Beyond the Synagogue. Rachel B. Gross
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.
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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. If nostalgia is a mitzvah, a reexamination of American Jewish religion is necessary.
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