The Columbia History of Jews and Judaism in America

In the six decades since the end of World War II, much ink has been spilled trying to characterize, analyze, or simply define American Jewish culture. Once discussed much less extensively or publicly, it has become an ongoing topic among American Jews in both scholarly and popular writing. This extensive public discussion reveals that conceptualizing American Jewish culture is anything but a straightforward or self-evident enterprise. What prompted this rise in attention to American Jewish culture after the war, and why, at the same time, has this proved to be a problematic subject—so much so that some even question the possibility of its existence?

In order to study this topic, we must first consider the dynamic range of possibilities of what has been considered American Jewish culture—as well as what it has been understood as not being. This examination entails differences over time, across a range of ideological convictions, and, in academic writing, among various scholarly disciplines, including both the humanities and the social sciences. Undertaking this analysis provides an informed basis for further study of American Jewish culture; moreover, it calls attention to the discussion of American Jewish culture as a topic of interest on its own. As communal leader Judah Shapiro noted, debating “the meaning of Jewish culture . . . is itself an aspect of Jewish culture, as are the multiple views and definitions of that term.”¹

A primary concern in analyzing the discussion of American Jewish culture is the challenging nature of the terms involved. The epigraphs opening this essay evince an array of assumptions of what American Jewish culture might be. Its distinctiveness, scope, and quality are questioned; the value of American Jewish culture for its constituents spans the spectrum from serving as their downfall (Abrams) to providing their salvation (Tobin). Moreover, literary scholar Robert Alter suggests that the meaning of each of the three words that comprise this term is uncertain.² While the words American and Jewish raise questions of defining group membership (What is an American? Who is a Jew?), the word culture poses a different order of challenge.

The social and cultural historian Raymond Williams notes that culture “is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language,” in part because the term is employed with distinctive meanings in several different areas of study. Williams argues that “it is the range and overlap of meanings [of the term culture] that is significant,” for they indicate “a complex argument about the relations between general human development and a particular way of life.” That is, the various meanings of the term suggest a need to investigate assumed relationships between the notion of culture as a process of nurturing human beings generally (culture as “cultivating,” one of its oldest meanings) and culture as the distinctive way of life of a particular group of people (a nation, local region, ethnic group, religious community, generation, social class, etc.). This investigation also calls attention to the relations between both of these notions of culture and “the works and practices of art and intelligence”—books, statues, folksongs, movies, and the like—that are often referred to as examples of culture.³

As in general discourse, the term culture covers a wide range of meanings in discussions of American Jewish life.⁴ Of particutar interest here are their variations in scope. On one hand, culture is sometimes understood narrowly as a particular set of “works and practices,” especially those associated with the arts: painting, music, theater, film, broadcasting, literature, and so on. Sometimes this inventory is expanded to include other activities associated with leisure—sports, games, travel, cooking, hobbies, and so on. This broad spectrum suggests that culture is not something fixed and uniform, but elective and multivalent. In this formulation the term is sometimes qualified further—for example, by creating a hierarchy of “high” or elite culture vs. “low” or popular culture. Sociologist Norman Friedman distinguishes American Jewish popular culture as “those ordinary consumption/leisure products and activities . . . that are experienced by many, if not most, American Jews,” including “Jewish food, media Jewishness, and basic Yiddish,” from a “Jewish elite culture” that is “rooted in the ideals and activities of traditional Judaism.”⁵

On the other hand, the term culture can be applied much more expansively, embracing a comprehensive array of activities, creations, and beliefs. In such uses of the term, culture often references a paradigm, understood not merely as an accumulation of works and practices, but as what is sometimes termed a cultural pattern, in which common structures of meaning link diverse cultural phenomena. In the early post-World War II years historian Abraham Duker, for example, called for a “psycho-cultural approach” to examining contemporary life in order to determine the nature of “Jewish culture patterns in America,” arguing that the study of “culture trends” is “a legitimate branch of the history of mores and religious belief.”⁶ Note that Duker implicitly situates culture within the larger category of religion. Others configure this relationship differently, either subsuming religion within culture as the overarching rubric or treating religion as something separate from (implicitly secular) culture.

Related to this understanding of culture are the terms subculture, counterculture, or alternative culture, which juxtapose one set of cultural patterns against another, implicitly normative or mainstream culture. Discussions of Jewish culture sometimes position it as a subculture or alternative culture in relation to a larger entity, such as a mainstream Western or American culture; in other instances Jewish culture is itself seen as having both a mainstream and alternative cultures or subcultures within it.⁷

Yet another use of the term culture that has particular implications for the community at hand is the relatively recent use of cultural Jew to distinguish—and to characterize—a type of Jewish identity and practice in relation to one defined as religious. The term cultural Jew does not merely supersede secular Jew, which was more widely used earlier in the twentieth century. Then, more so than now, secular Jew usually identified someone committed to a non-or antireligious and frequently politically progressive Jewish ideology, its realization often centered on ethnic or national markers, such as Yiddish or Modern Hebrew. The notion of cultural Jew implies different definitional criteria for Jewishness—and for understanding culture as a definitional practice—in the contemporary American context. As the National Foundation for Jewish Culture has recently observed, in its discussion of “the emergence of a Jewish cultural identity,” some Jews consider engagement with “culture—including film festivals, klezmer concerts, and fiction—[to be] their sole form of identification” as Jews.⁸

Considering the multiple meanings of the term culture calls attention to the interrelation of the phenomena characterized as culture (be they works of art, leisure activites, or religious customs) with the notion of culture as a community’s definitional system or shared views of the nature of the world. In the particular case at hand, the issue of identity concerns two terms—American and Jewish—and their own interrelation.⁹ The challenge posed by juxtaposing these two identities can be seen straightaway in the different ways that this interrelation is termed: American Jewish versus Jewish American, sometimes hyphenated, other times not.¹⁰ Rather than attempting to resolve the questions that these different terms suggest (is someone who claims these two identities a Jew who lives in America, an American who practices Judaism or considers him-or herself ethnically Jewish? and so on), it proves more valuable to consider the implications of the interrelation of these identities with regard to the possibilities of American Jewish culture.

From our present vantage it is perhaps difficult to recall that, before World War II, many Jews thought of the Jewish community in America as a cultural frontier rather than a center. For all its size and growing importance in the public affairs of world Jewry, America was then generally considered—even by many American Jews—as extrinsic in relation to the centuries-old Jewish communities of Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. While there had been a small Jewish population in America for nearly three hundred years, most of the Jews in the United States in the early decades of the twentieth century were a recent presence, being either immigrants or their children, and these Jews largely defined the community’s public profile. Typically, they understood their Jewishness primarily in terms of the Jewish life in the Old World homes that they or their parents had left behind.¹¹

Moreover, Jewish life in America was widely regarded by both this immigrant community and its Old World counterparts as suspect. It was a common notion that Jews in America, at best, led a weaker version of a more thoroughly informed and “authentic” Jewish existence than did their European cohorts—and, at worst, simply ceased to be Jews altogether. In the decades between the start of mass immigration from eastern Europe in the 1880s and the end of World War II, Jews’ discussions of their own culture in America typically conceptualized this subject in negative terms. In contrast to the enthusiasm many voiced with regard to political freedoms and economic opportunities that the United States offered, observers generally characterized Jewish life in America as relatively limited with regard to traditional religious practice and largely devoid of modern high-cultural aspirations.

A noteworthy early example is Rabbi Moses Weinberger’s Jews and Judaism in New York, published in Hebrew in 1887, which warns religious Jews in eastern Europe considering immigration to America that to do so is to enter a culturally impoverished milieu. “Instead of soaring high on the wings of poetry and song, or burrowing deeply into the world of culture, investigating and enriching scholarship, language, and literature,” he writes, even immigrant Jewish intellectuals “delve relentlessly into the practical world. . . . They sink up to their necks in a torrent of present-day banalities and material possessions, just like all the rest of their Jewish brethren in this city and land.”¹² Indeed, at times outsiders scrutinizing the community seem to have been more ready to see America’s immigrant Jewish culture as a distinctive and worthy entity in itself. Author Hutchins Hapgood, for example, celebrated the protean fervor of the immigrant Jewish life he observed on his visits to New York’s Lower East Side at the turn of the twentieth century in his book, The Spirit of the Ghetto¹³

So ingrained were Jewish notions of the cultural inferiority of life in America that Jewish observers on both sides of the Altantic frequently characterized venues in which Jewish culture seemed to flourish especially well on American soil during the early decades of the twentieth century as evanescent phenomena and, ultimately, heavily indebted to their counterparts on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. This was true even for America’s vibrant Yiddish culture—literature, press, pot itical activism, theater, and song—which, in some respects (notably theater and press), flourished more readily, at first, in America than in eastern Europe. Indeed, the dynamics of American Yiddish culture and of its valuation are instructive for assessing the study of American Jewish culture more broadly.

