American Jews – From Under the Fig Tree

The mother of invention

joselitAugust 8, 2016November 16, 2017Leave a comment

In what can only be construed as an accident of timing, two films have just been released, one right after the other, that showcase the experience of earlier generations of American Jews. One is Woody Allen’s Café Society, the other is Indignation, a cinematic interpretation of the Philip Roth novel of the same name.

The first film, set amidst the tony New York supper clubs and swanky Beverly Hills homes of the interwar years, follows the ups and downs of Bronx-bred Bobby Dorman as he seeks both his fortune and sense of self in Hollywood and among the belle monde.

The second, set in the early 1950s amidst a handsome, leafy college campus somewhere in Ohio (it’s actually Princeton), follows the trajectory of Marcus -- a k a “Marky” -- Messner -- as he, too, leaves the nest -- Newark, New Jersey, in his case -- for the wider world.

Apart from their geographical distinctiveness, the two films have much in common. Their cast of characters, often verging on stock and stereotype, includes earnest, hungry young men from lower middle class American Jewish families; their anxious and inept fathers, and their strong willed, fierce mothers who find it increasingly difficult to bite their tongues as their sons take flight.

Both films seek to lay bare -- sometimes in a heavy handed way and at other moments, much more subtly -- the costs of integration, or what academics like to call “acculturation.” In plain language: What happens when the lure of the supper club trumps the lure of the seder table and escargot take the place of brisket?

Well, nothing that we haven’t seen before, which is why the release of these two films and their attendant popularity -- at my local movie house, they’re packin’ em in -- puzzles me. Leaving aside their respective cinematic merits -- I’ll leave you to decide which one is more absorbing and compelling -- I can’t help wonder what is it about upwardly mobile, starry-eyed American Jewish sons and their more hidebound parents that renders that tale so evergreen.

It can’t only be a matter of nostalgia or a collective wistfulness for a seemingly simpler era. I’d like to think there’s more to it than that. Then again, given the zeitgeist in which we currently find ourselves, perhaps retrospection is more attractive than thinking about what lies ahead.

Stuffed

joselitApril 20, 2014November 16, 2017Leave a comment

Lionized and lampooned, widely consumed and just as widely eschewed, gefilte fish looms large on the American Jewish landscape. Many years ago, the making of gefilte fish was the stuff of a rather humorous episode of The Goldbergs, introducing television audiences across the country to what was then a decidedly unfamiliar, even risible concoction of fish, eggs and matzoh meal. Its name alone seemed funny.

Gefilte fish and horseradish/Flickr: Karen

The other day, meanwhile, the New York Times featured a story about gefilte fish on its front page -- yes, on page one! -- noting how a dwindling supply of whitefish, an essential ingredient, made it difficult for a goodly number of American Jews to serve the fishy dish at this year’s Seder. No laughing matter, that.

The article touched a nerve, inspiring fans and foes alike to weigh in. So numerous and varied were readers’ responses that the Times actually published a handful of them a few days later. “Scarcity of gefilte fish! This is the best news since the Red Sea parted,” cleverly opined one member of the public. Another grudgingly allowed that “Passover without gefilte fish is like Christmas without fruitcake.” Several more positively disposed readers couched their seasonal affinity for gefilte fish in terms of nostalgia, evoking warm memories of grandma.

What is it about gefilte fish that occasions such strong feelings, one way or another? Surely, it’s not only a matter of taste. After all, you don’t find too many people whinging publicly about schav or chopped liver. If you happen to find these two other staples of the East European Jewish diet objectionable, as many do, you simply don’t eat ‘em. No hue and cry, no public debate, accompanies that decision. But gefilte fish is another matter entirely.

I wish I knew why. Perhaps it has to do with the way in which earlier generations fulsomely celebrated this maychel. Way back in the 1940s, The Jewish Home Beautiful had this to say:

If there is any one particular food that might lay claim to being the Jewish national dish, gefilte fish is that food. This may be due to the fact that since it is associated with the Shabbat, it appears on our menus more frequently than do most of the other distinctly Jewish dishes. But the greatest factors making for its popularity are its intrinsically delectable qualities.

Could it be that taking a dim view of gefilte fish is all tangled up with identity politics, with an embrace of the universal at the expense of the particular? And conversely, that championing, or, at the very least, tolerating gefilte fish is an expression of Jewish pride?

Surely these are questions well worth pondering. In the meantime, as Pesach 5774 draws to a close, you can be certain of one thing: whitefish might come and go, but gefilte fish endures, generation after generation.

Let all who are hungry, come and eat

joselitApril 13, 2014November 16, 2017Leave a comment

In Messages from My Father, Calvin Trillin’s celebrated account of growing up an American Jewish child in St. Joseph, Missouri, he wisely noted that upbringings have themes. Much the same can be said of the ways in which American Jews celebrate Passover. Every year, there seems to be a different theme, a different approach, to the age-old holiday.

Manischewitz American Matzos/frumsatire.net

A couple of seasons ago, American Jews were all agog about a spate of new hagadot and inundated the blogosphere with comments about their content, physical appearance and, most especially, their authoritativeness. Another year, they turned their collective attention to Passover’s digitization, venting away on whether the latest app might diminish or augment the meaningfulness of the holiday.

