Is Otherness defined by religion or race?
re: <Miscegenation is the marriage or cohabitation of a white person with a person of another race.>
In practice, parents pass their religion to their children, just as they pass their skin color. Religion is a highly conserved meme, in the evolution of ideas. Almost everyone practices the religion of the family and community they were born into. So, it is, de facto, a characteristic determined at birth. Religion acts to separate communities, in exactly the same way race does.
This is especially true, in situations where the contending religions make it nearly impossible to convert.
Islam is a prosyletizing religion, and encourages conversion, but Islam has near-zero appeal to Jews. Among Hindus and Christians, conversions to Islam are largely confined to those at the bottom of society: blacks in America, Untouchables in India.
In Israel, the rules for conversion to Judaism are under the control of the most fundamentalist, rigid, Orthodox ideologues, and they make it nearly impossible to convert. Even when individuals say they have converted, the State and religious authorities frequently don't recognise it. With very rare exceptions, you have to be born a Jew, for the State of Israel to consider you a Jew. On the other hand, those who are born Jews, do not have to observe the religion in any way, or observe any Jewish cultural traditions, to remain Jews. They could even build temples to Baal and Astarte (like Solomon did), and still be considered Jews. So, de facto, being Jewish in Israel is a biologically (i.e., racially, not culturally) determined condition.
In the United States, the situation is different. Here, intermarriage is common, conversion to the spouse's religion is common and goes both ways, and the State does not concern itself with the question of who is a Jew, and who is a Christian. Recently, the State has started to get interested in who is a Muslim, since the loyalty of Muslims is being questioned, in the permanent war we are waging. Unlike Israel, the U.S. State does not award land, housing, water rights, a thousand different subsidies, a monopoly of military and political power, to the members of any one religion.
The word "miscegenation" applies whenever sex and marriage are banned between races. Any races. For instance, the California miscegenation law passed in 1901, which broadened an 1850 law, making it unlawful for white persons to marry "Mongolians" (Chinese). If, instead, California had passed a law outlawing marriages between Christians and Buddhists/Confucians, the practical effect would have been exactly the same. If the BJP in India passed a law outlawing marriage between Hindus and Muslims (and requiring a government permit to convert to Islam), that would be a miscegenation law.
In Israel, it isn't just Muslims whose lives are restricted by the miscegenation laws:
Initially adopted in 1950, the Law of Return gave every Jew the right to immigrate to Israel. An amendment in 1970 extended that right to non-Jews who had a Jewish parent or grandparent, their spouses and the spouses of Jews. Around 250,000 of Israel's Russian immigrants fall under the "grandfather clause." In other words, around one-quarter of Israel's Russian immigrant population is not Jewish according to halachah, or Jewish law. Assuming that half of those 250,000 are women of childbearing age, the figures mean that in coming generations the Jewish state will be producing non-Jews, since halachah does not accept the children of non-Jewish mothers as Jews. With only religious marriages recognized in Israel, the halachic issue raises certain dilemmas. How, for example, would a young man whose immigrant mother wasn't Jewish, but who served in the army and lives like any other secular Israeli, marry a girlfriend who is accepted as Jewish?
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