Thus American Yiddish culture during the period of mass immigration offers some views that challenge prevailing sentiments, which dismissed the value of America’s Jewish culture. Yiddish folklorist Y. L. Cahan, for example, considered its turn-of-the-century immigrant community a remarkable resource for his studies, reportedly claiming that “here folklore can be scooped up in handfuls.”¹⁴ While Cahan’s interest was in documenting Old World folkways remembered by older immigrants, rather than American Jewish culture per se, socialist leader Chaim Zhitlowsky exhorted fellow immigrants to exploit the unprecedented opportunities provided by life in America to forge a new secular Jewish culture centered on the Yiddish language and progressive, internationalist politics.¹⁵

The period between the two world wars, concomitant with the end of mass immigration from Europe to America, marked a watershed in American Jewish life, as the children of immigrants came of age. In the wake of immigration defining so much of American Jewish life, new discourses emerged. In particular, the tension between realizing material success and social integration on one hand and a dissolution of an Old World Jewish distinctiveness, morally as well as culturally, on the other hand, emerged as the defining trope of key works of American Jewish culture, including major works of fiction (e.g., Abraham Cahan’s 1917 novel The Rise of David Levinsky) and film (the Warner Bros. 1927 feature The Jazz Singer)¹⁶ This trope has continued to inform more recent scholarly assessments of the interwar years, even as some challenge its assumptions. Historian Deborah Dash Moore argues that the interwar period is marked by the emergence of an American Jewish “at-homeness” that fostered “a renascent Jewish culture,” especially in New York City.¹⁷ Other scholars have characterized American Jewish culture of this period as informed by a sense of profound insecurity, especially during the 1930s, when the bedrock of economic advancement that America offered was abruptly shaken. Historian Beth Wenger writes, “The Great Depression punctuated the maturation of the first mass generation of Jews born in the United States. Occurring precisely at a time when immigrant patterns were giving way to new formulations of Jewish community and culture, the Depression years set in motion Jewish patterns that would last for generations.”¹⁸

American Yiddish culture evinces signal shifts during the interwar years that resonate with these assessments of the period. In the 1920s and 1930s Yiddish culture witnessed the advent of important new forms—notably radio and “talking” pictures—as more established forms (literature, press, theater) reach unprecedented levels of accomplishment.¹⁹ At the same time, however, American Yiddish culture became more self-conscious, reflecting a growing awareness that its creation and consumption relied less and less on native speakers of Yiddish for whom the language served as their primary vernacular. Concern as to how future generations of American Jews would engage with Yiddish was increasingly evident—whether in the appearance of English sections of Yiddish newspapers, in the bilingual format of much of Yiddish radio programming, or in the advent of shules, secular afternoon and weekend schools where children learn to read, write, and speak Yiddish.²⁰ Nevertheless, the notion of Yiddish culture as a set of practices created in Yiddish for speakers of the language, and that embody a collective identity, remained largely self-evident.

This growing sense of cultural uncertainty resonated with pioneering works by American Jewish social scientists on the nature of Jewish life in the modern world, which are more remarkable, perhaps, for what they did not say about Jews rather than what they did. During the early decades of the twentieth century, Franz Boas, the doyen of American anthropology, all but erased Jews as a subject of study within this field. He situated Jews beyond the scope of cultural anthropology, which was to be concerned solely with preliterate, “primitive” peoples. Boas only studied Jews in his anthropometric work on immigrants, striving to demonstrate that Jews were not genetically homogeneous, in response to prevailing notions that they were a distinct—and, in the view of some, an inferior—race.²¹ In 1927 anthropologist Melville Herskovits posed the question “When is a Jew a Jew?” After dismissing the possibility that Jews could be accurately defined as a common race, nation, speech community, religion, culture, or worldview, he concluded that only the most nominal of definitions holds true: “A Jew is a person who calls himself a Jew, or who is called Jewish by others.”²² In other words, the meaning of the word Jew was, in effect, arbitrary. Shortly after World War II, Herskovits revisited the issue and again concluded that perhaps “no word . . . means more things to more people than does the word ‘Jew.’“²³

Herskovits’s claim notwithstanding, World War II profoundly transformed the way American Jews understood their stature in the world. Following the devastations of the Holocaust, Jews in America suddenly found themselves the world’s largest, most prosperous, and—compared to their fellow Jews throughout postwar Europe and Asia—the most continuous and stable Jewish community. This was, however, a qualified preeminence, achieved by default. As historian Oscar Janowsky wrote in 1964:

Other signal changes complicated American Jewry’s new stature. Despite the newness of the State of Israel, it quickly emerged as a contrasting model to American possibilities for Jewish existence politically, socially, and culturally. At the same time, the profile of American Jewry was changing rapidly, marked by swift embourgeoisement, migration from urban enclaves to suburbs, and the rise of American-born Jews as the majority of the nation’s Jewish population. Given all these developments, it is not surprising that long-held assumptions about what might define an American Jew’s sense of self were called into question in the early postwar era. Indeed, for many members of the American Jewish community at the time, living with questions about identity “in a state of useful discontent was,” according to literary critic Irving Howe, “perhaps what it . . . meant to be a Jew.”²⁵

The mythic image of Jews in America has a centuries-old history and has at times been only tangentially related to actual Jewish life there. During the colonial era, for example, Puritans envisioned their settlement on this continent as the initiation of a “new Zion” in which they emulated the ancient Israelites. Informed in part by this myth, Jews have occasionally contended that their presence in America is somehow exemplary. Philosopher Horace Kallen, for example, maintained in 1915 that east European Jewish immigrants occupied an exceptional place among their contemporaries in the United States, since they came

At the same time, the presence of Jews in America, like that of other ethnic, religious, and racial minorities, has long figured in the nation’s popular culture in terms of archetypes, often portrayed to comic effect in humor, the press, and stage performances. These images, especially unflattering stereotypes of Jewish peddlers and merchants, flourished in the United States in the mid-nineteenth century following the arrival of tens of thousands of Jews from German lands.²⁷ Even as the American Jewish public profile grew exponentially with the arrival of hundreds of thousands from eastern Europe beginning in the 1880s, these representations would continue to inform notions of how Jews figured in American culture for generations to come.

While at the turn of the twentieth century some outside observers of immigrant Jews considered that they, along with other recent arrivals to the United States, enriched the nation’s culture, such beneficent views were overshadowed in the years following World War I by much more outspoken American nativists’ critiques. Taking a dim view of recent immigrants generally, some nativists viewed the growing presence of Jews in the United States as a destructive force that threatened the integrity of American culture. Most infamously, the industrialist Henry Ford labeled Jews the nation’s “foremost problem” and assailed their pernicious influence on a wide array of American cultural life, including music, theater, film, and sports.²⁸

When responding to such attacks in national forums during the interwar years, American Jews tended not to defend their distinctive contributions to the nation’s culture or to vaunt the creation of a unique Jewish culture in the United States. Rather, they more readily insisted on the Americanness of their lives and cultural undertakings. Integration into an American mainstream did not merely serve as a major theme of American Jewish literature, drama, and film in the early twentieth century (at least those works created in English; different cultural sensibilities informed American works in Yiddish and other Jewish languages). Indeed, integration became a paradigm of American Jewish daily life—for some, the equivalent of a creed. “Most of the children of the immigrants had decisively turned their backs on the old ways of their parents,” historian Haym Soloveitchik writes of the American Jewish community of this time. “Many had even attended faithfully the chapel of Acceptance, over whose portals they saw inscribed ‘Incognito Ergo Sum,’”—a phrase Soloveitchik recalls from his college days—“which, like most mottoes, was both a summons and a promise.”²⁹

For some American social scientists writing during the interwar years, Jews figured as exemplary figures of cultural encounters with modernity. Sociologist Louis Wirth’s study of the ghetto, first published in 1928, characterizes it not merely as a phenomenon of Jewish social history, ranging from the first restricted Jewish residential area established in Venice in the sixteenth century to the voluntary urban ethnic enclaves of Chicago, New York, and other contemporary American cities. Wirth also regarded the ghetto as a paradigm of societal behavior defined by prolonged social isolation and, ultimately, as a state of mind, epitomized by Jewish experience. To study the ghetto, then, was to determine “the extent to which isolation has shaped the character of the Jew and the nature of his social life” and to apply this insight to a universal condition of modern life, “akin to the type of isolation of the person who feels lonely though in the midst of the crowd.”³⁰

