American Post-Judaism: Identity and Renewal in a Postethnic Society

RELIGION IN NORTH AMERICA

Catherine L. Albanese and Stephen J. Stein, editors

SHAUL MAGID

AMERICAN POST-JUDAISM

IDENTITY AND RENEWAL IN A POSTETHNIC SOCIETY

INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS

Bloomington and Indianapolis

This book is a publication of Indiana University Press

601 North Morton Street

Bloomington, Indiana 474043797 USA

iupress.indiana.edu

Telephone orders    800–842–6796

Fax orders    812–855–7931

© 2013 by Shaul Magid

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses' Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1992.

Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Magid, Shaul, [date]

   American post-Judaism : identity and renewal in a postethnic society / Shaul Magid.

      pages cm. — (Religion in North America)

   Includes bibliographical references and index.

      ISBN 978-0-253-00802-2 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-253-00809-1 (ebook) 1. Judaism—United States—History—21st century. 2. Jews—United States—Identity—History—21st century. I. Title.

   BM205.M25 2013

   296.0973’09051—dc23

                                                                                                                     2012049481

1 2 3 4 5 18 17 16 15 14 13

PUBLICATION OF THIS BOOK

IS SUPPORTED BY A GRANT FROM

Jewish Federation of Greater Hartford

For Yehuda, Chisda, Miriam, and Kinneret

It is your world now. Please try to leave it better than you found it.

If Judaism is terminable, Jewishness is interminable. It can survive Judaism.

—Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever, 72

For Judaism's future to be rescued something will have to die.

—Rachel Adler, Engendering Judaism, 170

Contents

Foreword

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Be the Jew You Make: Jews, Jewishness, and Judaism in Postethnic America

2. Ethnicity, America, and the Future of the Jews: Felix Adler, Mordecai Kaplan, and Zalman Schachter-Shalomi

3. Pragmatism and Piety: The American Spiritual and Philosophical Roots of Jewish Renewal

4. Postmonotheism, Renewal, and a New American Judaism

5. Hasidism, Mithnagdism, and Contemporary American Judaism: Talmudism, (Neo) Kabbala, and (Post) Halakha

6. From the Historical Jesus to a New Jewish Christology: Rethinking Jesus in Contemporary American Judaism

7. Sainthood, Selfhood, and the Ba'al Teshuva: ArtScroll's American Hero and Jewish Renewal's Functional Saint

8. Rethinking the Holocaust after Post-Holocaust Theology: Uniqueness, Exceptionalism, and the Renewal of American Judaism

Epilogue. Shlomo Carlebach: An Itinerant Preacher for a Post-Judaism Age

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Foreword

Shaul Magid's new book is groundbreaking. Building on David Hollinger's concept of a postethnic America, Magid turns the postethnic lens on American Judaism to reveal an emergent form of the received tradition that represents a new interpretive turn. In Magid's reading, Judaism is becoming postethnic, and that is a very good thing. Whereas traditional academic tropes regarding Judaism merge into Jewishness and ask searching questions about whether both are better seen as ethnicity or religion, Magid stands this concern on its head. Jews—the people and their faith—have been changing. In so doing they risk dissolving the boundaries of their thick identity as a people in favor of spreading abroad their spirituality and culture in a quasi-universalist gesture.

This will surely be a provocative thesis for many. As Magid presents it, however, it is hardly a completely new development. With readings that encompass a wide-ranging cast of characters and phenomena, Magid looks to earlier American Jewish figures like Felix Adler and Mordecai Kaplan even as, with his complex knowledge of the European Jewish mystical tradition, he lifts out themes regarding Kabbalism and Hasidism and other cultural manifestations. All of this comes into focus for Magid in the American Jewish Renewal movement and its founder and charismatic leader Zalman Schachter-Shalomi. Magid's sympathies for Schachter-Shalomi are no secret here, and they form the basis for a hermeneutic that re-centers American Judaism even as it de-centers it from convention scholarship and received understandings.

In the midst of this, Magid's book combines historical materials, cultural analysis, and theological exegesis in a blended methodology. The result is a tour de force to argue for the Jewish Renewal movement of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century as a major cultural force. Here Jewish Renewal, with its new paradigm Judaism, represents an engine generating a radical change in Jewish thought and practice as well as identity in the present-day United States. According to Magid, Schachter-Shalomi combines the Hasidic tradition with a strong infusion of New Age spirituality to deliver a combinative form of religiosity unlike any Judaisms of the past. At the core of this new creation is a move from the particularism of the traditional Jewish ideology of chosenness to a new universalism—a global consciousness on the part of American Jewry that prompts Jews to offer their spiritual insights to the world.

As the Hollinger allusion already suggests, the backdrop for all of this is a discussion that Magid situates within general cultural studies scholarship. Here the emergence of a postethnic America signals a social world in which multiculturalism has become a kind of new norm. With the later phases of multiculturalism and with the Jewish record of intermarriage, runs the argument, Jews in a mood of post-assimilation or even dis-assimilation have opened themselves to an ethos at once universalized and globalized. In the case of the Holocaust, for example, Jews choose such universal outlooks not because they are without power but because they are truly free and have not experienced the systemic anti-Semitism of Europe. As Magid tells the story, Jews establish their universalism on their own tradition, which they use to support a rebirth of social justice concerns throughout the world.

Chapters, as they develop, pursue many different angles as so many vectors leading, from various directions, to this central thesis about postethnic Judaism and the role of Jewish Renewal in promoting it. As the larger perspective emerges, Magid's introductory discussion of ethnicity and postethnicity explores the terrain. Then, in a new chapter, these concerns yield to the close reading of Adler and Kaplan as well as an integrated account of Schachter-Shalomi in the context of Adler's and Kaplan's work. Several chapters take on American philosophical pragmatism in relation to the spirituality of Jewish Renewal, probe the theology of Jewish postmonotheism, and scrutinize Hasidism and related movements as they shape Renewal. In another chapter, a rethinking of the Jewish view of Jesus past and present demonstrates that from the nineteenth century Jewish leaders were attempting to negotiate their view of Jesus in the context of American society. Looking to themes of sainthood and selfhood, yet another chapter examines a series of popular biographies of Jewish saints published by an American Orthodox Jewish publishing house, ArtScroll. Finally, Magid looks to the issue of how Jews have dealt with the Holocaust and are dealing with it now in an age of post-Holocaust theology. As a revealing epilogue, Magid introduces us to Schlomo Carlebach, the itinerant and charismatic storyteller/preacher who wrote almost nothing but, in his life and work, epitomizes the themes and issues raised throughout the book in the context of the Jewish Renewal movement.

