Jerusalem Letter / Viewpoints
No. 453 8 Iyar 5761 / 1 May 2001
THE SOVEREIGN SELF: JEWISH IDENTITY
IN POST-MODERN AMERICA
Steven M. Cohen and Arnold M. Eisen
The Importance of Childhood Memories / A Personal Journey / Another Journey /
Choosing Judaism / The Roots of Traditional Jewish Identity / The Challenge of
Modernity / A Generation Seeking Acceptance / The Postmodern Jewish Self
The Importance of Childhood Memories
I remember at my bat mitzvah having a thought, a prayer, and saying: Let me
never leave this. I also remember being surprised, because that was a time when
I couldn't imagine Judaism not being important to me--it was almost like
knowing what was coming. I remember thinking it and being surprised I was
thinking it.
--Molly
Molly is a physician in her forties who lives in suburban Boston: thoughtful,
soft-spoken, and extremely articulate--reason enough to take careful note of
what she has to say about the formative experiences which led to her current
commitments as a Jew. There is another reason as well: because the key words in
this passage from our conversation, "I remember," are repeated no less than
three times.
What
Molly and the other Jews we interviewed remember of their Jewish journeys,
and--more importantly--
how
they remember it, provide the clues to a new sort of Jewish self emerging in
the United States in recent decades.
Her bat mitzvah is still vivid in her mind despite the passage of three
decades. Similar events or experiences from childhood or adolescence figured
prominently in almost every interview we conducted. Time and again we heard
details of family gatherings decades earlier, or reports of conversations with
a grandparent long since departed, or descriptions of a moment of high emotion
that proved formative of later growth. The Judaism practiced by adult American
Jews is almost always bound up in key family relationships and rites of
passage, nourished by a stock of memories which are marked by passion and
ambivalence. Our subjects did not offer us dry "remembrances of things past"
tucked safely away. Rather, their memories were tokens of present commitments
and signals of the future they hoped to build. The individuals we met all care
deeply about their Jewishness--even when, or perhaps especially when, they are
rejecting it. Indifference concerning Jewish identity was nonexistent. The
memories associated with the fact of being Jewish are far too precious for
indifference, too powerful, too charged.
Strongly Jewish childhoods are a very good predictor of actively Jewish
adulthoods. The memories of those childhoods, and in particular of observant
parents, grandparents, or teachers, are crucial to the beliefs and behavior
adopted later in life. Molly has returned to a Jewish commitment that is very
different in its content from the one she knew as a child. She does not believe
or practice as her parents did. But the salience and intensity of that
commitment are very similar to the Judaism in which she was raised.
Molly took pains to stress the degree to which she had stepped out of any path
prepared for her by parents and teachers. Like other American Jews of her
generation, Molly has had to make a great many choices concerning Jewish belief
and practice along the way. The Judaism to which she is currently attached is
not one that she has simply grown into or inherited, but one that she herself
has fashioned from the large repertoire of possibilities available.
For virtually every one of the Jews we interviewed, we could not get at what
matters to them about Judaism by simply marking organizational affiliations or
counting charitable donations or ticking off synagogue visits. Only by hearing
personal stories can one comprehend the Judaism wrapped up in those stories.
That is so in part because Jews such as Molly, compared to predecessors a
generation or two ago, define themselves far less by denominational boundaries
(Reform, Conservative, Orthodox) or institutional loyalties (Hadassah, Jewish
community centers, synagogues). Their Jewish identities are not constituted by
organizational activity, do not center on concern for the State of Israel, and
do not arise out of anxiety about anti-Semitism.
What matters to the Jews we interviewed, rather, are powerful individual
memories and experiences. Personal journeys and experiences, especially if
shared with other family members, are the stuff out of which their Judaism is
now imagined and enacted, a Judaism constructed and performed one individual at
a time.
A Personal Journey
David is an administrator and faculty member at a major West Coast university.
He reads widely on politics, history, Jewish issues, and science fiction. His
politics are liberal. Are his political convictions linked to his Judaism? "I
never really thought of the origins of it. I was clearly brought up in a
liberal agnostic Jewish family where I was aware of being Jewish but without
Jewishness being an issue very much, in fact not at all, but where sympathy for
the underdog [was expected]." David's maternal grandfather, descended from a
long line of rabbis in Prague and Berlin, was born in Palestine; his father's
family was Orthodox until his father's generation.