In his 1937 study of the “marginal man,” sociologist Everett Stonequist cited Diaspora Jewry as the prototype of this phenomenon of modern society: “The marginal man . . . is one whom fate has condemned to live in two societies and in two, not merely different but antagonistic, cultures.” As cultural hybrids, Stonequist argued, Jews struggle between the lure of a societal mainstream and their own distinctive, traditional way of life. “The American environment is a baffling one for the Jew. He may establish contacts . . . which lead him strongly in the direction of assimilation. But he is also likely to encounter sharp anti-Semitism. . . . The divergent currents of American life produce their counterpart in his psychic life.” At the same time, Stonequist positioned the Jew, as marginal man, in a strategic role in cosmopolitan society: “The marginal man is the key-personality in the contacts of cultures. It is in his mind that the cultures come together, conflict, and eventually work out some kind of mutual adjustment at interpenetration.” Indeed, this “position of the Jew . . . becomes a theme of biography and a source of literature.”³¹

For both Wirth and Stonequist, American Jews serve as paradigmatic figures of modern experience. But though their situation positions them strategically in society, their hybridity is ultimately understood as a problematic, unresolvable conflict. Unlike many of their neighbors, these scholars suggest, Jews are never fully at home anywhere. In response to these models of incompatibility and marginality, some American Jews called for a reexamination of how they might conceptualize their existence more constructively. Most notably, the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism, Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, argued that Judaism be viewed not simply as a religion but as a civilization, which he defined as an “accumulation of knowledge, skills, tools, arts, literatures, laws, religions and philosophies,” comprising “a complete and self-contained entity.” For Kaplan, Jewish life in America was not inherently conflicted. Rather, as he maintained in his landmark 1934 book, Judaism as a Civilization, America offered Jews complementary opportunities: “Nothing less than a vigorous participation in the development of American life will content [the Jew]. But it is necessary to make clear that loyalty to American ideals does not call for the suppression of the Jew’s deep-seated desire to retain the individuality of his Jewish life.”³²

Just as World War II transformed notions of America’s place in Jewish life, the war also proved a watershed in the discussion of Jews’ place in American culture. In the postwar American public sphere the profile of Jews was suddenly much higher, as the Nazi persecution of European Jewry and the founding of the State of Israel made headlines repeatedly. Domestic anti-Semitism emerged as a subject of public discussion, thanks to the efforts of organizations dedicated to combating this and other prejudices, and extended to works of popular fiction, film, and broadcasting.³³ Most popular of these were two Hollywood feature films, Crossfire and Gentleman’s Agreement, both released in 1947, which addressed American prejudice against Jews through dramas based on popular novels in the established cinematic genres of film noir and romantic intrigue, respectively.³⁴

Moreover, Jewish scholars positioned Jews as paradigmatic figures of contemporary American life in new ways. Theologian Will Herberg, for example, characterized the dynamics of American life over the course of the first half of the twentieth century in terms of a “triple melting pot” of Protestants, Catholics, and Jews. Writing in 1955, Herberg argued that the progeny of various immigrant communities in the United States shed their forebears’ ethnic, national, and linguistic identities to become part of a national culture defined by religious pluralism.³⁵ While Herberg’s configuration builds on prewar models of Judeo-Christian ecumenism, it situates Jews, albeit tacitly, as the archetypal minority in Christian America. Jews’ acceptance by others as an American religious community thus proves the national commitment to the common bond of religiosity, which includes respect for the freedom of worship. At the same time, however, Herberg conceptualized Jewishness solely in terms of religion, arguing that an ethnic Jewish identity was a transitional phase of immigrants and their children, superseded by members of the third generation, who identified nationally as Americans and religiously as Jews. According to Herberg’s model, the fulfillment of American Jewish culture is integration into a national cultural mainstream.

While the discussions of American Jewish culture during the first half of the twentieth century are wide ranging, they share common concerns, if often implicitly. First, there is a prevailing notion that the interrelation of Americanness and Jewishness, however each of these identities may be conceived, is distinctly problematic. In particular, Jews frequently characterized the attractions that life in America proffers—especially its freedoms, its individualism, and its expansive, protean opportunities—as a challenge to Jewish well-being. Typically, the dynamic of Jewish life in the United States, often termed Americanization, was understood as a unidirectional path away from a distinct, comprehensive Old World Jewish existence and toward complete assimilation into an American mainstream. More than one mid-twentieth-century observer of American Jewish life described this as a process of “deculturation”—that is, as a loss, rather than transformation, of culture.³⁶ Conversely, some Jews and non-Jews alike questioned the possibility of Jews being fully at home in America; for some non-Jewish observers the Jewish presence in America was clearly less than welcome.

A second, related concern is the possible intractability of Jewishness, newly problematized by Jews’ encounter with modernity. During the first half of the twentieth century Jews in America experienced unprecedented opportunities to transform what it means to be Jewish, as individuals and as communities—including possibilities to reinvent themselves as something other than Jews. At the same time, a powerful new discourse of Jewishness as a biologically determined attribute raised questions about whether Jewish reinvention or assimilation could entail any actual alteration of an ineluctable racial identity.

Despite the fact that American Jewish culture was typically either characterized in negative terms or went unmentioned altogether before World War II, culture soon became an important category for discussing Jewish life in America in the postwar era. Moreover, culture emerged as an important new category of American Jewish endeavor, increasingly characterized as a mode of definitional behavior for many American Jews that is equal to—and sometimes superseding—religiosity, political affiliation, language, or ethnicity. The advent of this new discourse coincides with, and to some extent correlates to, signal changes within the American community: new opportunities, new paradigms, and new concerns.

Among the array of innovations in American Jewish life in the early postwar years are the emergence of new public venues for creating and discussing Jewish culture, many of them new undertakings by established Jewish communal institutions. For example, the decade following World War II witnessed the debuts of a spate of American Jewish periodicals, including Commentary, Congress Weekly, and Judaism³⁷ Of particular interest is the monthly journal Commentary, which made its debut in 1945. Published by the American Jewish Committee, Commentary regularly featured essays on Jewish cultural phenomena in the United States, ranging widely from literature, theater, and film to popular television programs, humorists, and foodways, as well as a series of ethnographic portraits of local Jewish life, “From the American Scene.”³⁸ During the mid-1940s the Jewish Theological Seminary initiated two large-scale cultural projects—the opening of The Jewish Museum in the former Warburg mansion on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue and the production of the ecumenical radio (and, later, television) series The Eternal Light in conjunction with NBC. Both these undertakings explored connections between art and religion, doing so prominently in the public eye.³⁹ In Los Angeles the establishment of innovative institutions of higher Jewish learning—the University of Judaism and the Brandeis Institute—helped forge a new vision of Jewishness that emphasized an affective experience of community over traditional forms of worship and study; here, too, the arts came to be regarded as essential to facilitating what Deborah Dash Moore has termed a “spiritual recreation,” which was inspired in part by Mordecai Kaplan’s notion of Judaism as a civilization.⁴⁰

Other new opportunities arose beyond the efforts of American Jewish institutions. Of paramount importance, perhaps, was the large-scale matriculation of Jews at American institutions of higher learning in the postwar era, thanks to the GI Bill and the rapid entry of Jews into the nation’s middle class as well as universities’ abandonment of restrictive admissions quotas. The burgeoning number of American Jews who attended college in the post-World War II era created a new kind of widely shared cultural literacy, informed by the scope and sensibilities of liberal arts curricula. Within the academy an intelligentsia flourished that was “more secular, more liberal, and more Jewish than any comparable professional and cultural cohort in the United States.” The presence of these “free-thinking Jews,” historian David Hollinger argues, made a strategic contribution to American intellectual culture during the early postwar decades.⁴¹ Among these scholars, special attention has been paid to cohorts of Jewish intellectuals associated with campuses in New York City. Their ranks included Sidney Hook, Meyer Schapiro, Lionel Trilling, followed by Clement Greenberg, Richard Hofstadter, Harold Rosenberg, and then Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, Irving Howe, among others. Typically they were east European immigrants’ children who came of age before World War II and subsequently became leading voices in national discussions of literature, art, politics, and the study of contemporary society.⁴²

In the mid-twentieth century—to say nothing of the period before—the study of American Jewish history, literature, society, or culture received little attention in the university.⁴³ However, the academy did provide American Jews with a forum in which to consider the place of American Jewish experience within the rubric of the liberal arts, eventually realized as the field of Jewish studies as we know it today. Irving Howe’s career offers a telling example. After beginning as a scholar of American literature, he turned his attention to Yiddish literature and culture, collaborating on a series of anthologies of Yiddish prose, poetry, and essays—beginning with ATreasury of Yiddish Stories, published in 1954—and writing World of Our Fathers, a landmark history of immigrant Jewish culture in New York City, published in 1976.⁴⁴

