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IJJER International Journal of Jewish Education Research,

2013 (5-6), 21-46.

Beyond a Humpty-Dumpty Narrative: In Search of New Rhymes and Reasons

in the Research of Contemporary American Jewish Identity Formation

Tali E. Zelkowicz | tzelkowicz@huc.edu Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion,

Los Angeles, CA, USA

Abstract

Oriented predominantly by a particular master narrative, knowledge produced by the social scientific study of Jewish identity formation tends to ask some questions but not others. Engaging in a study comprised of a select but key cross-section of the last half-century’s leading contributors to scholarship about American Jewish identity formation, the article exposes this narrative with the allegorical aid of the poem, “Humpty Dumpty.”

Applied to the field of Jewish identity formation research, the rhyme about this ill-fated character depicts an allegory of the Jewish people as having fallen down to America from some high place; namely, pre-America, pre-Holocaust, and sometimes also a pre-Enlightenment, pre-emancipation Europe. The story then concludes on a tragic note, with all the Jewish professionals and leaders failing to put the Jews together again in accordance with their allegedly whole state that had existed previously in Europe. Elucidating the “wall,” “fall,” and the failure to “repair,” the article demonstrates how social scientists of Jewish identity formation have, until quite recently, tended to default to one or another version of this same story of decline.

A joint IJJER-IARJE special issue

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Beyond a Humpty-Dumpty Narrative

First exposing the assumptions embedded within the Humpty narrative, showing how it has served to limit new and different kinds of questions that can be asked in the field, the article then turns to address a recent paradigm shift that is taking place. Participating in a further expansion of the shift, the author concludes by proposing an additional new avenue of knowledge for the field: non-judgmental, non-prescriptive explorations of the roles of conflict and dissonance in American Jewish identity formation. This line of inquiry has typically been a blind spot of the field since it lacks – or at least seems to lack – direct and immediate relevance for safeguarding ethnic survival, but it bears rich potential for creating new kinds of knowledge.

Keywords: Jewish identity formation, survival, essentialism, culture, theory, methodology, epistemology.

The more the topic of “Jewish identity” has become linked to Jewish education and hopes for survival, the more its study has gained ever increasing attention and funding. Communal leaders and also many scholars have come to believe, as Jonathan Woocher has said, that Jewish education is “the guarantor of Jewish survival” because of the assumption that Jewish education and Jewish educators can create “Jewish identity” (foreword to Reimer, 1997, p. xi). In the current climate of falling Jewish birth rates and the rising ratio of intermarriage, “making Jews” has become an urgent business.

Despite the fact that there is little consensus as to what “Jewish identity” really entails or involves, “it” has long been reified as a sort of powerful product to be urgently manufactured and marketed (Charmé et al, 2008). Literally thousands of articles about Jewish identity have been written in the last five decades alone (E. Cohen, 2010). Some of them have been written for academic purposes, but many (perhaps even most) have been commissioned by foundations and organizations hoping to gain a better understanding about how to make Jews and, ultimately, ensure their survival. In this article, I try to demonstrate how the conscious and unconscious use of a survivalist lens in research on Jewish identity formation in America has filtered what questions are worth asking, limited the ways in which data can be interpreted, and even determined which findings are deemed relevant.

If one were to take a chronological tour that surveyed the half-century development of research on American Jewish identity, beginning

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from its generally acknowledged origins with founder Marshall Sklare through today, a distinct and urgent narrative is discernible. It goes something like the familiar nursery rhyme that ends on a tragic note:

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall Humpty Dumpty had a great fall All the king’s horses and all the king’s men Could not put Humpty together again.

Similar to Humpty Dumpty, the master narrative that gets rehearsed by many social scientists of American Jewish identity formation depicts the Jewish people as having fallen from some high place, whence they were putatively complete, or whole. Moreover, this “wall” upon which Jews were once “in-tact,” can be translated into a pre-America, pre-Holocaust, and sometimes also a pre-Enlightenment, pre-emancipation Europe.

Despite historical accounts which convey how pre-modern and modern European communities were not consistently idyllic visions of Jewish existence, the underlying refrain persists. According to the predominant narrative, there used to be an environment that was wonderfully natural to “the Jew.” Under such indigenous conditions, key group processes such as communal life, decision-making, and education are considered to have taken place in organically Jewish ways, reflecting the essence of what being Jewish could and ultimately should be, in its least adulterated form. But outside of that ideal and somehow authentic place and time, as the story goes, Jews are out of their element. Participating in the Enlightenment and coming to America represent a “fall.” Now, all the social scientists and all the Jewish educators cannot put Humpty – the “American Jew” – together again.

For example, Sklare himself opened his now classic 1967 study of “Lakeville” Jews entitled Jewish Identity on the Suburban Frontier: A Study of Group Survival in the Open Society, with the following anecdote:

In 1900, Jacob David Wilowsky, the famous rabbi of Slutsk, Russia, told an audience in New York City that any Jew who came to the United States was a sinner. In his view, Judaism had no chance of survival on American soil. ‘It was not only home that the Jews left behind in Europe,’ he said, ‘it was their Torah [Biblical text and learning], their Talmud [Rabbinic texts and learning], their yeshivot [Jewish academies of learning] – in a word, their Yiddishkeit, their entire Jewish way of life.’ The Slutsker Rav [rabbi] implied not only that observant Jews placed themselves and their children in peril by

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Beyond a Humpty-Dumpty Narrative

coming to the United States but that their presence in the country condoned the heresy of America. (p. 3)

For Sklare, the overall problem is “how to guarantee [American Jews’] survival in a society which is on the one hand pluralistic but on the other hand is so hospitable as to make group survival difficult” (Sklare, p. xii).

