Jewish Family

Identity and Self-Formation at Home

Alex Pomson,Randal F. Schnoor

• Editorial: Indiana University Press
• Año: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780253033123
• Categoría: Sciences sociales
• Categoría: Démographie

In Jewish Family: Identity and Self-Formation at Home Alex Pomson and Randal F. Schnoor advance a new appreciation for the deep significance of Jewish family in developing Jewish identity. This book is the result of ten years of research focused on a small sample of diverse families. Through their work, the authors paint an intricate picture of the ecosystem that the family unit provides for identity formation over the life course. They draw upon theories of family development as well as sociological theories of the transmission of social and cultural capital in their analysis of the research. They find that family networks, which are often intergenerational, are just as significant as cultural capital, such as knowledge and competence in Judaism, to the formation of Jewish identity. Pomson and Schnoor provide readers with a unique view into the complexity of being Jewish in North America today.

ONE

“Growing into Our Skin as a Jewish Family”: Proposing a New Approach to the Study of Jewish Self-Formation

In the fall of 2003, Sandy Kleinman and Carla Lowe started Jewish day school for the first time: Sandy in kindergarten and Carla in first grade. The school they joined, the Paul Penna Downtown Jewish Day School (DJDS), had been founded five years earlier with just ten students and a staff of three. When the girls started school, there were seventy children in five grades.

The girls’ parents had spent some of their own school years in Jewish day schools, but they were deeply ambivalent about the choice they had made for their children. That wasn’t because of the quality of the education provided; both couples had visited a number of other schools before opting for DJDS and were pleasantly surprised by the school’s progressive approach to education, its warmth, and the inclusive Jewish environment. The parents were ambivalent because they had never thought of themselves as Jewish day school parents. Carla’s mother, Karen Lowe, had wanted to stay clear of what she called the “ghetto.” As she elaborated, “I didn’t want Carla’s world to be too narrow. I didn’t want her only to be friends with Jewish kids.” The ambivalence of Sandy’s father derived from a different source. Joe Kleinman feared that in choosing a Jewish day school he was selling out on his commitment to public education. “For me, I think the ideological and political aspects of the decision to send a child to private school weigh down on me more. . . . We really support the public system!”

In the last months of 2003, we first interviewed these two sets of parents, along with twenty-six other families who had children in kindergarten, first grade, and fifth grade at DJDS. We were starting a research project to explore the relationship between parents and their children’s schools. At the time, these two sets of parents and others in our sample talked with palpable emotion about the first few months since their children started school.

Joe Kleinman—a secular Jew, exploring Suki Gakai Buddhism and expressing doubts about God and about what he called “the Israel question”—remarked that “because Sandy started learning about [Judaism] and I see how that is for her, it reinforces that I want to be part of that as well.” His wife, Michelle, someone who thought of herself as a cultural Jew, was enjoying becoming closer with other Jewish families. She reported being almost moved to tears when she heard the children sing the Hatikvah (Israel’s national anthem) at the start of the school day. Joe revealed that the school “seems to be helping us along a path that really goes where we need to go.”

The story at the Lowes’ home was different. Despite her ambivalence about Jewish schools, Karen had agreed to join the school’s board. The couple seemed pleased with their school choice. They saw how their daughter could really be herself—100 percent Carla, as they put it—within the warmth of the school environment and how she now had no inhibition about singing the Hatikvah while out in the local supermarket. But they didn’t see why that should change anything in their own lives. Karen explained, “I just think if you are going to a school that is going to immerse you in that, why do you have to be immersed everywhere else in your life?” Describing herself and her husband as loners, Karen claimed, “I’m not really a member of any community. We are not really those kind of people. . . . I wouldn’t use the school for something like that.”

