A SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP?
OUR ASIAN LOVE AFFAIR
AMY CHUA, the notorious “Tiger Mom”, described it as the “triple package”. This is the idea that minority groups such as Jews and Asians experience disproportionate success because of shared values, which spring from the immigrant experience — namely insecurity and outsiderdom, “good impulse control”, and what she refers to as a “superiority complex”. It essentially boils down to the sense that immigrants have to work harder to succeed, something that characterised both Chua’s Asian background and her husband, Jed Rubenfeld’s, Jewish upbringing.
But are there more similarities between Jews and Asians — and do these similarities mean that relationships between the two will be disproportionately successful?
“Possibly,” is the answer from Helen Kim and Noah Leavitt, coauthors of JewAsian: Race, Religion, and Identity for America’s Newest
Jews and themselves a “JewAsian” inter-racial couple — Kim is second-generation immigrant Korean — who became interested in the merging of the two cultures when they started dating 20 years ago.
“When we first started going out, we had a mix of questions surrounding our interactions,” says Leavitt. “What did it mean when two people like ourselves got together?”
The couple met while on a social sciences masters’ programme at the University of Chicago. Both now work at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington. Kim is a professor of sociology and Leavitt has an administrative role, having previously taught in the sociology department. So it is unsurprising that they shared this academic desire to explore the wider meaning of their attraction.
Along with Tiger Mom and her Jewish husband, perhaps the most famous current JewAsian couple is Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan.
Zuckerberg was raised Jewish and had a barmitzvah but describes himself as an atheist, while Chan is a Buddhist whose parents came to America from Vietnam. The couple are famously private (despite the implicit irony there) and rarely talk publicly about their relationship.
Nonetheless, paediatrician Chan and billionaire tech superstar Zuckerberg are prime examples of Chua’s “triple package”. They are hardworking and successful, both professionally and, with the birth of baby daughter Max in 2015, personally.
Kim and Leavitt also noticed other Jewish Asian couples featuring in national newspapers, and saw the phrase JewAsian begin to grow. “We found the term was appearing a lot online,” says Kim, “especially in reference to certain kinds of food — such as kimchee with latkes — on the one hand, and on the other hand, being used [by people of mixed backgrounds] to refer either to themselves or to their relationships.
“It’s one of those terms that tends to appear right after a hashtag.”
The idea of a younger generation appropriating a mixed-race identity and translating it into something accessible for the social-media generation is an idea that figures prominently in much of Kim and Leavitt’s research. They interviewed 34 couples as well as the children of Jewish Asian couples. “We noticed that when a millennial JewAsian got a question such as ‘are you half-Jewish?’, the young people responded with a confidence and real understanding.
“In some ways, we went into this project thinking that there would be a certain amount of stress or conflict [between the two identities] but none of that played out. We were amazed by how much ‘Jewish’ there was, in a variety of ways — study, synagogue affiliation — it was very hopeful.”
Their research found that cul- turally, it was Judaism that tended to shape the home-life of these couples.
“There is an understanding that the key value systems have an overlap that gets played out in Jewish practice,” says Leavitt. Kim attributes this mainly to the fact that the Asian partner in JewAsian relationships is usually second- or third-generation immigrant.
“They are removed from the ethnicity of their parents’ or grandparents’ household,” she says. “Some of them had less of a sense of how to bring an Asian ethnicity into the realm of a household.” Judaism, however, retains a firmer hold.
Combine that, Kim continues,
We found the term ‘JewAsian’ a lot online’