Judaism did not figure prominently in David's home as a child, though Jewish
ethnic consciousness was strong: his father served for many years on the
medical staff at a Jewish-sponsored hospital, and his mother worked as a
volunteer for the local Jewish Federation. But there was "no Hebrew school, no
Sunday school," and there was a tree at home every Christmas. His brother
requested a bar mitzvah, which took place at the largest Reform temple in San
Francisco, but David was not interested in having one, and his parents did not
care.
David said that he first became acutely aware of being Jewish at the New
England prep school he attended during high school. However, the truly
transformative events came later, beginning with a trip to Germany in the
context of overseas study during college. "I went to Munich. I didn't know
quite why, what I was supposed to see or what I was supposed to do. I didn't
speak German, I needed to go to Dachau. I didn't know anything about
Dachau....I didn't know the word for concentration camp. People pointed me in
the right direction. It blew my mind. It absolutely blew my mind. Not that I
learned something factually...but just the experience of seeing it...that
really affected me. I came back and I now knew I was Jewish. I was connected to
that part of modern Jewish history in some way." The "next significant event"
was the Six-Day War. "I remember watching the news and seeing those arrows
sweeping through [a map of] the Sinai, and those arrows were my arrows."
At his wife's insistence, his wedding was performed by a rabbi. "I could've
married a non-Jew very easily. The fact that M was Jewish, however, by that
time was an appealing feature, though I didn't know much about what that meant,
to be Jewish." The couple's Jewish observance was at first limited to attending
Passover seders to which they had been invited and going to High Holiday
services at the campus Hillel Foundation. "I liked seders. The seder was my
introduction to Judaism as a tradition. It didn't involve a profession of
faith." At the time, David's father-in-law, a committed Reform Jew, complained
that "I wasn't Jewish enough and that didn't appeal to me." Synagogue did not
appeal to him then either. The couple eventually joined the local Reform
temple, when their older daughter turned five. That affiliation, David said,
was "the key thing" in his adult Jewish identity. "It gave me a formal
membership in the Jewish community. It was a public statement of being a Jew.
Slipping in and out of a Jewish service on High Holidays was not. My body could
be there but not my heart. Now I was paying good money to do this."
David still has trouble finding meaning in the liturgy, but over the years he
has grown more and more involved in Jewish life. He serves on the boards of the
local Jewish Community Relations Council and of Hillel, takes classes on
various aspects of Jewish history and thought, and finds meaning in holiday and
life-cycle rituals, particularly when they involve his family.
What does David want Jewishly for his children? Had we asked a few years ago
whether it mattered to him that his children marry Jews, David replied that he
would have said, "All I want is for them to be happy." Now, he is not certain
about his indifference to the religion of their spouses, though he knows he
would object to an intermarriage with a "religious Christian." David draws
lines between Jews and non-Jews in other ways as well, sometimes unequivocally.
For example, David reacts differently toward the persecution of Jews than
toward the persecution of other groups. "Those are my people. Those killed in
Argentina [in a bombing of the Jewish community center]: those are my people."
David has never been to Israel, though he has thought about going. He follows
news reports about it carefully. The only thing he dislikes about being Jewish
is the internal borders erected by Jews who insist that there is only one right
way to be Jewish. "The notion that there is a good Jew and a bad Jew...the fact
that people would judge other people and use Judaism as a boundary line or
something is...threatening to me."
Another Journey
Most of Molly's time at present is taken up by work and family. Her volunteer
activity is focused on her children's school and on their (Reform) synagogue.
Molly was born in Ohio, went to public school, and moved to Michigan for
college and medical school. Her parents belonged to a Conservative synagogue,
and their home was kosher and "reasonably observant." Education was a very
important value in her home. It was clear all along that Molly would go to
college, though the point as far as her parents were concerned might well have
been "to meet a guy."
Molly remembers her parents as being inconsistent where Jewish practice was
concerned. She was not allowed to color or to play solitaire or pick-up
baseball on the Sabbath, but her mother and aunt often spent the day shopping.
"I had difficulty with what my parents would and would not tolerate." The
family went to synagogue every Friday night, but on Saturdays, when Molly
attended services even after her bat mitzvah, her parents did not. Molly was
active as a teenager in United Synagogue Youth, the youth group of Conservative
Judaism. The Jewish figure Molly remembers most fondly from childhood is her
maternal grandfather. He was "probably the biggest influence in terms of what I
wanted to be, the sweetest, kindest person I have ever met, very insightful but
very nonjudgmental." Her father's father died in a transit camp in Vichy France
during the Holocaust. It was clear to her as a child that "this was something
we did not talk about." The story emerged, she says, only gradually.
