large number of American Jews practice the activities we will examine in the following chapter—including people of all ages, all genders, and all and no denominational affiliations and types of Jewish practice—though this number is not easily quantified. On the whole, the subjects of these case studies have not received considerable sustained attention from scholars of American Jews. Each of these activities takes place largely outside of traditional Jewish religious institutions, and they do not require or lend themselves to denominational affiliation, though they can be comfortable companions to traditional religious practices. Examined together, these activities demonstrate that engagement with nostalgic materials constitutes a religious experience for many American Jews, uniting them through shared feelings toward a particular past.
Each case study focuses on familial and communal concerns in different ways: Jewish genealogists focus on tracing their own ancestral lines but build local and digital organizations; historic synagogues are institutions that tell local, communal histories; children’s books created and distributed by particular organizations use family histories to create generalized narratives that draw children and parents into a shared emotional response; and restaurants are sites of commerce that include patrons in the restaurateurs’ family stories. At the same time, each case study examines the complementary relationships among familial, communal, and institutional Jewish histories. Nostalgia functions differently in each of the case studies, as alternately authoritative, intimate, playful, ironic, or elegiac ways of longing for the past and providing meaning in the present. American Jewish nostalgia is at once individualistic, familial, and communal, as well as commercial, cultural, and religious. In all four case studies, this nostalgia relies heavily on material culture, organizational structures, and transactional relations to teach and induce emotional connections to a purportedly authentic past.
Like Holocaust remembrance and Zionist advocacy, the other primary narratives of twentieth-century and twenty-first-century American Judaism, nostalgia for Eastern European Jewish immigrant pasts helps American Jews engage seriously and deeply with their place in Jewish history. As with Holocaust commemoration and support for the State of Israel, Jewish nostalgia can be a brief activity or a dedicated lifelong pursuit. While Holocaust commemoration focuses on Jewish suffering and support for Israel can tell an uplifting narrative of Jewish progress, nostalgia looks backward from the vantage point of an ostensible American Jewish success. The materials of American Jewish nostalgia express longing for an imagined period, before the Holocaust, when Jews suffered from poverty but were comforted by the warmth of strong familial and communal narratives.
To pursue this research on the commonplace practices and emotions of American Jewish nostalgia, I have conducted interviews, engaged in short-term ethnographic research, and analyzed material and digital culture. I observed participants in genealogical society meetings and staff and visitors at historic synagogues. I conducted interviews with over sixty people in fields related to American Jewish nostalgia, including genealogists, authors, and software designers working on family history research; staff members and volunteers at heritage sites; philanthropists; authors, illustrators, and editors of children’s books; Jewish communal professionals; and restaurateurs, cookbook authors, journalists, and entrepreneurs in the food industry. When possible, I conducted interviews in person, in my interlocutors’ places of business, their homes, or in coffee shops convenient to their home or work. The wide-ranging nature of my research also led me to conduct a number of telephone interviews in order to capture as many voices as possible. I conducted one group interview, a conversation with board members of the Jewish Genealogical Society in New York.
If particular types of American Jewish culture can serve as American Jewish religion, then the creators of these forms might be considered new kinds of Jewish communal leaders or religious experts. The following chapters focus most on the Jewish genealogists, museum staff members, children’s book authors, and restaurateurs who create the nostalgic materials of American Jewish popular culture. They are Jews who have rarely been recognized as leaders or experts either in scholarship or in Jewish communal conversations, and they do not necessarily see themselves as Jewish leaders. Often, staff members at such organizations deliberately minimize their own impact, emphasizing the authority of their patrons. Acknowledging the leadership of these content creators points to the importance of the new types of Jewish communal organization. Examining them as Jewish communal and religious leaders reveals how they now guide American Jews at least as much as those whose Jewish communal leadership has been recognized throughout much of the twentieth century, such as rabbis and directors of Jewish Federations, American Zionist organizations, and certain other Jewish non-profits.
At the same time, following the approach of lived religion rather than the earlier scholarly model of popular religion—which focused scholarly attention on laypeople rather than clergy—I resist an overly rigid distinction between the practices of “leaders” and “everyday practitioners.” Scholars of lived religion pay attention to the ways that both leaders and laypeople engage in the same patterns of behavior.26 I complement my interviews with institutional organizers and content creators with ethnographic observations of casual visitors to Jewish genealogical society talks and meetings, tourists at historic synagogues, and patrons at restaurants. I also take seriously online reviews of the programs, institutions, and materials I examine. The activities examined in this book are typically thought of as leisure activities, and they can take up as much time and money as one allows. Interviewing those who devote the most time to these activities affords us the clearest perspective on strongly held ideas about these activities and on those who shape their development, but I repeatedly balance this perspective with attention to those who engage more passively with these activities. The fact that nostalgia may recede into the background of an American Jew’s life, only to reappear repeatedly in different contexts, points to its role in structuring individual experiences into broader narratives of meaning—the very work of religion.
In addition to interviews and participant observation, my research draws upon my study of American Jewish material and digital culture, including family trees, memoirs, historic spaces, museum exhibits, illustrated children’s books, dolls, menus, meals, websites, online reviews, and other iterations of the cultures of American Jews. This wide-ranging research into the commercial objects and digital sites of American Jews’ lived religion allows me to make claims about the broad national phenomenon of American Jewish nostalgia as well as examine how it functions within particular locales and communities of like-minded people. While concepts such as religion, memory, and feeling are abstract and intangible, we can see how they operate among people by looking at the objects, images, and spaces they create and the conversations those items inspire.27 Nostalgic materials are often dismissed as kitschy, sentimental, and inconsequential, but they offer us a window into a central aspect of lived religion within American Judaism, the ways American Jews enact their religion on a daily basis.
The Breadth and Boundaries of Nostalgia
In providing a particular narrative of the past, American Jewish nostalgia, like all historical narratives, necessarily creates boundaries about what does and does not count as authentic and representative Jewish history. Twentieth- and twenty-first-century American Jews have continually policed authenticity by using texts, objects, and practices to make claims regarding what is and is not “really Jewish.”28 Within the practices of American Jewish nostalgia, authentic history is evaluated by the emotions it elicits.29 The authentic objects of American Jewish nostalgia are those that create an abiding emotional connection to a particular imagined past.
Standardization narrows the stories told about American Jews, but, paradoxically, it also expands who can engage with them. The story of American Jewish pasts has become expansive enough to encompass and include those whose families do not match the narrative—one does not have to be descended from New York Jews, or even be Jewish, to have a meaningful emotional connection to the past by visiting the Museum at Eldridge Street or reading a children’s book about Eastern European Jewish immigration. At the same time, the standardization of nostalgia for Eastern European Jewish heritage and its increased popularity necessarily marginalizes the communal and familial histories of Jews who do not descend
