Jews’ relation to history. Emotional connections to narratives about familial and communal pasts, and engagement with materials representing those narratives, are not merely cultural activities but religious ones.
Histories of Nostalgia
Like religion, nostalgia is a term that is often taken for granted but that has a complicated history. Scholars and cultural critics have referred to nostalgia and the related concept of sentimentality with derision, dismissing both as inauthentic and overly feminine emotions. At their worst, they may be considered “dangerous, like any ready-made emotion.” They have been dismissed as prefabricated feelings that allow the absence of individual, reflective thinking and subsequent abdication of personal responsibility.27 Philosopher Michael Tanner condemns sentimentality as a “disease of the feelings” and an “excuse for indulgence.” “The feelings which are worth having are those which it costs an effort to have,” Tanner proclaims.28 Recognizing nostalgia as a backward-facing sentimentality, historian Charles Maier calls nostalgia “coffee table longing” and a “stereotyped yearning.”29
In contrast, I argue that nostalgia is not merely reductive; it can also be productive. It reduces complicated histories to an accessible narrative, certainly, but it also produces personal and communal meaning for people of all genders. Even as critics disdain it as an inauthentic emotion, nostalgia fulfills individuals’ search for an authentic past, creating communal cohesion through shared religious affect and consumption. American Jewish nostalgia is “a structure of feeling,” an emotional reaction to the past that is learned and taught.30 While academics and others have disparaged nostalgia for its emphasis on exaggerated emotion, it is, in fact, a way of finding one’s place in the world and of laying claim to the past. The institutions of American Jewish nostalgia encourage their patrons to claim ancestral heritages in ways that are meaningful beyond simplistic divisions among religion, spirituality, and culture.
Though we take nostalgia for granted today as an emotion, it is, like religion, a supremely modern concept. Initially a diagnosable and curable disease, nostalgia was first identified by Johannes Hofer in his 1688 dissertation in Basel. Hofer diagnosed young Swiss mercenaries longing for their native land with a term he coined from the Greek nosos, return home, and algos, sorrow. Subsequent scholars and medics built upon Hofer’s “disorder of the imagination.” The Enlightenment-era neurologist Philippe Pinel described the symptoms, beginning with “a sad, melancholy appearance . . . countenance at times lifeless,” progressing to “a rather constant torpor” broken by fits of weeping while asleep. The worst cases refused to leave their beds, remaining obstinately silent and refusing food and drink, leading to malnutrition and eventual death. Unlike the more philosophical ailment of melancholia, which befell elite intellectuals such as monks and philosophers, nostalgia was a lowbrow disease, afflicting soldiers, sailors, and country people who had moved to the cities. Political and military leaders were particularly worried about the unstable and contagious nature of nostalgia, as the infirmity of longing for distant homelands both enforced and challenged the emerging concepts of nationalism and patriotism.31 Treatments included leeches, purges, “hypnotic emulsions,” opium, and blood-letting. A Russian general in 1733 found terror successfully restorative—he only had to bury alive two or three incapacitated nostalgic soldiers before the outbreak subsided. But the only certain cure remained a return home.32
Americans have often had an ambivalent and contested relationship with nostalgia as a condition of acute homesickness. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Americans of European descent considered homesickness for Europe a mark of a refined character. By the time of the market revolution in the nineteenth century, however, white American men idealized the self-made man, who conquered his homesickness and whose rugged individualism supported capitalist activity.33 Nostalgia’s medical associations proved surprisingly resilient, too. As late as World War II, the U.S. Surgeon General included nostalgia on a list of contagious disorders that might “spread with the speed of an epidemic” through induction centers.34
But even as some Americans—especially male intellectuals—have eschewed nostalgia in favor of personal histories emphasizing rugged individualism, sentimentality and nostalgia have long been an essential part of American Protestant piety. Sentimental materials are those that “appeal to tender feelings” to solicit an ethical or political response.35 Sentimentality blurs the boundaries between recognized categories of spirituality, religion, literary culture, and popular culture. In the nineteenth century, this was particularly evident in Christian writings by and for middle-class women that aimed to reshape American morality. The broadly popular materials of sentimental novels, poems, and hymns established Protestant women as religious leaders by presenting them as moral authorities. Harriet Beecher’s Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin is only the most famous example of this genre.36 Sentimentality and nostalgia would remain essential to American evangelicalism through the present day. For American Protestants, sentimentality and nostalgia strengthen emotional connections to leaders’ religious messages, identify the family as a sacred but fragile nucleus of Christianity, and fuel political efforts to influence national mores.37 American Jewish nostalgia would draw on this American Protestant legacy by making similar connections between emotion and morality, emphasizing the sanctity of family, and linking religious nostalgia to American patriotism.
In addition to its American Protestant roots, American Jewish nostalgia has deep roots in nineteenth-century European Judaism. Nostalgia for imagined Eastern European shtetls (Yiddish for “town”; used to refer to small, predominately Jewish towns) can be traced to nineteenth-century Europe, when Jews entered mainstream European society as recently emancipated citizens.38 Where nineteenth-century American Protestant sentimentality was largely the work of nineteenth-century female writers, men generally created nineteenth-century European Jewish nostalgia. Male writers and artists who had left small, predominantly Jewish towns for cosmopolitan Western European cities and had shed traditional Jewish religious practices repeatedly reminisced about the religious practices of their youth and their immediate and distant ancestors. As these enlightened Jewish men de-emphasized traditional ritual observance, they awarded nostalgia “a centrality that it likely never before possessed” in Jewish practice.39 Memories of pious forebears were essential for Jews forging new, modern Jewish identities.40
In the United States, Jewish nostalgic materials began to appear with increasing frequency after World War II. In the wake of the destruction of European Jewry, the term “shtetl” began to appear untranslated in non-Jewish languages, including English, much more frequently.41 For most American Jews, like nineteenth-century European Jewish writers and artists, shtetl nostalgia has been a means of yearning for a time and place that they have not personally experienced. “Shtetl” came to stand in for an increasingly nostalgic vision of European, particularly Eastern European Jewish life, generally imagined as a lost world that had been backward, pre-modern, and impoverished but warm in community spirit. Nostalgia for nineteenth-century European shtetls—itself originating in the nineteenth century—blended neatly with American Jews’ mourning for communities destroyed in the Holocaust. Images of shtetls and urban ethnic neighborhoods, writes historian Hasia Diner, “could be found almost anywhere. Their images ran through the imaginative world of American Jews as instant mnemonics of places that everyone knew, but, ultimately, few had lived in.”42 By 1955, one writer observed, “the wave of nostalgia was overwhelming. Memory of the shtetl, which for decades had been relegated to the back of the mind . . . now came into its own in the thinking of American Jews. It was recalled vividly and with love.”43
By the 1960s, American Jewish nostalgia blossomed. As American studies scholar Matthew Frye Jacobson documents, since the 1960s a white ethnic revival has recast mythological American origins from Plymouth Rock to Ellis Island, emphasizing Central and Eastern European immigrants who came to the United States between 1880 and 1924. White Americans increasingly identified themselves with ethnic minority statuses based on ancestral national origins, as in Polish Americans, Italian Americans, and Irish Americans.44 Ashkenazi Jews, those of Central and Eastern European origins, enthusiastically embraced this idea, substituting Jewishness for European nationalism.