Throughout this work, Magid displays astonishing facility in his ability to comprehend so many thinkers and in the readings he offers, readings that weave them into his central thesis with apparent ease. His comparative proficiency is in display seemingly at every turn and suggests the wealth of erudition he brings to this book. Magid has read widely, argued convincingly, and quoted succinctly. His work will surely stimulate conversation and lead to earnest debate in the Jewish scholarly community and elsewhere. We are pleased to be publishing it.

Catherine L. Albanese

Stephen J. Stein

Series Editors

Acknowledgments

This book was written over a period of about six years. There were many people along the way who helped, some of whom I will regrettably forget to mention. To begin, I want to thank Jo Ellen Kaiser, who first asked me to write an essay on Jewish Renewal for Tikkun magazine in 2006. After she received my overly long submission, she suggested I publish it in three installments. Those essays were the germ cell of this project and I thank her and Michael Lerner for their support. Kathryn Lofton was instrumental in this project from the beginning, as she really introduced me to the field of American religion, gave me numerous lists of books to read, and made me believe I could make the transition from a scholar of Jewish mysticism to a part-time Americanist.

Many people generously read versions of chapters, sometimes numerous times, and offered helpful advice and comments. They include Sydney Anderson, Yaakov Ariel, Michael Berenbaum, Nathaniel Berman, Zachary Braiterman, Jessica Carr, Aryeh Cohen, Shai Held, Susannah Heschel, Zvi Ish-Shalom, Martin Kavka, Barbara Krawcowicz, Nancy Levene, Yehudah Mirsky, Michael Morgan, Tomer Persico, Devorah Shubowitz, and Elliot Wolfson. Thanks to Sarah Imhoff, who read numerous drafts of numerous chapters and offered sage advice. Joseph (Yossi) Turner has been a conversation partner on these topics for many years, and his friendship and support in this project was invaluable. Lila Corwin Berman carefully read the manuscript in its entirely and saw the book for what it was in ways that I did not. Catherine Albanese was of enormous help in terms of the American religious context of the book. She saved me from some embarrassing errors.

I gave numerous academic talks on various chapters of this book over the past few years. I want to thank David Myers, Carol Bakhos, Don Seeman, Nathaniel Deutsch, Nora Rubel, Boaz Huss, and Sarah Pessin, all of whom generously offered me the opportunity to present my work. Thanks to Susan Berrin, who published a shorter version of chapter 1 on post-ethnicity in SHMA; Zev Garber for publishing a version of the chapter on the Jewish Jesus in The Jewish Jesus: Revelation, Reflection, Reclamation; Steven T. Katz for publishing an abbreviated version of the chapter on sainthood and selfhood in Modern Judaism; and, Kocku von Stuckrad and Boaz Huss for publishing a version of the chapter on pragmatism and piety in Kabbalah and Modernity. Thanks to Jonathan Sarna and Steven Cohen for their comments on questions of American Judaism and postethnicity. We may see things differently, but you both have been gracious and kind in your critiques.

I want to thank Jeffrey Veidlinger and the Borns Jewish Studies Program and David Brakke and David Haberman and the Department of Religious Studies at Indiana University. Both have been truly wonderful intellectual homes and places of support and encouragement. Thanks to all my friends at the Fire Island Synagogue for your continued patience and support. Thanks to Hila Ratzabi for an invaluable job copyediting the manuscript; Nancy Zibman for the index; and Janet Rabinowitch, Dee Mortensen, Sarah Jacobi, and Angela Burton for all their hard work at Indiana University Press and for believing in this project from the very beginning and seeing it to publication. Thanks to Steve Stein and Catherine Albanese, editors of the IU Press series Religion in North America for including this unorthodox book on American Judaism. Thanks to R. Zalman Schachter-Shalomi for all his continued help and support and for all the gifts he gave my generation. Thanks to Shlomo Carlebach for providing the soundtrack for this entire project and to Elliot Wolfson for permission to use his painting Entanglements for the cover. Thanks to Jon, Josh, Barbara, and Yehuda for the music, and to Zeelion, carrier of new light and words. My sons Yehuda and Chisda have listened to this book for years. While their intellectual interests lie elsewhere, they listened, sometimes reluctantly, and often had incisive things to say.

Chapter 3, Pragmatism and Piety: The American Spiritual and Philosophical Roots of Jewish Renewal appeared in Kabbalah and Modernity, Boaz Huss, Marco Pasi, and Kocku von Stuckrad, eds. (Brill, 2010), and is reprinted with the permission from the press. Chapter 5, Hasidism, Mithnagdism, and Contemporary American Judaism, appeared in The Cambridge History of Jewish Philosophy, Martin Kavka and David Novak, eds. (Cambridge University Press, 2012, and is reprinted with the permission from the press. An abbreviated version of chapter 6, From the Historical Jesus to a New Christology: Rethinking Jesus in Contemporary American Judaism, appeared as The New Jewish Reclamation of Jesus in Late Twentieth-Century America: Re-Aligning and Re-Thinking Jesus the Jew, in The Jewish Jesus: Revelation, Reflection, Reclamation, Zev Garber, ed. (Purdue University Press, 2011), and is reprinted with permission from the press.

I dedicate this book to my children, Yehuda, Chisda, Miriam, and Kinneret. They all make me realize that what we have tried to do will be in good hands. May you all find your way, forward and back, and make the world a better place.

