American Post-Judaism

Identity and Renewal in a Postethnic Society

Shaul Magid

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780253008091
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Jewish Theology

How do American Jews identify as both Jewish and American? American Post-Judaism argues that Zionism and the Holocaust, two anchors of contemporary American Jewish identity, will no longer be centers of identity formation for future generations of American Jews. Shaul Magid articulates a new, post-ethnic American Jewishness. He discusses pragmatism and spirituality, monotheism and post-monotheism, Jesus, Jewish law, sainthood and self-realization, and the meaning of the Holocaust for those who have never known survivors. Magid presents Jewish Renewal as a movement that takes this radical cultural transition seriously in its strivings for a new era in Jewish thought and practice.

1

Be the Jew You Make: Jews, Judaism, and Jewishness in Postethnic America

Have ethnicities, the influx of which has formed the population of the great modern republic of North America, kept their particularities? No.

—Bruno Bauer, “La question juive”

What will become of the Jewish people?

—A. B. Yehoshua, lecture to the American Jewish Committee, 2006

The trajectory of the twentieth century has taken America from a theory of the melting pot focused on the erasure of distinct immigrant identities to a resurgence of cultural specificity in Horace Kallen's cultural pluralism, multiculturalism, and identity politics. Jews have been active participants in all of these cultural shifts, both as Americans and as Jews.¹

The postwar reiteration of Horace Kallen's cultural pluralism in works such as John F. Kennedy's Nation of Immigrants (1958), Nathan Glazer and Daniel Moynihan's Beyond the Melting Pot (1963), Michael Novak's The Unmeltable Ethnics (1971), Irving Howe's World of Our Fathers (1976), and Alex Haley's Roots (1976) eventually produced a multiculturalism that enabled Jews (and other ethnic groups) to rediscover the religion and cultural distinctiveness of their grandparents that was largely hidden from view in the decades of assimilation.² Yet even as American Jews in the 1960s and 1970s became reacquainted with their tradition, or at least less afraid of expressing their Jewish identity, they largely remained secular and continued the forward motion of acculturation and assimilation. This tension is aptly expressed by Bernie Steinberg, the Jewish character in the early 1970s sitcom Bridget Loves Bernie, when he says to his family, “I don't believe this. I've lived with you people all my life. Now why is everyone all of a sudden being so Jewish?”³ Intermarriage rates among American Jews continued to rise, and Jews' full participation in secular American life continued to thrive unabated.

In short, in postwar America Jews became more interested in their Jewishness, and even Judaism, albeit not always in a specifically religious way. Zionism and the impact of the Holocaust served as new anchors of identity for many Jews who wanted to be more “Jewish” but also wanted to remain secular. This arguably brought ethnicity back to the forefront of Jewish identity in postwar America.⁴ White ethnic revival, especially after the Civil Rights movement, included the American Jewish search for its own roots as a part of the progressive political concerns of many American Jews.⁵

The connection between identity politics and the reclaiming of Jewish ethnic identity is duly noted by Eric Goldstein. “In the years that followed the emergence of black nationalism in the mid 1960s, young Jewish activists, many of whom had been active in the struggle for black civil rights, decided that the renewal of their own cultural traditions and the highlighting of their own ethnic distinctiveness was the only way to attain a sense of difference they desired.”⁶ This phenomenon is true of American society more generally. Will Herberg was simply mistaken when he wrote in 1960 that “the ethnic group [in America] had no future…ethnic pluralists were backward looking romantics.”⁷ In 1986 Werner Sollors, writing about the reception of Mario Puzo's The Godfather as ethnic literature, said, “This attitude is quite common in ethnic studies today. It is based on the assumption that experience is first and foremost ethnic. Critics should practice cultural relativism and stick to their own turfs (based, of course, on descent), since an unbridgeable gulf separates Americans of different ethnic backgrounds and most especially all White Anglo Saxon Protestants from all non-WASPS.”⁸

Sollors's comment was written almost a generation ago. The residual effects of identity politics in America have largely morphed into a different set of political and social concerns, significantly influenced by globalization. While ethnicity remains a strong source of identity both in America and in other countries around the globe, we need to take seriously Arjun Appadurai's observation that ethnoscapes, the conjunction between an ethnos and territory, are no longer an ironclad anthropological object, in large part the result of the dissolution of historically unselfconscious or culturally homogenous societies.⁹ Ultimately, Herberg may have been correct, albeit in a way he could not have imagined. Consider, for example, the trajectory from The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), which inspired the Black Nationalist movement, to Barack Obama's Dreams from My Father (1995), which showed a young man who had been inspired by Malcolm X and came to terms with his mixed-race parentage: a Kenyan father he barely knew and a white mother and white grandparents he adored.¹⁰

