Читать книгу Beyond the Synagogue - Rachel B. Gross - Страница 11

Viewing nostalgic activities such as touring the Museum at Eldridge Street or buying a pastrami sandwich at a deli as religious practices helps us to refute the claims of sociologist Steven M. Cohen and religious studies scholar Arnold M. Eisen in The Jew Within: Self, Family, and Community, a book widely acclaimed by academics, Jewish communal professionals, and lay Jews. The Jew Within identifies a “profound individualism,” an overwhelming focus on the “sovereign self,” as the guiding force of many American Jews’ lives.16 Cohen and Eisen, leading proponents of the idea of the American Jewish continuity crisis, see in this increasing individualism a fearful problem that could “contribute to the dissolution of communal institutions and intergenerational commitment” and weaken Judaism itself. In large part, this manufactured crisis rests on the premise that American Jews, especially interfaith families, lack the religiosity of their parents and grandparents.17 In the catastrophic imaginings of Cohen, Eisen, and their followers, the assimilation of individuals into a generic American culture could cause the disappearance of American Jews altogether. These fears about assimilation resist the idea that Judaism, like all human endeavors, has and always will change over time. They rely on the idea of a static Judaism and a static American culture, seeing the two as mutually exclusive rather than responsive to one another. By focusing on what they see as the waning religious practices of American Jews in institutions like synagogues, these scholars are looking for Judaism, especially public forms of American Judaism, in all the wrong places.

Bemoaning the decline of American Judaism as they recognize it, Cohen and Eisen argue that, for American Jews, “the importance of the public sphere . . . has severely diminished. The institutional arena is no longer the primary site where American Jews find and define the selves they are and the selves they want to be.” Cohen and Eisen identify synagogues, Jewish community centers, and Jewish Federations as the primary sites of public and institutional Judaism and as spaces in which American Jews could be “most themselves.”18 Looking for the content of Jewish public life, they fixate on American Jews’ public engagement with memorialization of the Holocaust and public support for Israel. They worry that American Jews’ interpretation of “universal lessons” in the history of the Holocaust signifies reduced concern for Jewish particularity and that American Jews’ criticism of Israeli governments and the Israeli Rabbinate (state-sanctioned Orthodox religious authority) implies lessened political engagement as Jews.

But where Cohen and Eisen fret about American Jews’ decreasing attention to the Holocaust and Israel, more recent studies make it clear that American Jews remain preoccupied with both issues, though how they do so may have changed.19 At the same time, American Jews do continue to define themselves through institutions, but not exclusively through the institutions or public conversations that Cohen and Eisen have in mind. American Jews have in no way “retreated from public Judaism,” but they enact their Judaism in institutions and public settings that Cohen and Eisen fail to consider. Cohen and Eisen are right that personal identity and family are important to American Jews, as they are to other Americans. But many American Jews today understand themselves and their families through emotional and narrative frameworks provided by ostensibly non-religious institutions that—as this book argues—perform religious functions.

Definitions of religion are not only topics for academic theory. They matter in real life. Beyond internal Jewish concerns about “continuity,” defining religion in the United States has been essential to issues of religious freedom. Discussions of religious freedom have long been used to strengthen white Protestants’ claims to racial and religious supremacy, and historical and recent court cases have addressed the intersection between everyday activities and religion. Racial and religious minorities, including Jews, have deliberately defined certain practices and beliefs as religious in order to improve their status and situation in the United States.20

At the same time, scholars of lived religion help us see religion in ordinary activities generally considered “secular.” These scholars identify religion and religious practices in baseball, Coca-Cola, Tupperware, celebrity worship, weight-loss culture, and the American office, to name just a few subjects. Broadening the category of religion in this way helps us to take seriously the structures, commitments, and activities that shape everyday life. Anything can become a religious object, depending on how it is used and understood. Expanding the conventional definitions of religion to include everyday practices and materials identifies the social value placed upon them and the communities developed around them. Eating a pastrami sandwich or fangirling Kim Kardashian can be a religious activity, not just because it is personally meaningful, but because of a shared cultural framework ascribing particular kinds of meaning to those activities.21

Just as religious studies scholars have long identified practices as “religious” that practitioners themselves might not label in this way, the people I study would not necessarily call their activities nostalgic. Indeed, I do not claim that all American Jews are nostalgic or that everyone who makes, buys, and sells the materials examined here is wholly nostalgic. Rather, this book makes the case that nostalgia has become a pervasive, normative mode of American Jewish religious thought and practice, particularly through commercial practices that have become increasingly common since the 1970s.