Introduction

American Jews or Jewish Americans? American Judaism or Judaism in America? What is at stake in the placement of the adjective, or in the hyphenated or non-hyphenated appellation? Is it simply a hierarchical question of identity: American or Jewish? Both, of course, but they are not identical nor are they prima facie equal. One is; the other describes. Which best captures the reality of Jews who happen to live in America and, in one way or another, identify as being Jewish, whatever that may mean? From a different angle: how much America is in American Judaism? How much Jewishness is in America? How much has Jewishness changed in contemporary America? And how much has America changed?

This book approaches these questions from two related yet distinct perspectives: the first analytic and the second constructive. The analytic perspective explores what I understand to be the challenges of Jews in America in the beginning of the twenty-first century, an era David Hollinger calls postethnic.¹ Defining the term Hollinger writes,

A postethnic perspective favors voluntary over involuntary affiliations, balances an appreciation for communities of descent with a determination to make room for new communities, and promotes solidarities of wide scope that incorporate people with different ethnic and racial backgrounds. A postethnic perspective resists the grounding of knowledge and moral values in blood and history, but works within the last generation's recognition that many of the ideas and values once taken to be universal are specific to certain cultures.²

Following Hollinger, I claim this postethnic shift in American society presents distinctive challenges to communities for whom ethnicity (broadly defined) used to serve as the primary anchor of identity.³ While it is impossible to determine exactly when this postethnic shift took place—Hollinger's Postethnic America was published in 1995—we can generally say this has been developing for at least the last two decades.

This book argues that when the ethnic bond is broken or dissolves into a multi-ethnic/multi-racial mix, the age-old strategies Jews deployed to meet the challenges of survival of both Jewishness and Judaism become largely inoperative, since those strategies assume an ethnic root of Jewish identity as its foundation. While Judaism as a religion was often viewed as the glue that held the Jewish people together, the opposite has also been the case. That is, it was a notion of peoplehood (ethnically defined) that historically enabled Judaism to continue to serve as a meaningful identity label.⁴ While throughout its history Judaism was often destabilized by the challenges of external rubrics, for example, Hellenistic culture, Greek and Western philosophy, mysticism, and science, what remained mostly stable was the ethnic core of Jewish peoplehood.

Today Judaism in America and Jewish peoplehood are in a state of transition—in a post state—in large part because the notion of peoplehood more generally is struggling to find footing in a society where ethnicity is becoming a more liquid and thus less dependable source of identity.⁵ This is only partly the consequence of the empirical reality of intermarriage. It is also the consequence of the changing nature of identity in America, moving from the inherited to the constructed or performed.⁶ In short, the success of Jews in America, and America's own turn from inherited to constructed identity, has created a challenge that is distinct if not unique in Jewish history.

The constructive component of this book presents one alternative for Jewish survival in such a shifting society. I argue that Jewish Renewal, a diffuse counter-cultural movement that began in the 1970s, offers a radical critique of Judaism coined by its founder Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi as Paradigm Shift. Throughout this book I argue that Jewish Renewal contains some thoughtful responses to postethnic America.⁷ While Renewal today largely consists of a fairly small group of alternative communities scattered throughout the urban landscape of North America, its influence extends beyond these counter-cultural enclaves and offers American Jews a progressive alternative that is post-halakhic, global in scope, and more embracing of the multiethnic makeup of contemporary American society. I engage Renewal as a topos, a theoretical frame of reference that is connected to but not limited by the sociological reality of its communities. I argue that Renewal's critique of Judaism and its constructive alternative reach down to the very roots of Judaism and Jewishness, offering various ways to reconfigure Judaism for what I call a post-Judaism age, an age where Judaism remains related to but is no longer identical with Jewishness. In the words of Jacques Derrida cited as an epigraph to this book, If Judaism is terminable, Jewishness is interminable. It can survive Judaism. The opposite is arguably also the case.

This book assumes that we live in an era of posts: post-colonialism, postethnicity, post-Zionism, post-halakha, post-monotheism, even post-Judaism. The term post-Judaism is not simply a placeholder but, following Homi Bhabha's assessment of post-colonialism, I suggest Judaism in America is marked by a tenebrous sense of survival, living on the borderlines of the ‘present,’ for which there seems to be no proper name other than the current and controversial shiftiness of the prefix ‘post.’⁸ I do not mean to suggest that contemporary Judaism in America should be viewed through a post-colonialist lens, only that Bhabha's framework for understanding the post-colonialist world can be helpful in understanding the transitional nature of Jewish identity in America.

The borderlines, the unchartered marginal space, the post state of contemporary Judaism in America have emerged in large part due to two related phenomena: the collapsing structures of ethnicity and the culmination of a period marked by a Jewish spiritual renaissance that dominated American Judaism in the 1970s and 1980s. That period saw a resurgence of Orthodoxy, the Ba'al Teshuva (newly religious/born-again) movement, and a renewed embrace of traditional practice among non-Orthodox American Jews that included the rise of egalitarian traditionalism and the Havurah movement that was the precursor to Jewish Renewal.⁹

Today we are arguably living on the other side of that renaissance, in a place between, no longer in the paradigm of a previous generation but not yet aware, and surely not familiar, with the new territory we already inhabit. Here is where we encounter Bhabha's notion of post. Much contemporary Jewish thinking continues to function, sometimes quite successfully, in an old paradigm—be it traditional or progressive—creatively rethinking past rubrics to answer the challenges of the present situation. But, as Bhabha suggests, newness does not exist on the continuum of past and present. Rather, it renews the past, refiguring it as a contingent ‘in-between’ space that innovates and interrupts the performance of the present.¹⁰ My claim is that we are living in that rupture that produces the in between. I do not propose that the experience of being in between is one that must be rejected or reformed, but rather, I attempt to understand the nature of this grey zone and explore ways to live in it, and from it.

Bhabha's reading of the post-colonial world is skeptical that our marginal position can be understood by old models. These ‘in-between’ spaces provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood—singular and communal—that initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation, in the act of defining the idea of society itself.¹¹ The age of Jewish assimilation and acculturation is over and has largely been successful. Jews are arguably one of the most integrated minorities in America.¹² And the age of romanticization and nostalgia in the form of Jewish rediscovery has run its course (although its after-effects will continue to be felt for some time). As is sometimes the case, our social reality has advanced beyond our capacity to conceptualize a response to it that will simultaneously embrace and engage—and not resist or reject—the new. In this post-Judaism era, the past requires a combination of translation and abandonment, or translation as abandonment.

