Thursday, April 3, 2014

A Few Thoughts on the Roots of the Identity Discourse

(paper given at last weekend's Rethinking Jewish Identity and Jewish Education conference at Brandeis)

The Roots and Structure of the Identity Discourse in Contemporary Jewish Life

The question of identity has both personal and intellectual interest to me. Unpacking the identity discourse is part of my personal project, situating my experience as a born again Yiddishist within the larger context of American Jewish history. Why do I need Yiddish? and why didn’t I have Yiddish?-- those have been two of my guiding questions. It’s impossible to answer these without stumbling over the related question of identity.

As I’ve written elsewhere, studying Yiddish brought me to a deeper understanding of my own family and the Jewishness transmitted within my home. Similarly, the study of American Jewish sociology has helped me understand the larger Jewish American milieu in which I grew up, and how I ended up with my middle class, suburban, Conservative Hebrew school, shma and hatikvah, bacon is ok but ham isn’t, 1980s Long Island jewish identity. You only have to look at the Pew study to see that for the majority of American Jews, that kind of minimal observance, minimal education, maximal pride, is very much the de facto American Jewish identity today.

Rather than being natural or inevitable, my so-called Jewish identity, was both a product of historical movements and a deliberately inculcated ideology, one that meshed so well with my upbringing as a liberal, cosmopolitan American, as to be invisible. What I’d like to do is push back on the sense of inevitability or naturalness that surrounds identity as a concept. Though identity may be a category of practice, as sociologist Rogers Brubaker has written, that doesn’t mean we must accept it as a category of analysis. That means investigating the work that identity does and how it is historically and politically inflected.

Though identity may be a category of practice... that doesn’t mean we must accept it as a category of analysis. That means investigating the work that identity does and how it is historically and politically inflected.

First: identity as a post-war ideology. Identity as ideology presents Jewishness and Americanness as inherently compatible and complementary, and most importantly, that a synthesis of the two is sustainable and transmissible.

The integration of American Jews, especially Eastern European Jews, was the great project of the Jewish elite of the first half of the century. That integration came with many seemingly irresolvable contradictions and tensions. For example, the terms of integration of Eastern European Jews were set, in part, by the German Jewish elite, a group traditionally less than enamored of Eastern European Jews.  But the most fundamental of these tensions was a reimagining of the Jewish way of life as an American style religion. Turning Jewishness into the Jewish religion was like stuffing 10 pounds of kishke into a five pound casing. It was lumpy as hell, but it worked, sort of.

As it happened, the vast majority of American Jews didn’t want religion or religious commitments. No matter. Identity as ideology could reframe the multitude of contradictions now at the heart of American Jewish life, including the rejection of religion by American Jews. Identity made it possible for sociologist Herbert Gans to make an observation which, 50 years earlier, would have seemed downright bizarre. In a 1951 ethnographic study he wrote: “In Park Forest... adult Jews quite consciously rejected any involvement in the religious and cultural aspects of the Jewish community, while trying to teach the children to be Jews.”

Lemme tell you, I had a chill of recognition upon reading that. Gans had pretty much summed up my Jewish education, decades before it even happened.

Identity as ideology reframes the contradictions and tensions which have enabled the integration of American Jews and gives them a unitary, affirmative power. It also has another, related, political function.

The evocation, and invocation, of identity by communal elites works to reify American Jews as a group, even as the connections between individual Jews have become ever more attenuated. It also serves to justify the power and resources allocated to those elite institutions and leaders.

In her book Speaking of Jews, Lila Corwin Berman describes how at mid-century, thinkers like Oscar Handlin and Nathan Glazer characterized Jews as the American ethnic, immigrant group par excellence. They, and others, created what she calls ‘sociological Jewishness' -- Jewishness as a manifestation of American values. She writes: “Handlin and Glazer’s attempts to prove the existence of an American ethnic pattern paralleled their desire to categorize Jewish experience in universal and American terms... arguing that all American groups felt the same tension between group cohesion and American integration...” Most importantly, there was “nothing distinctly Jewish about this bond.”

This sociological Jewishness was a powerful formula for the integration of American Jews, but, as Corwin Berman notes: “...while naming ethnic identity as an American norm, they [Glazer and Handlin] neglected its content...” 


Indeed, not inculcation of Jewish patterns of life, nor transmission of Jewish culture and history, but measurement and management of identity became the constitutive act of the modern Jewish communal apparatus. It’s no coincidence that the most lavishly funded communal project of our generation has not been universal comprehensive Jewish education, but rather, an identity making vacation whose goals are no more controversial than encouraging passive Zionism and getting young Jews near each other.  This is the insidiousness of the identity ideology. 


Indeed, not inculcation of Jewish patterns of life, nor transmission of Jewish culture and history, but measurement and management of identity became the constitutive act of the modern Jewish communal apparatus. It’s no coincidence that the most lavishly funded communal project of our generation has not been universal comprehensive Jewish education, but rather, an identity making vacation whose goals are no more controversial than encouraging passive Zionism and getting young Jews near each other.  This is the insidiousness of the identity ideology. 

The common purpose and shared culture that once bound Jews as a group, and set them off from the larger American culture, has dramatically diminished. It has fallen to the American Jewish elite, ----journalists, philanthropists, and social scientists -- to evoke, and invoke, a sense of groupness without content, and the language of identity has been key to that project.



As sociologist Rogers Brubaker has argued,  groups don't just exist, but are called into being in a variety of ways. Think of how an event like the latest Pew survey calls the group 'American Jews' into being. Without the survey, Jews in America are a diverse bunch, and, as we see by the numbers, the majority are only minimally engaged with the acts and beliefs of traditional Judaism, and are not much more involved with other Jews than they are with lots of other kinds of people. But the act of surveying brings those Jews together, bounds them within the inquiry, gives them the appearance of unified agency and purpose: being Jewish. Jewish identity is invoked in the very act of studying it.

...the act of surveying brings those Jews together, bounds them within the inquiry, gives them the appearance of unified agency and purpose: being Jewish. Jewish identity is invoked in the very act of studying it.

The Pew survey is what Brubaker would call a a project of group-making. Group-making is a "social, cultural, political project aimed at turning categories into groups or increasing levels of groupness..." The Pew survey is an event that reifies the idea of an American Jewish group, "groupness as an event." But it is a 'groupness' that reflects the values of the people constructing it. Those acting as consultants to the survey believe in a Jewishness bounded by Synagogue, Israel, Denomination and Federation. Those being surveyed, by and large, have a very different set of concerns.

As Brubaker points out, if groupness is something that needs to be cultivated and evoked, it can also fail to materialize. The 'groupness' the Pew survey (like all the previous NJP surveys) sought to invoke has consistently failed to materialize, or only weakly. Thus the talk of crisis from the Jewish institutional world and calls to action, or at least accountability. But that crisis rhetoric is itself a group making, identity heightening project. No matter what actions are taken or, or not, a sense of Jewish identity has been aroused in those who are the ostensible objects of crisis. And by using the language of crisis, the institutional elite, ethnopolitical entrepreneurs as Brubaker calls them, reinforce their own importance in solving whatever crisis they have defined.

In conclusion, Identity has become seemingly indispensable to the Jewish communal conversation, even as American Jews drift farther away from Jewishness. It behooves us to think critically about the work done by identity. For example, a willingness to grapple with the contradictions of American Jewish integration, that which is smoothed over by the identity ideology, could be an exciting new direction for Jewish thought and engagement.

5 comments:

  1. “In Park Forest... adult Jews quite consciously rejected any involvement in the religious and cultural aspects of the Jewish community, while trying to teach the children to be Jews.”

    Not at all bizarre. If you want to understand what it means in everyday life, watch the 1988 Canadian film "The Outside Chance of Maximilian Glick" which is available on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzPKHInWac8

    It will tell you a great deal about the perplexities of being Jewish in a benign environment with good people who cannot quite rid themselves of their own tribal baggage. A Jew must not look like, act or dress in any declaratively Jewish manner, should not draw attention to the fact that he's a Jew, yet let nobody forget, himself first and foremost, that he's a Jew. And that's just the beginning of it.

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  2. Thank you for another insightful post (sincere, not sarcasm).

    I've mentioned this before on your blog, but I think that one part of the post-War Jewish American acculturation that the Jewish Establishment supported is a fervent faith in public schools and opposition to private education.

    So often I read something about a state in the 1950s and 1960s considering some kind of public support for private schools and having the Jewish Establishment line up against the proposal. You would think that a Jewish Establishment that wants to see Yiddishkeit passed down, knowledge of the liturgy spread, and high-quality educational options for Jews living in places with inferior public schools would support Jewish schools, and but no, this was never the case.

    Since most private school students at the time were parochial schools and the Catholic Establishment usually supported public aid to private education it's surprising that there wasn't more Jewish-Catholic conflict over this.

