When we polled Pro-Semites, the number one reason they gave for desiring a Jewish spouse was a sense of strong values, with nearly a third also admitting they were drawn to money, looks, or a sense that Jews “treat their spouses better.” In 2004, I worked with Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, an Orthodox Jew, on his bid to be president. Although he failed to win his party’s nomination, his emphasis on values set a nationwide example that raised the consciousness about Jewish life in America. During his campaign, far more Jews than non-Jews told him a Jew shouldn’t run. But his strong sense of principle served him well in 2006, when Republicans and Independents—once unlikely supporters of a Jewish candidate—came to his aid after Connecticut Democrats declined to nominate him for reelection to the U.S. Senate.

  Pop culture, too, seems to have discovered Pro-Semitism. When Madonna wrapped herself in Kabbalah, a spiritual movement rooted in Jewish mysticism, a whole new side of America got introduced to Jewish life. Not the Seinfeld sort—where Jewish culture hovers faintly in the background—but the uniquely, distinctly, religious kind. Granted, some thought Madonna carried it too far: During her 2004 Reinvention tour, she apparently refused to drink anything but “Kabbalah water,” and she wouldn’t perform on Friday nights out of respect for the Jewish Sabbath.

  Once non-Jews started to get interested in Judaism, Jews got more into it, too. In 2005, the Jewish reggae artist Matisyahu (whose name is Yiddish for Matthew, or “gift of God”), donned his yarmulke and pais, rapped about the power of God to lift us up, and saw his second CD debut at number two on the Billboard charts. What is new here is not that a Jew can make it in rock ’n’ roll. Plenty have, like Robert Zimmerman, who changed his name to Bob Dylan, put on jeans and a T-shirt, sang about America, and rocked a generation. What is new is that Matisyahu looks like he comes from a thirteenth-century Polish shtetl, is singing partly in Yiddish and Hebrew, and is drawing in fans from Oklahoma.

  As Pro-Semitism spreads, so do distinctive Jewish customs—even when the Jews aren’t there. Non-Jews are starting to have bar mitzvahs, the Jewish “coming of age” ceremony when a child turns 13. An entire blog is devoted to the propriety and sensitivity of using a chuppah, a Jewish wedding canopy, in non-Jewish weddings. Matzoh, the “bread of affliction” to which Jews are supposed to limit themselves during Passover to commemorate the haste with which their ancestors fled Egypt, is happily munched down by non-Jews all year.

  Perhaps this all started with rye bread and hot dogs, and the deeply held belief that if they were Kosher they were better. My father was in the Kosher poultry business in the 1950s, and he faced a shrinking marketplace as Jews abandoned Kosher food. Today, with the right marketing, he could have welcomed growing demand from Jews and non-Jews alike. If anything, based on this trend, Jewishness is being substantially under-marketed today.

  According to Jewish tradition, a non-Jew must study, and ask three times, to be able to convert. Maybe in the modern era, they’ll shrink that requirement, now that non-Jews are absorbing Jewishness so casually and eagerly. But in the meantime, Jewish singles (like Hebrew National products) seem to bear an aura of “answering to a higher calling.”

  Interracial Families

  Perhaps no subject in American history has been more important, more fought over, or more all-consuming than race relations. And so it is perhaps remarkable that those couples on the frontier of being truly race- and color-blind have crossed the important 1 percent threshold in America.

  Today, over 3 million marriages in America are interracial. And with 83 percent of Americans saying they approve of mixed-race marriages, this trend represents a sea change in American attitudes and tolerance.

  My very first poll (when I was 13) was on the subject of race relations in America. I asked the faculty at the Horace Mann School in New York City to take a poll, which CBS had administered nationwide, on black-white attitudes. I discovered that when it came to race, my teachers were far more informed and more liberal than the general public (which was probably a seed of my fascination with the way different groups have opposite passions about the same things). But even among those teachers, there would not have been the kind of acceptance, and eager interchange, we see today in today’s younger generation.

