to American Jews, as they are to other Americans. But many American Jews today understand themselves and their families through emotional and narrative frameworks provided by ostensibly non-religious institutions that—as this book argues—perform religious functions.
Definitions of religion are not only topics for academic theory. They matter in real life. Beyond internal Jewish concerns about “continuity,” defining religion in the United States has been essential to issues of religious freedom. Discussions of religious freedom have long been used to strengthen white Protestants’ claims to racial and religious supremacy, and historical and recent court cases have addressed the intersection between everyday activities and religion. Racial and religious minorities, including Jews, have deliberately defined certain practices and beliefs as religious in order to improve their status and situation in the United States.20
At the same time, scholars of lived religion help us see religion in ordinary activities generally considered “secular.” These scholars identify religion and religious practices in baseball, Coca-Cola, Tupperware, celebrity worship, weight-loss culture, and the American office, to name just a few subjects. Broadening the category of religion in this way helps us to take seriously the structures, commitments, and activities that shape everyday life. Anything can become a religious object, depending on how it is used and understood. Expanding the conventional definitions of religion to include everyday practices and materials identifies the social value placed upon them and the communities developed around them. Eating a pastrami sandwich or fangirling Kim Kardashian can be a religious activity, not just because it is personally meaningful, but because of a shared cultural framework ascribing particular kinds of meaning to those activities.21
Just as religious studies scholars have long identified practices as “religious” that practitioners themselves might not label in this way, the people I study would not necessarily call their activities nostalgic. Indeed, I do not claim that all American Jews are nostalgic or that everyone who makes, buys, and sells the materials examined here is wholly nostalgic. Rather, this book makes the case that nostalgia has become a pervasive, normative mode of American Jewish religious thought and practice, particularly through commercial practices that have become increasingly common since the 1970s.
In this book, I use the term nostalgia as a way to engage and complicate conversations about Jewish memory, history, and heritage, popular accounts of the past that give it meaning in the present. Acclaimed Jewish historian Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi identifies Jewish memory and Jewish history as “radically different relations to the past.”22 Memory is the dynamic product of community, he says, while history is the product of scholars. Yerushalmi worries that a detached Jewish history has overtaken Jewish memory. Later theorists recognize a more complex relationship between history and memory, drawing attention to the ways that Jews and other peoples may use each in the service of the other.23 For individuals and organizations, I argue, nostalgia bridges historical scholarship and social memory. It is both an individual feeling and a shared practice. Individual Jews’ feelings about the past shape and are shaped by their families, communal institutions, academic scholarship, American capitalism, and other forces.
To examine nostalgia, we need to take seriously the feminist saying, “the personal is political.” Scholars of affect theory emphasize that emotions are political, too. Individuals’ emotions and their embodied experiences are closely connected to public life, communities, and civic bodies. Identifying American Jewish nostalgia as a “public feeling” and as a religious activity highlights the connections between how individuals make and find meaning in their own lives and how communal institutions guide the emotions that we share. Like others who study public feelings, I am not overly concerned with the distinctions between “emotion,” “feeling,” and “affect.”24 These terms are all usefully imprecise, retaining ambiguity about the origins of emotions as individual expressions or as inspired by public sentiment or corporate interest.
The institutions of nostalgia that promote and enable these feelings and practices, such as the Museum at Eldridge Street, are far from the first seemingly non-religious institutions to guide American Jews’ shared emotions toward historical events. In the second half of the twentieth century, much of American Jewish communal identity rested on commemoration of the Holocaust and support for the State of Israel. Holocaust museums and memorials increased throughout the country, and organizations that raised money for Israeli groups served as major social and political outlets for American Jews. Though the institutions of Holocaust commemoration and American Zionism were ostensibly nonsectarian, they created and upheld guiding sacred narratives for American Jews. They were so closely tied up with American Jewish identity that visiting and supporting Holocaust commemorations and Israel could be considered a religious activity on a par with attending a Passover seder. In their American contexts, both Holocaust commemoration and Zionist advocacy have conveyed stories about Jewish pasts, presents, and futures, connecting American Jews to present-day Jewish communities and stories about ancestors—precisely the work of religion.25 Recognizing Holocaust commemoration and Zionist advocacy as widespread Jewish religious activities counters Cohen and Eisen’s claims about the dissolution of Jewish communal institutions and intergenerational commitment.
Alongside these trends, the focus on Eastern European Jewish history and Jewish immigration to the United States has grown steadily since the 1970s, providing an additional narrative of modern Jewish history. In the early twenty-first century, this narrative has come to fruition as another significant mode of being Jewish in the United States. Nostalgia for immigrant pasts emphasizes American Jews’ journey toward success in the American middle class. The materials of American Jewish nostalgia are a sign of liberal American Jews’ faith in progress—the past was bad, but things are better now, and they will continue to improve. In this, it provides early twenty-first century American Jews with a communal narrative that can be more cheerful than the remembrance of the Holocaust and less communally divisive than Israeli politics. It is also more comfortable for American Jews to welcome non-Jews’ participation in Jewish nostalgia than in commemorations of the Holocaust or support for Israel, in which non-Jewish voices may be seen as secondary or even threatening. At the same time, just as many Jews have seen Holocaust commemoration and Zionist activism as supporting one another and not mutually exclusive, American Jewish nostalgia is not necessarily a replacement for the other two narratives but can also complement them. All three narratives provide stories of progress that structure an approach to Jewish pasts and presents.
Case Studies
This book examines four case studies of the institutions and materials of American Jewish nostalgia: researching and recording American Jews’ genealogy; the use of historic synagogues as heritage sites, such as the Eldridge Street Synagogue; the informal pedagogical tools of children’s books and dolls; and a Jewish culinary revival, including “artisanal” kosher-style restaurants. The following chapters trace the development of American Jewish nostalgia from the 1970s through the present day, each focusing on a specific case study as well as a certain decade, in chronological order. While each of these pursuits might be an interesting example of American Jewish culture in its own right, together they provide a window into the ways in which American Jews have created Jewish religious activities through supposedly secular institutions in which individuals can preserve, produce, and engage with materials that convey nostalgia for particular Jewish pasts. Each of these cases provides ways of emotionally engaging with Eastern European Jewish culture in America, building on a normative story about Central and Eastern European Jews who immigrated to the United States around the turn of the century.
Each case study highlights a different aspect of American Jewish nostalgia for Eastern European pasts and the integral ways in which material culture, institutional organization, and feelings construct American Jews’ religious practices and identities. These are exceptionally useful examples of American Jewish nostalgia, but they are far from the only ones. This book does not present a comprehensive overview of American Jewish nostalgia but rather focuses on examples that ably demonstrate the connection between material culture, institutions, and religious practice for American Jews as