The term post-Judaism has been used in contemporary Israel to describe a spiritual renaissance among non-affiliated Jewish Israelis who are adapting Jewish motifs and rituals outside any formal institutional or spiritual framework. It is also sometimes used to describe a humanistic notion of Judaism not limited to Jews.¹³ This includes large New Age gatherings in the Galilee and the Negev corresponding to Jewish festivals modeled after the Rainbow Gathering in the United States. An American articulation of post-Judaism would be different in large part because Jewishness, as a secular identity, is a much more stable category for Israelis than it is for American Jews. For American Jews, Judaism—either in a normative or post state—is a much more important source of Jewish identity than it is in Israel where Jewishness is defined through national affiliation and membership in the nation-state.

My use of the term post-Judaism is closer to Amanda Porterfield's use of post-Protestantism in her Transformation of American Religion. Porterfield suggests that the transformation to a post-Protestant culture is the result of a variety of factors working together to loosen the dominance of Protestant institutions over the larger culture while at the same time allowing beliefs and activities rooted in Protestant tradition to interact more freely than ever before with beliefs and attitudes from other traditions.¹⁴ Normative Judaism, either traditional or progressive, assumes a stable ethnic anchor, although the Reform movement's embrace of patrilineal descent has significantly challenged that stability.¹⁵ It is my contention that the ethnic anchor of Jewish identity has been irreparably torn in postethnic America. The inclusion of non-Jews in Jewish communities resulting from intermarriage, and the ways in which postethnicity has contributed to Jews defining their Jewishness by constructing/performing their Judaism outside any normative framework—including free and open expressions of religious syncretism and borrowing—has moved Judaism to what I have been calling a post state. In some ways, post-Judaism is a term that replaces heresy in a world where orthodoxy is no longer strong enough to enable heresy to be operative.¹⁶ In the past, heresy was mostly, albeit not always, limited to doctrine and practice.¹⁷ In contemporary America it is not only doctrinal and practical, but also cultural and biological. It is also the product of the lack of any central authority that is indicative of American religion more generally. All religious/rabbinic authority is limited solely to the individuals who accept that authority. Coupled with the individualistic spirit of American religion, Jewishness and Judaism have become liquid categories.

While this book argues that Renewal is perhaps the first systematic attempt to reconstruct Judaism in a post-Judaism era, I do not claim that it solves the problem. One aspect of this post phase is that the questions themselves are in a state of flux. I submit that Renewal's program is a radical departure from the very foundations of Jewish tradition. However, I suggest that it recognizes the shifting globalization of human, and Jewish, civilization in ways that may contribute to a new Judaism for the proximate future.

If postethnicity (and thus post-Judaism) is indeed upon us, new rubrics will be required to navigate the dislocation of ethnicity and construct a Judaism that is no longer tethered to a notion of peoplehood as previously understood. Bhabha describes what I think is also applicable to contemporary American Judaism and Jewishness: "The very concepts of homogenous national cultures, the consensual or contiguous transmission of historical traditions, or ‘organic’ ethnic communities—as the grounds of cultural comparativism—are in a profound process of redefinition."¹⁸ The post state is the unstable space of in between, not only between the past and future but between the possible and the unthinkable. Throughout this book, Renewal will be presented as offering a metaphysical, (post) halakhic, societal, and pragmatic template with which Jews can navigate the contours of the new territory in which they now live.

As mentioned earlier, I do not envision Renewal as a way out of this post state. In Bhabha's words, once we touch the future on its hither side¹⁹ there is no going back. If post-Judaism is one way to describe this new present, can it also be deemed successful? Have Jews in America moved beyond the possibility of saving themselves by reviving the past in an unrecognizable way? In the words of the Christian hymn, has American Jewry drifted too far from the shore?²⁰ If so, it is possible to think about ways of constructing this post-Judaism to engage the past without trying to save it. Ironically, America, which provided the most tolerant and embracing society in the Jewish Diaspora, has presented Jews with perhaps the most serious challenge they have faced in their long history: how to reconfigure Jewishness beyond ethnicity. For both classical secular Zionism and contemporary American Judaism, the Judaism of the past is over. Zionists, at least many of the radical secularists, viewed Judaism as a Diaspora phenomenon no longer necessary in a sovereign Jewish state. For them, Jewishness is a national identity, not religious. Jewishness as rooted in inheritance, in ethnicity, may not easily survive the postethnic turn in America, where biological descent increasingly yields to consent, where Jewishness is, for many, a choice rather than fate. While secular Zionism offered Jews Jewishness without Judaism, postethnic America has challenged Jews to consider whether Jewishness can exist beyond Judaism.

Before proceeding with this argument, it is important to take a step back and ask: Why focus on America? The assumption of this book is that America is categorically different than other parts of the Jewish Diaspora for at least two reasons. First, it is the first destination where Jews arrived emancipated. They never fought for their right to be there. They were almost immediately, with a few exceptions, expected to meet their obligations as citizens; they were assured of their right to practice their religion, and, perhaps ironically, quickly assumed the posture of acculturation and assimilation. Americanization was not one of a variety of options for Jews in America. It was the default position.²¹ And this largely remains so, even for those who resist that description. This experience is true of all minorities. It is part of what living in America means. And even the continued disassimilation of many American Jews—Jews rediscovering their Jewishness within their Americanness—is part of their experience of being American in a multicultural society. But as I mentioned above, that too may be a thing of the past. This book is not about Judaism and multiculturalism but Judaism in an increasingly postethnic world, a world where identities are mixed, where allegiances are more voluntary than inherited, more the result of consent rather than descent.

Second, the United States is one of the first, if not the only, significant diasporic venue where Jews were not the most othered Other. In the United States, racism has always trumped Jew-hatred or anti-Semitism. Even when anti-Semitism was a palpable problem, from the 1920s through the late 1930s in the voices of Father Coughlin, Henry Ford, and others, it was never as pronounced or as threatening as racism.²² In light of the racialist nature of American society, Jews were confronted with a different question: were they white? That is, were Jews a race and if so, what kind of race were they? The history of this question has been examined by numerous scholars and of late has become a subject of intense academic interest.²³ For Jews in America the race question was quite different from what it was in Europe. In Europe racialism was largely a handmaiden of anti-Semitism. In America, racism was situated within the historical context of slavery. While it included discrimination against non-white races, that is, Latinos, Asians, and Jews, its primary focus was against blacks. This difference is crucial in a discussion of Jewish identity in America, firstly, because it renders anti-Semitism an untenable source of Jewish self-definition and, secondly, because it means that Jews are unable to depend, negatively or positively, on simply being defined by another. They must define themselves.

How does this all play out in a time—our time—when race and ethnicity have become more complicated? In a society that aspires to be tolerant, where ethnicity is no longer supposed to be foundational, what separates the American Jew or Jewish American from any other American with a chain of hyphens to call his or her own?²⁴ In America it is not gentile animosity, as Sartre famously argued in his Antisemite and Jew, which defines the Jew. And it is no longer adherence to a religion defined as a set of behaviors and beliefs, since a majority of American Jews are secular and an increasing number of self-identified Jews say they have no religion.²⁵ Rather, it is an attachment to an ethnos, a pedigree, a people, often claimed without a sense of what that means. And it is that very structure that I argue is collapsing. A return to religion, that had its day from the early 1970s through the 1990s, is one answer to the question of what Jewish identity means. But that will only suffice for a small group of self-selected individuals, and even then its reach is quite limited and, in any event, requires a multicultural society in order to function.

In the past few decades we have witnessed a significant shift on the question of ethnos in America. It is often overlooked that the first African American president is also the first mixed-race president. In some ways the latter is even more monumental than the former, and the fact that we call him the first African American president without any real recognition of his mixed-race pedigree shows the extent to which we are still thinking in a binary ethnic/racial paradigm (black or white). It was only in 1967 (when Barack Obama was a child) that the Supreme Court determined that the prohibition of interracial marriage was unconstitutional. The growing rate of interethnic marriage among many hyphenated groups—Jewish intermarriage rates are largely on par with most of these groups—has helped create an empirical postethnic reality that challenges American Jewry's ability to identify, as it had for centuries, within the binary categories of Jewish and American, as if the former is distinct from, albeit integrated in, the latter.²⁶

This book assumes we are still living in a period of post-assimilation, which I have preferred to call disassimilation.²⁷ I divide American Jewish disassimilation into two basic periods: the romantic/nostalgic and the constructive/illustrative.²⁸ The first period lasted from the 1960s until the late 1990s. It gave us the resurgence of Orthodoxy, the Havurah movement, the rise of Habad and ArtScroll, even the fledgling Independent Minyan movement and a variety of traditional and progressive forms of reengagement with tradition in a world in retreat from secularism. This period is romantic in its depiction of the old world, holding it to be somehow more authentic than the world we live in today. It maintains an allegiance to a kind of legal formalism where precedent is authoritative albeit not always definitive.²⁹ One can even see this in the progressive three-volume Jewish Catalogues published from 1972 to 1976. The veritable bible of the New Age Jewish renaissance, the Catalogues present a largely nostalgic vision of the past with quaint photos of Hasidim from the Lower East Side or Meah Shearim and street addresses of hasidic rebbes to visit while in Jerusalem. The Catalogues designate New York's Lower East Side as a sacred place [where] a Jew could engage with authentic Judaism…and a suburban Jew could sensually imbibe the residue of a more traditional past.³⁰ The implication here is that the suburban Jew could be considered, by comparison to the Lower East Side Jew, inauthentic. The depiction in the Catalogues of the simplicity of the Sephardic and Yemenite Jews illustrates a kind of Jewish Orientalism common in those circles. The Catalogues had a very ethnic orientation. This period of Jewish romanticization did break new ground, but it cannot survive the transition from the postwar period to the period of (spiritual) globalization. There is, of course, a wide ideological chasm between, for example, ArtScroll and the Independent Minyan movement. The former are staunch traditionalists and halakhic formalists; the latter are progressive traditionalists and halakhic innovators. Yet when compared to what I argue is a radical critique of Judaism and Jewishness in Jewish Renewal, both occupy opposite ends of the first stage of disassimilation in American Judaism.

By the constructive/illustrative period I mean a selective adaptation of a tradition that is then reframed through the lens of ideals distinct from traditional/Orthodox articulations of that tradition and aligned with New Age spiritual and politically progressive principles. Thus it is not a return or even a corrective that we see in Orthodoxy or even traditional egalitarian (what I call post-Conservative or neo-Reform) Judaisms. It uses traditions from the past but no longer needs to romanticize them or hold them to be anything more than creative resources with which to reconstruct a new Jewish spirituality. It is radical, because it reimagines Judaism from its very roots without the obligatory tie to halakha or its past authority, while committed to ritual as a basis of communal cohesion (in some circles called post-halakha).

While dedicated to the affirmation of Jewish particularity expressed in ritual and practice, constructive/illustrative disassimilation has a trajectory that is expansive rather than insular, widening its scope to view Judaism as a template for the world rather than simply the source of Jewish identity. It proposes not only a (post) halakhic alternative (here strongly influenced by Mordecai Kaplan's Reconstructionist Judaism) but a metaphysics that grounds its new Judaism in an alternative theological system.³¹ It is open to the conscious use of religious syncretism and the sharing of texts and rituals with other religions. Its commitment goes beyond the religious pluralism that occupied progressive Judaisms in the romantic/nostalgic period. It is committed to an open and expansive trajectory not based on a new method of textual analysis or even societal reality but on a new metaphysical foundation that I call Jewish post-monotheism (elaborated in chapter 7). This post-monotheistic turn is not overtly rooted in historical precedent, although I argue it may reflect pre-monotheistic dimensions of Ancient Israelite religion. In line with an Aquarian Age ideology, it asserts that human civilization has entered a new epoch, and that Judaism (like all traditions) must recalibrate itself to conform to the cosmic and humanistic dimensions of this new epoch.