The postwar advent of new opportunities for making and discussing American Jewish culture coincided with fundamental changes in how American Jews defined their community. Sociologist Nathan Glazer characterized this as a paradigm shift from ethnic to religious identity—what he termed a move from Jewishness (i.e., Jews understood as an ethnic group—or, as Glazer termed it, “secular culture and quasi-national feeling”) to Judaism (Jews defined as a religious community).⁴⁵ This paradigm shift has telling implications. Situating Jews as a religious community locates them within a social category widely recognized in America as legitimate and, moreover, as private. Freedom of worship was a readily acknowledged American value (hailed by President Franklin Roosevelt as one of the four freedoms that Americans were defending during World War II), in contrast to the more problematic notion of freedom of ethnic expression. During the early years of the cold war in particular, Jews’ religiosity was called upon to signify their loyalty to the United States, especially as individual American Jews repeatedly made headlines when they were accused of being agents for the Soviet Union (most prominently in the case of the “atom spies” Ethel and Julius Rosenberg).⁴⁶ At the same time, the American concept of religiosity as a private pursuit has erased Jewishness a category in certain rubrics—notably among ethnic, national, political, and especially racial identities; in doing so, this paradigm shift has altered notions of what might possibly constitute Jewish culture.⁴⁷

Moreover, the paradigm of religion conceptualizes being Jewish as voluntary (following the Christian model of religious identity as a personal, elective confession of faith). The rubric of religion thus distances Jewishness not only from the intractable model of race but also from notions of Jewish identity as a birthright, a collective covenantal identity, or an ethnicity “by descent.” On one hand, this development has opened up the possibilities of realizing Jewishness in the American context to various invented identities (ethnicity “by consent,” in Werner Sollors’s terms) and self-styled practices, thereby embracing discontinuity as a force that energizes, rather than undermines, culture. In recent decades this has been especially evident in the flourishing of an array of feminist and queer Jewish writings and cultural practices, including innovations in worship and ritual.⁴⁷ On the other hand, such changes destabilize long-standing notions of what reliably, inevitably signifies or constitutes Jewishness.⁴⁸

This paradigm shift in American Jewish self-definition was concomitant with and, to some extent, tied to signal changes in geography. Before World War II the social geography of American Jews vis-à-vis the rest of world Jewry was articulated primarily in terms of its status as a New World community in relation to the European (and, to a lesser extent, North African and Middle Eastern) Old World. After the war this geographic model was replaced by the juxtaposition of the Diaspora, now centered in the United States, in relation to the new State of Israel. American Jewry’s internal geography was also being remapped. Jewish urban enclaves, epitomized by neighborhoods in New York City and other major cities, were attenuated by outward migration to the suburbs. No longer brought together by close settlement and a considerable, often informally constituted public life—on the street, in parks, shops, schoolyards, and so on—postwar Jewish communities increasingly organized around new institutions. In addition to synagogues and Jewish community centers, new, more formally organized social networks were established, especially philanthropies.⁴⁹

Concomitant with this geographical shift was the decline of immigrant Jewish culture, much of it rooted in the use of Yiddish. The number of Yiddish newspapers and other periodicals, published works of literature and literary criticism, radio programs and theater performances diminished sharply during the first postwar decades; Yiddish film disappeared altogether. More than simply the result of a pervasive shift away from maintaining Yiddish as a Jewish vernacular, this decline indicates a profound shift in American Jewish sense of self, in which having a distinct language of daily life (even a scorned language, as Yiddish often was) no longer plays a defining role. At the same time, the esteem of immigrant culture has risen among scholars of Jewish life. Largely disparaged or neglected by the academy when this culture flourished in the first half of the twentieth century, American Yiddish culture, especially its literature, has been championed in an array of analyses.⁵⁰ Moreover, the paradigms of immigrant culture have been reassessed, vaunted as a distinct form of cultural creativity defined by the immigrants’ experience negotiating between Old World and New World ways of life.⁵¹

Indeed, American Jews have assigned their bygone immigrant culture new value as heritage. Heritage culture has taken a wide range of forms, including new interest in Yiddish language, in particular through a series of books in English about Yiddish and its Old World culture, especially klezmer, the traditional instrumental music of east European Jewry.⁵² Similar treatment has been accorded immigrant Jewish neighborhoods, above all Manhattan’s Lower East Side, which has emerged as a popular center of American Jewish tourism. In addition to local institutions dedicated to commemorating immigrant Jewish experience—notably, the Lower East Side Tenement Museum and the restoration of the Eldridge Street Synagogue, an architectural landmark, built in 1886—the neighborhood is regularly visited by sightseers on any of a variety of walking tours.⁵³

The model of heritage has been used to position other aspects of the Jewish past as touchstones of American Jewish culture in the past half-century. Most remarkable is the emergence of the Holocaust as a locus of heritage, which entails conceptualizing the mass murder of European Jewry as a defining event in American Jewish cultural life. The notion of the Holocaust as Jewish heritage has given rise to an extensive array of cultural practices, exemplified by the construction in the 1990s of the Museum of Jewish Heritage: A Living Memorial to the Holocaust in lower Manhattan.⁵⁴ This notion also informs the discourse of Holocaust remembrance in the United States, where many children of Jewish Holocaust survivors describe themselves as “second-generation survivors”—the term situating survivors’ experience of Nazi persecution as a legacy inherited by their children.⁵⁵

The reification of the Holocaust as Jewish heritage is conjoined with other transformations, notably the prominent place the State of Israel occupies in American Jewish culture. In 1981 Judaic studies scholar Jacob Neusner noted that many American Jews share a “vision of reality beginning in death, ‘the Holocaust,’ and completed by resurrection or rebirth, ‘Israel.’ “Neusner argues that, although the Holocaust and the establishment of Israel took place “far from America’s shore and remote from American Jews’ everyday experience, [these events] constitute the generative myth by which the generality of American Jews make sense of themselves and decide what to do with that part of themselves set aside for ‘being Jewish.’“⁵⁶ Jonathan Woocher, a Jewish community activist, terms the cultural practices that conceptualize and enact this myth the civil religion of American Jews, an “ideology of the American Jewish polity” realized in non-religious communal organizations and their cultural practices, which center to a considerable extent on philanthropy.⁵⁷

To some extent, issues that American Jews may regard as unprecedented in the post-World War II era are, in fact, iterations of concerns raised during the first half of the twentieth century, if not earlier. Whether articulated as questions of demographic continuity (often centered on the issue of intermarriage) or socio-cultural assimilation, the uncertain future of American Jewry has remained a frequent trope.⁵⁸ Similarly, concerns about internal strife within the American Jewish community endure as a subject of discussion, although the particular issues dividing the community change with time.⁶⁰

These debates, which inform notions of what constitutes American Jewish culture, recur during the postwar era as American public culture generally witnesses major shifts in the discussion of cultural difference and hybridity. Like other communities in America—ethnic groups, racial minorities, sexualities, disabilities—Jews are increasingly content to enact their difference and to be seen as different in the public sphere. The possibilities of Jewishness as part of a hybrid identity—as a result not merely of the interaction with an American mainstream culture, but of intimate engagement with other religions and ethnicities—has similarly expanded, at least for some American Jews. This is seen most readily in changing responses to interfaith marriages among some sectors of the American Jewish community. Whereas earlier generations almost uniformly regarded Jewish-Christian intermarriage solely as a loss for the Jewish community, there are now both organized movements and individual convictions that view intermarriage as an opportunity for new kinds of engagement with Jewishness. Similarly, the sizable involvement of American Jews with Buddhism and other non-Western religions has engendered new understandings of the possibilities of Jewish spiritual culture.⁵⁹

If a new concern has in fact emerged in the postwar era, it may be over how one might realize one’s Jewishness, given, on one hand, the seemingly limitless spectrum of possibilities that American freedom and prosperity afford and, on the other hand, a sense that once automatic ways of being Jewish are lost. Haym Soloveitchik, writing about the religious culture of American Orthodox Jewry, characterizes this new concern as a pervasive sense that traditional mimetic means of transmitting practices and mores—“imbibed from parents and friends, and patterned on conduct regularly observed in home and street, synagogue and school”—are no longer available and have given way to a text-based transmission of knowledge and practice. Now, Soloveitchik argues, “traditional conduct, no matter how venerable, how elementary, or how closely remembered, yields to the demands of theoretical knowledge. Established practice can no longer hold its own against the demands of the written word.”⁶⁰ This sense that there has been a fundamental shift in how culture is transmitted—and, as a consequence, how it is conceptualized and even recognized as culture—can be observed more broadly in American Jewish life (even as traditional mimesis continues to inform many Jews’ cultural practices). Consider, for example, much of contemporary Yiddish culture in the United States, where engagements with Yiddish have increasingly become something other than vernacular. this includes dozens of college courses and cultural festivals and is perhaps epitomized by the success of the National Yiddish Book Center (NYBC). Established in 1980 in Amherst, Massachusetts, as a repository for abandoned Yiddish books, which young students of the language were having difficulty finding, the NYBC now sponsors a wide array of activities that celebrate Yiddish (and, more generally, Jewish) culture—doing so primarily in English. Not only do American Jews acquire Yiddish less often as a “native” language, but their engagement with it is increasingly deliberate and self-conscious.⁶¹ At the same time, this signal shift in Yiddish culture has opened up possibilities for engagement with the language for those who did not grow up with Yiddish—including a noteworthy number of non-Jews, who learn Yiddish for a variety of reasons.

