Читать книгу Beyond the Synagogue - Rachel B. Gross - Страница 15

In 2013, the Pew Research Center released a sociological study of American Jews, A Portrait of Jewish Americans, which, like other sociological studies of American Jews, received a great deal of attention from Jewish organizations and communal leaders.4 The Pew study identified 78 percent of the 6.7 million Americans as Jews as “Jews by religion.” The remaining 22 percent comprised the category of “Jews of no religion.”5 American Jews’ panicked public responses to the survey were ritualized and predictably alarmist. In newspapers, on blogs, and from the pulpit, American Jews repeatedly interpreted the results in ways that intensified their fears of secularism and assimilation. Jane Eisner, who had set the survey in motion when she was editor-in-chief of the prominent Jewish newspaper The Forward, told The New York Times that she found the results “devastating” because “I thought there would be more American Jews who cared about religion.” She continued, “This should serve as a wake-up call for all of us as Jews to think about what kind of community we’re going to be able to sustain if we have so much assimilation,” assuming that readers shared her understanding of “assimilation” as a negative force in American Jewish communities.6

As with previous surveys of American Jews, the buzzwords of this survey—“Jews by religion” and “Jews of no religion”—will be repeated until another national survey of American Jews is published. The previous national telephone survey of American Jews, the 2000 National Jewish Population Survey (NJPS), differentiated between “highly involved” Jews and “people of Jewish background,” seeing a wide gulf between these groups. Jewish institutions and philanthropists repeatedly employed these terms for a decade. In the 2013 survey, Pew presented American Jews with a distinction between Jews by religion and Jews of no religion, a Jewish version of the “nones,” the current sociological term used to identify the religiously unaffiliated, and a label used by Pew as well.7 As Pew researchers were quick to remind readers, Americans as a whole increasingly identify themselves as having no religion. The share of American Jews who say they have no religion (22 percent) is similar to the share of “nones” in the general public (20 percent). Still, commentators on American Jews—rabbis, sociologists, demographers, cultural critics, and others—remain concerned about what they see as an increasing number of “Jews of no religion.”8 These scholars and communal leaders see Judaism as threatened by American culture. In cultural commentaries and in sermons, they tell a widely believed story about American Jews that is one of increasing secularism, or, as American Jews say, “assimilation.” These cultural commentators imagine American Jews transitioning from a more pure or essential religious Judaism toward watered-down Jewish identities. In more catastrophic visions, they predict the potential disappearance of American Jews altogether. According to this fearful worldview, secularism could complete the destruction of world Jewry begun in the Holocaust.

But American Jews’ Jewish lives are richer and more complex than these studies and commentaries portray. Divisions between Judaism (the religion) and Jewishness (the culture) are no longer useful, if they ever were. This dichotomy assumes a distinction between beliefs and rituals, on the one hand, and the arts and lifestyle activities, such as foodways and humor, on the other hand. It ignores the overlap between ritual and lifestyle, and the influence each has on the other. In reality, activities understood as both religious and cultural provide existential meaning for American Jews and connect them to imagined transhistorical communities of Jews past, present, and future. Simplistic divisions between “religious” and “secular” Jews do not accurately describe the diversity of American Jewish practice.

At the same time, the declension narrative of assimilation and secularism, like many such narratives, is historically inaccurate. It plainly overlooks the dynamic developments in Jewish culture and ritual around the globe over the past two thousand years as well as changes and diversity in Jewish culture and religion in North America over the past three centuries. Narratives of assimilation are closely aligned with narratives of American Jewish economic success, which fail to take into account both wealthy Jews of the early twentieth century and impoverished Jews of the present day. Meanwhile, as the Pew researchers highlight at the beginning of their report, “Jews by religion” and “Jews of no religion” are both overwhelmingly proud to be Jewish and have a strong sense of belonging to the Jewish people.9 Examining practices shared by religious and secular Jews that provide fundamental narrative meanings in their lives and connect them to imagined communities in the past, present, and future allows us to see different patterns in American Jewish religion. Nostalgic practices are part of the unrecognized religious practices of American Jews across and beyond denominational structures, divisions that have become increasingly fluid.10

Moreover, the concept of religion is a modern, Protestant creation, and Jewish practices have frequently fit uncomfortably in the category of religion, despite the best efforts of Jewish thinkers to separate religious and cultural aspects of Jewish practice. Though uses of the word date back to Roman and early Christian settings, the origins of how we understand the term today lie in Protestants’ efforts to differentiate their religion from Catholicism and colonialists’ efforts to distinguish Christianity from non-Christian religions, both efforts that emphasized personal faith or belief over practice and ritual.11 The political emancipation of Jews, which allowed Jews to become citizens of modern Western nation-states over the course of the eighteenth through early twentieth centuries, required Jews to define Judaism as a voluntary religious association. Before emancipation, European Jewish communities had largely governed themselves. As newly minted citizens in modern nation-states, Jews gave up their communal autonomy and used the language of religion to articulate themselves as a group. But traditional understandings of “religion,” emphasizing individual, private, and voluntary confessions of faith, have rested uneasily with Jewish realities, which have a greater focus on communities and practices.12

