weddings and bar and bat mitzvahs.57 The Fiddler song “Sunrise, Sunset,” explains religious studies scholar Ronald L. Grimes, “is Jewishly nondenominational in the way that commencement prayers are Christianly nondenominational.”58 Here, nondenominational in no way means “non-religious,” but rather Jewishly religious and broadly accessible to those both within and beyond religious boundaries.
As I researched American Jewish nostalgia, Fiddler was ever-present in conversations and materials. In the Avotaynu Guide to Jewish Genealogy, Harold Rhode advises Jewish genealogists to think critically about the recorded and unrecorded pasts of Eastern European Jews. “Registration with the authorities in Eastern Europe invariably meant trouble,” he explains. He continues,
One way to understand this is to remember what Tevye, the main character in “Fiddler on the Roof,” asked the shtetl rabbi: “Is there a blessing for the czar?” The rabbi answers: “A blessing for the czar? Of course. May G-d keep the czar far, far away from us!” This short exchange sums up how our ancestors viewed government.59
More than most American Jews, Rhode knows how to do archival and scholarly research to trace his genealogy and place his ancestors in their historical contexts. Nonetheless, Rhode, like many others, employs Fiddler on the Roof as a nostalgic referent, a shorthand way to gesture toward a bygone world that contemporary Jews know primarily through popular culture.60
New forms of American Jewish public history and popular culture followed suit. In the mid-1970s, inspired by the “roots movement” that was born of the popularity of Alex Haley’s 1976 book Roots: The Saga of an American Family and the ABC mini-series the following year, American Jewish genealogists began to organize and educate themselves, writing manuals and creating Jewish genealogical societies. A decade later, historians and preservationists started paying attention in earnest to the role historic synagogues might play in Jewish public life. In the 1990s, mainstream publishing houses started publishing increasing numbers of children’s books depicting stories of Jewish immigration as part of the American story of multiculturalism. And in the early twenty-first century, the Eastern European Jewish culinary revival began in earnest.
These new forms of American Jewish public history encourage a more active longing for Eastern European Jewish immigration history. American Jews could connect to this past, and other Jewish histories, through a variety of older types of Jewish institutions and media, such as passively watching a movie or performance. The materials of the new Jewish public history lead American Jews to practice a more active longing for this Jewish past, beyond expressing a desire to connect to it. Longing activates their agency in this religious practice beyond a passive connection. Jewish genealogists actively research their family histories; visitors at historic synagogues step into the footprints of past congregants; parents read illustrated books aloud and children are encouraged to play with dolls; and restaurant patrons literally consume their longing for Eastern European Jewish immigration history.
While some forms of nostalgic popular culture are accessible for audiences of all ages—like the catchy tunes, memorable dances, and iconic images of Fiddler on the Roof, which one can view as a film or high school play or Broadway performance—other forms of nostalgic pop culture are specifically designed for children of certain ages and their parents. The institutions that create and distribute children’s books and dolls help parents to prime children to understand American Jewish values, including nostalgia. As Dianne Hess, executive editor at Scholastic Press, which has published many Jewish children’s books, told me, “Most kids don’t have any Jewish background now and don’t have that nostalgia for the immigrant grandparents. And for me, it’s like you can’t lose that, because that’s sort of the glue that’s been holding the culture together.”61 Some of the books Hess publishes, particularly the work of acclaimed children’s book author Eric Kimmel, address this perceived disconnect. The commercial exchange of certain Jewish children’s books reconstitutes nostalgic longing, passing it from one generation to the next.62
Restaurants, too, can be institutions of public history, and food is an essential but ephemeral form of popular culture. The immediate intimacy of eating encourages asking and answering questions about one’s self, identity, and community, and Jewish restaurants encourage patrons to relate family stories.63 “A lot of people come in and they want to tell us their experiences they’ve had with this food growing up,” said Ilyse Lerner, owner of On Rye, a deli in Washington, D.C.64 The restaurateurs and purveyors of Jewish food examined in this book relate stories of their family histories and of Jewish communal histories through their food, décor, and presentation. Like all sites of public history, these eateries have a particular point of view. For Karen Adelman, co-owner of Saul’s Deli in Berkeley, California, “the principal story” told in Saul’s Deli is that of “Ashkenazi Jews from the Old World and then New York, and then they continue going west” until they reach California, making Saul’s Deli—and its patrons—the apotheosis of Jewish history.
Looking beyond traditional religious institutions and practices to ostensibly secular sites of popular culture and public history reveals that nostalgic institutions and practices are an alternate, as yet under-appreciated, way of being Jewish and of maintaining Jewish continuity. These institutions and practices help Jews establish and sustain an emotional connection to an imagined transhistorical Jewish community. Nostalgia helps us to expand the concept of religion, demonstrating that religious meaning is contingent upon practices and narratives, not only on beliefs, attendance at religious services, and participation in established institutions. Once we think to look for it, we can see Jewish religious meaning and experience in a variety of seemingly non-religious settings.
Beyond the door of the synagogue or Jewish community center, American Jews’ religious lives are rich, complex, and hard to pin down. American Jews with a broad array of religious affiliations and those with no affiliation engage in the ostensibly non-religious activities of Jewish genealogical research, visiting Jewish historic sites, consuming markedly Jewish food, and purchasing books and toys that teach the mitzvah of Jewish nostalgia to their children. These activities can provide personally meaningful, emotionally driven engagement with American Jewish pasts that inspire longing for Jewish communities across time and space. Attention to American Jewish nostalgia helps us to look for American Judaism in new places, identifying robust forms of religious meaning in works of public and private history and emphasizing the centrality of emotional norms in American Jewish religion.
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