Two years after these first interviews, we returned to the homes of the two families to see what, if anything, had changed in their lives over the intervening period. We discovered that both families had in fact withdrawn their child from the school within fourteen months of starting. The Lowes had transferred their daughter after a month in second grade into a non-Jewish private school. They had been deeply disappointed with the new teacher hired to teach the second-grade class and the school’s refusal to replace her. Karen clarified, “There is a nice and homey feel to the school, but they’re still sort of wild . . . and we are academic, we believe in homework.” Recognizing that Carla was now missing a Jewish dimension to her education, they resolved to send her to Jewish summer camp. Karen continued: “That was our thing: if she goes to a Jewish school she can go to secular camps. If she goes to secular school, she has to go to Jewish camps. I actually got more of a sense of being Jewish from Camp Shalom than I did from my day school.” Repeating something that they had said at the first interview—that they didn’t need the school to provide their social circle—she conveyed that switching schools was clearly more of a struggle for their daughter than it was for them.

Joe Kleinman—whose wife Michelle was not available at the time of the second interview—reported that they switched Sandy at the end of kindergarten into a progressive, alternative public school. The tipping point for them was being prevented from observing the first-grade class into which their daughter was due to continue, and about which they had some concerns. They also had concerns about “some very specific [patriarchal] notions of God” that their daughter was acquiring at school, and the sense of socio-economic privilege that they felt in the school community. Having withdrawn Sandy from a Jewish school, Joe made clear that it was now their “responsibility to introduce her to Judaism and to expose her to it, as opposed to the school’s. . . . I feel like I have to take the initiative. I just can’t leave it to the teachers.” Joe acknowledged that this was a special challenge because the private Hebrew teacher they had hired at the start of first grade had moved to Australia a few months later. Part of the problem, he reported, was that there really wasn’t any obvious community, let alone synagogue where they felt comfortable as cultural Jews. Leaving the school had somewhat cut them off from an immediate community of Jews.

At the end of our research in 2005, these two families seemed like outliers. Almost all the other families whose children had started alongside theirs had remained in the school, certainly for more than one year. Many celebrated the ways in which their Jewish lives had been touched and even changed by the school choice they had made, much as the Kleinmans had done in their first interview. Most other families were closely connected to the school community. The book we wrote about the experience of these families, Back to School: Jewish Day School in the Lives of Adult Jews, explored how adult identity—specifically adult Jewish identity—can be shifted through the interaction with one’s child’s school, particularly at the point of transition into elementary school (Pomson and Schnoor 2008).

Over the following few years, we wondered how “our” families were doing, but in the interim we both moved on to other projects, such is the flow of university life. In 2010, we were awarded a second grant by Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). We had proposed a follow-up to our study of the transition to elementary school, this time following Jewish families through the transition from elementary school to high school. Developing the proposal, we had not intended to return to the DJDS families: their children were already in high school. Some of the children of those we had interviewed were already moving on to university.

And yet, our curiosity got the better of us. A year after the start of this new project, we decided to devote a small part of our research funds to tracking down and interviewing some of those we had interviewed ten years previously; after all, we rationalized, they too had transitioned into high school at one point. We started tentatively, resolving to interview only three or four of the families we had previously studied. When we reviewed what we found, we realized that we should not stop with just four families. We began to wonder if what we were learning from this small sample of interviewees might prove more significant than what we were learning from the almost thirty families in the high school–transition study. Over the ten years since we had first met them, the Jewish lives of those we had previously interviewed had moved on in remarkably diverse and often unexpected directions. Those changes called for exploration and explanation. We recognized that we were launching an inquiry that was no longer just about Jewish schooling but about Jewish family life and its complex dynamics.

Ten years after we had first met with them, the Lowe family was not hard to find. Although not in the same house, they were living in the same comfortable Toronto neighborhood. Carla, now sixteen years old, was still attending the same private school to which she had transferred from DJDS. Her younger sister, born since the last interview, was there too. Carla had attended Camp Shalom for the previous nine summers: “It’s where I get my entire Jewish identity from,” she said, sounding a lot like her mother. Like her mother, it was also where she made her closest friends, some of whom were the children of her parents’ friends. She was very comfortable in the more religiously observant environment of camp. Carla expressed an interest in the family being, what she called, “more Jewishy.” But, it seemed as if her parents had long ago found a point of Jewish equilibrium at home that was unlikely to change now.