In high school, several years after the bat mitzvah memory, Molly unexpectedly
fell in love with a non-Jewish boy. It provoked the "rote response" from her
parents that "you can't do this, you can't see him, we don't approve." She is
"not sure that conversation about this changed anything, but it meant I had to
choose, I could be Jewish or care for him, and that was a point where I was
going to care for him." The relationship precipitated further rejection of
involvement with Judaism. She quit USY as well as a Jewish high school
sorority. This made her mother more upset. At the same time, the Jewish
teenagers of her acquaintance, who had once run around the synagogue together
and noticed each other skipping the "Christ our Lord" lines when singing
Christmas carols in public school, now stopped being engaged in Jewish
activities. One by one they dropped out of Hebrew school and synagogue life,
and drifted apart. Later in the interview we learned that Molly's grandfather
also died around this time. When that happened, Molly "seriously questioned the
existence of God, and no one around me was able to help me through that period."
A few years later Molly fell in love with and eventually married a man who was
not Jewish. This was "a really big deal for me then." Religion was not very
important to her at that point, Molly recalls, but being Jewish was. She made
it clear to S before they decided to marry that she "could not deal with
Christmas trees and the kids had to be Jewish." But at the same time she "could
not ask S to convert, because that was important to my parents." The latter
were very upset at the prospect of an intermarriage. "My mother's first comment
was 'who will marry you?'" (They found a rabbi who agreed to do the ceremony.)
It took five years for her parents to accept S, Molly reports, and when he
converted to Judaism a few years ago "my parents went crazy in the opposite
direction. They were thrilled beyond belief."
The conversion took Molly completely by surprise. Her husband "just announced
it, it was not something we discussed." S had been doing a lot of reading about
Judaism, had taken courses in Jewish history and thought along with Molly in
the context of Me'ah, a high-level adult Jewish education program held at their
local Reform synagogue, and had enjoyed ritual activities with the family.
The adult education program had another impact as well. A year before, Molly
reported, S had been unwilling to consider sending their children to a Jewish
day school. He was not interested in private schools of any kind. After a year
of Me'ah, S went to see a nearby Reform day school and was impressed. Molly
feels good about the way Judaism is now infusing her children's lives. They are
in a Jewish environment all day long at school and feel very good about that.
This year her sons were far more involved in the family seder than ever before.
They wrote stories which the adults read. Molly and her family not only
celebrate Passover ("my favorite") but also the High Holidays, Hanukkah, and
Purim, as well as Shabbat. Friday night is a family time together at home, with
occasional synagogue attendance. Saturday mornings Molly goes to services by
herself. She once found the experience incredibly lonely. Now she enjoys the
time it furnishes for peaceful introspection.
What does Molly like about being Jewish? Feeling part of a community, the
structure given her year by the Jewish calendar, feeling the continuity of
history over thousands of years, the relationship with writings that have been
studied for generations "and I can read them and think about them as well."
What does she not like? Intolerance toward diversity. "I feel bad for people
who don't think there's anything for them in Judaism and who have let their bad
experiences of Sunday school or whatever drive them away. I'm not so far from
that place." What does she want for her children Jewishly? "I'd love to see
them marry Jewish people because I'd like their Jewishness to stay important in
their lives. But it would be hypocritical to demand it, because I didn't do it.
Our lives have taken a turn in terms of depth and breadth of Jewishness [since
S's conversion, but before that] it was still a Jewish household. It matters to
me more that they continue to live as Jews and their children be Jews."
The most important thing a Jew should do as a Jew, Molly concluded, is to
study. "In whatever way. As the rabbis said, from study comes everything else.
I don't profess to know enormous amounts, I just started studying a year and a
half ago, but I see the effect it's had on my life. The rabbis hit it on this
one. It gave me a sense of belonging and of why being Jewish does and can fill
your life with meaning."
Choosing Judaism
Both Molly and David are fully aware of (and happy with) the fact that they
have chosen Judaism, but believe nonetheless that it was theirs all along. It
is a birthright which they have voluntarily claimed, a given which they have
autonomously elected to receive.