Whereas Sklare’s frame highlights the “wall” and the “fall” aspects of the master narrative, the following example from Charles Liebman’s The Ambivalent American Jew (1973) focuses upon the “repair” of the brokenness. But Liebman, too, has a “wall.” His opening sentence reads, “If we want to understand Jewish life in America, we must begin with traditional Judaism” (p. 3). Liebman’s “wall,” or high place of wholeness, is a “traditional Judaism” that once “made no distinction between ethnicity, nationality, culture, and religion” (Liebman, p. 20). All of these were “intertwined and interrelated” in somehow organic, harmonious, and seamless ways. Then, this traditional Judaism is seen to have “declined in the period of the Enlightenment and emancipation” (p. 20). Finally, and most significantly for Liebman, these social and political processes led to distortions of that ideal identity mixture. Now, “one aspect of Judaism [the religious] was stressed at the expense of the others [what he called the natural-cultural-communal aspects]” (p. 21). Liebman has thus framed the perceived problem he addresses in the rest of the book: the way in which American Jewry has attempted to put itself back together is a warped version of that archetypal and importantly “authentic” original. There has been an inaccurate (and Liebman worries, possibly fatal) repair of the brokenness.

The version of the Humpty narrative that gets rehearsed in scholarship on American Jewish identity formation conveys the overwhelming sense that by coming to America, Jews have fallen from having coherent, unified, content-rich, thickly demarcated, meaningfully vibrant Jewish identities, and are now lying in warped reconfigurations all over the United States. Chief Ideas Officer at the Jewish Education Service of North America (JESNA), Jonathan Woocher, captured this trope of brokenness most explicitly when he described American Jews as broken in seven different ways: “hyphenated, fragmented, truncated, episodic, pluralized, marginalized and homogenized” (Woocher, 1995). His quest for a “Unified Field Theory” of Jewish identity both laments the perceived brokenness and proposes ways to repair it.

Upon critical examination, though, there are at least three specious

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assumptions embedded within the Humpty narrative: a wall,1 a fall, and someone’s version of a certain kind of repair that strives to restore the parts to their allegedly original integrated state. Some version of this master narrative has become both compass and filter, directing what sorts of questions can and should be asked for the field of American Jewish identity research. Social scientists of Jewish identity formation are commissioned to provide foundations and communal leaders with diagnoses of how well the Jews are faring as an ethnic and religious minority in America. These “impact studies”2 all involve assessing how effectively the independent variable of education influences the dependent variable of identity formation, all of which is ultimately used to produce prognoses for survival.

Historians, too, are affected by the master narrative. Leading American Jewish historian, Jonathan Sarna, even recalls his mentor’s attempt to dissuade him from a career in American Jewish history because of it, saying,

I’ll tell you all that you need to know about American Jewish history…The Jews came to America, they abandoned their faith, they began to live like goyim, and after a generation or two they intermarried and disappeared. That…is American Jewish history; all the rest is commentary. Don't waste your time. Go and study Talmud. (Sarna, 2003, p. 157)

Eventually writing as an American Jewish historian, Sarna would later analyze his field, concluding that this fear that “Jews in America are doomed to assimilate” is nothing new (Sarna, 2003, p. 157). However,

1 Moreover, the “wall” is an exclusively Ashkenazic one, reflecting the cultural and historical reference points of the great majority of current researchers in the field of Jewish identity research. In fact, any Sephardic or Mizrachi (Jews from North Africa and Middle Eastern countries) narrative is absent from the dominant story of the field.2 Since the 1970s, there has been a growing sociological literature composed of these impact studies within the social scientific study of Jews. These include, for example, Steven Cohen’s “The Impact of Jewish Education on Religious Identification and Practice” (1974); Harold Himmelfarb’s Impact of Religious Schooling: Effects of Jewish Education (1974); Geoffrey Bock’s The Jewish Schooling of American Jews: A Study of Non-Cognitive Educational Effects (1976); Mordechai Rimor & Elihu Katz’s Jewish Involvement of the Baby Boom Generation: Interrogating the 1990 National Jewish Populations Survey, (1993); another study by Cohen called “The Impact of Varieties of Jewish Education upon Jewish Identity: an Inter-Generational Perspective, 1995; Seymour Martin Lipset’s analysis of day school effects called The Power of Jewish Education (1994); Leonard Saxe et al.’s “Mega-Experiment in Jewish Education: The Impact of birthright Israel”, and Amy Sales and Leonard Saxe’s Limud [learning] by the Lake: Fulfilling the Educational Potential of Jewish Summer Camps (2002).

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this old story limits possibilities for new lines of inquiry and research designs.

Of course, Jews and researchers of Jewish life are by no means alone in their concerns about survival as a distinct ethnic minority in America. Nor are they alone in wrestling with which types of education will best achieve what Huynh et al (2012) have called “bicultural identity integration,” which allows for a full expression of one’s ethnic identity or identities as Americans and not in contrast to being American. Like Jews, African American, Hispanic American, Native American, and Native Hawaiian communities, for example, all navigate multiple and competing cultural identities. A growing body of ethnographic literature focuses specifically on how various forms of schooling become rich sites for examining how these various ethnic minority groups struggle for cultural preservation amidst the dominant white Anglo-cultural paradigm in the United States.3

In this way, Jews in America are not unique among other ethnic minorities in their plight regarding cultural survival. However, research on American Jewish identity formation does diverge in one important way from parallel literature on ethnic identity formation in America. Unlike self-reflexive researchers of identity formation writing since the postmodern turn,4 at least until the late 1990s, social scientists of American Jewish identity formation have not written with a critical self-awareness about how researchers' own insider status as Jews who study Jews may affect the production of new knowledge. Most significantly, most have not acknowledged the extent to which their field is preoccupied with Jewish continuity, and therefore too few have not been willing or able to critically deconstruct that master narrative. With a few exceptions, the majority of researchers of American Jewish identity formation have not exercised the discursive self-reflexivity required to examine how the predominant survivalist predispositions have animated both theoretical and methodological assumptions in their work.