America is steadily being transformed from a multiculturalist and ethnocentric society to a postethnic society, and this change undermines, or at least problematizes, the place of ethnicity in American identity that dominated the second part of the twentieth century. This does not suggest that ethnicity has disappeared, or will disappear, and that America will become a society divided purely by class. “Ethnicity,” depending on how the term is defined, will survive but will become something other than purely a consequence of ascription or descent.¹¹ A multiethnic or polyethnic society will produce new ethnicities that are created by a combination of descent and consent, ascription and affiliation. Disassimilation will often occur before ethnicities are totally reconstituted, because disassimilation is not a return to a pre-assimilated ethnic mode as much as a revision, taking into consideration the changes assimilation has invariably produced. Disassimilation among ethnic groups that have already lost a sense of “pure” ethnicity due to intermarriage and assimilation will generate new ethnicities and not erase ethnicity as a category of social identification. This type of assimilation is quite different from the “structural pluralism” Milton Gordon described in 1964.

The acculturation process, thus, has drastically modified American Jewish life in the adaptation to American middle-class values, while it has not by any means “dissolved” the group in a structural sense. Communal life and ethnic self-identification flourish within the borders of a group defined as one of the “three major faiths” of America, while at the same time its members and, to a considerable degree, its institutions become indistinguishable, culturally, from the personnel and institutions of the American core society.¹²

While structurally Gordon's assessment may still be relevant, one could argue that the American Jewish community has moved beyond what he describes into a “post” phase outside this “acculturation without assimilation” model to something more complicated and less cohesive.¹³

Defining ethnicity is no easy task and has been the subject of many studies by social theorists.¹⁴ For my limited purposes I have found Max Weber's definition suitable, albeit not perfect.

We shall call ethnic groups those human groups that entertain a subjective belief in their common descent because of similarities of physical type or of customs or both, or because of memories of colonization and migration; this belief must be important for the propagation of group formation; conversely it does not matter whether or not an objective blood relationship exists. Ethnic membership (Gemeinsamkeit) differs from the kinship group precisely by being a presumed identity, not a group with concrete social action, like the latter. In one sense ethnic membership does not constitute a group; it only facilitates group formation of any kind, particularly in the political sphere.¹⁵

Weber's distinction between ethnicity and kinship, between real and imagined connectedness, between blood and custom and, I would add, between history and narrative, speaks to ethnicity as conceived throughout Jewish history. Anthony Smith's definition of “ethnie” adds some texture to Weber's definition above.

An ethnie may be defined as a named human population with a shared myth of descent, shared memories and culture and a sense of attachment to a “homeland.”…They may be seen as communities of culture and history based on a fictive kinship, summed up in a powerful myth of descent that binds and legitimates the community…. The “core” feature of such memories, myths and symbols is the point of reference in the past, in myths of origin and memories of liberation and a golden age.¹⁶

Many Jews in America identify as Jews primarily through the notion of a relatedness that speaks to Weber's and Smith's notion of cultural formation, religion being only one piece of that group identity. Of late, this primal identity has begun to waver, if not disappear.¹⁷

Following David Hollinger I suggest this shift from ethnic to postethnic and from identity as fixed to identity as performed merits a re-evaluation of the melting pot and Reform Judaism's claim that religion and not ethnicity should define American Jews.¹⁸ This is not to suggest these theories can be resurrected. The conditions of twenty-first-century America make that impossible. It is to say, rather, that the underlying problematic of ethos (religion) verses ethnos (ethnicity) that informed these solutions over a century ago has not disappeared and, in fact, may have reappeared in new ways in postethnic America.¹⁹ The contours of postethnic America provide different rubrics for what the melting pot could mean and how religion is increasingly a product of voluntarism and inventiveness as opposed to inherited tradition.²⁰ New formulations of these ideas could serve to construct new forms of identity in a postethnic civilization.

There is considerable fear in the contemporary American Jewish community that America's acceptance of Jews and Judaism—perhaps coupled with America's postethnic turn—could result in the disappearance of both. Books such as Alan Dershowitz's The Vanishing American Jew and Elliot Abram's Faith or Fear, and programs such as Birthright Israel, are three examples among many in which this fear is addressed and solutions are sought.²¹ Others, like Jonathan Freedman in his recent Klezmer America, offer an alternative perspective. Commenting on Dershowitz and Abrams, Freedman writes,

The anxiety they register, it seems to me, is not significant in and of itself—clearly those who identify with traditional Jewish identity politics of either a secular or a religious nature are going to want to stress their embattlement for strategic reasons—but it is an indicator of an impulse in Jewish intellectual and cultural life with which I am in profound disagreement, one that stressed the need for purity, consistency, essence, limits, boundaries in defining what is and what is not Jewish. This is of course one impulse in Judaism as a religious practice itself, one in which the delineation of the clean and unclean, the pure and corrupt, is central, definitional. But it's more powerfully, and more problematically, a repeated impulse in the critical response of American Jews in a multiracial, multicultural America—an impulse to (as it were) circle the wagons, to define Jewishness (itself a notoriously multiple religious practice and identity) in monolithic and essentializing terms.²²

I am sympathetic to Freedman's intuitions here. In part, the fears he draws attention to may be the result of an old paradigm trying to force itself on a new situation that cannot meet its criteria. If postethnicity is indeed a growing reality, and if Jews in America are so integrated into their social structure that asking them to reject it would be tantamount to asking them to become an anomaly in order to “survive,” might we think about how this postethnic turn can suggest new structures of Jewish identity? That is, how can “survival” be reformulated in a way that enables the entire notion of identity to be calibrated anew?

