I always thought of Stanley Fish as a radical when I was young. Well not in this piece titled “Marrying Out of the Faith,” at the Times site; he’s a conservative. At the start of the essay, Fish, 74, puts intolerance of intermarriage off on his Jewish Polish immigrant father, but before long Fish is explaining that religious differences are “deep and immovable” and overcoming them is very hard work. Well marriage is hard work; and he is lecturing my generation about something that many of us are working through in ways that he cannot imagine.

Of course he has a disclaimer at the end, that he’s not against intermarriage, but along the way Fish utters the words “faith” and “ritual and doctrine” with reverence. What do those words mean? How meaningful is Jewish ritual or doctrine (Shabbos dinner, wrapping the tefillin, etc) to Anne-Marie Slaughter’s Jewish husband or to Ben Rhodes the son of an intermarriage, or to Barack Obama seeking to reconcile his parents’ difference?

Later Fish puts down our “multicultural doctrine.” Oh: so there’s meaningful and nonmeaningful doctrine. Some of us find more meaning in multiculturalism than in bars on intermarriage. (My secularized American Jewish “faith” includes John Brown’s faith that the Golden Rule and the Declaration of Independence enshrined the same beautiful principle, of equality. My faith includes the motto of my wife’s girlhood religious compound: Simplicity, Sincerity and Service.)

Fish: