Jewish Cultural Manifesto -- Throwback Thursday

Throwback Thursday. Would you rather see something I wrote 9 years ago or would you like to see a picture of me playing cello on our senior year orchestra trip?

I thought so.

A Jewish Cultural Manifesto was one of the first things I ever published. It appeared in my first year as a columnist for Jewish Currents. However, it was already a number of years in the making.

If I were to write this today, I'd probably be slightly less self-righteous. But I wouldn't change too much. You can see, all the major themes of today are there in 2005. And interestingly, the Manifesto is my number one most cited, quoted and read piece. It's turned up in books, academic syllabi, and articles. So, it seems like a natural for recycling-- I mean, revisiting, today. 

Enjoy!

A Jewish Cultural Manifesto

(Originally published in November 2005 in Jewish Currents)

I’m a busy woman with no time for nostalgia. My grandparents didn't have a shop on the Lower East Side, my great uncle didn't play in a swing band in the Catskills, and my parents never, ever threatened to disown me if I didn't  marry a Jewish man. Perhaps that¹s why I don¹t find Yiddish and Yiddish-American culture cute. So why the hell do I bother with it, if not out of sentiment or guilt?

Because to grow up Jewish in assimilated America is to absorb a world of cultural confusion. The Jewish history I learned moved pretty quickly from the ancient land of Israel to the modern state of Israel, with brief, terrifying stops between 1939 and 1945. As you can imagine, this creates a bit of an identity crisis in the average young Jew. Who wants to be a Yid at home and an ersatz Israeli at school? 

Not I.

The mainstream Jewish press and other Jewish institutions have spent the last fifty or so years nudging Yiddish culture into its grave, and like the man on the cart full of corpses in Monty Python¹s Holy Grail, no one can hear it screaming, ‘But I'm not dead yet!’

Even before I spoke one word of Yiddish, the language itself was talking to me, telling me that there was more to being a Jew than the empty signifiers, and emptier materialism, of the modern Jewish suburb.

Don¹t get me wrong, I have the greatest respect for all Jewish cultures: Iraqi, Syrian, Moroccan, Ethiopian, Algerian, what have you. I acknowledge that American Jewish culture has been dominated at times by Ashkenazi Jews, at the expense of other Jewish cultures. But it is an equal if not greater crime to see an Ashkenazocentric world view replaced with an á la carte approach to identity! Such an approach assumes that whatever we were in the past -beard-having, matse- ball fressing, shmate peddling ghetto Jews-  is not only over, but it¹s as if it never happened! No wonder we have a crisis! It¹s not too late to acknowledge the truth about ourselves and start repairing this psychotic split. I¹d like to start with six simple declarations:

1. Jewish culture belongs to Jews

Funny how you never really care about something until someone else wants it. Or takes it. At  www.klezmershack.com, the most comprehensive klezmer music site on the internet, you can find listings for klezmer bands all over the world, including twenty-seven in Germany alone. Among those twenty-seven, few Jews are to be found. At the Hackesche-Hof-Theater in Berlin, you can find someone performing ‘Jewishly’ almost any night of the year. And if you insist on that performer being Jewish, you can always check out Irith Gabriely, an Israeli woman living in Germany. This self-proclaimed Queen of Jewish Soul wears a black hat and tallis and sings khasidish songs for adoring German crowds.

You know how every resident of Alaska gets a check every year from oil revenue? Forget Holocaust reparations. I¹d like to see every Jew in the world get a piece of the exploitation of Jewish culture. It wouldn't be much, I admit; in fact, it would be infinitesimal. But all I want is the tiniest little symbolic recognition that we have something that they want.

The American Jewish attitude towards things like klezmer music has been indifferent at best, to hostile, at worst. Ask any musician who has worked full time in Jewish music in the last twenty years and he or she will tell you: the serious money and the serious respect were almost exclusively found in Germany and elsewhere in Europe. While American Jews wanted to believe that Yiddish and European Jewish music had disappeared in the night, the band played on, wherever they could.

2. Secular and observant are not parallel paths, they are points on a common path. 

Neither religious nor secular are immutable characteristics, and we all know someone who¹s gone both ways. Both sides view each other with so much suspicion, when in fact we each have much to learn from the other. You heard me. You think Hasidim are coming to the (secular) Yiddish theater for the acting? They¹re coming because they¹re starving for this kind of Jewish entertainment. And secularists, yeah, I¹m looking at you, too. I¹m well aware that religion is the opiate of the masses. I also know that Karl Marx didn't know bupkes about the Jewish religion. We all have a duty to know something about the core texts of our tradition and the languages in which they were written. Which brings me to my next point:

3. Jewish culture and religion are intertwined. 

Jewish philanthropists like Michael Steinhardt want to revive the non-Orthodox Jewish community by replacing ‘victimhood’ with ‘joy.’ (See his op-ed of February of this year in the Jerusalem Post.) I think we all know that you can read 'Europe' for victimhood and 'Israel' for joy. 