The prehistory of the constructive/illustrative period of disassimilation in the United States was a classic third-generation nostalgic search for roots that mirrored a similar phenomenon in general society sparked by, among other things, the 1977 television miniseries Roots³² Jacob Neusner suggests that American Judaism in the 1980s was the creation of the third generation of Jewish Americans beginning with the wave of immigration from 1880 until the Johnson-Reed act of 1924, the result of a contentious effort to remember what its parents equally deliberately forgot. The decision was made in a free society and represented free and uncoerced choice…it is the first generation to define for itself what ‘being Jewish’ would consist of, and how Judaism, as an inherited and received religious tradition, would be taken over as part of this definition.³³ In the early 1970s and 1980s American Jewry, fully assimilated and mostly comfortable, witnessed a phenomenon of religious return sometimes referred to as the Ba'al Teshuva movement. In many ways this was a classic third-generation return to roots; it was influenced by everything from the counterculture to the rise of identity politics and ethnic pride (the 1967 Six-Day War, the movement for Soviet Jewry, and Holocaust education are only a few Jewish cultural referents).³⁴ Children of second-generation assimilated Jews began to explore their tradition, and many found a faith that was lost in the receding current of Jewish Americanization. The Orthodox Jewish establishment, lacking direction in the rising tide of Americanization in the 1950s and early 1960s, was poised for such a postwar turn and quickly developed outreach organizations for these newly religious seekers.³⁵ At the same time, albeit for different reasons, Israel began to play a more prominent role in American Jewish identity as well. The post-1967 era, a strong U.S. dollar, and more inexpensive overseas travel, coupled with the leisure time—and financial resources—of many young middle-class Jewish Americans, made Israel a popular destination for a generation seeking to discover their origins. On this reading, the Ba'al Teshuva movement was identity spirituality in practice.

Yet even in its widest articulation, the Ba'al Teshuva movement was essentially a return to Orthodoxy. Many young Jews were fleeing their overly Americanized, middle-class, and hopelessly sterile non-Orthodox synagogues (portrayed as the source of existential angst and banal cynicism in the Coen brothers' film A Serious Man) in search of an authentically spiritual path, a Jewish nirvana, and a way out of the American suburbs. Orthodoxy presented itself as a spiritual alternative to American materialism and the uninspiring and bourgeois Judaism of their parents (Franz Kafka's Letter to My Father resonates with this sentiment even as it was written in a very different time and place). Thinkers such as Martin Buber and Abraham Joshua Heschel served as bridge figures between these young, Jewishly illiterate but highly intelligent men and women and the spirituality of authentic Judaism. And the seventh Lubavitcher Rebbe Menahem Mendel Schneerson and his Habad movement provided the resources and an uplifting spiritual message of authenticity and nostalgia (Hasidism as good old-time religion) that touched many in this generation of seekers. This movement back to tradition/Orthodoxy also coincided with the rise of New Age religion in America in the early 1970s. Many young Jews became ba'alei teshuva through a short stint in one of the many New Age venues.

As time went on three things happened to undermine or at least attenuate the ba'al teshuva phenomenon, eventually leading to its demise as a movement and giving rise to what I call the constructive/illustrative period of disassimilation. First, many Jews began to construct New Age Judaisms that retained a strong commitment to the progressive ideals of New Age religion but expressed those ideals through a reconstructed Judaism no longer tied to Orthodoxy. Orthodoxy's claim of authenticity weakened in the less sentimental psychology of the fourth generation. Many in this fourth generation gained access to tradition and then severed it from its ideological foundations without feeling the weight of tradition pressing down on them.

Second, the rise of Jewish Studies in the American academy began to produce scholars who were offering more nuanced and complex studies on the history of Judaism and the Jewish textual tradition. By 1971 over 185 colleges and universities in America began offering courses in Jewish Studies. Over the past two decades, Jewish Studies scholarship has begun to make a tangible impact on the larger questions of Jewish identity and Judaism more generally.³⁶ Functioning in the secular academy, many of these scholars and the newly found Jewish Studies programs where they teach offer new (and often subversive) perspectives on the Jewish tradition that are neither rooted in traditional ideology nor tied to any community (Elliot Wolfson's work on Kabbala and Daniel Boyarin's reconstruction of rabbinic culture are significant contributions to this phenomenon). Like many academic disciplines in the humanities, and the study of religion in particular, Jewish Studies often sought to undermine accepted orthodoxies and question previous assumptions about tradition. Representing a new approach to Judaism unmoored from religious life or practice, academic Jewish Studies provided resources for a new generation in search of a way to define Jewishness outside the confines of institutional religion.

Third, by the late 1980s and early 1990s, after the Ba'al Teshuva movement had significantly waned, Conservative, Reform, and Reconstructionist Judaisms began to offer outreach to a new generation of American Jews in search of a return to Judaism but no longer willing to abandon their progressive ideals and join Orthodoxy. Traditional egalitarianism and the Independent Minyan movement, still in its infancy, and Reform's return to ritual and spirituality are some examples of these new responses. More recently, certain factions of Modern Orthodoxy have begun to creatively rethink their own commitments to their ideals, specifically but not exclusively related to issues of gender, producing an inner tension within the Modern Orthodox community that is working itself out in the first decade of this new century. These all constitute late instantiations of the romantic/nostalgic period.

In each chapter of this book, I argue that the transition from this first phase of disassimilation (romantic/nostalgic) to the second (constructive/illustrative) can be found in what has become known today as Jewish Renewal.³⁷ Renewal offers new rubrics to reintegrate Judaism by reformulating it from its very foundations in an era in which (a) ethnicity is no longer the first-tier source of Jewish identity in America; and (b) American Jewry's successful assimilation and integration into American society means that it no longer needs to construct its religion as a way to protect it from the world. Rather, Renewal offers the argument that Judaism can now move beyond its parochial interests and enable Jews to contribute to global civilization as Jews, offering Judaism's many positive attributes to the non-Jewish world while erasing many of its negative qualities that Renewal claims are remnants of an earlier paradigm stemming largely from Jews' historical status as a pariah people.