  In 1970, there were about 300,000 interracial married couples in America, or 0.3 percent of the married population. By 2000, there were over ten times that many—3,100,000-- or 5.4 percent of all marriages.

  The trend of interracial marriage and its multiracial offspring is significant enough that in 2000, for the first time, the U.S. Census allowed Americans to check multiple boxes under “race”—creating 63 possible racial combinations that don’t even include “other.”

  Who tends to mix it up, racially speaking?

  According to Pew Research Center data from 2006, while the majority of interracial couples include a Hispanic, the most common type of interracial couple (at 14 percent) is a white man married to an Asian woman. Second, at 8 percent, is a black man married to a white woman. (Interestingly, white-Asian pairings are three times as likely to be white men with Asian women as the other way around; and black-white pairings are three times as likely to be black men with white women. Observers have commented on the lagging marriage prospects for black women and Asian men as a result—although those groups do not, as one might expect as a purely mathematical matter, seem to marry each other.)

  Source: Population Reference Bureau, 2005

  Moreover, interracial marriage occurs more in the West than it does in the South, Northeast, or Midwest. However, a recent Gallup poll says it is Easterners who say they approve of black-white marriages the most. This is the famous gap between those who just talk the talk and those who walk the walk—in this case actually down the aisle.

  Loving across race isn’t just limited to romance—it also extends to child-rearing. Between 1998 and 2004, the percentage of foster care children in America adopted transracially (which generally means black children adopted by white parents) leapt from 14 percent to 26 percent. Between 1990 and 2005, the number of children adopted by U.S. parents from other countries, including from China, Guatemala, and South Korea, tripled—rising to almost 18 percent of all adoptions, or 20,000 families each year.

  Even taken together, the number of interracial families is still just a sliver of American households. But it’s steadily growing, and will undoubtedly continue. The main reason is that acceptance of interracial relationships has soared. In 1987, fewer than half of Americans thought it was “all right for blacks and whites to date each other”; in 2003, more than three-quarters thought it was all right.

  And today’s young people think so even more strongly. Not only were they raised on curricula based on “diversity” and “multiculturalism,” today’s under-30s are also the most diverse generation in history. Perhaps as a result, over 90 percent of young people accept interracial relationships, compared to just 50 percent of seniors.

  And they don’t just accept it; they do it. In 2002, 20 percent of 18–19-year-olds said they were dating someone of a different race, up from under 10 percent just a decade before. Of members of Match.com, 70 percent say they are willing to date someone of a different race.

  In the future, it seems, race will be less divisive than it was. President Clinton liked to say that humans are bound together by being 99.9 percent genetically alike—and only one-tenth of 1 percent different. It seems that even the dividing power of that .1 percent is diminishing.

  With this kind of dramatic growth in interracial couples, families on the frontier of interracial life could use a little support. Nearly half of black-white couples say marrying someone of a different race makes marriage harder. Two-thirds of black-white couples say at least one set of parents objected at the start. Friends and siblings of interracial lovers seem to fly every which way—like the alternately supportive, furious, disgusted, and jealous posses of both Wesley Snipes and Annabella Sciorra in Spike Lee’s Jungle Fever.

  White parents who want to adopt a black child in America are still subjected to “cultural competency” training—a nod to the days (from the 1970s through the early 1990s) when transracial adoptions were denounced as “cultural genocide.”

  But apart from needing our respect and support, interracial families of all sorts are owed our attention, because very quietly they are eroding the assumptions that have guided America’s race-related policies, customs, and habits for decades.

  For example, what does affirmative action mean, in an era when people’s ancestors were both victims and oppressors? Do such people get preferential treatment, or not?

  How long will we adhere to the “one drop” rule in identifying people’s race? Illinois senator Barack Obama has a white mother, who raised him exclusively, but does anyone (including the senator) tell his story without reflecting on his blackness? Halle Berry has a white Mom, too, who also raised her alone. But the first line of her bio (and the subject of her lengthy Oscar acceptance speech) was her status as the first African-American to win Best Actress. Race scholars contend that race is an experience, not a fact—so if a person is treated as black, he or she is black regardless of the number of “drops” involved.