In conjunction with these new opportunities, paradigms, and concerns, culture has assumed new prominence as a resource for examining and realizing American Jewish life. The subject has been addressed in a growing corpus of monographs, essays, exhibitions, documentary films, courses, reports, surveys, and philanthropic endeavors by the press, institutions of higher education, Jewish communal organizations, and public cultural institutions. From our current perspective, there is ample material on this topic.⁶⁴

And yet, almost fifty years ago the sociolinguist Joshua Fishman wondered why, if there were apparently so many American Jews who were social scientists, so few of them had devoted their careers to the study of American Jewry.⁶² In the ensuing decades the scholarship on American Jewish experience has grown considerably, taken up by historians, literary scholars, sociologists, anthropologists, folklorists, psychologists, linguists, and others. Of special note, in light of Fishman’s observation, is the rise of what anthropologist Sol Tax termed the “in-culture” study of American Jewry—that is, the study of American Jews by members of this population.⁶³ The special self-reflexive nature of studying “one’s own people” has since been given considerable attention by American Jewish anthropologists, beginning in 1978 with the publication of Number Our Days, Barbara Myerhoff’s landmark study of aging among American Jewish immigrants in Venice, California.⁶⁴ Indeed, Fishman anticipated the advent of such scholarship, noting that, by the late 1970s, “almost every adult member of [the American Jewish] community will be American-born and more than two-thirds will be college graduates. In such a community the social sciences will be an integral part of every adult’s intellectual nourishment.”⁶⁵ Under such circumstances the study of American Jewry, encountered in the course of college studies, has had the potential to become a formative experience not merely for an intellectual elite, but for a large portion of the community at large. Consequently, the study of “one’s own people” has become a defining cultural undertaking, especially as part of forging an independent sense of self for young adult American Jews as they come of age and begin life independent of parents in the course of undergraduate studies.⁶⁶

The wide range of topics and approaches to the contemporary study of American Jewish culture offers lessons in the possibilities of scholarly engagement with the subject at hand. For example, the considerable number of studies of synagogue culture by historians, sociologists, anthropologists, ethnomusicologists, art historians, and others demonstrates the distinctions among various disciplinary approaches.⁶⁷ Reading across the spectrum of work in this field provides important instruction in the value of interdisciplinary scholarship. Indeed, some of the most thoughtful studies of American Jewish culture are by scholars looking beyond their usual purview—such as historian Arthur Goren’s work on rites of American Jewish public culture, including Zionist pageants and funerals of famous figures, literary scholar David Roskies’s analysis of the iconography of the Workmen’s Circle “Honor Row” in the Old Mount Carmel Cemetery in Queens, New York, where many luminaries of Yiddish culture have been interred, or historian Alan Steinweis’s examination of contemporary Holocaust remembrance by diverse communities in Nebraska.⁶⁸ Other scholars have contributed to the study of American Jewish culture by working across the boundaries between the academy and institutions of public culture. Jenna Joselit, for example, has made equally important contributions to the study of American Jewish social and cultural history in her work as a scholar and as a curator of exhibitions.⁶⁹

The study of culture can examine particular phenomena and practices as points of entry into larger discussions of scholarly interest. A case in point is the klezmer “revival” of the past thirty years, which has generated a considerable body of literature. In addition to the central work of ethnomusicologists, there are both scholarly and popular publications by authors in a variety of fields. Moreover, there is a significant body of writing on the topic by some of the musicians themselves, including popular histories, artists’ manifestos, and dissertations.⁷⁰ These texts demonstrate how analysis of the performance, reproduction, and consumption of klezmer reveals much about American Jewish life beyond the sphere of music, addressing issues of ethnicity, spirituality, cultural literacy, and communal practice. Klezmer also offers important insights into the role of American Jewish culture abroad, as musicians from the United States and their recordings travel to Latin America, Europe, Israel, and Australia. And, as the klezmer scene has proved to be an important venue for non-Jewish involvement in the production and consumption of Jewish culture, the study of these developments has raised important questions about the relation of identity and culture.

Among the wide range of possibilities within American Jewish culture, certain topics have attracted greater attention from both scholars and other writers. Contemplating scholars’ focus on particular topics can in itself offer valuable insight into American Jewish culture and its study. Consider, for example, the extensive literature on American Hasidim, written by journalists as well as historians and social scientists.⁷¹ Since all these authors scrutinize the community from a distance (while they are almost all Jews, none are Hasidim themselves), their work demonstrates the complex, powerful role that American Hasidim play for other Jews in this country as objects of cultural reflection. (In this regard, their scholarship is worth comparing to the literature on European Hasidim written during the first half of the twentieth century.) As Holocaust remembrance has proliferated in America in a wide array of cultural practices—including literature, memoir, historiography, drama, film, broadcasting, exhibition, fine art, music, ritual, monuments, pedagogy—it has also generated an extensive body of public debate and academic study.⁷² So extensive is this discourse that it has helped situate Holocaust remembrance as the quintessential case study of cultural works of memory generally.

One of the most extensively examined topics in the study of American Jewish culture—the connections between Jews and American popular entertainment, especially film but also theater, broadcasting, comedy, and other activities—demonstrates the challenges that arise in this field with regard to conceptualizing the relationship between identity and culture. Some studies address this challenge forthrightly, especially as an issue of historical interest, often focusing on issues of stereotyping and antisemitism.⁷³ Often, however, the problem is subsumed within the rubrics of these studies. In the case of American Jews and film, studies tend to be organized by means of a particular criterion: the Jewishness of the producers or distributors of films, the Jewish content of films, variously identified in terms of character types, images, or themes, or, less often, Jewish audiences.⁷⁴ Studies of American television not only are similarly organized around the scrutiny of Jewish content on screen but also sometimes link the evaluation of broadcasts with the authors’ concerns for accurate or inspiring representations.⁷⁵

Such approaches impose problematic expectations on popular culture to serve as either a documentary or an edifying presence; moreover, they run the risk of essentializing Jewish identity and drawing facile connections among creators, subjects, and audiences of media works in an effort to define cultural phenomena as “Jewish.” At their most extreme, studies of American Jewish entertainment culture propose totalizing schemes that link the Jewishness of artists, characters, themes, and even consumers in a tautological relationship.⁷⁶ The motivation to claim Jewish cultural property is of interest in itself—Wherefore the desire to see Hollywood films, comic books, or Broadway musicals as Jewish inventions?—and is worthy of scholarly scrutiny for what it reveals about the sensibilities of American Jews with regard to the interrelation of identity and culture.

As folklorist Elliott Oring has observed about the study of Jewish humor, such issues may be more effectively approached not as phenomena but as concepts. In doing so, one escapes the unresolvable challenge posed when asking, What makes this Jewish? by asking instead, What do people think makes this Jewish? Oring argues that “there is no particular concern that these conceptualizations can be demonstrated as matters of fact—it is the orientation itself that defines the subject matter.”⁷⁷ In this spirit, it can be more informative to study the connections between Jews and American popular entertainment culture as a concept realized in public discussion. As film critic J. Hoberman and I have written elsewhere,

The self-reflexive nature of much of the scholarship on American Jewish culture can be found in other works—notably documentary films and works of contemporary art—that are of interest both as interrogations of American Jewish culture and as examples of it themselves. Since the mid-1970s, dozens of documentary filmmakers have turned their attention to some aspect of American Jewish life, as part of a much more extensive burgeoning of personal filmmaking and videography in America. Many of their films—including works by Alan Berliner (Intimate Stranger, Nobody’s Business, The Sweetest Sound), Marlene Booth (Yidl in the Middle), Gregg Bordowitz (Fast Trip Long Drop), Michelle Citron (Daughter Rite), Menachem Daum (Hiding and Seeking), Sandi DuBowski (Tom Boychick), Pearl Gluck (Divan), Judith Helfand (A Healthy Baby Girl), Alisa Lebow and Cynthia Madansky (Treyf), Marian Marzinski (Shtetl)—are explicitly self-reflexive, using the medium as a vehicle for autobiography of some kind, often set in the context of family or community relations.⁷⁹

Contemporary American Jewish artists—including Eleanor Antin, Ken Aptekar, Ross Bleckner, Nan Goldin, Deborah Kass, Cary Leibowitz, Rhonda Lieberman, Beverly Naidus, Elaine Reichek, Tom Sachs, Ilene Segalove, Albert Winn—have similarly deployed painting, sculpture, photography, video art, installation art, and other media to explore various aspects of their lives as American Jews, devoting their attention especially to issues of gender, sexuality, and family life. These artists’ and filmmakers’ works have been drawn into the public discourse of American Jewish culture through exhibitions in Jewish museums (notably “Too Jewish? Challenging Traditional Identities,” organized by The Jewish Museum, New York, in 1996) and through the dozens of Jewish film festivals now held annually across the United States, including major festivals in San Francisco (the oldest such festival, established in 1980), Boston, New York, and Washington, DC. The fact that a sizable number of people attending these festivals analogize the experience to attending synagogue or explain that, for them, the Jewish film festival has replaced congregational worship testifies to larger shifts in notions of what, for some American Jews, constitutes Jewish cultural literacy and sites of Jewish communion.⁸⁰