We heard this sentiment time and again from our respondents. They do not seem
bothered by the paradox involved in what some American Jewish religious
thinkers have called "choosing chosenness"--freely deciding to take on
commitments which one could have rejected, and yet which define the person one
is and always was. Fully 94 percent of those we surveyed concurred with the
simple declaration, "Jews are my people, the people of my ancestors"--this,
despite the fact that they jealously guarded their right to choose or reject
this legacy as they pleased.
Joshua is a young artist who lives in Berkeley, a single man who has never
dated a Jewish woman and is only marginally involved with the Jewish community.
But he said, "I think I identify very strongly with Judaism. I mean I always
thought of myself as a Jew as something very central to who I was." The minute
he is introduced to people for the first time, Joshua reported, his obviously
Jewish first and last names broadcast his identity.
The simultaneous conviction held by Joshua, and many others, is that Judaism is
(1) a
given
from birth, identity in the strict sense of total overlap with who one is as a
person, and (2) a
choice
one makes, and is entitled to make, even if one chooses not to choose it.
Because Judaism is a given, it is fully possessed no matter what one elects to
make of it. One cannot become more Jewish by opting for greater Jewish
involvement, and cannot become less Jewish by opting for less. No Jews are more
Jewish than other Jews. One does not sacrifice any quotient of Jewishness by
marrying a non-Jew, because the identity resides in the self and is independent
of the course one's life takes.
This rather tribalist conception of identity goes along with beliefs and
practices that are profoundly universalist and personalist. Our subjects almost
all believe in God, but not in a God who exercises special providence for, or
gives special revelations to, Jews or any other group. Some confess to greater
concern for Jewish suffering than for suffering inflicted on other human
beings--but they are almost always uneasy with this sentiment. Almost all have
been touched by the Holocaust directly or indirectly, but many--unlike Molly
and David--see no specifically Jewish meaning in the event, no significance to
their lives as Jews, and no lessons for Jewish history. Even the most observant
and active of our interviewees expressed discomfort with the idea of
commandment, all the more so with the notion of particular commandments issued
by God (or assigned by Jewish groups) to Jews alone.
At the same time, they maintain a shared definition of Judaism that is tribal
despite their own misgivings about tribalism, one that holds that a Jew who
does not convert to another faith is always a Jew and is always the parent of
Jewish children, assuming they do not convert either. Such are the complexities
of choice and birthright in late-twentieth-century America.
The Roots of Traditional Jewish Identity
These dilemmas, we believe, are new. American Jews have begun to face these
only in the current generation, a sign, perhaps, of a significant shift in the
understanding of Jewish selfhood.
Before the modern period, Jews took for granted a conviction of
essential Jewish difference
from non-Jews. Both Jewish doctrine and Jewish ritual posited an axiomatic and
dichotomous view of self and other, a distinction between "Israel" and "the
nations of the world" as fundamental and self-evident as the difference between
day and night. The Torah (in Exodus 19) declares the Israelites gathered at
Sinai to be God's "kingdom of priests and holy nation." God had redeemed them
from Egyptian bondage in order to set them apart as a "peculiar treasure,"
thereby making them (and only them) a party to a unique covenant that,
according to the Torah, would remain in force forever. When the Israelites were
exiled to Babylonia in 586 B.C.E., the prophets interpreted the debacle as
confirming rather than disconfirming the people's status as God's elect. Exile
was God's punishment for their misdeeds. God took special note of their
wrongdoing, and would give them a chance to make amends. Their return to the
land decades later was taken as a sign of God's forgiveness, and proof that the
prophetic account of God's relation with them was correct.
This self-understanding apparently remained in place during the historical
vicissitudes of the centuries which followed. It survived intact the challenge
posed by the second exile, this time by the Romans in 70 C.E.--a tragedy
interpreted by the founders of Christianity as proof that God had abandoned the
old partner to the covenant and elected a new one. The teachers and jurists who
assumed national leadership in the wake of defeat by the Romans, known to us as
"the rabbis," provided rites and forms which countered that thrust. Jews
survived as "a people dwelling alone" for nearly two millennia, secure in the
framework of Judaism still practiced by many Jews today. The covenant remained
in force, despite Christian (and, later, Muslim) claims to the contrary and the
periodic miseries of Jewish history. Teachings and rites encompassed nearly
every aspect of daily existence with instruction in the nature of Jewish
selfhood. Jews
were
a people apart, scattered among the nations. Each individual Jew came into
this inheritance at birth as a member of the covenant people.