To be sure, exposing the master narrative of the field does not require us to reject empirical data that have been culled. To be self-conscious of the histories we choose to tell does not oblige the negation of those things we may know social scientifically about American Jewish life.

3 See Benham and Heck (1998); Garroutte (2003); McCarty (2002); Stulberg (2008), and Valencia (2002), for examples of how these various ethnic groups navigate multiple and competing cultural identities particularly through the apparatus of education.4 See, for example: Coffey (1999); Collins (1991); the introduction in Emerson (2001); Ewing (1987); Smith (1972); Stacey (1988); Zinn, (2001).

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The following, for example, have been among the classically monitored phenomena: intermarriage rates appear to be rising, Jewish birth rates are lower than any other American cultural group, anti-Semitism seems to fluctuate both in terms of amount and type and by region, certain varieties of Jewish education do seem to have some effects on Jewish identity formation (although these impact studies are typically vague and limited because we are still quite uncertain about the types of key causal variables), and by some measures, rates of collective Jewish ethnic and religious identity are declining, while individual meanings of being Jewish seem to be intensifying. All this and more seems to be more or less objectively true. But distinct from what we know is how and why we have come to know it, and whether these are the only questions worth knowing. The purpose of exposing and naming the master narrative is to gain understanding about how and why the scholarship tends to reproduce itself, continually posing nearly identical questions, and engaging in the same survivalist versus transformationist debates.

As a committed and practicing Jew, I have my own postulations about what is perceived to be at stake. Survival is so hotly contested because it is always relative to the array of one’s own deeply held value propositions about what constitutes a meaningful continuity of the Jewish people. By rendering the field’s master narrative transparent, however, we can elucidate how the literature on American Jewish identity formation has been so steeped in a survivalist paradigm that it has developed both methods and theoretical frameworks that come to serve that paradigm in various ways.5

In the bulk of this paper, I will survey select major sociological studies of American Jewish identity formation beginning with Marshall Sklare, demonstrating how those projects became bound up in measuring one or another version of “good” or “real” Jews. Others have provided vastly more comprehensive overviews of work in the field. Indeed, the most thorough survey was Erik Cohen’s 2010 analysis of hundreds of articles, which he classified in detail according to a wide array of content criteria. This study is far narrower in purpose, and is guided by a very specific meta-critique of the field’s literature. Tracing key and typical studies over past decades, I examine how they have been limited by a regnant master narrative of survivalism. I then turn to recent signs of a paradigm shift that seems to be taking place in the field that is changing approaches to both theory and methodology. Finally, in an attempt to further the

5 I am grateful to sociologist of education, Lisa Stulberg, who helped me to articulate this idea.

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paradigm shift, I conclude by offering an additional perspective on the way in which Humpty’s survivalist narrative may have the most acutely limiting effect upon the purview of what is knowable and worth knowing in the field of contemporary American Jewish identity formation.

Measuring “Jewishness:” A Survivalist Quest

Since its origins in the mid 1960s, debate among sociologists of American Jewish identity has struggled with how to conceive of, describe, define, and of course measure, the social and cultural subjects, “Jews.” Scholars have striven to fine-tune an ultimate instrument for measuring “Jewishness.” There has been a quest for some form of “systematic conceptual framework” (See, for example, Himmelfarb [1974]; E. Cohen [2010]).6

However, conceiving of the object of study as “Jewishness” was a problematic assumption from the outset. The very term “Jewishness” reduces the complex, fluid, and iterative processes of identity formation to a static and essentialized product that can somehow (survivalists hope) be mass produced. Indeed, it is curious to note that parallel terms such as “Christianness,” “Muslimness,” or “Greekness,” are not used. Even avoiding the suffix “ness,” and simply using the word “identity” do not resolve the deeper problem. Although identity is grammatically a noun, sociologically it functions as a verb, or ongoing activity (Côté & Levine, 2002; Elder, 1985; Gergen, 2000; Giele & Elder, 1998; K. Hall, 2002; S. Hall, 1992; Miedema & Wardekker, 1999; Perry, 2002; Swidler, 1986). As a result, I try to use the phrase “Jewish identity formation” to evoke the notion that identity formation is a dynamic and unstable process, as opposed to an entity with fixed properties.

Quantitative research that needs to operationalize the abstract variable of “Jewishness” in some way seems especially susceptible to ossifying “identity” into a static object. In his now classic 1967 study of American Jews, Marshall Sklare employed a two-part classification of “Jewishness” into two criteria he called “moralism” and “sacramentalism.” Sklare’s sacramentalism basically stemmed from rabbinic literature and encompassed what was for Sklare “traditional” Jewish legal observance of ceremonies, rituals, and behaviors. Further deferring to philosophical-theological constructions of religiosity, Sklare drew upon another traditional notion: mitzvot, religious obligations commanded by God.

6 Erik Cohen has surveyed many such attempts and added one of his own (E. Cohen, 2010, p.13).

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His sacramentalist interview questions sought to establish which mitzvot were practiced in the Lakeville home (pp. 45-49ff). This focus on measuring sacramentalism translated into specific survey questions such as “Which of the following observances are practiced more or less regularly in your home?” Respondents could choose from the following list (p. 50):

Bacon or ham never served. Kosher7 meat bought regularly. Kasher8 the meat. Special dinner on Friday night. Kiddush9 on Friday night. No smoking allowed in house on Sabbath. Seder10 on Passover. Bread not eaten in home on Passover. Either or both parents fast on Yom Kippur.11

Candles lit on Hanukkah.

