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A Famous Jew Intermarries, and Nobody Notices

You haven’t heard much about Mark Zuckerberg’s nuptials

by
Marc Tracy
May 22, 2012
Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg at their wedding over the weekend.(Facebook/AP)
Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg at their wedding over the weekend.(Facebook/AP)

And lo, in the month of Jewish American and Asian-Pacific American Heritages both, it came to pass that famous Jew Mark Zuckerberg married his longtime girlfriend Priscilla Chan, who is not Jewish, and then a great miracle (if you ask some) happened: nobody rang the intermarriage bells.

Allison Kaplan Sommer noted that the non-news is itself news. “And so we’ve reached the stage where, in many cases, actual disappointment over intermarriage has drastically diminished,” she writes, “because the expectation that non-Orthodox American Jews will actively prefer and seek out fellow Jews as life partners doesn’t exist.”

I don’t have much to add to that. I’m a little bit surprised it has not been a bigger deal, but then again, it was something that barely registered with me. I do wonder whether it wouldn’t almost be a bigger deal if Zuckerberg were marrying, say, a fifth-generation WASP rather than an Asian-American with some family still in China. There may also be a whiff of “well, Asians are the new Jews” thing to it, particularly given that they met at an AEPi party at Harvard.

Marc Tracy is a staff writer at The New Republic, and was previously a staff writer at Tablet. He tweets @marcatracy.