Three basic component elements constituted the view of self and world put
forward in the doctrine of election, all three evident in the Torah and
reiterated in the countless texts which reinforced it over the centuries.
Exclusivity
was one: the basic and inevitable apartness of Jews from non-Jews. The
character of daily Jewish interactions with non-Jews (or the lack of
interactions) confirmed a distinction as basic as the difference between
Sabbath and weekday.
Covenant
was a second component: Jews were bound not only to fellow Jews but to
God--and bound to each of these covenant partners by the tie binding them to
the other. Religion was inseparable from nationhood. A Jew was born
simultaneously into a people and a faith, both of which entailed a regimen of
lifelong obligation. Third, however, chosenness involved
mission
; the separation of Jews from non-Jews served a divine purpose that would one
day bring the entire human race to the worship of the one true God. Jewish
particularity, then, was meant for a universal end. Universalism and
particularism stood in perpetual tension. At the end of days, when the messiah
came, Jewish and non-Jewish selves might not be essentially different. All
would worship the same God, though they would perhaps do so in different ways.
In the meantime, however, the difference between Jews and all others was
pronounced. The result of teachings and historical experience alike was a
notion of the Jewish collective that we might term "historical familism."
Historical
expresses the extent to which the religion, the culture, the myths, and the
symbols of Judaism centered on the historical memory of one particular people.
Familism
points to the several senses in which this people regards itself as united by
ties of blood, with far-reaching consequences that extend from the most
abstract theological speculation to the most mundane everyday behavior.
Jews were family. They were all born into the same covenant with each other and
with God. If--as occurred in rare cases--they had converted into the faith,
they were known in the Jewish community as "children of Abraham and Sarah,"
adopting at the moment of conversion not only a religion but a family, a tribe.
Non-Jews, unwilling to intermarry with Jews over the centuries, lent still more
meaning to the association between religion and family. So did religiously
based notions of mutual responsibility and assistance among Jews. The simple
fact that Jews felt more comfortable in each other's presence than in the
company of non-Jews was due in part to safety from anti-Semitism and in part to
shared experience nurtured by immersion in the beliefs and customs of their
tradition.
The Challenge of Modernity
Modernity constituted a grave challenge to this conception of the personal and
collective Jewish self. Emancipation--the opening of Western societies to
Jewish participation on a formally equal footing, or the promise of that
opening--meant the sudden or gradual end to many elements of the social
segregation that undergirded Jewish tribalism. Even before the granting of
civil rights, the politically autonomous Jewish communities
(kehillot)
which had governed daily Jewish life for centuries had lost much of their
authority, ceding effective control to emerging state and national governments.
Over time Jews dispersed to non-Jewish towns, cities, and neighborhoods and
integrated in lesser or greater degree into the surrounding non-Jewish
societies.
Historians of the period have demonstrated that Emancipation entailed a
contractual quid pro quo in which Jews agreed to sacrifice exclusivity in
return for civil rights and economic opportunities. Sabbath observance, a bar
to employment opportunities as well as to leisure activities, atrophied.
Dietary laws, a barrier to social relations with non-Jews and so to acceptance
in their society, were relaxed or abandoned. Jews increasingly worked side by
side with non-Jews. Indeed, beginning with Moses Mendelssohn, arguments on
behalf of Judaism itself had to be couched in the language of the non-Jewish
culture which Jews had begun to internalize. The Enlightenment, unlike
Christianity before it, was not seen as an opposing religion to be resisted but
as an achievement of human culture, a vehicle of truth and human dignity, which
many Jews sought to make their own.
How then could they make the case for chosenness? Jews could no longer deny
that other peoples too, personal friends and neighbors now among them,
possessed equal access to divine truth. Nor could Jews propound a
distinctiveness at odds with their aspirations to civic equality. The prayer
book adopted for use by the Reform congregation in Berlin in 1844 noted in its
introduction that changes had been made in all prayers mentioning the
chosenness of Israel. Reform Jewish writings in particular, but not only these,
played down the exclusivity inherent in the chosen people idea, re-interpreted
covenant to stress the autonomy of human beings in general and of each
individual vis-a-vis God, and placed more emphasis upon Israel's "mission" to
bring the highest knowledge of "ethical monotheism" to all humankind.