In addition to sacramentalism, Sklare also conceived of “Jewishness” in terms of his second category, “moralism,” by which he meant ethical behavior (Sklare, pp. 89-91). Sklare observed a shift in “Jewishness,” moving towards this moralism and away from sacramentalism. He used questions about “support for humanitarian causes,” “leading an ethical and moral life,” or “helping the underprivileged to improve their lot,” as indicators of moralism. Moralism and sacramentalism are ultimately rabbinic not sociological categories, and therefore become essentialist rather than empirical constructions of Jewish identity formation.

With sacramentalism and moralism anchoring his conceptualization of Jewish identity formation, Sklare had already created a problematic

7 Kosher refers to food that is “fit” according to a variety of biblically and rabbinically determined criteria.8 To kasher meat is to have it ritually slaughtered by a Jewish legal authority, soaked in water, and salted according to rabbinical ly set criteria.9 Kiddush is a special blessing recited over a ritual cup of wine. Perhaps believing he was speaking as a Jew, to Jews, Sklare did not translate any of these technical Jewish terms for respondents, and only this term, kiddush, was footnoted for his readers.10 The Seder is the ritual re-telling of the biblical story of the Israelites liberation from slavery and their exodus from Egypt that takes place during a special evening meal at the beginning of the weeklong Passover holiday.11 Yom Kippur is the Day of Atonement, which is part of the Jewish New Year (in autumn), and is often described as the holiest day of the Jewish year.

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frame rooted in prescriptive, rabbinic notions about what Jews are and do. Upon closer examination, there is another curious flaw in his study. In Sklare’s attempt to identify “the image of the Good Jew in Lakeville” (pp. 321-332), among the list of indicators that he provided his respondents from which to choose, fully half of the items on the list do not belong either in his sacramentalist or moralist categories (p. 323). These included:

Accept being a Jew and not try to hide it. Support Israel Support Zionism Belong to Jewish organizations Be well versed in Jewish history and culture Know the fundamentals of Judaism Have mostly Jewish friends Promote the use of Yiddish Give Jewish candidates for political office preference Gain respect of Christian neighbors Be a liberal on political economic issues

These indicators seem to address categories that we might call social cohesiveness, interaction with the “other,” Jewish knowledge, cultural pride, and identification with American culture.12 There is a problematic discrepancy between what Sklare set out to study and what he was actually studying. But it is clear that Sklare also wanted to explore these other categories. Outside the normative notions through which he was conceiving “Jewishness,” however, he appeared to have no names or categories. At that time, it seems that it was not possible even for social scientists of Jewish life to categorize Jews’ behaviors as Jewish when they were outside of a canonical, rabbinic, or “traditional” paradigm.

By the mid 1970s, sociologist Harold Himmelfarb had expanded the typology of Jewish “religious” involvement into a “complex multi-dimensional scale" (Himmelfarb, 1974, p.48). In Figure 1.1, “Dimensions of Religious Involvement” (Himmelfarb, 1974, p. 55), we see how moralism and sacramentalism had multiplied into a host of new categories, including supernatural, communal, cultural, interpersonal, behavioral, and ideational factors, within which he nested nine additional sub-categories. His mission, like other early sociologists of American Jewish identity formation, was “to arrive at an adequate definition of the dependent variable” (Himmelfarb, 1974, p. 20). Believing he was

12 It is in these directions that future conceptual frameworks would move.

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bringing the field ever closer to a “clear conceptual scheme," (see, for example, pp. 49 and 61) Himmelfarb’s typology was an attempt to systematically synthesize other existing definitions (pp. 49-54).

This fixation on creating the ultimate conceptual apparatus that could finally account for every component of “Jewishness” can only happen when “identity” is conceived as static. Moreover, the focus on all the fragments in this sociology of religious involvement is ideologically linked to the brokenness that so many researchers of American Jewish life have described and personally lamented. To solve this problem about how to properly conceive of “Jewishness,” and arrive at the correct typology is an ideological debate steeped in the politics of authenticity.13 But attempts to develop ever sharper typologies of “Jewishness” continued to dominate the field for at least two more decades.14

Consider, for example, the following typologies of the late 1970’s through the late 1980’s. Although they extricated themselves from traditionally legal Jewish, rabbinic categories, they were still mired in one or another set of prescriptive conceptions of the “good” or “real” Jew. For example, in 1977, social psychologist Simon Herman devised a framework that sought to conceive of the salience of Jewish identity. Having moved away from traditional notions of what counts as legitimate practice and behavior, his criteria still required him to designate those activities that are ideal or valorous for Jews whose “Jewishness” is most pronounced. He submitted that the extent to which feelings and attitudes of group identity will be present for an individual depends upon the following five criteria (Herman, 1977, p.55):

1. that the individual perceives the Jewish group as being both a national and a religious entity, and not just exclusively one or the other

2. the Jewish group occupies a position of centrality in his life-space3. being Jewish has high positive valence4. the Jewish group serves as a source of reference in significant

13 See, for example, chapter 5, “The Inauthentic Jew: Jewishness and its Discontents,” in Vincent Cheng’s 2004 book Inauthentic: the Anxiety Over Culture and Identity (Cheng, 2004). As well, Stuart Charmé has mapped out the various problematics involved with essentializing notions of Jewish identity formation in his 2000 article, “Varieties of Authenticity in Contemporary Jewish Identity (Charmé, 2000).”14 For a more comprehensive array of other typologies that have been used, see Erik Cohen’s most thorough chronicle of this phenomenon (E. Cohen, “Jewish Identity Research: A State of the Art,” 2010, pp. 20-22).

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spheres of the individual’s life5. the individual acts – more particularly in the daily conduct of his

life – are in accordance with norms of the group which have a distinctive Jewish stamp.