In the United States, Jews continued to characterize religion as an individual matter of belief and choice rather than one mandated by ethnicity and community. American Jews have created dynamic communal arrangements and rituals, but many of these activities are dismissed as mere cultural habits, insignificant activities without religious implications. In the multiculturalism of the late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century United States, religious habits are seen as distinctive to particular groups, while cultural habits are understood as analogous across different groups. Culture is seen as something can be shared with outsiders, while religious practices are limited to adherents. For American Jews—who rarely emphasize belief, often share religious practices with non-Jewish family members, and transmit communal identity through ostensibly secular activities—this divide between religion and culture is overdrawn.13

In the 1950s, a time of American church growth in general, American Jewish leaders worked to frame their shared endeavors as a religion. Throughout World War I, World War II, and the postwar years, the American government, the military, and religious leaders viewed democracy and religious faith as shared endeavors. In contrast to fascists who identified as “Christian” and anti-religious communists, they articulated American democracy as a “Judeo-Christian” endeavor, resting on the three pillars of Protestantism, Catholicism, and Judaism. Participating in these political conversations, Jewish leaders employed the language of religion in order to demonstrate Jews’ Americanness.14 This rhetoric also helped Jews of European ancestry identify as white by framing Judaism as a religious rather than a racial minority.15

In the postwar years, synagogue building and membership burgeoned as Jews, like other white Americans, reorganized themselves in the newly built suburbs. Mid-century sociologists of American Jews “noted the paradox of Jews defining themselves overwhelmingly by religion while at the same time showing indifference and apathy for actual religious practice.”16 Perhaps this is because what sociologists recognized as “actual religious practice” did not adequately capture the realities of American Judaism. In fact, the trends of the 1950s should be recognized as the exception and not the norm for American Jews. In the decades following World War II, American Jews organized themselves aggressively, but not necessarily through synagogue memberships. “To be a Jew is to belong to an organization,” one observer noted. “To manifest Jewish culture is to carry out . . . the program of an organization.”17 Many of these manifestly Jewish organizations included apparently secular groups. A large number were devoted to supporting the State of Israel. Many groups focused on memorializing and publicizing the murder of European Jews and the destruction of Jewish communities in the Holocaust.18 Other Jews organized around liberal social justice causes, including the Civil Rights Movement. By the 1960s and 1970s, Jews were participating in the broader counterculture movements as well as turning countercultural critiques towards Jewish communities.19

In the second half of the twentieth century, Jewish organizations were plentiful, but synagogue attendance was declining. However, even in the heyday of American synagogues, attendance at services was never particularly high: One 1945 survey found that only 24 percent of Jews claimed to attend religious services at least once a month, compared to 81 percent of Catholics and 62 percent of Protestants, and only nine percent of Jews claimed to attend at least once a week. By 1970, only eight percent of Jewish household heads attended religious services fifty times or more per year, and fifty-five percent attended fewer than four times per year.20 However, this does not mean that Jewish communities were dissolving. Instead, it means that attending public religious services was not where most Jews found existential meaning. Rather, the sacred relationships of Jewish community extended beyond these conventional indicators of religion.

Mid-twentieth-century synagogues served the dual primary functions of providing a place for adults to associate with other Jews and to socialize and educate children as Jews.21 By the end of the twentieth century, synagogues competed for these roles with a variety of other institutions. The organizations we will examine in the following chapters—Jewish genealogical societies, historic synagogues, publishers and distributors of children’s books, and Jewish restaurants—are some of the many institutions that provide these functions. These organizations serve many of the same essential functions of the mid-twentieth-century synagogue: facilitating spending time with other Jews, socializing and educating children, and placing these activities within a historical narrative. Like synagogues, the institutions of American Jewish nostalgia create imagined communities, allowing participants to think of themselves in terms of sacred relationships with those around them as well as with Jews in other places and times, both past and present.