The existence of Reform Jewish prayer books and writings signals another
dramatic change in the understanding of Jewish selfhood: the need to qualify it
with an adjective such as "Reform" or "Orthodox" or, later, "secular." One
could now choose what sort of Jew to be, and could in some cases choose--by
conversion or assimilation--not to be any sort of Jew at all. The two parts of
the Sinaitic covenant, faith and peoplehood, were no longer inseverable. One
could be a Jew by religion but of German or French nationality; one could
regard oneself as a part of the Jewish people and profess no religious faith.
A Generation Seeking Acceptance
Nowhere was this challenge to traditional selfhood more apparent than in the
United States during the decades of the "second generation" (ca. 1925-1950), a
period shaped by children of immigrants who sought to take advantage of
political and economic opportunities that promised unparalleled acceptance by
the surrounding non-Jewish society. How could such Jews proclaim their
essential apartness at the very same moment when they were working so hard to
become a part of an ethnically and religiously diverse America? This was played
out in re-interpretations of the doctrine of chosenness. On the one hand, the
aim was to preserve Jewish particularity, and in some cases to make sense of
the singling out of Jews by anti-Semites in America and by the Nazis overseas.
On the other hand, the concept was stripped of any vestiges of exclusivity or
superiority.
The sociological dilemma was straightforward. Jews who were at home in America,
or wished to be, could not affirm either to themselves or to others that they
were essentially "strangers in a strange land," exiles awaiting a return to
Palestine, or God's one true chosen people. America was, after all, a society
embarked on a providential mission involving all humanity. Zionism was for this
reason embraced by American Jews only after Louis Brandeis and others had made
it clear that the movement, in the U.S. at least, aimed only at providing a
home for Jews who lacked one--and no American Jew did. Two centuries of
experience with modernity had long since eroded belief by many in a God active
enough in history to choose any people, and undemocratic enough to choose only
one. Shorn of its theological base, chosenness seemed ethnic chauvinism. Jews
were not comfortable with that. Yet if one abandoned the claim to election,
what reason was there for continued apartness?
In the years prior to World War II, still vividly recalled by many older
American Jews, apartness was in many respects the dominant experience, and
integration a promise yet to be realized. Occupational and residential
discrimination were commonplace. Jews were denied admission to elite colleges
and country clubs. Anti-Semitic attitudes were widespread in the United States
as the specter of Nazism hovered across the ocean. Even after the war, when
barriers in America began to fall and social acceptance became more and more a
reality, a degree of mutual suspicion remained.
According to author Philip Roth, writing in 1963, one was special, but did not
know how or why. So "one had to invent a Jew....here was a sense of specialness
and from then on it was up to you to invent your specialness; to invent, as it
were, your betterness." His inheritance, Roth said, was a "psychology without a
content, or with only the remains of a content." The psychology was perhaps no
less powerful for that, and perhaps all the more so.
Elements of this psychology remain in place even today, at century's end,
although Jews are strikingly different from those growing up four decades ago.
Back then, Jews were just making the move from urban neighborhoods, often
heavily Jewish, to the suburbs. They not only married other Jews, with very few
exceptions, but for the most part numbered only other Jews among their closest
friends, retained a social distance from non-Jewish co-workers, and--by virtue
of the Jewish neighborhoods in which many remained, or the new suburbs in which
Jews tended to cluster--encountered other Jews on a daily basis when shopping,
taking their kids to the playground, or swimming at the country club.
At the same time, Jews built an impressive array of communal institutions.
Federations of Jewish philanthropies raised unprecedented amounts of money,
particularly after the events of May and June 1967 in the Middle East seemed to
bring Jews face to face with renewed threat to their collective survival.
Synagogues built impressive new buildings in the suburbs, even as they lost
pride of place in the community to secular organizations which could claim to
speak for American Jews as a whole rather than for particularist or partisan
sectors of the population. According to Jonathan Woocher's concept of the
"civil religion" which emerged and triumphed among Jews in this period, the
adherents of civil Judaism included the following: that one could be a good Jew
and a good American; that the separation of church and state was essential;
that Jews were one people and could not permit denominational differences to
divide them; that while theology was somewhat irrelevant, ensuring Jewish
survival was central; that Jewish rituals were valuable, but individuals must
be free to observe them or not as they chose; that every Jew was obliged to
work for the survival of Israel. "To the question of what it means to be
Jewish," Woocher writes, "civil Judaism responds: to be part of a people with a
proud tradition and enduring values, values which can be embodied in the life
of the modern Jew and the modern Jewish community."