In 1980, educational philosopher Barry Chazan and psychologist Perry London attempted to apply Erik Erikson’s stages of identity formation to Jewish identity formation. While their typology moves towards highlighting Jewish identity as a process rather than a static construct, in Psychology and Jewish Identity Education, they still designate three categories of “traits” which they found to be associated with “strong or intense Jewish identity” (Chazan & London, 1980, p.13). Specifically, they identified kinship traits (feelings of belonging to the group, including safety, comfort, loyalty, and obligation), cultural or religious traits (such as performing rituals, expressing Jewish literacy, subscribing to Jewish ideologies), and Jewish ethnic apologia or self-justifying traits (belief that “Jewishness” corresponds to positive universalist humanitarian values and as a distinct entity has value to American society) (Chazan & London, 1980, pp. 13-14).

Thus far, the scholars of these studies of American Jewish identity formation all focus on survival and are motivated by hopes for some form of “repair” of Jewish life in America.15 Survivalist projects, although they

15 Even less survivalist-oriented projects become hindered by prescriptive measures. If survivalists are at one end of the spectrum, then what are usually called “transformationists” have fewer explicit investments in particular visions for what count as legitimate or “authentic” Jewish survival. From a transformationist perspective, that Jewish life in America is transforming is merely an empirical fact, and is neither mourned nor celebrated. Transformationist sociologist Calvin Goldscheider set out to study “social cohesion” among American Jews and argued that religiosity should be considered as simply one among a variety of ways in which Jews express their “Jewishness” (Goldscheider, 1986, p. 165). The bulk of his structuralist study focused upon indicators such as residential integration, secularization, education levels, family size, and inter-marriage with non-Jews. But Goldscheider’s six-factor index for measuring religious expression defaults once again to Talmudic indicators to define what counts as distinctively Jewish practice. They included: keeping dietary laws at home, attending daily prayer services, lighting Sabbath candles, affixing a mezuzah (a tiny piece of parchment inscribed with a Biblical passage within a decorated casing) on the front door, fasting on the Day of Atonement, and observing the dietary restrictions of the Passover holiday (Goldscheider, 1986, p.155). Moreover, his inquiry is still mired in questions of decline, asking, “Does the transformation imply the assimilation of Jews, the decline in communal cohesion, and the erosion of Jewish life in America? Has the transformation of American Jewry weakened the Jewish community, threatening its

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attempt to describe Jewish life, seem stuck in a prescriptive paradigm and end up creating parameters that pre-determine what sorts of Jewish expressions can be deemed legitimate. In 2000, this decades-old methodological problem was finally made explicit. An anthropologist of American Jewish life, Riv-Ellen Prell, identified the tautology elegantly when she wrote,

Lacking a prescriptive view of Jewish life, these sociologists, unwittingly or not, created a set of norms that defined it. These surveys ultimately became the instrument that allowed sociologists to ‘invent’ the very Jewishness they wanted to measure. The survey method, by its very nature, set out standards that in turn appeared normative. (Prell, 2000, p.33)

Continuing our survey of empirical studies of Jewish identity formation into the 1990s, we find a survivalist quest from a feminist perspective. Sociologist Sylvia Barack Fishman asserted, “American Jewish life is in desperate need of revitalization,” and illustrated her statement by citing “rising rates of intermarriage, falling rates of affiliation with Jewish communal activities, and increased numbers of Jews who do not identify Judaism as ‘very important’ to their lives” (Barack Fishman, 1993, p. 233). Her thesis argues that Jewish feminism has been, as the title of her book suggests, A Breath of Life to the Jewish community. But the version of authoritative “Jewishness” she endorses leads her to warn that “certain trends within feminist thought must be recognized as antithetical to the survival of Judaism as a distinctive culture, religion, and peoplehood” (Barack Fishman, 1993, p. 232). Ultimately, she seems ambivalent when it comes to the politics of authenticity. On the one hand, she cites Jewish feminist Judith Plaskow, who asserted that to try “to decide in advance which [feminist changes] will be authentic is to confine our creativity and resources,” while on the other hand, Barack Fishman counters this by saying, “[b]ut advising the Jewish community blithely to ignore questions of authenticity denies the fact that change and transformation can as easily result in disaster as in revitalization” (Barack Fishman, 1993, p. 232). Fishman communicates her commitments transparently to the reader, but for her message to be more fully self-reflexive, it would be useful to know precisely what counts as “disaster” in her formulation of Jewish identity formation, and why.

Perhaps no study’s potential intellectual contribution was as limited by a survivalist lens as the ethnographer David Schoem’s 1989 Ethnic

vitality and survival? (Goldscheider, 1986, p.1).

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Survival in America: An Ethnography of a Jewish Afternoon School, which demonstrates that qualitative research is also not immune to Humpty’s narrative. Schoem begins on novel theoretical footing, offering the following definition of an ethnic group, which he then adopts for his conception of “Jewishness.” Specifically, he describes an ethnic group as a self-perceived group of people who:

1. are transgenerational2. share a common sense of peoplehood3. share a sense of common historical roots and continuity4. share a common set of cultural traditions that can be more or less

religious, linguistic, geographical (but are not limited to these)5. may have shared genetic characteristics6. commonly consider inclusion in the group to be involuntary

(Schoem, 1989, p. 5).

Highly descriptive, this conceptual formulation is the least fraught with pre-conceived notions about what good Jews are or do. The fourth criterion, in particular, conveys the assumption that it should be one’s subjects who determine what counts as specific ethnic practices or behaviors, and not the researcher. Moreover, Schoem adds a new temporal qualification that presages later reconceptualizations of Jewish identity formation which will strive to account for flux and fluidity. “At any given time,” he avers, “various aspects of the common culture and traditions, and the common sense of historical continuity may neither be shared nor practiced in all respects by all members of the group” (Schoem, 1989, p. 5). While Schoem is among the first to escape Prell’s tautology (it may also help that qualitative research does not require pre-constructed or operationalized notions of “Jewishness”), the problems lie in Schoem’s analysis of his data and in the conclusions he draws.

