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A review by lpm100
Marrying Out: Jewish Men, Intermarriage, and Fatherhood by Keren R. McGinity
Did not finish book.
slow-paced
2.0
Book Review
Marrying Out
Keren McGinty
2/5 stars
"Low value added"
*******
Of the book:
-205 pages of prose (read more like 410 pages)
-4 chapters. 51.25/per
-751 point citations. 3.66/page (=Very heavily sourced)
This is the second book that I've read like this in the past couple of months. ("Like this"=a book composed of interviews.)
This book and the other one (which I will not identify) suffered from the exact same problem: The author was so interested in expanding his/her thoughts that information acquired from the subjects' interviews was buried almost completely underneath all of the author's expatiation.
A better way that this book *could have* been done would have been to just choose a dozen representative interviews and put them in the book "Alex Haley" style and then put the discussion and conclusions at the end of each chapter WITH A MINIMUM OF WORDS.
As it happens, the ratio here of the author's words to the subjects of the book was probably at least 75 to 1.
The book is also unremarkable for several other reasons:
1. Different types of white groups in the United States/North America have been marrying each other freely for many centuries. So, I'm not sure why Jewish people would actually need to be a special case.
2. Most normal guys DO NOT want to be with a woman that reminds them of their mother. (There may be evolutionary reasons behind that; it would make sense.)
The easiest way to do this would be to just find some other ethnicity to pursue and have babies with.
3. From the perspective of a Jewish person of either sex, think about it:
As of today, there are
-219 million white people in the United States.
-7.5 million Jews.
-211.5/7.5≈28:1, the ratio of Gentiles to Jews.
So, you could have 28 partners to choose from compared to only one if you decided to stay only with people of the same religion.
And that's just assuming that you stay within white people.
Jewish men are also known to appreciate Non-white Trim, to the point where it has become a sociological cliche. (Mark Zuckerberg. Sy Kravitz, etc. Walter Yetnikoff referred to his stable of women as his "shiksa farm." Locally, I have seen Jewish men pass over white Jewish ladies to take black ones on MULTIPLE occasions.)
If you were a guy that wanted a natural blonde Nordic type (a lot of gentlemen prefer blondes, and this book ascribes that guilt to Jewish men), then you would be looking for a long time/sorting through many fewer choices just to find that one phenotype within Jewish women.
By me: Southern European/Jewish women are the pinnacle of human evolution (think: Armenians, Italians, Romanians), but not everybody shares that opinion. (Crazy, isn't it?)
4. Jewish men have beenv eagerly injecting their DNA into non-Jewish ladies for thousands of years by now. (How else to explain people like the Lemba? How else explain the genetic divergence between Ashkenazim and Sephardim? How else to explain the genetic markers in certain Spaniophone/Chinese/Indian populations? )
There were a few interesting statistics in here, but not enough to justify the time-cost of reading the book.
1. Most of the women eventually convert.
2. Most of the children are raised as Jewish.
3. A lot of times these men are lax in observance, and the Gentile wife is the one that pulls the family further toward Jewish observance.
I had wanted to read McGinty's book on intermarriage between Jewish ladies and Gentile men, but after this book I don't think I will.
If you want this information, I think there's a forward article about it and that's about all the needs to be said about that.
If you were a father who wanted to advise his sons to consider the type of Jewish women that most Jewish men overlook, You won't really get that much information from this book.
Verdict: Not recommended.
Marrying Out
Keren McGinty
2/5 stars
"Low value added"
*******
Of the book:
-205 pages of prose (read more like 410 pages)
-4 chapters. 51.25/per
-751 point citations. 3.66/page (=Very heavily sourced)
This is the second book that I've read like this in the past couple of months. ("Like this"=a book composed of interviews.)
This book and the other one (which I will not identify) suffered from the exact same problem: The author was so interested in expanding his/her thoughts that information acquired from the subjects' interviews was buried almost completely underneath all of the author's expatiation.
A better way that this book *could have* been done would have been to just choose a dozen representative interviews and put them in the book "Alex Haley" style and then put the discussion and conclusions at the end of each chapter WITH A MINIMUM OF WORDS.
As it happens, the ratio here of the author's words to the subjects of the book was probably at least 75 to 1.
The book is also unremarkable for several other reasons:
1. Different types of white groups in the United States/North America have been marrying each other freely for many centuries. So, I'm not sure why Jewish people would actually need to be a special case.
2. Most normal guys DO NOT want to be with a woman that reminds them of their mother. (There may be evolutionary reasons behind that; it would make sense.)
The easiest way to do this would be to just find some other ethnicity to pursue and have babies with.
3. From the perspective of a Jewish person of either sex, think about it:
As of today, there are
-219 million white people in the United States.
-7.5 million Jews.
-211.5/7.5≈28:1, the ratio of Gentiles to Jews.
So, you could have 28 partners to choose from compared to only one if you decided to stay only with people of the same religion.
And that's just assuming that you stay within white people.
Jewish men are also known to appreciate Non-white Trim, to the point where it has become a sociological cliche. (Mark Zuckerberg. Sy Kravitz, etc. Walter Yetnikoff referred to his stable of women as his "shiksa farm." Locally, I have seen Jewish men pass over white Jewish ladies to take black ones on MULTIPLE occasions.)
If you were a guy that wanted a natural blonde Nordic type (a lot of gentlemen prefer blondes, and this book ascribes that guilt to Jewish men), then you would be looking for a long time/sorting through many fewer choices just to find that one phenotype within Jewish women.
By me: Southern European/Jewish women are the pinnacle of human evolution (think: Armenians, Italians, Romanians), but not everybody shares that opinion. (Crazy, isn't it?)
4. Jewish men have beenv eagerly injecting their DNA into non-Jewish ladies for thousands of years by now. (How else to explain people like the Lemba? How else explain the genetic divergence between Ashkenazim and Sephardim? How else to explain the genetic markers in certain Spaniophone/Chinese/Indian populations? )
There were a few interesting statistics in here, but not enough to justify the time-cost of reading the book.
1. Most of the women eventually convert.
2. Most of the children are raised as Jewish.
3. A lot of times these men are lax in observance, and the Gentile wife is the one that pulls the family further toward Jewish observance.
I had wanted to read McGinty's book on intermarriage between Jewish ladies and Gentile men, but after this book I don't think I will.
If you want this information, I think there's a forward article about it and that's about all the needs to be said about that.
If you were a father who wanted to advise his sons to consider the type of Jewish women that most Jewish men overlook, You won't really get that much information from this book.
Verdict: Not recommended.