The Postmodern Jewish Self
In several crucial respects, today's Jews are very different. They count
non-Jews among their close friends and marry non-Jews in ever greater numbers.
Even when they do marry Jews, they maintain that they might well have done
otherwise but for the intervention of chance or circumstance. They remain
anxious about the possibility of renewed anti-Semitism in America, but few
reported actual experiences of such hostility in their own lives. Quite the
contrary: they take for granted the opportunity for full participation in every
aspect and arena of American society. They have attended some of the best
universities in the country, and were not socially isolated. They know that
Jews are counted among the members of the most exclusive country clubs and are
represented (or over-represented) in American political and financial elites.
Despite retention of most of the principal tenets of "civil Judaism,"
therefore, today's moderately affiliated Jews do not fit the previous notion of
what it is to be a Jew. Their connection to Israel is weak, as is the
connection they feel to the organized Jewish community in America. They take
the compatibility of being both Jewish and American for granted; this is simply
not an issue anymore. And they are even less interested in denominational
differences than their parents' generation was, insisting on the right of
individual autonomy when it comes to deciding the details of Jewish practice.
On the other hand, theology is far from irrelevant to these Jews. God is often
quite important to them; spirituality is a felt concern; ritual and texts
resonate with religious meanings that they view positively. Their
self-consciousness as Jews is strong, their claim to their birthright proud,
despite their insistence, on the basis of personal struggles with their
identity, that they themselves had chosen Judaism, and could have chosen
otherwise. They want to be Jewish because of what it means to them
personally--not because of obligations to the Jewish group or its historical
destiny or the need to ensure Jewish survival (though this too remains a
widespread concern). Jewish survival is not in and of itself sacred in their
eyes. Jewish life, in the private spaces of self and family, is held sacred--it
is that which they most deeply value.
We would suggest that this pattern marks the emergence of a postmodern Jewish
self. The term "postmodern" involves several elements of selfhood that are
consistent with major currents in the set of theories grouped together under
the rubric of postmodernism.
Our subjects emphasize
personal meaning as the arbiter of their Jewish involvement.
Their Judaism is personalist, focused on the self and its fulfillment rather
than directed outward to the group. It is voluntarist in the extreme: assuming
the rightful freedom of each individual to make his or her own Jewish
decisions. As a result, Judaism must be strictly nonjudgmental. Each person
interacts with Judaism in ways that suit him or her. No one is capable of
determining for others what constitutes a good Jew.
Jewish meaning is not only personal but constructed, one experience at a time.
The Jews we met exhibit unusual and diverse configurations of Jewish
involvement. With the revalorization of tradition, the absolute commitment to
pluralism, and the continuing assumption of individual autonomy, they feel free
to borrow selectively from traditional Jewish religious and cultural sources.
They also--routinely and without embarrassment--combine these Jewish elements
with others drawn from the larger cultural milieu, including non-Jewish
religious or spiritual traditions.
The principal arena for the construction of this meaning is the family. Judaism
more and more is enacted in private space and time. Many noted a preference for
Passover, because the seder takes place at home rather than in synagogue. At
home each Jew is sovereign in relation to the tradition. In the synagogue, by
contrast, one enters a space in which what is said and done is predetermined
and prescribed.
The key to renewed interest in ritual observance among moderately affiliated
American Jews involves a recognition that one need not take on any rituals with
which one is uncomfortable, or associate with anyone who will challenge the
Jewish choices one has made, however idiosyncratic those might be.
A related development is the
emergence of Jews who combine great concern for issues of spirituality and
meaning with severely diminished interest in the organizational life of the
Jewish community.
This seems to reflect a shift of passion from the public domain to the private
sphere, from what post-modern theorists call the "grand narrative" (in this
case, the exalted story of Jewish peoplehood and destiny) to the "local
narratives" and "personal stories" of family and self. Many Jews evinced this
pattern, revealing a high degree of commitment to Judaism and concern for the
continued existence of the Jewish people, accompanied by relatively infrequent
participation in conventional Jewish communal activities.
Finally,
identity is far more fluid than ever before.
One can change Jewish direction, and change again, at many points in life.
Almost all our subjects saw themselves as explorers in Judaism, people in
perpetual quest of Jewish meaning.