My point in this chapter is not to argue that our understanding of the future of Jews, Judaism, and Jewishness in America should be driven solely by the realities of the American cultural landscape (that is, that the “ought” should, by definition, be determined by the “is”). One could surely argue quite forcefully (and many have tried to) that the existence of a burgeoning postethnic America should compel Jews to create an even stronger ethnic anchor in order to prevent Jewishness and Judaism from becoming hopelessly buried in the multiethnic mix of American society. This is exactly what Dershowitz, Abrams, Steven Cohen, and Jack Wertheimer argue. In some way, the Orthodox kiruv (outreach) movement and contemporary Reform's return to ethnicity and tradition (first manifest in the 1937 Columbus Platform's advocating a return to the notion of Jews as a nation, and more recently in the Reform embrace of a new style of progressive “halakha”) are implicitly making such a claim.²³ What I am suggesting, however, is that while the “is” of postethnicity poses certain challenges, it also poses certain potentially productive opportunities to rethink the very notion of the “ought.”

Here I am compelled by Georg Simmel's notion that when cultural forms become spiritually empty and no longer embody the life of the society, they cease to serve to perfect the members of the society in question. Such a situation does not require new articulations of older ideas but new models of understanding the very categories in question. Put differently, the new reality is not simply one more obstacle to be overcome (the traditional argument) or one more dimension of modernity that Jews must creatively respond to in order to survive under traditional parameters of survival (the progressive argument).²⁴ Rather, postethnic America is, to borrow a term used by Zalman Schachter-Shalomi for different purposes, a “paradigm shift” that demands a totally new approach to the very notion of survival, to the very contours of what we mean by “Jewishness” and “Judaism” in contemporary America (that is, to rethink the very parameters of the “ought”).²⁵ My point is only to begin with the premise that postethnicity is with us for the foreseeable future, and Jews must learn how to think within its boundaries and not simply deny its existence or remain wed to old-paradigm “oughts” in order to create models for survival, continuity, and renewal.²⁶

The question as to whether the instability of identity and ethnicity is a phenomenon limited to the individual or whether it extends to the very fabric of the Jewish collective is pertinent. That the individual Jew is in a state of flux in America is not a new observation. The important question is with regard to the collective. The debate among sociologists, cultural theorists, and historians who study American Jewry is generally about the collective future of Jews and Judaism in America.²⁷ Much of it begins with the assumption that being Jewish in America is no longer a liability. In the words of Bethamie Horowitz, “The major change in contemporary America is that there is no longer a stigma attached to being Jewish.”²⁸ For some this is the blessing under which hides a curse. While some argue that the Jewish collective has already collapsed, others argue that notwithstanding the danger posed to Jewish individuals, the community remains stable, intact, and thriving and continues its process of Americanization, managing the tension between tradition and acculturation.²⁹ I submit that the Jewish collective in America (as previously construed) is in a state of collapse, but unlike those who view this change in purely negative terms I suggest this collapse is largely dependent on the lens through which it is viewed, that is, how we understand the criterion of the “Jew” and the makeup of the Jewish collective.

The Jewish collective in America will survive; it will just look different than before. The normalization of intermarriage combined with a fairly new phenomenon of the intermarried Jew remaining part of a Jewish community and bringing his or her spouse and children into that community raises new issues about the very construction of a Jewish collective that includes non-Jews. The actual multiethnic and multir...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Be the Jew You Make: Jews, Jewishness, and Judaism in Postethnic America
• 2. Ethnicity, America, and the Future of the Jews: Felix Adler, Mordecai Kaplan, and Zalman Schachter-Shalomi
• 3. Pragmatism and Piety: The American Spiritual and Philosophical Roots of Jewish Renewal
• 4. Postmonotheism, Renewal, and a New American Judaism
• 5. Hasidism, Mithnagdism, and Contemporary American Judaism: Talmudism, (Neo) Kabbala, and (Post) Halakha
• 6. From the Historical Jesus to a New Jewish Christology: Rethinking Jesus in Contemporary American Judaism
• 7. Sainthood, Selfhood, and the Ba'al Teshuva: ArtScroll's American Hero and Jewish Renewal's Functional Saint
• 8. Rethinking the Holocaust after Post-Holocaust Theology: Uniqueness, Exceptionalism, and the Renewal of American Judaism
• Epilogue. Shlomo Carlebach: An Itinerant Preacher for a Post-Judaism Age
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Authors