  But between stars like these in every field—from Obama in politics, Berry in Hollywood, and Tiger Woods (half-black, half-Asian) in sports—there is no question that the stigma surrounding interracial families is eroding, and indeed, its acceptance is growing. America has come a long way from the shocked parents of the 1967 film Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, when their daughter brought home Sidney Poitier.

  And now that Madonna has adopted a child from Malawi, and Angelina Jolie has adopted children from Ethiopia, Cambodia, and Vietnam, it really just couldn’t be hipper to build your family as diversely as possible.

  Of course, some will argue that in the growing acceptance of interracial relationships, there is also the loss of particularism that each group once brought and has worked to preserve. Native Americans, who have the highest intermarriage rate of any racial group in America, mourn the loss of the customs, language, and identity that used to define them; they have recently opened a museum in Washington to celebrate their culture.

  One big theme of this book is that America is no longer a melting pot—that, rather, small groups are now defining themselves in sharper, starker distinction than ever before. To some degree, interracial families are an exception. For hundreds of years, this country had significant racial divisions, and now those divisions appear to be easing in some very significant ways. But at the same time, people can now express and choose their individuality not predetermined by race or creed or date of birth, but rather as an expression of their life experiences and beliefs. And Americans are learning how to be different and accept differences in new ways. Perhaps what makes interracial marriages such a good sign is that it shows how even old divisions can become unifying forces over time. America would not want to repeat the conflicts it went through over race when it comes to religion, politics, art, or culture. As microtrends take America in hundreds of new directions, this central idea can serve to moderate the societal impact of the evolution of society—the ability to bury old differences while not letting new ones rise to the fever pitch of the past.

  THE INTERNATIONAL PICTURE

  To be sure, interracial marriages are hardly just an American phenomenon. It seems that people all over the world are marrying across ethnicities, borders, and continents—although their reasons may be different from the ones that drive this microtrend here in the United States.

  The practice of marrying internationally has hit a new level of popularity in Asia:

  In 2005, marriages to foreigners accounted for 14 percent of all marriages in South Korea, up from 4 percent in 2000.

  In Japan in 2003, 1 of every 20 new marriages had a non-Japanese spouse. The majority of these marriages were Japanese men searching for foreign wives.

  Due to increased opportunities in the workplace for women in Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, and Taiwan—and disproportionately male populations—men in those countries are finding themselves jumping on planes to tie the knot. And women from other Asian countries are happily stepping up. Vietnam is second only to China as Asia’s biggest wife-supplier: More than 87,000 Vietnamese women married foreign men in the past eight years. Other countries where women are jumping at the chance include Thailand and Indonesia.

  Russia became known during the 1990s as the source for the mail-order bride for Americans; but this, over time, has changed as well. Turkey has now replaced America as Russian women’s favorite source of husbands. In 2006, the majority of international marriages in Moscow included Turkish spouses, followed by those from Germany, America, Britain, and the region encompassed by the former Yugoslavia.

  There is a dark side to all these transnational marriages, however. While some may be based in love and romance, most happen out of necessity. Some men who look abroad for wives do so out of economic disadvantage; most of them can’t compete economically for a wife of their own nationality. Other marriages are arranged for the sole purpose of conferring citizenship, and are promptly followed by divorce. Many also end in isolation and abuse.

  But interracial, interethnic, and international pairings are on the rise, as are their offspring. Benetton may have been on to something.

  Protestant Hispanics

  Guess which country sends the largest number of Catholic immigrants to the United States? Right, Mexico.

  Now guess which country sends the largest number of Protestant immigrants to the United States? Yep, it’s Mexico again.

  Protestant Mexicans? Protestant Latinos? In significant numbers?