Life is fluid in other senses as well. The boundaries dividing Jews from
non-Jews have come to seem less essential, because they have been less fixed
and of less consequence. Fully two-thirds of our survey participants agreed
that "my being Jewish doesn't make me any different from other Americans." The
self is more and more composed of multiple parts.
There were, of course, exceptions to these generalizations, most notably among
those Jews who exhibited the highest degree of activity and involvement. Simon,
a lawyer from Denver who brought his family to Israel for a year dedicated to
exploring and deepening their Jewish commitment, expressed a sense of humility
before the tradition that we found rare. "I realize, the more I study, the more
I know how much I don't know; the more I wade into the sea of Jewish knowledge,
the more I realize how big it is, and how deep it is, and how wide it is. I
didn't have any idea before; I was barely on the beach, let alone in the sea."
While these sentiments were somewhat exceptional, they highlight the fact, true
in nearly all cases we encountered, that we are not witnessing an extreme turn
inward by Jewish selves uninterested in Judaism or the Jewish people or in
Jewish community at the local level. Our subjects remain Jews who value their
membership in a people three thousand years old. No less than 94 percent agreed
that "Jews have had an especially rich history, one with special meaning for
our lives today." The individuals we interviewed expressed pride in their
participation, real or vicarious, in the achievements of the Jewish people in
the present day. The Jews we met celebrated Jewish community where they sensed
real connection, and voiced the desire for more such community. They took no
pleasure in the "invisibility" of their religion; indeed they could rarely
become aware of themselves as Jews, let alone sustain Jewish involvement,
except in the presence of extremely "significant others" and with the help of
the community and its tradition.
Indeed, if those we interviewed are and seek to be autonomous, sovereign
selves, who carefully weigh every commitment they make and no less carefully
guard their options for transferring commitments as they please, they are only
exhibiting in the Jewish realm attitudes and behaviors which are demanded of
them in every other realm of contemporary American life. Jewish families
inculcate independence, initiative, agility, and personal drive no less than
any other middle-class families, and savor the rewards these attributes bring
no less than any others. Our subjects, at times, seem to recognize that the
kind of selves they have been raised to become does not always jibe with the
models of self put forward by the Jewish tradition.
As we listened to them speak, it occurred to us that a great deal of modern
Jewish thought has stressed that Jewish commitment represents precisely the
fulfillment of the self rather than its denial. How else could Judaism appeal
to selves who had internalized notions of autonomy and agency, and for whom
submission or obedience were no longer virtues to be prized? Fulfillment by
means of tradition and community is very much the message preached in the
synagogues of virtually every denomination these days. Our subjects have
perhaps heard that message and made it their own.
Our subjects have also moved beyond the modern rejection of Jewish commitment
in the name of modernity, a rejection often enacted by their own parents or
grandparents. They are defined as much by what they have embraced Jewishly as
by what they have rejected of the tradition--and still more by
how
they have embraced it, resolutely protecting their autonomy at the same time
as they reach out for meaning and community they cannot attain on their own.
These are selves very much in process, engaged in fashioning a relation to the
Jewish past and to other Jews that is likewise only now emerging.
* * *
Steven M. Cohen, a Fellow of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, teaches
at the Melton Center for Jewish Education at the Hebrew University of
Jerusalem. His works on American Jewish
identity include "Religious Stability and Ethnic Decline" (Jewish Community
Centers Association);
Two Worlds of Judaism
(with Charles Liebman, Yale University Press);
American Assimilation or Jewish Revival
(Indiana University Press); and
American Modernity and Jewish Identity
(Routledge). He serves as Director of the Florence G. Heller/JCCA Research
Center and Senior Research Consultant to the UJC.
Arnold M. Eisen is Professor of Religious Studies at Stanford University. He is
the author of
The Chosen People in America
(Indiana University Press);
Galut: Modern Jewish Reflections on Homelessness and Homecoming
(Indiana University Press);
Taking Hold of Torah: Jewish Commitment and Community in America
(Indiana University Press); and
Rethinking Modern Judaism: Ritual, Commandment, Community
(University of Chicago Press)--winner of a Koret Jewish Book Award.
This
Jerusalem Letter/Viewpoints
is excerpted, with permission, from
The Jew Within: Self, Family, and Community in America
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000).
The
Jerusalem Letter
and
Jerusalem Letter/Viewpoints
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The opinions expressed by the authors of Viewpoints do not necessarily reflect
those of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.