As a sign of the growing awareness of the importance of these venues, scholars are currently joining with Jewish communal organizations to study the place of culture in American Jewish life. Noting that, in the 1990 National Jewish Population Study, a majority of respondents “identified themselves as Jewish by ‘culture,’ “the Institute for Jewish and Community Research in San Francisco issued a study by demographer Gary Tobin of Jewish culture in the Bay Area in 2002. By examining what the region’s Jews mean by culture and how they engage with it, the report is meant to help leaders of the organized Jewish community “better plan and support the creative evolution of Jewish life” through cultural activity, which is characterized as “a key strategy for strengthening Jewish identity and participation.”⁸¹

The study of American Jewish culture will always be in process, as new arenas of cultural activity (for example, the Internet) and new approaches to thinking about culture emerge. The challenges faced by scholars of this subject today are markedly different than what they were six decades ago. No longer is there a debate as to whether there is something worthy of scrutiny here, nor is the value of its study in the academy an unanswered question. Instead there are new challenges. Paradigms of what constitutes Jewish culture or Jewishness more generally are once more undergoing signal shifts, as are notions of what constitutes identity and cultural literacy in America generally. The new value invested in culture as a locus of Jewish experience calls for scrutiny, and the self-awareness that informs so much of American Jewish culture needs to be recognized as one of its distinctive characteristics; this, too, needs to be examined. Scholars’ increasing implication in how American Jews discuss and practice what they regard as their culture warrants the attention of the academy and practitioners of American Jewish culture alike. Finally, there is the challenge of remaining open to all the possibilities of what American Jewish culture might be as the nation’s Jews turn with greater frequency and variety to culture, in its various meanings, as a site of self-definition.

My thanks to Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett for her assistance and inspiration in preparing this essay.

1. Judah J. Shapiro, “Jewish Culture: Transplanted and Indigenous,” in Oscar I. Janwosky, ed., The American Jew: A Reappraisal (Philadelphia, 1964), 374.

2. Elliott Abrams, “Can Jews Survive?” National Review, May 19, 1997, 38; Gary A. Tobin, “A Study of Jewish Culture in the Bay Area” (San Francisco, 2002); Robert Alter, “The Jew Who Didn’t Get Away: On the Possibility of an American Jewish Culture,” Judaism 31 (Summer 1982): 274. See also Harold Bloom, “A Speculation Upon American Jewish Culture,” Judaism 31 (Summer 1982): 266–73.

3. Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, rev. ed. (New York, 1983), 87, 91.

4. See, e.g., the discussion in Stephen J. Whitfield, In Search of American Jewish Culture (Hanover, 1999), 1–6.

5. Norman, L. Friedman, “Jewish Popular Culture in Contemporary America,” Judaism 24.3 (Summer 1975): 265, 263.

6. Abraham G. Duker, “Emerging Culture Patterns in American Jewish Life: The Psycho-Cultural Approach to the Study of Jewish Life in America,” in Abraham J. Karp, ed., The Jewish Experience in America; At Home in America: Selected Studies from the Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society, 5 vols. (Waltham, Mass, 1969), 5:383–84. Duker’s essay is a reworking of research and writing done in the late 1940s, see 382, note 1.

7. See, e.g., Paul Buhle’s assessment of the “underground,” “subversive” nature of American Jewish popular culture in From the Lower East Side to Hollywood: Jews in American Popular Culture (New York, 2004); or Riv-Ellen Prell’s analysis of how American Jews have responded to notions of otherness in America, especially with regard to gender stereotyping, in Fighting to Become Americans: Jews, Gender, and the Anxiety of Assimilation (Boston, 1999).

8. “The Emergence of a Jewish Cultural Identity,” Jewish Culture News (Spring 2003): 1–2.

9. The term identity is also one whose meaning is complex and requires scholarly interrogation. See, e.g., Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay, eds., Questions of Cultural Identity (London, 1996), especially Hall’s introductory essay, “Who Needs identity?”

10. See Berel Lang, “Hyphenated Jews and the Anxiety of Identity,” Jewish Social Studies 12.1 (Fall 2005): 1–15.

11. See, e.g., Rebecca Kobrin, “Rewriting the Diaspora: Images of Eastern Europe in the Bialystok Landsmanshaft Press, 1921–45,” Jewish Social Studies 12.3 (Spring/Summer 2006): 1–38.

12. Jonathan D. Sarna, ed. and trans., People Walk on Their Heads: Moses Weinberger’s Jews and Judaism in New York (New York, 1982), 61.

13. Hutchins Hapgood, The Spirit of the Ghetto: Studies of the Jewish Quarter of New York (New York, 1902).

14. As cited in Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, “The Folk Culture of Jewish Immigrant Communities: Research Paradigms and Directions,” in Moses Rischin, ed., The Jews of North America (Detroit, 1987), 82.

15. See Tony Michels, A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York (Cambridge, 2005).

16. On The Rise of David Levinsky, see Jules Chametzky’s introduction to Abraham Cahan, The Rise of David Levinsky (New York, 1993 [1917]), vii-xxv; David Engel, “The Discrepancies of the Modern: Reevaluating Abraham Cahan’s The Rise of David Levinsky,” Modern Jewish Studies Annual 3 (1979): 68–91; Esther Romaine, “Eros and Americanization: David Levinsky and the Etiquette of Race,” in Jack Kugelmass, ed., Key Texts in American Jewish Culture (New Brunswick, NJ, 2003), 25–45. On The Jazz Singer, see J. Hoberman and Jeffrey Shandler, Entertaining America: Jews, Movies, and Broadcasting (Princeton, 2003), 77–92; Michael Rogin, “Blackface, White Noise: The Jewish Jazz Singer Finds His Voice,” Critical Inquiry 18.3 (1992): 417–53; Mark Slobin, “Some Intersections of Jews, Music and Theater,” in Sarah Blacher Cohen, ed., From Hester Street to Hollywood: The Jewish-American Stage and Screen (Bloomington, 1983), 29–43.

17. Deborah Dash Moore, At Home in America: Second-Generation New York Jews (New York, 1981), 233.

18. Beth S. Wenger, New York Jews and the Great Depression: Uncertain Promise (New Haven, 1996), 5. For a discussion of the cultural uncertainty of small-town American Jews during the period before World War II, see Eva Morawska, Insecure Prosperity: Small-Town Jews in Industrial America, 1890—1940 (Princeton, 1996).

19. On Yiddish radio, see Ari Y. Kelman, “Station Identification: The Culture of Yiddish Radio in New York,” Ph.D. diss., New York University, 2003; on Yiddish film, see J. Hoberman, Bridge of Light: Yiddish Film Between Two Worlds (New York, 1991).

20. See Jeffrey Shandler, “Beyond the Mother Tongue: Learning the Meaning of Yiddish in America,” in Jewish Social Studies 6.3 (Spring/Summer 2000): 97–123.

21. See Leonard B. Glick, “Types Distinct from Our Own: Franz Boas on Jewish Identity and Assimilation,” American Anthropologist 84 (1982): 545–65; Gelya Frank, “Jews, Multiculturalism, and Boasian Anthropology,” American Anthropologist 99.4 (1997): 731–45. See also the discussion of Boas in Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, “Imagining Europe: The Popular Arts of American Jewish Ethnography,” in Deborah Dash Moore and S. Ilan Troen, eds., Divergent Jewish Cultures: Israel and America (New Haven, 2001), 155–91.

22. Melville Herskovits, “When Is a Jew a Jew?” Modern Quarterly 4.2 (June-September 1927): 117.

23. Melville Herskovits, “Who Are the Jews?” in Louis Finkelstein, ed., The Jews: Their History, Culture, and Religion (Philadelphia, 1949), 2:1168.

24. Oscar I. Janowsky, “The Image of the American Jewish Community,” in Oscar I. Janwosky, ed., The American Jew: A Reappraisal (Philadelphia, 1964), 394.

25. Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made (New York, 1976), 642.

26. Horace M. Kallen, “Democracy Versus the Melting-Pot: A Study of American Nationality,” in Werner Sollors, ed., Theories of Ethnicity: A Classical Reader (New York, 1996), 71; originally published in the Nation 100.2590 (February 18, 1915), 190–94, 100.2591 (February 25, 1915), 217–20.

27. See Rudolf Glanz, The Jew in Early American Wit and Graphic Humor (New York, 1973).

28. See Neil Baldwin, Henry Ford and the Jews: The Mass Production of Hate (New York, 2001). See also Leonard Dinnerstein, Antisemitism in America (New York, 1994) .

