate Noah S. Leavitt regarded it and scoffed, “Nice use of your time, making a fancy dessert with all the homework we have.”
Ms. Kim did not exactly swoon at that snarky version of a pickup line.
Over the next three weeks, though, Mr. Leavitt kept pursuing her in more polite fashion and they eventually went out for dinner and drinks. Very quickly, the two aspiring academics found themselves talking in candid detail about the recent and untimely deaths of their fathers.
From that encounter grew not only their own subsequent marriage but a joint scholarly interest in the very trend they embodied: intermarriage between Asian-Americans and American Jews. Their major research paper on the subject appeared in February, just three months before arguably the highest-profile example of the phenomenon, the wedding of Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook founder, to his longtime girlfriend, Dr. Priscilla Chan…
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Tags: Helen K. Kim, Helen Kim, Noah Leavitt, Noah S. Leavitt, Samuel Freedman, Samuel G. Freedman, The New York Times