Almost repeating verbatim something she said ten years earlier about her aversion to settling in an overtly Jewish neighborhood, Karen stated: “I don’t understand . . . why you would choose to be in a ghetto? That’s my thing.” Karen’s husband, Adam, had become interested in exploring theological questions but preferred to do so by listening to podcasts in his car. He pulled back from attending seminars at the synagogue about such things because, as he put it, “I don’t want to get co-opted.” Their resistance to committing too far was likely why they had not encouraged Carla to consider switching to a Jewish high school with her friends from camp. In Karen’s words, they were reacting to the way they had been raised: “I grew up with, you go to Jewish day school, you go to Jewish camp, you go to Jewish this, you go to Jewish that, all your friends are Jewish, you only go out with Jewish boys.”

In the years since we had previously interviewed them, their Jewish lives had changed little. Three times a year they attended synagogue alongside Adam’s parents; it was the synagogue where Carla had marked her Bat Mitzvah. They did not tend to celebrate Shabbat; Adam was invariably working on Friday night. They were always with their parents for Seder, although—in what they saw as a major departure—their parents now came to their house rather than them going to their parents. They expressed a sense of being comfortable with who they were as Jews and how their children were turning out.

When we tracked down Joe Kleinman, we found that he had moved to a lower-income area of Toronto—more than twenty miles from where he had first been interviewed. We might not have been able to find him had he changed his email address. He was no longer married to Michelle.

Ten years later, Joe had a new partner, Liesha, a non-Jewish woman. Joe had continued his exploration of Buddhism, more seriously than before. He found it completely compatible with his being Jewish. As he continued, “After being with Liesha I feel more Jewish than I ever have.” Sandy, his daughter, did not however feel very Jewish at all. She elaborated: “I don’t know much about the religion, and so [asking if] it means something to me, I don’t really know all of what it means because I don’t know what exactly being Jewish means.” She had not celebrated a Bat Mitzvah, and had received little Jewish education since kindergarten. She explained that there had not seemed to be much point going to Jewish afterschool programs “because I wasn’t sure why I was [there]. I wasn’t interested in it so much. . . . There is a focus on God in some places, and that part . . . I’m interested in it, but it’s not something that I believe in, so it’s hard for me to sit in the room, and talk about God.”

Joe expressed disappointment that this is how things had turned out. He told us that he would love to celebrate Shabbat, but without an extended family nearby, he and Sandy found it hard. They had tried to devise their own secular Seder ritual for a couple of years, and had even created their own Haggadah, but that had fizzled. He said that he would love to recover the Hebrew from his childhood that he seemed to have completely forgotten, but “it was a question of time, you know.” He’d also love to go to Israel, but “it’s a lot of money.” He knew that he had committed to taking more responsibility for educating his daughter Jewishly but, he reflected, “You have to choose your battles, you know, and that was not a high enough priority. There were other things that had to be attended to, like splitting up, and divorcing . . . and the pressure of [advancing in my career].”

Sociological Paradigms for Studying Jews

The contrast between the Kleinmans and the Lowes is dramatic. Their lives had overlapped for one year, and for a short period seemed to be headed in similar directions. When we first met them, they had both traveled what we called in our last book a “long and winding road” to choosing a Jewish day school for their children (Pomson and Schnoor 2008, 37). Ten years later, although the parents in these two families continued to identify as Jews, what being Jewish meant to them had substantially diverged. What being Jewish meant in terms of their expectations for their children had diverged further still.

This book explores the sociological reasons why families’ Jewish lives develop in such diverse ways. This exploration straddles two traditions of research: the sociology of Jewry and the study of the family life course. In this conjunction lies the point of departure for our work from most recent studies of contemporary Jewry.

Toward the end of the last century, the sociology of Jewry took an inward turn, as did the broader field of the sociology of religion. For the first decades after World War II, sociologists of North American Jewry, using primarily quantitative survey methods, studied what Jews did and how they behaved. This was a paradigm that produced classic works such as Gans’s (1958) “The origin and growth of a Jewish community in the suburbs” and Sklare and Greenbaum’s (1967) Jews on the Suburban Frontier.