  Everyone knows the Latino influence in America is rapidly growing. In 2006, there were over 43 million Latinos in America, up from about 22 million in 1990. If you count Puerto Rican islanders (4 million), and adjust for what is surely some undercounting, the U.S. Latino population reaches something like 50 million people.

  In 2003, Latinos surpassed African-Americans as the largest minority group in the United States. They now make up 14 percent of the U.S. population, and about 8 percent of the electorate—up from just 2 percent in 1976.

  But in general, Latino immigrants are thought of as Catholic. And to be fair, 70 percent of Latino immigrants are Catholic, and with high immigration rates now, U.S. Latino Catholics are at an all-time high, at about 29 million. Catholicism itself has record numbers of American adherents (about 70 million), and it is predicted that, by 2015, over 50 percent of them will be Hispanic.

  But a remarkably important subgroup of Latinos in America are Protestant. According to the 2005 book Latino Religions and Civic Activism in the United States, nearly one-quarter of U.S. Latinos identify themselves as Protestant or other Christian, including Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons. That’s about 10 million people in America—more than the number of Jews, or Muslims, or Episcopalians, or Presbyterians in the U.S. And of those 10 million Protestant Latinos, nearly 90 percent describe themselves not as “mainline” or liberal Protestants, but as Pentecostal, evangelical, or “born again.”

  To some degree, this is all part of the worldwide explosion of Pentecostals, who grew from fewer than 50 million to over 400 million worldwide in the last several decades. Clearly, some of the Latino immigrants’ Protestant identity took hold in their home countries. But a lot of it is happening here. According to a 2003 study on Hispanic Churches in American Public Life, Catholic affiliation drops almost 15 percentage points between first-generation Latino Americans and their grandchildren. Sure, shedding our immigrant ethnic traditions is an old melting pot story—except that now, it’s the opposite. New generations aren’t so much “blending in” to America as choosing a different niche identity.

  Observers of Latino converts say the appeal of Pentecostalism happens on several levels. Pentecostal churches offer services in immigrants’ native tongues, and focus strongly on the individual. They place a high value on social and financial mobility, which appeals to many immigrants’ personal aspirations. Their focus on laying of hands and physical healing appeals to low-wage immigrants, many of whom don’t have health insurance. According to one expert on Latino culture in America, Pentecostal ministers in Latino communities are like the old precinct captains in Northeastern American cities. They provide jobs, health care, loans, and social supports. For low-income Latinos, the Pentecostal community is like family.

  In addition, Catholic Latinos are said to be drawn to the greater leadership opportunities in the Pentecostal movement. While Latinos make up about 40 percent of all U.S. Catholics, fewer than 8 percent of American Catholic priests are Hispanic, and many of the ones that are come from Colombia and Spain. So for Latino Americans, the Pentecostal movement provides greater, faster opportunities for leadership.

  And perhaps most importantly, the Pentecostals are doing aggressive outreach. In some places, they are equipped with full-blown corporate tactics, from direct mail to Latino addresses, to tightly honed messaging, to sanctuary “amenities” that appeal to all comers.

  And why is this important? Because Protestant Hispanics—whom many politicians don’t even know exist—are a potent political force. In the last two presidential elections, the two main groups who made the difference between President George W. Bush’s popular vote loss (and Supreme Court–assisted electoral vote win) in 2000, and his decisive win on both counts in 2004, were white women and Hispanics. In 2000, Hispanics voted for Bush at a rate of only 35 percent. In 2004, they upped their support to 40 percent, with the original exit polls tallying it as high as 44 percent. That was a dramatic shift, and pivotal for the president. But here’s what’s remarkable. All the shift was among Hispanic Protestants. The percentage of Bush voters among Hispanic Catholics in 2000 and 2004 was exactly the same—33 percent. Only Protestant Latinos increased their Bush support, from 44 to 56 percent. Pentecostal Hispanics, unknown to most Americans, were one of the key forces that tipped the 2004 election.