The very title of Schoem’s book reveals the survival story he believed he was telling. According to his survivalist thesis described in the opening chapter (Schoem, 1989, pp. 3, 4, 12), Jews are not dying, but neither are they transforming and renewing themselves. Then, Schoem’s concluding chapters, entitled “Success in the Short-Term: Survival and Identification” and “Beyond Survival: Is There Hope for Substance and Authenticity,” revert back to his survivalist thesis, and follow the path of so many other studies in the field by providing “will we or won’t we” diagnoses for survival. But Schoem is apparently so steeped in the survivalist paradigm built into the Humpty narrative that it turns his

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analysis towards questions of survival, rather than to his data. In other words, it is possible to hear in Schoem’s data a different thesis altogether.

If one reads only the middle four chapters (five through eight), which contain Schoem’s ethnographic descriptions of the school, one finds that the book is far less about ethnic survival, and more precisely about identity conflict and dissonance. Group survival and conflict in identity formation are not the same things. Actually, Schoem’s data point to an intriguing sort of charade of Jewish life, which the students and parents are generally willing to maintain, and which leaders are unwilling to expose. The way Schoem depicts how his subjects related to mentions of “Jewish ways of life” or “Jewish community” conjures images of a museum or a virtual Judaism, where Jewish identity formation is not something that takes place across various spaces and settings of one’s daily life. Instead, his rich descriptions depict his subjects treating Jewish identity formation as something that other people used to value in other places and times, and which are now being re-enacted in rote and perfunctory ways, perhaps even performed akin to installations in a museum of modern art, for some vague audience. Clearly, though, the rehearsals are not performed for the subjects themselves.

Even more intriguing, Schoem’s ethnographic data also point to a strategy that his subjects seem to develop in order to cope with the acute tension between the bulk of their lives that are lived outside of the synagogue walls, and the virtual Judaism that they, in a sense, pretend to find meaningful within the synagogue space. For example, while the school’s explicit curricular goals were to present normative Conservative Jewish practice, Schoem’s description of teacher diversity (some were not religious, some antireligious, some simply unsure about the role of their Jewish identity formation and then some were observant in traditionally Conservative Jewish ways), points to a tacit or “hidden” curriculum, of unnamed ambivalence among the adult role models about how to be Jewish in America. For example, Schoem offers images of a teacher’s aide who stepped out of the classroom to listen to the Sunday morning football game, and the senior teacher who left school early on some Sundays to get to kickoffs in time (Schoem, 1982, p. 314) that represent powerful examples of a quest to straddle multiple cultural worlds simultaneously.

Indeed, rather than a story about failing ethnic survival, his valuable data could have been used much more productively to interpret the theme which Sarna has called “the most fundamental question of American Jewish life;” namely, “how to live in two worlds at once, how to be both American and Jewish, part of the larger American society and

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apart from it” (emphasis added, Sarna, 1998, pp. 9, 10). Striving to be “a part of” and simultaneously “apart from” is also what Schoem’s teachers witness in their students and families, as well as struggle with themselves (as in leaving for football games), although they do not acknowledge it. For example, Schoem provides the following vivid quotations from teachers he studied:

Why should the kids have to go to Hebrew school and then return home and find a Christmas tree in their home. It’s hypocritical!”

If Judaism is positive at home and happens at home, school will have meaning. If a child learns esoterically about Havdalah at school but never experiences it-what does he need it for? (Schoem, 1982, p.316).

But Schoem never interprets the rich data he collected in these alternative ways. Instead, he analyzes his findings in terms of prognoses for survival or in terms of the substance and authenticity of Jewish identities, as the two final chapters’ titles imply. These seem like unnecessary projections of survivalist themes onto his data. There were missed epistemological opportunities in his study, and perhaps the most obvious was to analyze the data in terms of the dissonance – at times painful, ironic, and even comical – involved in trying to negotiate competing cultural systems. I will elaborate on this point in the final section of the paper.

While survival is an important political challenge, the analysis of Jewish identity formation in terms of conflict and dissonance raises issues capable of producing new kinds of knowledge. In fact, investigating conflict may do more to aid the survivalist project in the longer term because those studies could teach us about what is hard for American Jews and how so, not just about what is “working” or if and to what extent Jews are in decline, by whatever measures.

By contrast, Steven Cohen, sociologist of American Jewish life, has asserted that some form of a “Jewishness continuum” that implies some individuals are “‘more Jewish’ or ‘less Jewish’” is “useful if not unavoidable” (S. Cohen, 1991, p. 4). Although he acknowledges this to be crude, he does not see a way around Jewish identity studies that implement some scale of strong or weak ties, and good or bad chances of survival. But such a hierarchy is only unavoidable if one’s main goal is to measure chances for ethnic survival and determine the rate of its decline.

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Towards new rhymes and reasons

This survey of studies in the field of American Jewish identity formation is unified by one common theme. They have all resulted, consciously or not, in measuring some version of weaker versus stronger Jewish identities, which in turn are used to predict the “success” or “failure” of Jewish life in America. However, with Prell’s exposure of the pervasive methodological tautology in her challenge to the study of American Jewish identity research in the social sciences in 2000, the first hints of a paradigm shift can be detected. Two years later, social psychologist Bethamie Horowitz expanded the critique of the field into the theoretical realm with her proposal for “Reframing the Study of Contemporary American Jewish Identity,” in which she confronts the field’s master narrative directly. With a clever turn of phrase, she contended that while the field’s research has mainly been asking “How Jewish are Jews?” new knowledge could be produced by asking, “How are Jews Jewish” (Horowitz, 2002, p. 14)? She argues that the shift from a normative inquiry of “how Jewish are Jews” to a descriptive inquiry that asks “how are Jews Jewish” allows us to study “the varied ways that people relate (if at all)” to their Jewish identity formation (Horowitz, 2002, p. 14).