At end of the century, there was a move away from studying how people acted as Jews toward studying how people, individuals, thought of themselves as Jews. The shift was prominently expressed by Cohen and Eisen’s succinctly entitled volume, The Jew Within (2000). But, as the book’s authors acknowledge, their inquiry followed a path that Bellah and his colleagues, and that others too, had started to navigate two decades earlier. Interviewing Americans about their religious and spiritual lives, Bellah’s group had found that for “most Americans . . . the meaning of one’s life . . . is to become one’s own person, almost to give birth to oneself” (1985, 82). As Baumeister subsequently elaborated, this implied that “realizing oneself meant breaking away from family, home, and community as well as from the views and teaching imposed by the larger society” (1991, 108, emphasis added).

The act of “breaking away from family and home” was at the axis of what Roof and McKinney (1987) coined the “new voluntarism,” wherein individuals felt less and less constrained to maintain previous generations’ patterns of religiosity (Davidman 2007). In a sense, they were free to create themselves or, in Arnett and Jensen’s terms, they felt empowered to build “a congregation of one” (2002). For sociologists, in this context, to understand people’s religious lives called for studying the choices people made as individuals and how they achieved religious identities rather than how they assumed ascribed identities. This work privileged the investigation of people’s inner lives, uncovering how people made meaning and how they constructed and reconstructed their sense of who they were. This is what Warner called a “new paradigm for the sociological study of religion” (1993). Thus, when Wuthnow (1998) influentially explored the shift in American religion from what he called a spirituality of dwelling to one of searching, his study was constructed around interviews in which people described their journeys, or what he called their exploration of their inner selves. His inquiry was not, however, that of a psychologist. As a sociologist, he was interested in the social and cultural significance of the multiple individual odysseys he charted.

Against this intellectual backdrop, the sociology of contemporary Jewry for the last twenty years has been as much concerned with studying the inner landscape of Jewish lives, the self-formation of Jews, as it has been with studying the landscape of Jewish communal life. During this time, the regnant modality for studying Jews, especially when employing qualitative research, has been the exploration of how Jews define and understand themselves. Scholars have been concerned with the stories Jews tell themselves about who they are (Charme 2009), how they negotiate between different aspects of their identities (Barack Fishman 1995; Horowitz 2000; Hartman 2007), and how they use language to authentically express themselves as Jews (Benor 2012; Fader 2009). In these instances, the drama of contemporary Jewish life is presumed to play out on a biographical stage, within the life story of the individuals who, as Thompson put it, are “Jewish on their own terms” (2013).

Research into conversion and into the lives of ba’alei teshuva (“returnees” to Orthodox Judaism) is paradigmatic of the focus on the inner life of the individual. From this perspective, few life choices are a stronger expression of individuals’ capacity to reinvent themselves whether in taking on a different faith or in returning to a different version of themselves (Aviad 1983; Davidman 1991). It is no wonder that Christians conceive of such transformation as being “born again” (Johnston 2012). As Bellah implied, it is a paradigmatic American act of self-invention. In a similar vein, to be a Jew by choice is paradigmatic of the Jewish condition today. As one in...

Índice

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. “Growing into Our Skin as a Jewish Family”: Proposing a New Approach to the Study of Jewish Self-Formation
• 2. Dreidels on the Christmas Tree: Jewish Capital in the Family
• 3. “Reversing Some Screwed-Up Thing”: Changes in Families’ Jewish Lives over the Life Course
• 4. “It’s about the Kids, Right?”: Jewish Families as Social Systems
• 5. “This Is the Way Our Family Is”: The Work of Home-Based Family Ritual
• 6. “I’m My Generation”: Talking with Jewish Teens at Home
• 7. Home Work: Reflections on Studying Families for Ten Years
• Appendix: The Participating Families
• Bibliography
• Index
• Bio
• Back Cover