Beyond the Synagogue. Rachel B. Gross
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 to an organization,” one observer noted. “To manifest Jewish culture is to carry out . . . 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