guided the determination of which American Jews count, literally and metaphorically, and they have influenced the funding and aims of local and national Jewish communal organizations.
This book argues that the premise of American Jewish religious decline and the studies supporting a continuity crisis incorrectly identify the ways that Jews think about and practice Judaism in the United States. When Jewish communal leaders and sociologists distinguish between Jewish culture and Jewish religion, many of the ways that American Jews create individual and communal meaning in their lives are flattened or even erased. Rather than turning to—or turning only to—the institutions that have previously guided American Jewish communal life, such as synagogues, religious schools, Jewish community centers, and Jewish Federations, many American Jews are increasingly communicating Jewish values and ideas to their children by engaging with the products of museums, gift shops, restaurants, publishing companies, toy manufacturers, philanthropies, and other ostensibly secular institutions. These products are often described as Jewish cultural materials, but they are better understood as Jewish religious ones.
Religion is best understood as meaningful relationships and the practices, narratives, and emotions that create and support these relationships. Religious studies scholar Robert Orsi defines religion as networks of relationships among the living, between the living and the dead, or between humans and the divine, each of which may be highlighted to varying degrees in different contexts.9 While Orsi focuses on Catholics’ relationship to sacred figures, American Jews tend to emphasize other forms of religious relationships, such as between the living and their ancestors. “Whatever else religion might be, it is a way of describing structures by which we are bound or connected to one another,” explains religious studies scholar Kathryn Lofton.10 Understanding religion as relationships and structures makes families, communities, and memory central to religious activity.
Using this framework, religion may be found both within and beyond traditional religious institutions and rituals. A conception of religion as constituted by individuals’ relationships with families, communities, ancestors, and the divine allows us to see the significance of purportedly secular activities and organizations. It helps us consider how individuals who do not regard themselves “religious” make meaning in their lives, as well as how those who do see themselves as religious find meaning outside of traditional practices. The meaning-making work of religion helps people understand the world around them by construing or making sense of life events, relationships, and themselves. Jewish communal leaders and philanthropists bemoan the supposed decrease in American Jewish religious practice, but if we reorient where we look for American Jewish religion and reconsider how we define it, then we start to find a lot more of it.
In shifting where we look for American Jewish religion, I employ the lived religion approach of religious studies. The study of lived religion focuses our attention on the ways in which people enact their religious identities on a daily basis, through ordinary activities such as eating, cooking, shopping, reading, or entertaining.11 Most people do not recognize the practices of lived religion as religious actions similar to celebrating a holiday or reciting prayers; they are rather seen as the mundane practices that provide the structure of our lives or the leisure activities that we engage in throughout the week. Commerce, in particular, is often dismissed as a profane activity. But what we spend our money on often illuminates our values more than our words do.12 Certain commercial institutions and materials can inspire emotions, like nostalgia, that are commonly interpreted within established patterns. Using a lived religion approach, I contend that buying and selling certain items connects people to religious networks through affective norms. Buying a pastrami sandwich from a deli is an ordinary activity, but many American Jews understand the sandwich as a connection to other Jews past and present. It may remind them of other delis where they have eaten, perhaps with their families. They may think sentimentally of how Jews in the past have eaten, imagining that the sandwich links them to their ancestors. The nostalgia inspired by a pastrami sandwich, I argue, is part of American Jewish religion.
This book examines institutions and products that encourage the feeling of nostalgia for Eastern European immigrant pasts as an American Jewish religious activity, one that especially emphasizes the religious practices of remembering ancestors and creating community. For American Jews, nostalgia for Eastern European Jewish pasts functions as a mitzvah (literally, commandment). Mitzvot (plural of mitzvah) are the building blocks of Jewish religion. According to rabbinic tradition, there are not only ten commandments, but 613 divinely commanded mitzvot articulated throughout the Torah, forming the basis of halakha, Jewish law.13 In American Jews’ colloquial use, the term is even broader. Jews have long used the language of mitzvot to describe a variety of practices they consider sacred.14 In everyday speech, a mitzvah is both a divinely mandated ordinance and, more loosely, a good deed. Expanding upon biblical commands to honor one’s parents and to remember certain biblical stories, Jews have come to understand honoring their ancestors and remembering Jewish histories as mitzvot.15 American Jewish nostalgia for Eastern Europe fulfills and expands upon both of these mitzvot. Like other mitzvot, Jewish nostalgia has become both praiseworthy and obligatory for American Jews.
Looking for Judaism in All the Wrong Places
Viewing nostalgic activities such as touring the Museum at Eldridge Street or buying a pastrami sandwich at a deli as religious practices helps us to refute the claims of sociologist Steven M. Cohen and religious studies scholar Arnold M. Eisen in The Jew Within: Self, Family, and Community, a book widely acclaimed by academics, Jewish communal professionals, and lay Jews. The Jew Within identifies a “profound individualism,” an overwhelming focus on the “sovereign self,” as the guiding force of many American Jews’ lives.16 Cohen and Eisen, leading proponents of the idea of the American Jewish continuity crisis, see in this increasing individualism a fearful problem that could “contribute to the dissolution of communal institutions and intergenerational commitment” and weaken Judaism itself. In large part, this manufactured crisis rests on the premise that American Jews, especially interfaith families, lack the religiosity of their parents and grandparents.17 In the catastrophic imaginings of Cohen, Eisen, and their followers, the assimilation of individuals into a generic American culture could cause the disappearance of American Jews altogether. These fears about assimilation resist the idea that Judaism, like all human endeavors, has and always will change over time. They rely on the idea of a static Judaism and a static American culture, seeing the two as mutually exclusive rather than responsive to one another. By focusing on what they see as the waning religious practices of American Jews in institutions like synagogues, these scholars are looking for Judaism, especially public forms of American Judaism, in all the wrong places.
Bemoaning the decline of American Judaism as they recognize it, Cohen and Eisen argue that, for American Jews, “the importance of the public sphere . . . has severely diminished. The institutional arena is no longer the primary site where American Jews find and define the selves they are and the selves they want to be.” Cohen and Eisen identify synagogues, Jewish community centers, and Jewish Federations as the primary sites of public and institutional Judaism and as spaces in which American Jews could be “most themselves.”18 Looking for the content of Jewish public life, they fixate on American Jews’ public engagement with memorialization of the Holocaust and public support for Israel. They worry that American Jews’ interpretation of “universal lessons” in the history of the Holocaust signifies reduced concern for Jewish particularity and that American Jews’ criticism of Israeli governments and the Israeli Rabbinate (state-sanctioned Orthodox religious authority) implies lessened political engagement as Jews.
But where Cohen and Eisen fret about American Jews’ decreasing attention to the Holocaust and Israel, more recent studies make it clear that American Jews remain preoccupied with both issues, though how they do so may have changed.19 At the same time, American Jews do continue to define themselves through institutions, but not exclusively through the institutions or public conversations that Cohen and Eisen have in mind. American Jews have in no way “retreated from public Judaism,” but they enact their Judaism in institutions and public settings that Cohen and Eisen fail to consider.