29. Haym Soloveitchik, “Rupture and Reconstruction: The Transformation of Contemporary Orthodoxy,” Tradition 28.4 (1994): 79.

30. Louis Wirth, The Ghetto (Chicago, 1956 [1928]), 9, 287. Compare Wirth’s conceptualization of the ghetto as a sociocultural paradigm with Max Weinreich, “The Reality of Jewishness Versus the Ghetto Myth: The Sociolinguistic Roots of Yiddish,” in To Honor Roman Jakobson: Essays on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday (The Hague, 1967), 2199–2211.

31. Everett V. Stonequist, The Marginal Man: A Study in Personality and Culture Conflict (New York, 1961[1937]), xv, 129, 221, 138. Stonequist’s study elaborated on earlier work by sociologist Robert E. Park; see his “Human Migration and the Marginal Man,” American Journal of Sociology 33.6 (May 1928): 881–93.

32. Mordecai M. Kaplan, Judaism as a Civilization: Toward a Reconstruction of American Jewish Life (New York, 1934), 179, 293. Kaplan acknowledged that his notion of Judaism as a civilization was indebted, in part, to the Semiticist Israel Friedlander’s formulation of Judaism as a culture; see 180. See also Mel Scult, “Americanism and Judaism in the Thought of Mordecai M. Kaplan,” in Robert M. Seltzer and Norman J. Cohen, eds., The Americanization of the Jews (New York, 1995) 339–54.

33. See Stuart Svonkin, Jews Against Prejudice: American Jews and the Fight for Civil Liberties (New York, 1997).

34. See Donald Weber, “The Limits of Empathy: Hollywood’s imagining of Jews Circa 1947,” in Jack Kugelmass, ed., Key Texts in American Jewish Life (New Brunswick, NJ, 2003), 91–104.

35. Will Herberg, Protestant—Catholic—Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology (Garden City, NY, 1955). See also David G. Dalin, “Will Herberg’s Path from Marxism to Judaism: A Case Study in the Transformation of Jewish Belief,” in Seltzer and Cohen, The Americanization of the Jews, 119–32.

36. See, e.g., Duker, “Emerging Culture Patterns in American Jewish Life,” 384; Shapiro, “Jewish Culture,” 378.

37. On American Jewish publishing before World War II, see Jonathan D. Sarna, “Jewish Culture Comes to America,” Jewish Studies 42 (2003/2004): 45–57.

38. On Commentary, see, e.g., Nathan Abrams, “‘America Is Home’: Commentary Magazine and the Refocusing of the Community of Memory, 1945–60,” Jewish Culture and History 3.1 (2000): 45–74; Ruth R. Wisse, “The Maturing of Commentary and of the Jewish Intellectual,” Jewish Social Studies 3.2 (1997): 29–41; Steven Zipperstein, “Commentary and American Jewish Culture in the 1940s and 1950s,” Jewish Social Studies 3.2 (1997): 18–28; Milton S. Katz, “Commentary and the American Jewish Intellectual Experience,” Journal of American Culture 3.1 (1980): 155–66.

39. On The Eternal Light, see Jeffrey Shandler and Elihu Katz, “Broadcasting American Judaism: The Radio and Television Department of the Jewish Theological Seminary,” in Jack Wertheimer, ed., Tradition Renewed: A History of the Jewish Theological Seminary (New York, 1997), 363–401; on the Jewish Museum, see Julie Miller and Richard I. Cohen, “A Collision of Cultures: The Jewish Museum and JTS, 19041971,” in Wertheimer, Tradition Renewed, 309–61.

40. See Deborah Dash Moore, To the Golden Cities: Pursuing the American Jewish Dream in Miami and L.A. (New York, 1994), chapter 5.

41. David A. Hollinger, Science, Jews, and Secular Culture: Studies in Mid-Twentieth-Century American Intellectual History (Princeton, 1996), 3.

42. See, e.g., Alexander Bloom, Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals and Their World (New York: 1986); Terry Cooney, The Rise of the New York Intellectuals: Partisan Review and Its Circles, 1934–1945 (New York, 1985).

43. The American Jewish encounter with university culture has become a subject of inquiry in itself; see Dan A. Oren, Joining the Club: A History of Jews and Yale (New Haven, 1985).

44. See Gerald Sorin, Irving Howe: A Life of Passionate Dissent (New York, 2002).

45. Nathan Glazer, American Judaism, rev. ed. (Chicago, 1989 [1957]), 108.

46. Remembrance of the Rosenbergs after their execution in 1953 became a noteworthy locus of American Jewish culture. See Deborah Dash Moore, “Reconsidering the Rosenbergs: Symbol and Substance in Second-Generation American Jewish Consciousness,” Journal of American Ethnic History 8.1 (Fall 1988): 21–37.

47. See, e.g., Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America (New Brunswick, NJ, 1998); Eric L. Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity (Princeton: 2006); Matthew Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, 1998).

48. See, e.g., See Evelyn Torton Beck, ed., Nice Jewish Girls: A Lesbian Anthology (Watertown, MA, 1982); Miriam Peskowitz and Laura Levitt, eds., Judaism Since Gender (New York, 1997); David Shneer and Caryn Aviv, Queer Jews (New York, 2002).

49. See Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (New York, 1986).

50. See, e.g., Albert I. Gordon, Jews in Suburbia (Boston, 1959); Marshall Sklare and Joseph Greenblum, Jewish Identity on the Suburban Frontier (Chicago, 1979).

51. On American Yiddish literature, see, e.g., Benjamin and Barbara Harshav, American Yiddish Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology (Berkeley, 1986); Ruth R. Wisse, A Little Love in Big Manhattan: Two Yiddish Poets (Cambridge, 1988); on Yiddish theater and music, see, e.g., Joel Berkowitz, Shakespeare on the American Yiddish Stage (Iowa City, 2002); Edna Nahshon, Yiddish Proletarian Theatre: The Art and Politics of the ARTEF, 19251940 (Westport, CT, 1998); Mark Slobin, Tenement Songs: The Popular Music of the Jewish Immigrants (Urbana, Ill., 1982).

52. See Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, “The Folk Culture of Jewish Immigrant Communities,” 79–94.

53. Key popular books in English about Yiddish include Leo Rosten, The Joys of Yiddish (New York, 1968); Maurice Samuel, In Praise of Yiddish (Chicago, 1971); and Michael Wex, Born to Kvetsh: Yiddish Language and Culture in All of Its Moods (New York, 2005).

54. See Hasia Diner, Jeffrey Shandler, and Beth S. Wenger, eds., Remembering the Lower East Side: American Jewish Reflections (Bloomington, 2000), especially Jack Kugelmass, “Turfing the Slum: New York City’s Tenement Museum and the Politics of Heritage,” 179–211, and Seth Kamil, “Tripping Down Memory Lane: Walking Tours on the Jewish Lower East Side,” 226–40. On the concept of heritage, see David Lowenthal, The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (Cambridge, 1988); Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage (Berkeley, 1998).

55. See Rochelle G. Saidel, Never Too Late to Remember: The Politics Behind New York City’s Holocaust Museum (New York, 1996); for a discussion of the museum, see Jeffrey Shandler, “Heritage and Holocaust on Display: New York City’s Museum of Jewish Heritage—A Living Memorial to the Holocaust,” Public Historian 22.1 (1999): 73–86.

56. See Aaron Hass, In the Shadow of the Holocaust: The Second Generation (Ithaca, 1990); Melvin Jules Bukiet, Nothing Makes You Free: Writings by Descendants of Jewish Holocaust Survivors (New York, 2002).

57. Jacob Neusner, Stranger at Home: “The Holocaust,” Zionism, and American Judaism (Chicago, 1981), 1.

58. Jonathan S. Woocher, Sacred Survival: The Civil Religion of American Jews (Bloomington, 1986), 20. Woocher’s work is, of course, indebted to Rousseau via Robert Bellah’s conceptualization of American civil religion: see Robert N. Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” Daedalus (Winter 1967): 1–21.

59. For a historical critique of the assimilation model, see Jonathan D. Sarna, “New Paradigms for the Study of American Jewish Life,” Contemporary Jewry 24 (2003/2004): 157–69; see also Riv-Ellen Prell’s response to Sarna, 170–75.

60. See, e.g., Jack Wertheimer, A People Divided: Judaism in Contemporary America (New York, 1993); Samuel G. Freedman, Jew Versus Jew: The Struggle for the Soul of American Jewry (New York, 2000).

61. On intermarriage, see, e.g., Egon Mayer, Love and Tradition: Marriage Between Jews and Christians (New York, 1985); on Jews and Buddhism, see, e.g., Roger Kamenetz, The Jew in the Lotus: A Poet’s Rediscovery of Jewish Identity in Buddhist India (New York, 1994).