Didn't that attitude get us in this mess? Turn a shul into a temple, a khazn into a cantor and Jewish music into Debbie Friedman, well, you better lock the doors cuz the inmates will be breaking out. Witness our so-called youth crisis. American Jewish culture has turned Camembert into CheezWhiz: It is boring and every young Jew and Jewess knows it. Real Jewish Culture is the product of hundreds-- -- thousands of years of joy and pain; it¹s the expression of the realities of halokhe lived in a hostile world. It¹s the result of every Jew¹s struggle between tradition and modernity. Most importantly, Real Jewish Culture is our connection to those who came before us, and without access to it, well, that bagel in your hand is not a symbol of anything, just a bunch of empty calories masquerading as breakfast.

4. I am not an Israeli. 

About two thousand American Jews make aliyah every year. Out of a total Jewish population of 5,200,000, this comes out to about .04% of American Jews each year who will choose to live in Israel. I am an American and, like 99.96% of my fellow American Jews, I will never become an Israeli. I care deeply about the State of Israel, most of all because my fate is linked to that of every other Jew. But where does the spirit of klal yisroel end and the unquestioning acceptance of Zionism begin?

Open a magazine like Moment and you¹d think every Jew in America had already put down a security deposit on an apartment in Jerusalem. Moment bills itself as 'Jewish culture, politics, and religion.' Three of four stories on the October cover are Israel-related, with more inside. And this is the music issue. Now, I would understand if this were a newspaper for a small Jewish community somewhere in the world. I doubt that the Jewish community of Honduras has enough news to fill twelve issues of a monthly magazine. But we don¹t live in Honduras. We live in the other Jewish state, a country with a Jewish population roughly equal to that of the Jewish state. And let me tell you, we've got enough news here to fill up every single Jewish newspaper, magazine, newsletter, leaflet and 'zine.

5. Israeli culture is NOT Jewish culture. 

Obviously, Jews everywhere have a special interest in Israel. I don¹t deny that we are going to want, and need, news and other information about Israel that reflects that special interest. But what I need, as a Jew in the diaspora, is a vibrant Jewish culture that will nourish my life here, where I live, worship, and write contentious though charming columns.

Writers like Ahad Ha¹am thought that Israel would eventually function like a research and development lab for the diaspora. Real Jewish culture would finally develop and nourish the diaspora Jews, even as the diaspora would wither away. Yeah, that worked well. Can you name the last Israeli novel you read? The last Israeli band you listened to? As for religious matters, when the rest of the Jewish world sends its sons (and daughters) to yeshiva, they¹re just as likely to ship them off to Brooklyn as to Jerusalem.

The real problem with the unstated focus on Israel is that it takes our focus away from our lives, and problems, here in goles. This displacement of expectations shifts resources in a way that leaves Jewish culture here poorer, culturally, spiritually and communally. Our leaders will spend millions of dollars to send every Jewish kid to Israel but can¹t find the money to support scholarships for important youth programs like Klezkamp. I guarantee that the kids who discover Klezkamp and develop a Jewish identity through Jewish music, those kids are just as likely, if not more, to marry Jewish and be part of a Jewish community as the kids who go on Birthright. I know this from experience, visiting the Jewish state doesn't make you feel more Jewish, being part of a Jewish community makes you feel more Jewish.

6. Yiddish and Yiddish culture are not dead. 

Nor were they revived. They've been here the whole damn time, waiting patiently for you to remember to call, perhaps visit, perhaps remember where Yiddish is living. And if you can¹t remember where it is, assimilation is only partially to blame. The diminishment of Yiddish and European Jewish culture in general was a necessary part of Zionism. But see points 1-5, it¹s time to take back our culture and start living our lives in the most Jewish way possible, in the here and now.

In Case You Missed It... Why We Need to Shut The Door On Identity

From earlier this week:

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. 

How Do You Say Open Mic in Yiddish? Find Out On April 17th at YIVO!

Join celebrated host, actor and singer Shane Baker, and special guests for a fun, intimate night of Yiddish performance. Bring your instruments, poems, monologues, manifestos, and films in Yiddish. Sign up starts at 7:00pm, open mic starts at 7:30pm. 

Master of Ceremonies Shane Baker and special guests

Admission: Free
RSVP Required: yivo.org/reservations | 212.294.6140




*Yes, I know, if you read the poster you already learned how to say open mic in Yiddish. Don't be so literal! It's bad for your health.

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.