Redefining American Jewish Religion
In 2013, the Pew Research Center released a sociological study of American Jews, A Portrait of Jewish Americans, which, like other sociological studies of American Jews, received a great deal of attention from Jewish organizations and communal leaders.4 The Pew study identified 78 percent of the 6.7 million Americans as Jews as “Jews by religion.” The remaining 22 percent comprised the category of “Jews of no religion.”5 American Jews’ panicked public responses to the survey were ritualized and predictably alarmist. In newspapers, on blogs, and from the pulpit, American Jews repeatedly interpreted the results in ways that intensified their fears of secularism and assimilation. Jane Eisner, who had set the survey in motion when she was editor-in-chief of the prominent Jewish newspaper The Forward, told The New York Times that she found the results “devastating” because “I thought there would be more American Jews who cared about religion.” She continued, “This should serve as a wake-up call for all of us as Jews to think about what kind of community we’re going to be able to sustain if we have so much assimilation,” assuming that readers shared her understanding of “assimilation” as a negative force in American Jewish communities.6
As with previous surveys of American Jews, the buzzwords of this survey—“Jews by religion” and “Jews of no religion”—will be repeated until another national survey of American Jews is published. The previous national telephone survey of American Jews, the 2000 National Jewish Population Survey (NJPS), differentiated between “highly involved” Jews and “people of Jewish background,” seeing a wide gulf between these groups. Jewish institutions and philanthropists repeatedly employed these terms for a decade. In the 2013 survey, Pew presented American Jews with a distinction between Jews by religion and Jews of no religion, a Jewish version of the “nones,” the current sociological term used to identify the religiously unaffiliated, and a label used by Pew as well.7 As Pew researchers were quick to remind readers, Americans as a whole increasingly identify themselves as having no religion. The share of American Jews who say they have no religion (22 percent) is similar to the share of “nones” in the general public (20 percent). Still, commentators on American Jews—rabbis, sociologists, demographers, cultural critics, and others—remain concerned about what they see as an increasing number of “Jews of no religion.”8 These scholars and communal leaders see Judaism as threatened by American culture. In cultural commentaries and in sermons, they tell a widely believed story about American Jews that is one of increasing secularism, or, as American Jews say, “assimilation.” These cultural commentators imagine American Jews transitioning from a more pure or essential religious Judaism toward watered-down Jewish identities. In more catastrophic visions, they predict the potential disappearance of American Jews altogether. According to this fearful worldview, secularism could complete the destruction of world Jewry begun in the Holocaust.
But American Jews’ Jewish lives are richer and more complex than these studies and commentaries portray. Divisions between Judaism (the religion) and Jewishness (the culture) are no longer useful, if they ever were. This dichotomy assumes a distinction between beliefs and rituals, on the one hand, and the arts and lifestyle activities, such as foodways and humor, on the other hand. It ignores the overlap between ritual and lifestyle, and the influence each has on the other. In reality, activities understood as both religious and cultural provide existential meaning for American Jews and connect them to imagined transhistorical communities of Jews past, present, and future. Simplistic divisions between “religious” and “secular” Jews do not accurately describe the diversity of American Jewish practice.
At the same time, the declension narrative of assimilation and secularism, like many such narratives, is historically inaccurate. It plainly overlooks the dynamic developments in Jewish culture and ritual around the globe over the past two thousand years as well as changes and diversity in Jewish culture and religion in North America over the past three centuries. Narratives of assimilation are closely aligned with narratives of American Jewish economic success, which fail to take into account both wealthy Jews of the early twentieth century and impoverished Jews of the present day. Meanwhile, as the Pew researchers highlight at the beginning of their report, “Jews by religion” and “Jews of no religion” are both overwhelmingly proud to be Jewish and have a strong sense of belonging to the Jewish people.9 Examining practices shared by religious and secular Jews that provide fundamental narrative meanings in their lives and connect them to imagined communities in the past, present, and future allows us to see different patterns in American Jewish religion. Nostalgic practices are part of the unrecognized religious practices of American Jews across and beyond denominational structures, divisions that have become increasingly fluid.10
Moreover, the concept of religion is a modern, Protestant creation, and Jewish practices have frequently fit uncomfortably in the category of religion, despite the best efforts of Jewish thinkers to separate religious and cultural aspects of Jewish practice. Though uses of the word date back to Roman and early Christian settings, the origins of how we understand the term today lie in Protestants’ efforts to differentiate their religion from Catholicism and colonialists’ efforts to distinguish Christianity from non-Christian religions, both efforts that emphasized personal faith or belief over practice and ritual.11 The political emancipation of Jews, which allowed Jews to become citizens of modern Western nation-states over the course of the eighteenth through early twentieth centuries, required Jews to define Judaism as a voluntary religious association. Before emancipation, European Jewish communities had largely governed themselves. As newly minted citizens in modern nation-states, Jews gave up their communal autonomy and used the language of religion to articulate themselves as a group. But traditional understandings of “religion,” emphasizing individual, private, and voluntary confessions of faith, have rested uneasily with Jewish realities, which have a greater focus on communities and practices.12
In the United States, Jews continued to characterize religion as an individual matter of belief and choice rather than one mandated by ethnicity and community. American Jews have created dynamic communal arrangements and rituals, but many of these activities are dismissed as mere cultural habits, insignificant activities without religious implications. In the multiculturalism of the late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century United States, religious habits are seen as distinctive to particular groups, while cultural habits are understood as analogous across different groups. Culture is seen as something can be shared with outsiders, while religious practices are limited to adherents. For American Jews—who rarely emphasize belief, often share religious practices with non-Jewish family members, and transmit communal identity through ostensibly secular activities—this divide between religion and culture is overdrawn.13
In the 1950s, a time of American church growth in general, American Jewish leaders worked to frame their shared endeavors as a religion. Throughout World War I, World War II, and the postwar years, the American government, the military, and religious leaders viewed democracy and religious faith as shared endeavors. In contrast to fascists who identified as “Christian” and anti-religious communists, they articulated American democracy as a “Judeo-Christian” endeavor, resting on the three pillars of Protestantism, Catholicism, and Judaism. Participating in these political conversations, Jewish leaders employed the language of religion in order to demonstrate Jews’ Americanness.14 This rhetoric also helped Jews of European ancestry identify as white by framing Judaism as a religious rather than a racial minority.15
In the postwar years, synagogue building and membership burgeoned as Jews, like other white Americans, reorganized themselves in the newly built suburbs. Mid-century sociologists of American Jews “noted the paradox of Jews defining themselves overwhelmingly by religion while at the same time showing indifference and apathy for actual religious practice.”16 Perhaps this is because what sociologists recognized as “actual religious practice” did not adequately capture the realities of American Judaism. In fact, the trends of the 1950s should be recognized as the exception and not the norm for American Jews. In the decades following World War II, American Jews organized themselves aggressively, but not necessarily through synagogue memberships. “To be a Jew is to belong
