“If you want to instill Jewish identity, you have resources available that may not be equivalent on the Asian-American side,” Ms. Kim said. “You have synagogues, day schools, J.C.C.’s, a text you can go to. And for a number of Asian folks in the second generation — and I can relate to this — they don’t know how to instill ethnic identity because they aren’t confident in their own sense of it.”

This phenomenon of Jewish-Asian intermarriage comes as a startling change for two immigrant groups that in the past had often made light of their differences. A famous rye-bread ad in the 1960s featured a Chinese-American man with the slogan, “You don’t have to be Jewish to love Levy’s.” One of the unofficial rituals of American Jewish life is to spend Christmas seeing a movie and eating in a Chinese restaurant. The religion journalist Ari L. Goldman once interviewed an observant Jewish homemaker who explained that she kept three sets of dishes — for meat, for dairy and for Chinese takeout.

The early adopters in the realm of Asian-Jewish marriage included the jazz musicians Lew Tabackin and Toshiko Akiyoshi (1969) and the television personalities Maury Povich and Connie Chung (1984). The best statistical evidence for the trend appears in a research paper published in 2000 by Colleen Fong and Judy Yung. They found that more than 18 percent of marriages by Chinese- and Japanese-Americans were to American Jews — who constitute about 2 percent of the nation’s population.

Whatever the frequency of such marriages, the visibility of them has soared. Well before Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Chan exchanged vows, there emerged such intermarried power couples as Noah Feldman and Jeannie Suk, both Harvard Law School professors, and Amy Chua of “Tiger Mom” fame and Jed Rubenfeld, her colleague at Yale Law School. The late star of the Beastie Boys, Adam Yauch, was married to Dechen Wangdu, an activist for Tibetan independence.

“When we talked about choosing couples for diversity,” Mr. Leavitt recalled, “we looked at different parts of the country, different Asian ethnic groups, different religions for the Asian-American spouse. The one thing we didn’t see at all was diversity of education level or income level. Graduate degrees, advanced degrees, professional tracks were all very common.”

As for the scholars themselves, Mr. Leavitt and Ms. Kim have been married for a decade and are the parents of a son, Ari, and a daughter, Talia. Ms. Kim said she hopes the children will learn Korean language and history — as she, the daughter of Korean immigrants who insisted that she assimilate to America, did not. Meanwhile, the hybrid Kim-Leavitt family belongs to a synagogue, has Shabbat dinner weekly and celebrates many Jewish holidays, not just the American staples of Passover and Hanukkah. On the subject of conversion, Ms. Kim’s answer is a qualified no. But for years, she added, “I’ve been thinking about it.”