In Horowitz’s own work this translates into developing a grounded research approach that allows respondents to define their own priorities and sensibilities regarding their Jewish identity formation (Horowitz, 1998). Initially employing long interviews and focus groups, Horowitz asked her subjects, “For you personally, what does being Jewish involve?” She then used this data to create a large-scale representative survey. With respondents creating the initial indicators, Horowitz reasons, any conceptual instruments based on their formulations should have greater validity. In this way, she carefully avoids falling into Prell’s tautology, because she is separating the gathering of the data from the analysis of the data (Charmé et al, 2008, p. 137). Horowitz’s hope is that it will become possible to more accurately describe what American Jews are doing, feeling, and thinking, rather than what researchers decide in advance what they should be doing, feeling, or thinking. As she put it, by shifting the “analytic yardstick from one rooted in normative Jewish religious practice to one that attends to meaning,” changes in Jewish life can be probed in terms of individual and group agency rather than how they may contribute to a story of ethnic decline (Charmé et al, 2008, p. 135, emphasis in original).

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By interrogating the scholarship in the field in these innovative ways, Prell and Horowitz have begun to help extricate the process of measuring Jewish identity formation from Humpty’s master narrative. Gradually, more work is emerging that does not seek to measure the “Good Jew” or “what went wrong” with American Jewish identity formation. In “Jewish Identities in Action: An Exploration of Models, Metaphors, and Methods,” the authors further developed the argument for the need of a paradigm shift. For example, Charmé interrogated what he dubs the “drink-your-milk” approach to studying Jewish identity formation and challenged the field’s trend to assess which types of Jewish identities are strong or healthy enough to resist the non-Jewish world (Charmé, Horowitz, Hyman, and Kress, 2008, pp. 117-119). The field has been driven primarily by the pursuit to find “an antidote for the impact of modernity on Jews and Judaism” (Charmé and Hyman Zelkowicz, 2011, p. 164). In sum, studies have by and large assumed Jews are suffering from some new illness since coming to America and focused on the search for a cure.

This is not a neutral pursuit, however. As we have seen, developing criteria for measuring Jewish identity formation is fraught with value propositions. Broadening the prospects for new modes of scholarly inquiry will require researchers to address the politics of authenticity and acknowledge that the conceptual frameworks used for Jewish identity formation are not merely intellectual exercises, but are themselves contested arenas, and should be treated as such. Two recent articles engage in this very process, one by an educational historian of Jewish education and the other by a philosopher of Jewish education (Jacobs, 2013; Levisohn, 2013). From different disciplinary perspectives, both authors provide meta-critiques of the field by tackling existing paradigms and narratives of the study of American Jewish identity formation. With these theoretical and methodological challenges from scholars within the field of American Jewish identity formation, a promising paradigm shift seems to be gaining traction.

A Call for the Study of Conflict

As Jack Kugelmass has noted, the field of contemporary Jewish identity formation is populated primarily by Jews who study Jews (Kugelmass, 1988, p. 1). Consequently, it is especially vital for social scientists in this field to work to clarify how their personal Jewish commitments and investments affect their intellectual work. Far from

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discounting their projects, this sort of self-reflexivity that acknowledges the lack of “critical distance” will clarify the projects and help to sophisticate the discourse within the research of American Jewish identity formation.16 This will help redress the production of scholarship that projects anxieties of survival on to the study of American Jewish identity formation. Moreover, it may pry open another unexplored avenue of inquiry; namely, the role of tensions and dissonance in identity formation.

The dominant trope among studies of Jewish identity formation has assumed that bearing multiple shifting and competing identities is a deleterious state for American Jewry and mitigates prospects for survival. As a result, any notion of a “healthy” identity has included theoretical and methodological attempts to render that which is conflicted, multiple, dissonant, and changing, as harmonious, unified, coherent, and stable. Well before Woocher’s quest for a “unified field theory,” Simon Herman sought an “inclusive identity,” calling for reconciliation when aspects of one’s identity are competing (Herman, 1977, pp. 32-35).

Striving to account for the dynamic motion and tensions in identity formation directly challenges that quest for final conceptual clarity of “Jewishness” that has marked a half-century of research on American Jewish identity formation. Recall Himmelfarb’s elaborate, multi-celled matrix (Figure 1.1), for example. While he may broaden the Jewish tent by adding ever more variables, this will never allow us to question how those variables move. There is great struggle and tension in these processes, which studies in the field have tended to iron out.

This quest for harmony was made most patent by one of the first sociologists of American Jewish life, Charles Liebman. He asserted that “the behavior of the American Jew is best understood as his unconscious effort to restructure his environment and reorient his own self-definition and perception of reality so as to reduce the tension between these

16 The innovation here involves a fairly major shift with regard to the traditional notion of objectivity. I have discussed this shift specifically with regard to ethnographic work (Charmé et al, 2008, pp. 125-126). In short, I suggest that the classic use of “critical distance” is not well suited to researchers who have, in a very real sense, "gone native" before entering the field. Therefore, rather than working hard to maintain a “critical distance” which seeks to keep in check feelings such as abandonment, betrayal, loss, inadequacy, joy, delight, or love, lest they obscure one’s project, I propose replacing this approach with a “critical proximity.” Applying a critical proximity, a researcher works hard to use, consciously and productively, the full range of reactions that s/he has to being in the field, simultaneously as “insider” and as “outsider” (in different, and shifting ways), in order to clarify their project.

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[American and Jewish] values” (Liebman, 1973, p. vii). But it is not clear on what basis he assumed these tensions needed to be reduced, nor what kind of tensions he meant, or how they should, in his view, be reduced. Moreover, his assumption that there are just two monolithic – “American” and “Jewish” – value tensions at play conflates a much more complex reality. People negotiate multiple identities simultaneously, in different ways at different times (Gergen, 2000; K. Hall, 2002; Huynh, Nguyen, & Benet-Martínez, 2012). Ultimately, Liebman linked these dangers of trying to manage multiple and competing identities with his fears about Jewish survival, warning that

…if the Jewish community is to survive, it must become more explicit and conscious about the incompatibility of integration and survival. To do so today will offer the possibility of conscious choice. To refuse to do so will mean the continuing redefinition of Judaism, to the point where its existence is meaningless in any traditional sense…If Judaism as I understand it is to perpetuate itself in America, it must, at least to some extent, reject the value of integration which I see as sapping its very existence (p. viii).