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  3. I am not very qualified to reflect on American Jewish matter but as you encouraged me Rokhl, here are a few thoughts on your thoughts (in 2 posts:-):

    “The most fundamental of these tensions was a reimagining of the Jewish way of life as an American style religion. Turning Jewishness into the Jewish religion was like stuffing 10 pounds of kishke into a five pound casing. It was lumpy as hell, but it worked, sort of.”
    I like very much this image of “stuffing”, and specially the adjective “lumpy”. They both describe in a physical way the process of revamping a structure that offers itself as an abstraction, a spiritual luggage, a covenant (or a Covenant) in an embodied form or in a more invisible way that can appear as a rainbow or disappear and be carried inside of you. It reminds me of packing a luggage on the way back.
    Maybe that American Jews have lost their link to religion and to culture. In that, they may be very different from their brothers and sisters from other denominations in a time where culture has been – is being – replaced by communication. Jews are torn apart between a tradition that may take on fanatical aspects and a radical rejection of anything that reminds a shameful proximity with these remnants of the past (in between, all the palette of options). Nevertheless, there is a consciousness, a sort of pride and joy (different from vanity or hubris) of carrying something that is bigger than oneself, than each one, something that doesn’t consist – in that the am ha-aretz is perfectly right – in a legacy that is only bound to religious ritual transmission.

    “The act of surveying brings those Jews together, bounds them within the inquiry, gives them the appearance of unified purpose and agency: being Jewish. Jewish identity is invoked in the very act of studying it.”
    Jewish identity is invoked in the very act of studying from the 19th century on – at least. I don’t think that American Jews are different in that from their European fathers who have re-invented Jewish identity a few times in the history of Enlightenment, the Haskole, and then with the Wissenshaft des Judenthums – not speaking of all the forms of re-inventing religion itself through so many versions of reformed Judaism. The parallels are to many to hold in this short note. In re-telling, re-framing, re-considering Jewish history as a part of world history, the Wissenshaft des Judenthums has paved the way to all the many (Jewish and sometimes not Jewish) approaches/systems of nowadays labile Jewish identities, specially in providing a secular approach for so many Jewish secular schools or political narratives and trainings. I don’t think it is very new or provocative to say that, but it is for sure a raccourci/shortcut.

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  4. “Indeed, not inculcation of Jewish patterns of life, nor transmission of Jewish culture and history, but measurement and management of identity has become the constitutive act of the modern Jewish communal apparatus.”
    As a historian I don’t totally believe in the virtue of sociology to describe the world. As an instrument of measurement, the beauty of sociology is that it is always questioned by a methodological discussion. Sometimes, I prefer to trust my ears and my eyes. I know a few Jewish families in the US. Mainstream, right wing (more children), left wing, more or less religious, unpretentious, intellectuals. No one in these families seems unconcerned by transmission of Jewish culture and history – whatever they cover with this appellation.
    Sometimes, a sort of strong genealogical consciousness takes the place of Jewish historical culture. The families whose children are (apparently) the most distant of Judaism are the lefties, ex-hippies and Jewish intellectuals kids. They go as far as … organic farming, NGO activism, climbing mountain summits, play all sorts of music. I suspect they only take a breath of the ethereal air of the summits before coming back to more Jewish concerns, or growing garlic in Yiddish farms. They are the first to understand and participate to the deconstruction of gender, race, cultural and ethnic old models. And they will have their mother’s and father’s books, or write their own Wissenshaft des Judenthums.

    As many scholars in the field of the history of the Jews (Biale, Laqueur, & al.) have underlined, the Jewish people is a numerically small and from the beginning highly heterogeneous people that tends to behave like a numerous/powerful/influential people. Jewish people are also viewed like that from the outside (anti-Semites are always reminding us) partly because of the tremendous consequences of the history of Judaism on world history. I would coin this phenomenon – in my own words – as a specific Jewish talent for being a minority … with the internal ricochet which is to proliferate/benefit internally from divisions that may appear at first like revolutions, break-ups, radical and alternative conducts, heresy, and other cosmopolitan rootlessness. (Re)-Inventing identity is a not such distant a product of what Scholem has defined as the commentative nature of Judaism. In Judaism, when you have the commentary of the commentary left, you still have something, a thread that you can reconnect with other threads, because the text, the structure of the house is so strong.

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  5. "The common purpose and shared culture that once bound Jews as a group, and set them off from the larger American culture, has dramatically diminished. It has fallen to the American Jewish elite, ----journalists, philanthropists, and social scientists -- to evoke, and invoke, a sense of groupness without content, and the language of identity has been key to that project."

    There is no effective waste management plan for organizations and institutions. Once founded, organizations always want to stick around even after their raison d'etre has long gone and their very existence becomes the cause. As non-biodegradable resources, their prolonged half-life wreaks havoc on society.

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