Renewal in America is diasporist and post post-Holocaust in the following way. It is not founded on Zionism or the Holocaust, the two pillars of contemporary American Jewish identity and the centerpieces of the romantic/nostalgic period. This is not to say that Israel and the Holocaust have no role to play in Renewal thinking. It only means that their centrality is viewed as part of a previous epoch and must be recalibrated, along with everything else, in this new epoch. In my view, this phenomenon is also part of a shift in the thinking of contemporary American Jewry more generally.

Jews in America today do not need Judaism in order to identify as Jewish, and they do not need to identify as Jewish or to identify with a Jewish collective (nor do they need to convert to some other religion) in order to live fully integrated lives in twenty-first-century America.³⁸ Yet increasingly many Jews in America want to identify as Jews—even many who are married to non-Jews or who have one non-Jewish parent—and they want Judaism in some form to serve that identity. But they want it on their terms in part because the myth of tradition no longer operates for them as authoritative. Moreover, being ethnically Jewish (Jewishness sans religion) is no longer sufficient when a growing minority—and soon, the majority—of American Jews are multiethnic. For many of them, being Jewish is one part of a more complex narrative of identity.

In addition, the significant diminution of anti-Semitism in America provides new opportunities for Jews to rethink Judaism as something other than a way to self-identify in opposition to a threatening host society. The fear of disappearance is no longer operative as the driving force for Judaism to serve as a protective shield against assimilation. American Jews are largely assimilated. Yet many choose to remain Jews, regardless of the extent of their Jewish knowledge. It is true that the increasing multiethnic makeup of American Jewry and the growing number of non-Jews who, for various reasons, want a voice in the Jewish community without becoming Jews, will change what was the ethnocentric character of Jewishness in America. This radical change in the Jewish community is clearly a result of thriving in a tolerant society. The fact that non-Jews want to marry Jews and then often choose to play a role in the Jewish community without converting to Judaism is a sign of the success, not the failure, of American Judaism. It is also a sign of the success, and not the failure, of American society in general with regard to its relationship to Jews. The changing nature and texture of Jewish identity and community are only tragic if one remains wed to a confined, albeit normative, definition of Jewishness or Judaism—a definition that I would also argue is unsustainable.

This book is not a historical study. It is also not a sociological study in the formal sense of the discipline. It is, rather, a contribution to the growing field of Jewish cultural studies. I examine various phenomena, both religious and cultural, throughout the American Jewish experience in an attempt to construct what I find to be the seeds of a new paradigm of Jewishness in Jewish Renewal widely construed. I have been very selective in choosing topics to illustrate my thesis. The topics include ethnicity/postethnicity, Jesus in the American Jewish imagination, piety and progressive religiosity, halakha/post-halakha, sainthood and selfhood as models of leadership, and the Holocaust.

The choice of topics mentioned above indicates a specific point of view, even bias, in that these topics include what I think is both important and interesting about American Jews and American Judaism in the contemporary world. I begin in the first chapter with a general discussion of ethnicity and postethnicity to serve as the frame of the analytic part of my argument. The second chapter offers a trajectory on the question of ethnos and Jewishness in America from the late nineteenth century to the present in three figures: Felix Adler, Mordecai Kaplan, and Zalman Schachter-Shalomi.

Chapter 3 explores American Jewish attitudes toward the figure of Jesus, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century and continuing, with some interruption, until today. My assumption, following Stephen Prothero, is that Jesus in America is not solely a religious figure but also a central cultural icon. Jewish reactions to Jesus, no longer as prominent as they were in the nineteenth century, continue to be expressed in American Jewish theology today.³⁹ Much of that discussion in postwar America took the form of ecumenicism focused on shared values and paths of cooperation. Almost all are born from the historical Jesus school that began in nineteenth-century Germany among Protestants and was adopted by Jews in both Europe and America and, to a certain extent, in Mandate Palestine/Israel. Here I argue that Zalman Schachter-Shalomi breaks new ground by abandoning the search for the Jewish Jesus as a historical figure and painting a Jesus who is a Christ figure. This is not say that Schachter-Shalomi advocates Jewish worship of Jesus, but that Jews must consider the role Jesus plays for Christians as a Christ figure and not simply as a rebellious rabbi. He creatively deploys the kabbalistic/hasidic notion of the collective soul (neshama kelalit) as a way for Jews to acknowledge Jesus as Christ for Christians and also to explore how a similar model of the collective soul could function in contemporary Jewish spirituality.

In chapters 4 through 6 I turn to Jewish Renewal more systematically. I focus on three areas: post-monotheism as a new American Jewish metaphysics exemplified in Renewal's radical Jewish theology (chapter 4); the relationship between Renewal and pragmatism and American philosophical thinking (chapter 5); and the question of talmudism, halakha, and post-halakha in American Judaism (chapter 6). In chapter 7 I examine the issues of leadership and authority, illustrated through a comparison of the rise of sainthood in contemporary Israeli Judaism and the turn to selfhood in American Judaism. Here I engage contemporary Orthodoxy in the form of ArtScroll publications and compare it to Renewal to illustrate the way ArtScroll reconstructs the Jewish saint into an America hero as a self-help guide, and, similarly, how Renewal views the rebbe as function rather than person. In both cases, there is a kind of humanization of leadership or, at the very least, a diffusion of the model of wonder-working saint as it exists today in contemporary Israel.

