power of this narrative is so dominant that sites of public history that do not fit the pattern of Jewish nostalgia for Eastern Europe are often folded into it. As we will see, the Touro Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island dates back to 1763, but it is presented to the public with the nostalgic themes of longing for immigrant pasts that derive from the presentation of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century synagogues. Likewise, some of the restaurateurs we will meet incorporate dishes from the cuisines of Sephardi and Mizrachi Jews (Jews of Spanish or Portuguese descent and Middle Eastern Jews) into their menus, but these are generally side dishes that do not distract from the Eastern European-focused nostalgia that propels their enterprises. American Jewish nostalgia, particularly nostalgic commerce, can incorporate stories that deviate from the standard narrative without losing the magnetic power of its central story.
Family histories that do not fit the story of Eastern European immigration rest more uneasily alongside the standard narrative. Those adopted into Jewish families are also encouraged to feel nostalgia for their biological and adoptive family histories. While genealogist Arthur Kurzweil told me that he prides himself on his work helping adoptees find their biological families, his Jewish genealogy manual also strongly suggests that adoptees research the family history of their adoptive parents. “Just as they adopted you as their child, you can adopt their history as your own,” he optimistically advises.30 This is a generous view of what family history means, but it may also narrow the possibilities of what ancestries of Jews may mean. This advice, too, does not help adult converts to Judaism find their way into the geographies of America Jewish nostalgia.
Those whose families do not fit traditional models in other ways run into difficulties, too. Rabbi Jo David found this when she taught Jewish genealogy to a religious school class in the early 1990s. When her students handed in their genealogy charts, one girl had only completed her matrilineal line. As David later told me, when she pressed her student on the incomplete assignment, her student said, “I don’t have a father.” David asked if her parents were divorced or if her father had passed away. “No,” the student replied. “For you to be here, there had to be a man in your mother’s life somewhere!” David said, exasperated. “No,” the student said. “My mother went to a sperm bank.”31 Reflecting on this moment years later, David told me that the episode taught her not to make assumptions about people’s family backgrounds. She had learned to be more attentive to children of single parents and those with gay and lesbian parents, and she would have handled the situation differently. As an adult in the twenty-first century, David’s student might find her mother’s sperm donor through DNA testing and genealogy websites, and she might make choices about the presence or absence of her biological father and other paternal relatives in her life. Still, the story points to how genealogy research, and American Jewish nostalgia more broadly, rests on assumptions about biological inheritance and normative family structures. Those whose family structures do not fit a normative pattern are often shoehorned into traditional models and must work hard to make these models accommodate their family histories.
But, on the whole, the mitzvah of nostalgia for Eastern European immigration history is flexible enough to accommodate the diverse religious needs of American Jews. It is suitable for those who only have time and interest to devote occasional moments to it and those who pursue extended engagements with it. Clinical psychologist Sallyann Amdur Sack, an early leader of Jewish genealogy, told me that her interest in genealogy began when her fifteen-year-old daughter, Kathy, came across Dan Rottenberg’s newly published Finding Our Fathers: A Guidebook to Jewish Genealogy in a bookstore in the summer of 1977. Kathy handed the book to her mother, saying, “Here, I brought you a present. I want to learn all about my ancestors.” Delighted to spend time with her teenage daughter, Sack followed Rottenberg’s instructions to write to relatives, asking for permission to interview them. “And then,” Sack told me, “because Kathy was fifteen, the inevitable happened. She got a boyfriend.” Kathy lost interest in the project, but her mother was still receiving replies to their letters. “And it was so fascinating,” Sack said. “People who do genealogy, or do Jewish genealogy, will tell you it’s like a virus. It just sort of bites you. In any case, I started answering all the letters and corresponding. And before I knew it, it was just an obsession.”32
As in Sack’s experience, American Jewish nostalgia is practiced by Jews of all ages and Jews with varied schedules and attention spans. While retirees may have more time and financial resources to devote to protracted genealogical research or to work as a docent at a historic synagogue, one may get one’s DNA tested, flip through a historic synagogue’s Instagram account, read a picture book, or pick up a pastrami sandwich without a great deal of fuss. This is American Jewish religion—the commonplace personal practices and feelings that are mediated and standardized by certain materials and institutions. These are the everyday activities that connect Jews to past, present, and future Jewish communities. They are structures and feelings by which American Jews are bound together.
1
How Do You Solve a Problem like Nostalgia?
I do not want anything to happen in Jewish history without it happening to me.
—Elie Wiesel, quoted in Arthur Kurzweil, From Generation to Generation: How to Trace Your Jewish Genealogy and Family History (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2004)
Tiny replicas of the façade of the Jewish Museum of Florida appear throughout the museum. Located in Miami Beach’s South Beach neighborhood, the institution is housed in two former synagogue buildings. The museum’s main entrance is the front of a 1936 synagogue building designed by the well-known Floridian Art Deco architect Henry Hohauser.1 In the museum’s gift shop, located by the front entrance, one may purchase Jewish ritual objects—tzedakah (charity) boxes and mezuzah cases (ritual objects affixed to doorframes)—in the shape of the Hohauser building with which to decorate one’s home or give as a gift.2 In an amusingly self-referential gesture, mezuzahs with the Hohauser façade hang on the internal doorways of the passageway between the two buildings. As they pass between museum spaces, tourists can admire the image of the building even as they stand within it. More traditionally minded Jewish visitors might ritually touch a museum-shaped mezuzah and kiss their fingers as they walk within the museum.
Such hollow, resin miniatures of synagogue buildings are ubiquitous in Jewish gift shops and on websites of Judaica retailers. One can buy replicas of the grand synagogues of Europe, the landmarks of ancient Israel, and American synagogues. They are the kind of tchotchke that might be easily dismissed as an inconsequential item of Jewish culture, not significantly representative of Jews’ beliefs, values, and practices. Alternatively, they might be understood as religious because of their traditional forms, as ritual objects fulfilling the religious mitzvot of giving charity and hanging mezuzahs. But these miniatures also should be understood as religious objects for another reason: They encourage the American Jewish mitzvah of longing for an imagined communal Eastern European Jewish immigration history.
Figure 1.1. Mezuzah depicting the façade of the Jewish Museum of Florida. Photo by author, 2012.
“I would like others to believe as I do—that it is a mitzvah for each of us, in our own unique way, to do what we can to honor our Jewish ancestors—to learn about, preserve, and perpetuate our memories of them and the world in which they lived,” Jewish genealogist Steven Lasky wrote in a cover story for Dorot: The Journal of the Jewish Genealogical Society in 2007.3 Drawing on the past for affective meaning in the present, the mitzvah of nostalgia is both praiseworthy and something American Jews must do. American Jewish nostalgia articulates shared narratives of the past and honors ancestors, creating community in the present and passing on certain sentiments, affections, and values to the next generation. Understanding nostalgia as a mitzvah complicates simplistic, if common, divisions between “religious” and “secular” Jews and between religious and secular Jewish activities.