62. Soloveitchik, “Rupture and Reconstruction,” 66, 69. On this issue, see also Menachem Friedman, “Life Tradition and Book Tradition in the Development of Ultraorthodox Judaism,” in Harvey E. Goldberg, ed., Judaism Viewed from Within and from Without: Anthropological Studies (Albany, 1987), 235–56.

63. See Jeffrey Shandler, Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language and Culture (Berkeley, 2005). Modern Hebrew culture in America follows a different trajectory, shaped largely by the Zionist movement and American Jewish relations with the state of Israel. See Alan L. Mintz, ed., Hebrew in America: Perspectives and Prospects (Detroit, 1992).

64. For example, a search run on March 31, 2005, of RAMBI Index of Articles on Jewish Studies (http://jnul.huji.ac.il/rambi/) for entries with the keywords “American,” “Jewish,” and “Culture” yields a list of 161 items published between 1967 and 2004, of which 152 entires were published in 1980 or later.

65. Joshua A. Fishman, “American Jewry as a Field of Social Science Research,” YIVO Annual for Jewish Social Science 12 (1958/1959): 70f.

66. Sol Tax, “Jewish Life in the United States: Perspectives from Anthropology,” in Jewish Life in the United States: Perspectives from the Social Sciences (New York, 1981), 297.

67. See Barbara Myerhoff, Number Our Days (New York, 1978).

68. Fishman, “American Jewry as a Field of Social Science Research,” 101.

69. On the self-reflexive study of American Jewry, see Jack Kugelmass, ed., Between Two Worlds: Ethnographic Essays on American Jewry (Ithaca, 1988).

70. See, e.g, Samuel C. Heilman, Synagogue Life: A Study in Symbolic Interaction (Chicago, 1976); David Kaufman, Shul with a Pool: The “Synagogue-Center” in American Jewish History (Hanover, 1999); Joseph A, Levine, Synagogue Music in America (Crown Point, IN, 1988); Riv-Ellen Prell, Prayer and Community: The Havurah in American Judaism (Detroit, 1989); Moshe Shokeid, A Gay Synagogue in New York (New York, 1995); Henry Stolzman, Faith, Spirit, and Identity: Synagogue Architecture in America (Woodbridge, 2004); Jack Wertheimer, ed., The American Synagogue: A Sanctuary Transformed (Cambridge, 1987).

71. Arthur A. Goren, The Politics and Public Culture of American Jews (Bloomington, 1999); David G. Roskies, “A Revolution Set in Stone: The Art of Burial,” in The Jewish Search for a Usable Past (Bloomington, 1999), 120–45; Alan E. Steinweis, “Reflections on the Holocaust from Nebraska,” in Hilene Flanzbaum, ed., The Americanization of the Holocaust (Baltimore, 1999), 167–80.

72. See, e.g., Susan L. Braunstein and Jenna Weissman Joselit, eds., Getting Comfortable in New York: The American Jewish Home, 1880–1950 (New York, 1990), and Jenna Weissman Joselit, The Wonders of America: Reinventing Jewish Culture, 1880–1950 (New York, 1994).

73. See Steve Rogovoy, The Essential Klezmer: A Music Lover’s Guide to Jewish Roots and Soul Music, form the Old World to the Jazz Age to the Downtown Avant-Garde (Chapel Hill, 2000); Henry Sapoznik, Klezmer! Jewish Music from Old World to Our World (New York, 1999); Mark Slobin, Fiddler on the Move: Exploring the Klezmer World (New York, 2000); Ruth Ellen Gruber, Virtually Jewish: Reinventing Jewish Culture in Europe (Berkeley, 2002), part 4: Klezmer in the Wilderness. Doctoral dissertations on klezmer by klezmorim include Hankus Netzky, “Klezmer in Twentieth-Century Philadelphia,” Ph.D. diss., Wesleyan University, 2004; Joel Rubin, “The Art of the Klezmer: Improvisation and Ornamentation in the Commercial Recordings of New York Clarinettists Naftule Brandwein and Dave Tarras, 1922–1929,” Ph.D. diss., London: City University, 2001.

74. See Janet S. Belcove-Shalin, ed., New World Hasidim: Ethnographic Studies of Hasidic Jews in America (Albany, 1995); Robert Eisenberg, Boychiks in the Hood: Travels in the Hasidic Underground (New York, 1995); Sue Fishkoff: The Rebbe’s Army: Inside the World of Chabad-Lubavitch (New York, 2003); Lis Harris, Holy Days: The World of a Hasidic Family (New York, 1985); George Kranzler, Hasidic Williamsburg: A Contemporary American Hasidic Community (Northvale, NJ, 1995); Jerome R. Mintz, Hasidic People: A Place in the New World (Cambridge, 1992); Solomon Poll, The Hasidic Community of Williamsburg (New York, 1962).

75. See, e.g., Matthew Baigell, Jewish-American Artists and the Holocaust (New Brunswick, NJ, 1997); Dorothy Bilik, Immigrant Survivors: Post-Holocaust Consciousness in Recent Jewish American Fiction (Middletown, 1985); Judith E. Doneson, The Holocaust in American Film (Philadelphia, 1987); Hilene Flanzbaum, ed., Americanization of the Holocaust (Baltimore, 1999); Annette Insdorf, Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust (New York, 1983); S. Lillian Kremer, Witness Through the Imagination: Jewish-American Holocaust Literature (Detroit, 1989); Edward T. Linenthal, Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America’s Holocaust Museum (New York, 1995); Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (New York, 1999); Jeffrey Shandler, While America Watches: Televising the Holocaust (New York, 1999); James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven, 1993); Barbie Zelizer, ed., Visual Culture and the Holocaust (New Brunswick, NJ, 2001) .

76. E.g., Steven Carr, Hollywood and Anti-Semitism: A Cultural History Up to World War II (Cambridge, 2000); Harley Erdman, Staging the Jew: The Performance of an American Ethnicity, 1860–1920 (New Brunswick, NJ, 1997).

77. See, e.g., Omer Bartov, The “Jew” in Cinema: From the Golem to Don’t Touch My Holocaust (Bloomington, 2005); David Desser and Lester D. Friedman, American-Jewish Filmmakers: Traditions and Trends (Chicago, 1993); Patricia Erens, The Jew in American Cinema (Bloomington, 1984); Lester D. Friedman, Hollywood’s image of the Jew (New York, 1982); Andrew Heinze, Adapting to Abundance: Jewish Immigrants, Mass Consumption, and the Search for American Identity (New York, 1990); Judith Thissen, “Jewish Immigrant Audiences in New York City, 1905–1914,” in Melvyn Stokes and Richard Maltby, eds., American Movie Audiences: From the Turn of the Century to the Early Sound Era (London, 1999), 15–28.

78. See Vincent Brook, Something Ain’t Kosher Here: The Rise of the “Jewish” Sitcom (New Brunswick, NJ, 2003); Elliot B. Gertel, Over the Top Judaism: Precedents and Trends in the Depiction of Jewish Beliefs and Observances in Film and Television (Lanham, MD, 2003); Jonathan and Judith Pearl, The Chosen Image: Television’s Portrayal of Jewish Themes and Characters (Jefferson, NC, 1999); David Zurawick, The Jews of Prime Time (Lebanon, NH, 2003).

79. See, e.g, Neal Gabler, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood (New York, 1988); Andrea Most, Making Americans: Jews and the Broadway Musical (Cambridge, 2004).

80. Elliott Oring, “The People of the Joke: On the Conceptualization of a Jewish Humor,” Western Folklore 42 (1983): 262.

81. Hoberman and Shandler, Entertaining America, 12.

82. On this phenomenon in general, see Faye Ginsburg, “The Parallax Effect: Jewish Ethnographic Film,” Jewish Folklore and Ethnology Review 10.1 (1988): 16–17. On Alan Berliner, see Efrén Cuevas and Carlos Muguiro, eds., El hombre s in la cámera: El cine de Alan Berliner/The Man Without the Movie Camera: The Cinema of Alan Berliner (Madrid, 2002).

83. Norman L. Kleeblatt, ed., Too Jewish? Challenging Traditional Identities (New Brunswick, NJ, 1996); On Jewish film festivals, see Mikel J. Koven, “‘You Don’t Have to Be Filmish’: The Toronto Jewish Film Festival,” Ethnologies 21.1 (2003): 115–32.

84. Gary A. Tobin, “A Study of Jewish Culture in the Bay Area” (San Francisco,2002), 5, preface [unpaginated]. For other recent assessments of the place of culture in the lives of american jews, focusing on younger Jews who are “unaffiliated” with a synagogue or other established jewish organization, see also steven m. cohen and ari y. kelman, cultural events and jewish identities: young adults in new york (new york: national foundation for jewish culture/uja-federation of new york, 2005); anna greenberg, “grande soy vanilla latte with cinnamon, no foam . . .”: jewish identity and community in a time of unlimited choices ([new york]: reboot, [2006?]).