In the early twenty-first century, American Jews with a broad array of religious affiliations and no affiliation engage in the ostensibly nonreligious activities of Jewish genealogical research, attending Jewish historic sites, consuming markedly Jewish food, and purchasing books and toys that teach Jewish heritage to their children. These are mundane activities, yet engagement with them can provide a core emotional connection to a Jewish identity. When social scientists measure such practices, the way they phrase survey questions may mask respondents’ views of their significance. When Pew asked respondents, “What’s essential to being Jewish?” only fourteen percent of Jews found “eating traditional Jewish foods” to be essential to their Jewish identities. An additional 39 percent described the activity as important but not essential.22 The very wording of the question, however, reflects the Pew Research Center’s essentialist ideas about what counts as “religion” for American Jews. Eating traditional Jewish foods, particularly in a public setting such as a deli, may be a meaningful part of a Jew’s life, but it may be too ordinary, too easily overlooked, to be described as essential or important. Moreover, the survey’s essentialist phrasing makes it unclear whether the respondent is solely reporting on his or her own practice or pronouncing on the boundaries of Jewish identity and declaring the practice mandatory. Commonplace activities such as eating Jewish foods are often quietly fundamental to religious identities rather than explicitly identified as essential to them.

By claiming as religious those activities generally recognized as secular, I highlight the significance of shared meanings and practices for Jewish individuals, families, and communities. Like other Americans, American Jews are not necessarily very good at articulating and recognizing sacred practices, places, or narratives in their lives. Activities like eating Jewish foods may provide a connection to Jewish history through consuming traditional dishes. It often provides a community in the present, too, as one is surrounded by others doing the same thing—much like attending a synagogue, but with perhaps more immediate gratification.

In North America, both “religion” and “spirituality” have been identified with Christian notions of belief and theology to such an extent that both scholars and practitioners have failed to recognize the meaning-making practices of other traditions as religious.23 The inadequacy of common uses of these terms is particularly evident for traditions and practices that place little or no focus on theistic beliefs, as is the case for much of American Judaism. Examining the material religion and consumption of American Jewish nostalgia expands the concept of religion and demonstrates that religious meaning is contingent upon practices and narratives as well as beliefs and occurs in a variety of supposedly non-religious settings.

Susan King, an early leader in Jewish genealogy who developed online platforms connecting Jewish genealogists, told me that, for her, “doing the research and finding the truth is a spiritual journey.” She explained, “I am a Jew, I will always be a Jew, I just don’t have to practice all the quote ‘religious’ beliefs to be spiritual. . . . In this lifetime I have followed my truth. I have done service to the community.”24 For King, the work of Jewish genealogy, including both family history research and building online communities of genealogists, is the pursuit of her “truth” and sacred work on behalf of Jews living and dead. Like many other American Jews, King shies away from the word “religious,” which many American Jews associate with formal organizations and mandated activities, such as belonging to a synagogue and following dietary laws. Nonetheless, we can understand King’s work as religious because it provides existential meaning for her and her clients by placing them in a meaningful relationship with individuals and communities in the past and the present. King’s genealogical research is in line with an understanding of the religiosity of activities that provide social and existential meaning in Jews’ lives, even when they do not define those activities as religious.

Understanding nostalgic practices as religious activities challenges assumptions about the limited role of religion among non-Orthodox Jews in modern America. Doing so highlights normative practices that American Jews hold in common across and beyond the standard spectrum of American Jewish movements. The American Jews in this book identify with all and no denominational structures. They are people of all genders and all ages. They live throughout the United States and have a variety of economic situations. Nostalgia is a standardized mode of American Judaism that fosters a particular, affective response to the past, cutting across the statistical categories of religious affiliation, gender, class, and age that delineate American Jews.

It is not incidental that when I asked Robert Friedman, the former director of the Genealogy Institute at the Center for Jewish History in New York, how he got started as a genealogist, he began by explaining, “I didn’t have a particularly religious upbringing. I did have a bar mitzvah, but I didn’t really identify with the process, particularly.” Recalling this typical American Jewish experience, he laughed, and continued, “However, I was extremely close with my father’s parents, who were Hungarian immigrants who came to this country in 1921. And as I was growing up, my grandfather used to tell me all kinds of stories about the old country.”25 For American Jews, emotional engagement with ancestral pasts is a religious activity, one that can take the place of or exist alongside traditional religious practices.

Thematic research on nostalgia moves beyond the scholarly distinctions between Judaism and Jewishness and beyond the simplistic divisions between “religious” and “secular” Jews; these oppositions obscure the diversity of American Jewish practice. American Jews of all types of religious affiliation, including no affiliation, engage in ostensibly nonreligious activities that provide personally meaningful engagements with American Jewish pasts. Attention to American Jewish nostalgia identifies robust forms of religious meaning in works of public and personal histories, emphasizing the centrality of emotional and commemorative norms in American and Jewish religious practices and consumer habits.26 Studying the consumption of nostalgia reveals normative themes about historical periods, immigration, and religious practices often taken for granted in American Jews’ relation to history. Emotional connections to narratives about familial and communal pasts, and engagement with materials representing those narratives, are not merely cultural activities but religious ones.