Beyond the Synagogue. Rachel B. Gross
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 from Eastern European immigrants and of converts to Judaism.
The 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