while they benefited from the gains of increased recognition of Ashkenazi Jews as white.45
That is not to say that earlier generations of American Jews were not nostalgic. Americans have a persistent popular belief in “Hansen’s Law,” historian Marcus Lee Hansen’s 1930 assertion that what the second generation wishes to forget the third wishes to remember. In fact, the second generation forgot considerably less than later generations presumed they did. Examining newspaper accounts, public monuments, pageants, parades, and children’s books of the early and mid-twentieth century, Jacobson finds that, “whatever death or slumber ethnicity was supposedly ‘revived’ from in the ethnic revival, the hiatus could not have been very long.”46 What is different since the 1970s is not that American Jewish nostalgia exists, but how it has been organized and standardized and how it has become a central way of being Jewish. At the same time, a belief in Hansen’s Law shaped Americans’ understanding of the ethnic revival of the 1960s and their continued “rediscovery” of communal pasts in the subsequent decades. For Ashkenazi Jews and other ethnic Americans, these rediscovered histories are frequently stories of the hardship and deprivation of earlier generations and their subsequent economic success in the United States. The nostalgic longing for recovery of a European and immigrant American past is coupled with a narrative of progress, underscoring a fervent if unstated hope that perceived upward economic trends of American Jews will continue in the future.
American Jews’ nostalgia for Eastern European origins is not totally distinct from another major focal point of American Jewish communities since the mid-twentieth century: support for Israel. In traditional Jewish models of longing for the biblical Land of Israel, those living outside of the region were living in the diaspora or, in Hebrew, galut (golus, in the Ashkenazi Yiddish pronunciation), an inherently negative term suggesting spiritual diminishment and exile. In traditional liturgies and mystical texts, Jews have expressed a yearning to return to Zion under the guidance of the Messiah. At the same time, Jews have been far more at home in the diaspora than this trope would suggest, creating vibrant communities around the world that influenced and were influenced by the cultures surrounding them.47 Following the establishment of the State of Israel, American Jews and others reorganized their communities to make support for Israel into a civil religion—in which nationalism functions as a religion—around which they could build Jewish identity within and beyond religious institutions. Mainstream American Jewish organizations have encouraged Jews to connect to Israel through philanthropy, education, tourism, lobbying, and business ventures.
American Zionism provided a model of a religiously inflected attachment to place that Jews practiced through consumption, one that mitigated the traditional understanding of galut as spiritual exile. From the 1950s and 1960s onward, American Jews purchased “Israeli patina menorahs and mezuzot, olivewood ashtrays, letter openers, and coins fashioned into keys chains and jewelry.”48 American Jews used Israeli objects as tools used to build American Jewish communities, providing shared physical and emotional connections to a distant place. (Some American synagogues are literally built out of “Jerusalem stone” imported from Israel.) Israeli goods provided a shared affection and longing for a distant past while creating distinctive Jewish communities in the United States, just as materials evoking nostalgia for Eastern European Jewish immigration histories would.49
To some extent, American Jews’ nostalgia reframed Ashkenazi Jews’ diaspora as an exile from Eastern Europe and urban American neighborhoods rather than from the Land of Israel. Echoing their Zionist consumer habits, American Jews purchased tchotchkes like synagogue tzedakah boxes and Fiddler on the Roof snow globes. But nostalgia for European origins also existed comfortably alongside Zionism. American Jewish nostalgia for immigrant homelands does not necessarily replace a connection to Israel, and the Jews in this study have a range of opinions about Zionism, representative of the current range of American Jewish opinions about the State of Israel.50 Nonetheless, as debates about Israel’s policies have increasingly divided American Jews, a turn toward nostalgic consumption of immigration history has provided a seemingly more unifying practice for members of this diverse community.
Popular Culture and Public History
As American Jews have grown increasingly distant from the objects of communal longing—urban immigrant neighborhoods and imagined Eastern European shtetl origins—popular culture and public history have played an increasingly essential role in American Jews’ lives. Despite American Jews’ general fears about a lack of Jewish differentiation, Jews have rarely feared engagement with the materials of American popular culture. Popular culture on its own did not threaten Jewish continuity; failing to complement it with a firm grounding in Jewish religion, culture, and traditions did. Ostensibly non-religious institutions of public history and popular cultural materials now instruct Jews and other Americans on how to feel Jewish, including how to long for particular Jewish pasts. Institutions such as museums and restaurants make nostalgia a consumable product as well as an emotion and a religious practice, while popular culture and public history function as religious objects and sites.
This is not altogether new. Jews have long identified forms of engagement with material culture as religious and spiritual practices. As religious studies scholar Vanessa Ochs explains, “in Judaism, the spiritual is material.”51 When they recall mythic ancestors who were freed from slavery in Egypt at the Passover seder or display family photographs of grandparents, American Jews engage in the mitzvah of remembering forebears, creating a transhistorical sense of community as Jews pass on to their children the sensibilities they believe were held by past generations. American Jews’ practices reveal them engaging with popular culture and public history in ways that are not merely entertaining but point to the sacred values by which they organize their lives.52
In the nineteenth- and the twentieth-century United States, the popular heritage narratives of American Jews, like those of other American ethnic and religious groups, focused on Jewish patriotic participation in the American Revolution and the Civil War. Through these stories, they claimed essential roles in the major events of American history to underscore the nation’s acceptance of Judaism.53 While this Jewish heritage work focusing on the formation of the United States persists—it is notably present in the Smithsonian-affiliated National Museum of American Jewish History, which reopened on Philadelphia’s Independence Mall in 2005—it has been largely overshadowed by the emphasis on European heritage in the white ethnic revival that began in the 1960s and 1970s.
American public history changed in both form and content in the 1970s. Public histories of the American Revolution and the Civil War had used material culture such as relics, replicas, and monuments to represent the past as both distant and different from the present. But starting in the 1970s, Americans increasingly and explicitly wanted to feel something about the past as well as remember it. They were eager for personal, emotional connections to the past in a variety of popular cultural forms—not just in museums, but also in film, television, novels, fashion, music, games, and toys. Public history increasingly became an emotional enterprise, and it could be found everywhere.54 The creators, staff, and participants at the institutions examined in this book encourage patrons to use their materials to form emotional connections to Jewish pasts that are inaccessible by other means. As the Jewish Museum of Florida told its prospective members, “This Museum is about you—and for you.”55
As this new nostalgia for white ethnic pasts got underway, American Jewish nostalgia found its cultural lodestone in Fiddler on the Roof, the 1964 Broadway musical and 1971 film based on short stories written in Yiddish by Sholem Aleichem between 1894 and 1914. While Sholem Aleichem’s original tales of Tevye the Dairyman were funny and bitingly sarcastic critiques of European Jews trying—and often failing—to respond to social changes at the turn of the twentieth century, late-twentieth-century American Jews approached the stories with a serious sentimentality. Jewish and non-Jewish audiences used Fiddler’s story of Eastern European shtetl life to respond to the turbulent social changes of the 1960s, including women’s liberation, the Civil Rights Movement, and representations of the United States as a nation of immigrants. Fiddler
