Dating and Marriage

What does it really look like to be Jewish and single in Canada today? For many, it means navigating the usual ups and downs of modern dating while contending with some additional complexity: the hope of building a Jewish home, preserving traditions, and finding someone who instinctively understands their cultural world.

In conversations with 45 single Jewish Canadians — men and women aged 21 to 51, from Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver — a complex picture emerged, one filled with hope, frustration, and deep reflections about love, identity, and continuity. Many interviewees expressed a clear desire to marry within the faith. They spoke about shared values, cultural familiarity, family history, and the feeling that being with another Jew simply “makes life easier.”

And yet, these desires collide with a very Canadian reality: the Jewish population is small, and the dating pool is even smaller. Many described the search as “looking for a needle in a haystack,” especially when combined with modern expectations for emotional depth, compatibility, and shared life goals.

The challenge isn’t only finding a Jewish partner, it’s finding one who fits everything else people hope for in a modern relationship. This tension shows up vividly in the interviews. On one hand, collective considerations remain powerful. Many singles still express a desire for an ethnically and culturally similar partner, someone who shares their traditions, rituals, and worldview. On the other hand, they describe how difficult it is to find such a partner, given the small number of available Jewish singles. And this challenge is magnified by the expectations people now bring into relationships: deep emotional intimacy, open communication, vulnerability, a clear and stable life path, physical attraction, and socioeconomic expectations. Today’s romantic hopefuls expect their partners to fulfill a wide range of social and emotional needs — and the higher the expectations, the harder it becomes to find the right match.

Within this diverse cohort, three clear clusters are evident. First, some singles, across ages and levels of observance, strongly prefer a Jewish partner. For them, it’s non-negotiable. Second, others become more open to dating non-Jewish partners as they move into their thirties and forties when the desire for companionship sometimes outweighs communal norms. In these cases, most want a partner who is supportive of Jewish life — someone who will share their Jewish lifestyle and sensibilities. Finally, there are those who spent years with non-Jewish partners and ultimately decide to leave those relationships, realizing that they want someone who shares their Jewish background more fully.

Taken together, these stories show that, while the pathways to partnership vary, Jewish identity in culture, values, and daily life remains deeply meaningful. Whether Jews ultimately marry within the faith or beyond it, their reflections reveal a sincere effort to balance personal happiness with a connection to Jewish life. In Canada’s vibrant yet intimate Jewish community, that balance continues to shape the future. 

WHAT PERCENTAGE of Canadian Jews who are married or living common-law are partnered with a non-Jew? How does the rate of Jewish intermarriage vary across time, age cohort, gender, and community size? What factors might slow the increasing rate of Jewish intermarriage?

The key factor influencing the Jewish intermarriage rate is the opportunity to associate with non-Jews: the more such opportunities, the higher the intermarriage rate. Since the early 1900s, the average Canadian Jew has become less religious. Prejudice and discrimination against Jews have declined, and Jews have become more at home with Canadian culture. Social interactions and all manner of social relationships between Jews and non-Jews have become more common. Accordingly, while hardly any Canadian Jews intermarried in 1900, the intermarriage rate rose to 16% in 1981 and nearly 33% in 2021.

As a general rule, younger Jews are most exposed to contact with non-Jews. As a result, they tend to have a relatively high intermarriage rate: in Canada in 2021, more than 36% of married Jews between the ages of 18 and 39 were intermarried, compared with 25% of Jews over the age of 39.

Analogously, women have now become well integrated into the paid work force, so they have many more opportunities to interact and form relationships with non-Jews than they did when they were restricted to domestic roles. Consequently, the historical tendency for Jewish men to be somewhat more likely than Jewish women to intermarry is weakening.

Also in keeping with these patterns is the importance of geography. Jews are much more likely to interact and form social relationships with non-Jews in smaller communities: there are relatively few Jews to engage with, and the pool of potential Jewish marriage partners is consequently small. In Atlantic Canada, Saskatchewan, and the northern territories, where Jewish communities are small, the Jewish intermarriage rate averages about 70%. In Ontario and Quebec, where the overwhelming majority of Jews live in large and medium-size Jewish communities, the comparable figure averages around 25%.

In short, the more exposed Jews are to Jewish life, and the more they engage with other Jews, the more likely they are to marry someone who is Jewish.

Our research suggests that, if the Jewish community can recruit more Jewish children to Jewish day schools and summer camps and attract more Jewish immigrants to Canada, the increasing rate of Jewish intermarriage may slow. Another force that may have the same effect is the rise in antisemitism that has been especially evident since October 2023, insofar as it has reduced Jewish interaction with non-Jews. 

I REMEMBER it was the dead of January, and I was a guest of the Jewish community in Windsor, Ontario. I called the local Reform temple to ask if I might be able to visit on Friday night. The lay leader enthusiastically welcomed me to their small Shabbat service, and invited me to each event thereafter. The scholar in me got to wondering: Where did the community fall on the religiosity spectrum? Were there any patterns I might discover in who engaged religiously and who did not?

I decided to launch a research study called “Progressives and Purists: A Study of Religiosity in a Canadian-Jewish Community.” To measure religiosity, I asked community members about eight indicators in total. For the article that emerged from this research, I focused on three of those in particular: whether respondents believe in God (58% did, 16% did not, and the rest were in between); whether they prayed (16% did daily, 42% did sometimes or on holidays, and 32% did not — with another 6% saying they talked to God), and whether they limited their activities on Shabbat (34% did).

I concluded that the community did not seem particularly religious. To explain these results, I drew on work done by two esteemed political scientists, Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart. They developed a view called existential security theory, which holds that as a person’s sense of internal security increases, their religiosity decreases. Since the respondents in my survey were highly educated and living in a free country like Canada — that is, since they were likely to feel quite secure — I could see how religion might be less consequential to them. In the study, 82% of participants had at least one post-secondary credential; it certainly appears there is an inverse relationship between education and religiosity.

It is well worth studying whether this relationship characterizes other Jewish communities in Canada. For example, a larger survey that included more Orthodox Jewish participants might be useful in testing this relationship between education and religiosity more closely. Modern Orthodox Jews are strongly encouraged to study both religious and secular subjects; this might confound the otherwise expected inverse relationship between education and religiosity, even in a cohort that feels itself to be secure.