. the program of an organization.”17 Many of these manifestly Jewish organizations included apparently secular groups. A large number were devoted to supporting the State of Israel. Many groups focused on memorializing and publicizing the murder of European Jews and the destruction of Jewish communities in the Holocaust.18 Other Jews organized around liberal social justice causes, including the Civil Rights Movement. By the 1960s and 1970s, Jews were participating in the broader counterculture movements as well as turning countercultural critiques towards Jewish communities.19
In the second half of the twentieth century, Jewish organizations were plentiful, but synagogue attendance was declining. However, even in the heyday of American synagogues, attendance at services was never particularly high: One 1945 survey found that only 24 percent of Jews claimed to attend religious services at least once a month, compared to 81 percent of Catholics and 62 percent of Protestants, and only nine percent of Jews claimed to attend at least once a week. By 1970, only eight percent of Jewish household heads attended religious services fifty times or more per year, and fifty-five percent attended fewer than four times per year.20 However, this does not mean that Jewish communities were dissolving. Instead, it means that attending public religious services was not where most Jews found existential meaning. Rather, the sacred relationships of Jewish community extended beyond these conventional indicators of religion.
Mid-twentieth-century synagogues served the dual primary functions of providing a place for adults to associate with other Jews and to socialize and educate children as Jews.21 By the end of the twentieth century, synagogues competed for these roles with a variety of other institutions. The organizations we will examine in the following chapters—Jewish genealogical societies, historic synagogues, publishers and distributors of children’s books, and Jewish restaurants—are some of the many institutions that provide these functions. These organizations serve many of the same essential functions of the mid-twentieth-century synagogue: facilitating spending time with other Jews, socializing and educating children, and placing these activities within a historical narrative. Like synagogues, the institutions of American Jewish nostalgia create imagined communities, allowing participants to think of themselves in terms of sacred relationships with those around them as well as with Jews in other places and times, both past and present.
In the early twenty-first century, American Jews with a broad array of religious affiliations and no affiliation engage in the ostensibly nonreligious activities of Jewish genealogical research, attending Jewish historic sites, consuming markedly Jewish food, and purchasing books and toys that teach Jewish heritage to their children. These are mundane activities, yet engagement with them can provide a core emotional connection to a Jewish identity. When social scientists measure such practices, the way they phrase survey questions may mask respondents’ views of their significance. When Pew asked respondents, “What’s essential to being Jewish?” only fourteen percent of Jews found “eating traditional Jewish foods” to be essential to their Jewish identities. An additional 39 percent described the activity as important but not essential.22 The very wording of the question, however, reflects the Pew Research Center’s essentialist ideas about what counts as “religion” for American Jews. Eating traditional Jewish foods, particularly in a public setting such as a deli, may be a meaningful part of a Jew’s life, but it may be too ordinary, too easily overlooked, to be described as essential or important. Moreover, the survey’s essentialist phrasing makes it unclear whether the respondent is solely reporting on his or her own practice or pronouncing on the boundaries of Jewish identity and declaring the practice mandatory. Commonplace activities such as eating Jewish foods are often quietly fundamental to religious identities rather than explicitly identified as essential to them.
By claiming as religious those activities generally recognized as secular, I highlight the significance of shared meanings and practices for Jewish individuals, families, and communities. Like other Americans, American Jews are not necessarily very good at articulating and recognizing sacred practices, places, or narratives in their lives. Activities like eating Jewish foods may provide a connection to Jewish history through consuming traditional dishes. It often provides a community in the present, too, as one is surrounded by others doing the same thing—much like attending a synagogue, but with perhaps more immediate gratification.
In North America, both “religion” and “spirituality” have been identified with Christian notions of belief and theology to such an extent that both scholars and practitioners have failed to recognize the meaning-making practices of other traditions as religious.23 The inadequacy of common uses of these terms is particularly evident for traditions and practices that place little or no focus on theistic beliefs, as is the case for much of American Judaism. Examining the material religion and consumption of American Jewish nostalgia expands the concept of religion and demonstrates that religious meaning is contingent upon practices and narratives as well as beliefs and occurs in a variety of supposedly non-religious settings.
Susan King, an early leader in Jewish genealogy who developed online platforms connecting Jewish genealogists, told me that, for her, “doing the research and finding the truth is a spiritual journey.” She explained, “I am a Jew, I will always be a Jew, I just don’t have to practice all the quote ‘religious’ beliefs to be spiritual. . . . In this lifetime I have followed my truth. I have done service to the community.”24 For King, the work of Jewish genealogy, including both family history research and building online communities of genealogists, is the pursuit of her “truth” and sacred work on behalf of Jews living and dead. Like many other American Jews, King shies away from the word “religious,” which many American Jews associate with formal organizations and mandated activities, such as belonging to a synagogue and following dietary laws. Nonetheless, we can understand King’s work as religious because it provides existential meaning for her and her clients by placing them in a meaningful relationship with individuals and communities in the past and the present. King’s genealogical research is in line with an understanding of the religiosity of activities that provide social and existential meaning in Jews’ lives, even when they do not define those activities as religious.
Understanding nostalgic practices as religious activities challenges assumptions about the limited role of religion among non-Orthodox Jews in modern America. Doing so highlights normative practices that American Jews hold in common across and beyond the standard spectrum of American Jewish movements. The American Jews in this book identify with all and no denominational structures. They are people of all genders and all ages. They live throughout the United States and have a variety of economic situations. Nostalgia is a standardized mode of American Judaism that fosters a particular, affective response to the past, cutting across the statistical categories of religious affiliation, gender, class, and age that delineate American Jews.
It is not incidental that when I asked Robert Friedman, the former director of the Genealogy Institute at the Center for Jewish History in New York, how he got started as a genealogist, he began by explaining, “I didn’t have a particularly religious upbringing. I did have a bar mitzvah, but I didn’t really identify with the process, particularly.” Recalling this typical American Jewish experience, he laughed, and continued, “However, I was extremely close with my father’s parents, who were Hungarian immigrants who came to this country in 1921. And as I was growing up, my grandfather used to tell me all kinds of stories about the old country.”25 For American Jews, emotional engagement with ancestral pasts is a religious activity, one that can take the place of or exist alongside traditional religious practices.
Thematic research on nostalgia moves beyond the scholarly distinctions between Judaism and Jewishness and beyond the simplistic divisions between “religious” and “secular” Jews; these oppositions obscure the diversity of American Jewish practice. American Jews of all types of religious affiliation, including no affiliation, engage in ostensibly nonreligious activities that provide personally meaningful engagements with American Jewish pasts. Attention to American Jewish nostalgia identifies robust forms of religious meaning in works of public and personal histories, emphasizing the centrality of emotional and commemorative norms in American and Jewish religious practices and consumer habits.26 Studying the consumption of nostalgia reveals normative