In this book, I use the term nostalgia as a way to engage and complicate conversations about Jewish memory, history, and heritage, popular accounts of the past that give it meaning in the present. Acclaimed Jewish historian Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi identifies Jewish memory and Jewish history as “radically different relations to the past.”22 Memory is the dynamic product of community, he says, while history is the product of scholars. Yerushalmi worries that a detached Jewish history has overtaken Jewish memory. Later theorists recognize a more complex relationship between history and memory, drawing attention to the ways that Jews and other peoples may use each in the service of the other.23 For individuals and organizations, I argue, nostalgia bridges historical scholarship and social memory. It is both an individual feeling and a shared practice. Individual Jews’ feelings about the past shape and are shaped by their families, communal institutions, academic scholarship, American capitalism, and other forces.

To examine nostalgia, we need to take seriously the feminist saying, “the personal is political.” Scholars of affect theory emphasize that emotions are political, too. Individuals’ emotions and their embodied experiences are closely connected to public life, communities, and civic bodies. Identifying American Jewish nostalgia as a “public feeling” and as a religious activity highlights the connections between how individuals make and find meaning in their own lives and how communal institutions guide the emotions that we share. Like others who study public feelings, I am not overly concerned with the distinctions between “emotion,” “feeling,” and “affect.”24 These terms are all usefully imprecise, retaining ambiguity about the origins of emotions as individual expressions or as inspired by public sentiment or corporate interest.

The institutions of nostalgia that promote and enable these feelings and practices, such as the Museum at Eldridge Street, are far from the first seemingly non-religious institutions to guide American Jews’ shared emotions toward historical events. In the second half of the twentieth century, much of American Jewish communal identity rested on commemoration of the Holocaust and support for the State of Israel. Holocaust museums and memorials increased throughout the country, and organizations that raised money for Israeli groups served as major social and political outlets for American Jews. Though the institutions of Holocaust commemoration and American Zionism were ostensibly nonsectarian, they created and upheld guiding sacred narratives for American Jews. They were so closely tied up with American Jewish identity that visiting and supporting Holocaust commemorations and Israel could be considered a religious activity on a par with attending a Passover seder. In their American contexts, both Holocaust commemoration and Zionist advocacy have conveyed stories about Jewish pasts, presents, and futures, connecting American Jews to present-day Jewish communities and stories about ancestors—precisely the work of religion.25 Recognizing Holocaust commemoration and Zionist advocacy as widespread Jewish religious activities counters Cohen and Eisen’s claims about the dissolution of Jewish communal institutions and intergenerational commitment.

Alongside these trends, the focus on Eastern European Jewish history and Jewish immigration to the United States has grown steadily since the 1970s, providing an additional narrative of modern Jewish history. In the early twenty-first century, this narrative has come to fruition as another significant mode of being Jewish in the United States. Nostalgia for immigrant pasts emphasizes American Jews’ journey toward success in the American middle class. The materials of American Jewish nostalgia are a sign of liberal American Jews’ faith in progress—the past was bad, but things are better now, and they will continue to improve. In this, it provides early twenty-first century American Jews with a communal narrative that can be more cheerful than the remembrance of the Holocaust and less communally divisive than Israeli politics. It is also more comfortable for American Jews to welcome non-Jews’ participation in Jewish nostalgia than in commemorations of the Holocaust or support for Israel, in which non-Jewish voices may be seen as secondary or even threatening. At the same time, just as many Jews have seen Holocaust commemoration and Zionist activism as supporting one another and not mutually exclusive, American Jewish nostalgia is not necessarily a replacement for the other two narratives but can also complement them. All three narratives provide stories of progress that structure an approach to Jewish pasts and presents.