In the final chapter I examine the Holocaust and its American reception as an introduction to Zalman Schachter-Shalomi's post post-Holocaust thinking, which I argue changes the trajectory of the discussion of the Holocaust and its place in twenty-first-century American Judaism. To set this innovation in context I examine five very different American Jewish thinkers, none of whom are considered Holocaust thinkers but all of whom have very important things to say about it. They are Jeffrey Alexander, Henry Feingold, Jacob Neusner, Meir Kahane, and finally Zalman Schachter-Shalomi. The goal is to broaden the discussion about the Holocaust at a time when its witnesses are slowly fading from our midst. A child born today may never know a Holocaust survivor as an adult. American Jewry in the next generation will have to construct ways to understand, memorialize, and integrate the Holocaust in their American lives in very different ways from their parents or grandparents. Formulating a response to the Holocaust as history may be one of American Jewry's biggest challenges in the next generation, just as the death of the last African American born a slave in the 1960s was for African Americans. Post-Holocaust consciousness is endemic to the sweeping cultural changes that began in the second half of the twentieth century.

I conclude this introduction with a kind of confession. While this book is scholarly in both apparatus and method, its genealogy is far more personal and complex (or, perhaps, messy). Here I have found Edward Said's comment in his essay Overlapping Territories: The World, the Text, and the Critic quite instructive:

I think there is no doubt that one does organize one's study out of concerns for the present; to deny that is bad faith. You're interested in things for all kinds of contemporary reasons. It may be the advancement of your career (to start at the very bottom), but it can also concern your own genealogy, as Foucault would say, your sense of belonging within a particular field…I guess you could say that a project arises out of two normally unconnected things: convergent political concerns in the contemporary world and a genuine historical curiosity about what produced this situation. And you have to carry it out in a conscious and rational way, with lines of force emerging out of the past for transformation in the present. ⁴⁰

While we are taught in graduate school that personal investment is not a criterion for scholarship, as we mature and explore the intricacies of academic books and the scholars who write them we come to realize that the very teachers who taught us this principle did not, could not, live up to it. Whether we agree or disagree with his concerns, Said is the model of a scholar who was unafraid to openly acknowledge the relationship between his thinking and his experience of the world. Another example of this courageous step (and the confession that one's personal investment in academia is, in fact, courageous) appears in Judith Butler's Preface 1999 to her groundbreaking book Gender Trouble (1990). Reflecting on almost a decade since the appearance of her book she writes:

Although I've enumerated some of the academic traditions and debates that have animated this book…there is one aspect of the conditions of its production that is not always understood about the text: it was produced not merely from the academy, but from convergent social movements of which I have been a part. And within the context of the gay and lesbian community on the east coast of the United States in which I have lived for fourteen years prior to the writing of this book…At the same time I was ensconced in the academy, I was also living a life outside those walls, and though Gender Trouble is an academic book, it began, for me, with a crossing-over, sitting on Rehoboth Beach, wondering whether I could link the different sides of my life.⁴¹

It seems to me Said and Butler not only recognize the legitimacy of such confessionals but feel responsible to give their readers a sense of the psychological nature and personal investment of their academic writing.⁴² Here, briefly, I add my own.

I grew up as a secular Jew in the suburbs of New York City. In 1978 at the age of twenty I became a ba'al teshuva and fairly quickly entered into the haredi world in Brooklyn and Jerusalem initially under the tutelage of an obscure and enigmatic hasidic rabbi named Dovid Din. Before entering the sphere of old-world Hasidism I had a few brief encounters with two individuals who maintained considerable space in my psyche throughout my adult life (largely unbeknownst to them): Shlomo Carlebach and Zalman Schachter-Shalomi (Dovid Din had been a student of Schachter-Shalomi in the mid 1960s). Looking for the authentic spiritual life, I walked the hasidic walk and talked the hasidic talk, studying in hasidic, Sephardic, and later Modern Orthodox yeshivot for almost seven years and then living for three years in Moshav Modi'im, a small collective community in Israel founded by students of Shlomo Carlebach. For reasons not relevant here I eventually left that world, and subsequently Orthodoxy more generally, yet remained fascinated by, and deeply invested in, the complex nexus of Judaism and the American counterculture in which I was raised. Academia, in particular, the field of religious studies, is a logical choice for many in my situation, people who passed through various avenues of alternative lifestyles yet felt unsatisfied being on the inside. One sometimes has to leave those worlds to gain a deeper intellectual understanding of how those worlds work and why they didn't work for them. For people like me, academia is a form of self-exile.

After writing many scholarly articles and numerous books on Hasidism and Kabbala (and, yes, getting tenure), I came to a point succinctly expressed by Butler above, I was also living a life outside those [academic] walls…[and I wondered] whether I could link the different sides of my life. And so, in light of, and in spite of, my enduring commitment to the academy I turned my attention to what Said coined as one's own genealogy as a way to avert the bad faith he claimed accompanied the illusion of objectivity.

The claim of this book is that we stand on the cusp of a new era, what Bhabha calls a time of posts. But for me it is also a time to reassess what Jews in America have accomplished in the past fifty years and the role I have played as a participant in that ongoing project. I do not write as an impartial observer but as a player in many of the communities mentioned in this book and as an experimenter in many of the ideas that have become concretized in its chapters. In I Shall Be Released Bob Dylan wrote, every distance is not near. Proximity does not by definition produce bias. Investment does not necessarily yield apologetics. The best critic, perhaps, is one who is open (to herself at least) about what is at stake, collectively and personally, in her scholarly projects. As Butler wrote, scholars also live lives outside the walls of the academy, and those lives mold, inform, and have a voice in the production of good scholarship. For better or worse that is how I have chosen to engage in my scholarly pursuits, and this book is perhaps the most overt example of this process. Readers and history will be the judge of its, and my, success. And that is how it should be.

1

Be the Jew You Make: Jews, Judaism, and Jewishness in Postethnic America

Have ethnicities, the influx of which has formed the population of the great modern republic of North America, kept their particularities? No.

—Bruno Bauer, La question juive

What will become of the Jewish people?

—A. B. Yehoshua, lecture to the American Jewish Committee, 2006

The trajectory of the twentieth century has taken America from a theory of the melting pot focused on the erasure of distinct immigrant identities to a resurgence of cultural specificity in Horace Kallen's cultural pluralism, multiculturalism, and identity politics. Jews have been active participants in all of these cultural shifts, both as Americans and as Jews.¹

The postwar reiteration of Horace Kallen's cultural pluralism in works such as John F. Kennedy's Nation of Immigrants (1958), Nathan