Thus, we have found another neglected avenue of inquiry as a result of the dominant survivalist narrative. The central role of conflict in identity formation has been largely pathologized (as in Liebman’s work) or simply ignored and overlooked (as in Schoem’s work). Without an appreciation of the role of conflict, though, the important “work” of identity formation becomes meaningless, as Erikson and others have taught us (Erikson, 1982; Elder, 1985; Mitchell & Black, 1995). Properly conceived as an activity and not an inert entity, identity formation involves what sociologist Elizabeth Swidler has called “strategies of action” in response to ever shifting cultural contexts and settings (Swidler, 1986, p. 273). As ethnographer of education, Pamela Perry put it, the contradictions, inconsistencies, and conflicts that we find among people we study can be highly illuminating and “need not be seen as nefarious” (Perry, 2002, p. 3). Instead of striving only for alignment and resolutions among the various competing identities that American Jews experience, researchers could also be producing literature that addresses dissonance and explores the many complex tensions of identity formation, Jewish and otherwise.

To fully legitimate conflict as a focus of inquiry, in addition to making the shift to viewing identity formation as fluid and unstable, researchers will also need to re-examine the definition of culture. In

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particular, it will be crucial to analyze how and why “cultural identities” are seen in contradistinction to “religious” ones, and how they serve as shorthand for food, art, music, and other potentially secular expressions of Jewish identity formation. By contrast, Swidler offers a non-hierarchical definition of culture as that which consists of “symbolic vehicles of meaning, including beliefs, ritual practices, art forms, and ceremonies, as well as informal cultural practices such as language, gossip, stories, and rituals of daily life” (Swidler, 1986, p. 273). Culture, therefore, can be a bagel or a film, but it can also be worship, ritual, and variation in religious observance. Culture can “happen” in the hallway of a workplace, be “announced” over a loudspeaker, or be “whispered” in the formal and informal rules of an institution or group.

Drawing on Swidler’s work, identity formation can then be seen as a dynamic cultural tool-kit in motion. This is a useful image for analyzing the role of conflict in identity formation. Within this tool-kit are the “symbols, stories, rituals, and world-views” which people may use in varying configurations to solve different kinds of problems, or what become their “strategies of action” (Swidler, 1986, p. 273). One’s cultural response is therefore necessarily determined not only by the sheer number of tools but also by the ways in which one can employ those tools in combination. This introduces the greatly overlooked dimension of agency in research on Jewish identity formation. There is a capacity to choose some tools over others. One new research aim could be to analyze the nature of the strategies that American Jews employ to manage the conflicts they face in wanting to be, as Jews, both a part of and apart from American society.

To clarify, applying this notion of culture to better comprehend processes of American Jewish identity formation is not an attempt to “de-religiocize” notions of Jewish identity formation. As such, the classic twin concerns of the social scientific literature on contemporary American Jewry – intermarriage and assimilation – do not disappear, but they become interesting and important processes to study for reasons we have yet to imagine in survivalist narratives. Rather than lamenting the role of dissonance in Jewish identity formation or striving to eliminate it, researchers could be learning how better to study those messy and mercurial processes.

Whereas I wholeheartedly agree with Liebman, who stated that there cannot logically be as many Judaisms as there are Jews,17 a cultural

17 For possibly the most candid published scholarly debate on this topic, see the proposals Charles Liebman presents, and the responses to him by Steven Cohen and Riv-Ellen Prell in Contemporary Jewry, 2001, Vol. 22, 99-125.

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studies approach to identity formation scholarship would be able to consider how there might be as many different ways of navigating and negotiating Jewish identity formation as there are Jews. To accept such a proposition will require scholars to go beyond the Humpty narrative and challenge assumptions about the need to heal putative ruptures to an imagined ideal whole and put the pieces back together in a certain way.

Moreover, if research aims were expanded to include questions about navigating conflict, scholarship could compare the cultural strategies among a wide variety of Jews, not only those in the “middle” (as Steven Cohen has called for, 1991, p. 4). For example, rabbis and Jews who are in inter-faith relationships are two populations not usually considered to have much in common, since they are apparently at opposite ends of the “affiliation spectrum.” But analyzed from the perspective of cultural strategies used to manage identity tensions, they actually share something significant in common. As a result of personal or professional contexts, their circumstances tend to force them to make conscious and explicit their cultural strategies in ways that the so-called “moderately affiliated” (or Cohen’s “middle”) rarely need to identify.

Countless other possibilities for applying cultural studies to the study of American Jewish identity formation will emerge as the field continues to move beyond Humpty’s narrative. Dwelling in the processes of Jewish identity formation because of the dissonance, and not in spite of it, will lead to new research questions and prompt the need for new tools and theories that are best suited to observing and analyzing the role of conflict in Jewish identity formation. What we find when we look in these new places using new theoretical frameworks and new methodologies may be encouraging or discouraging from survivalist points of view, but it will produce new types of knowledge about processes of Jewish identity formation that the field has yet to imagine.

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Appendices

Harold Himmelfarb’s Dimensions of Religious Involvement

Object of Orientation

Type of Orientation

Behavioral Ideational

Supernatural (1) devotional (2) doctrinal(3) experiential

Communal

(4) affiliational• associational• fraternal• parental

(5) ideological

Cultural (6) intellectual-esthetic (7) affectional

Interpersonal (8) ethical (9) moral