Is this post too sincere for April 1?

A group of fellow NYU PhD students have a newish blog, and one (going here by "Weiner") has just alerted me to his post about intermarriage.

I'll respond: If we're talking about secular-ish Jews in the US today, which I assume we are, my take is simple: You don't know until you know. In the words of the great philosopher Dan Savage, "Every relationship fails, until one doesn't." Many established Jewish-Jewish couples I can think of owe their relationships to the fact that previous relationships that happened to be with non-Jews happened to fail with reasons that had zilch to do with the cultural or religious background of either partner. Conversely, plenty of Jews in mixed couples had previous relationships with Jewish partners that happened not to work out for reasons that did not have a thing to do with Jewish self-hatred or with finding a partner 'too similar'.

What I'm getting at is that in real life, contrary to Portnoy's Complaint, Jews do not conceive of romantic partners entirely with respect to Jewishness or lack thereof. It's not as though there are the Jews who only date Jews, and then this other set who'll only date non-Jews. The very same Jewish person can be attracted at various points to Jewish and non-Jewish people. It's not like true 50-50 bisexuality, which as we all know is highly uncommon. The difference between Jews and non-Jews is not - and I realize this ought to sound more obvious than it does - as great as that between men and women.

But what I'm also saying is that those who happen to end up in Jewish-Jewish marriages, after a string of ultimately unsuccessful relationships with Jewish and non-Jewish partners, should not present a revisionist history of their own experience, as though they were 'all along' going to marry a Jew, that they, unlike the nasty intermarrieds, really care about the Jewish future. Nor, for that matter, should those who happen to end up intermarried declare that they've 'always' been exceptions to the rule among Jews, that they've always been somehow different, more enlightened, less parochial, provincial, blah blah blah.

So, to my fellow non-pious Jews: The person you end up marrying is not an overarching statement about your understanding of the Jewish Question, but a highly contingent eventuality, far more related to how integrated Jews happen to be in your milieu than to your abstract vision for the Jewish future. Do not retroactively attribute political motivations where there were virtually none.

(And... while this could make this post dissertation-length, I'll add that a good number of Jews, Theodor Herzl among them, have on some level thought that it would be convenient if Jews would just disappear through assimilation, and on another level thought that the Jewish future was the most important thing ever. This is what makes it so easy for Jews to retroactively justify their choice of spouse - Jewish or otherwise - in ideological terms.)