This year, American Jewry’s thematic embrace of Passover centers on food. Whether online or in print, stories about what to eat are all the rage, eclipsing virtually everything else. Recipes trump ritual.

Some of these stories have to do with the adaptation of traditional standbys like matzoh balls or gefilte fish. Others reflect the globalization of Jewish cuisine, calling on readers to expand their repertoire of holiday fare: Think Turkish, not Polish! Still other accounts, their tongues firmly planted in their cheeks (at least I hope that’s the case), encourage readers to fill their glasses in the course of the Seder with the likes of Red Nile, a fiery cocktail of potato vodka, tomato juice, Arak and horseradish.

This year’s gastronomic commotion was sparked, I suspect, by the decision of the Orthodox Union, one of the nation’s leading kashruth authorities, to certify quinoa as a Kosher-for-Pesach product. For years, rabbis were reluctant to do so, arguing that even though quinoa was an herb, not a grain, it looked like a grain -- and tasted like one, too – rendering it unfit for Passover consumption. But in 5774, after much study and contemplation, they reversed their position, prompting consumers to cheer “Hooray” at the prospect of banishing what an earlier generation of American Jews had once called “matzoh monotony.” Out with farfel and potatoes, in with quinoa!

A testament to its pliability, the food-centric perspective on Passover also makes sense when considered historically. American Jews have a long and distinguished tradition of culinary innovation. After all, they’re responsible for giving the world that singular invention: Chocolate-covered matzoh.

A sweet Pesach to one and all.

Star turn

joselitApril 7, 2014November 16, 2017Leave a comment

Now and again, I have the opportunity to venture beyond my customary haunts and spend a weekend in another place and amidst another congregation as a scholar-in-residence. These “gigs,” as some of my colleagues are wont to call them, are no walk in the park. Yes, most pay handsomely. But they also give new meaning to ‘singing for one’s supper’: You’re called on to prepare and deliver anywhere from three to five different presentations within the space of 25 hours and sometimes on a Sunday morning, too. And since expectations tend to run really high, you have to be on your toes at all times.

Amish buggy near Lancaster Pa — Amish buggy near Lancaster, Pa. Flickr/denisbin

Time-consuming and emotionally draining, these ventures can also be hazardous to your health. If it’s your practice not to travel by car on Shabbat, you just might find yourself escorted along a highway or a deserted stretch with no sidewalks at 11 p.m. of a Friday night, wondering how on earth you managed to get yourself into this scary situation.

It’s worth it. There’s nothing like a close encounter with contemporary Jewish life at the grass roots to set you straight. Talk about a cold bath of reality. Your high minded theories quickly go out the window when you’re face to face with the direct consequences of changing demographics, widespread intermarriage, dwindling communal resources and a gnawing sense of frustration. Comforting bromides about the importance of continuity and constancy simply won’t do.

Having just completed a scholar-in-residence weekend at Temple Beth El of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, I speak from experience. I returned home from my visit to this intellectually engaged and searching Conservative congregation feeling rather sobered, even chastened. Despite a keen sense of community and deep reservoirs of good will, its children have either moved away for good or they’ve intermarried. Or both.

Some have left the fold altogether; others feel much more comfortable within the precincts of the Reform rather than the Conservative movement. One way or another, a younger generation is not much in evidence at Temple Beth El. To compound matters, the local JCC has closed its doors for want of support and the local day school is no more. And yet, the members of Temple Beth El keep at it, cautiously optimistic that the situation will turn around one of these days.

I suspect that I was invited to Lancaster in the hope that my work on the American Jewish experience might shed some light on why things are the way they are: History pressed into the service of the present and the future. I hope I didn’t disappoint. All the same, I think I took away more from my scholar-in-residency than I brought to it.

Temple Beth El: I’m rooting for you.

Line in the sand

joselitAugust 12, 2013November 16, 2017Leave a comment

Summer conjures up notions of ease and freedom, a release from the strictures and tensions of everyday life. You could even say that the allure of summer rests on the erasure of boundaries.

Little wonder, then, that many residents of Southampton, Long Island -- that doyenne of summer resorts -- are up in arms at the prospect in their very own backyard of an eruv, a boundary-setting device that enables observant Jews to reconfigure public space as private space and, as a result, to proceed unimpeded on Shabbat. They've even gone to court to block it.

According to The Southampton Press, which featured the story on its front page, the Southampton Town Zoning Board of Appeals denied the East End Eruv Association a variance that would allow it to proceed any further with its plans to erect an eruv.

The zoning board’s ruling was based on a provision of the town code that prohibits the posting of signs on utility poles. Since an eruv deploys utility poles (though in ways that are visible only to those in the know), its creation and maintenance, strictly speaking, ran counter to the law of the land (or the town). And that’s that.

But, of course, there’s much more to the story. Whether or not to install an eruv in Southampton is not just a legal issue or one of collective aesthetics, but an expression of social norms and values: neighborliness run amuck. The situation has quickly devolved into an ugly contretemps, pitting one set of residents against another. Property values, the First Amendment, and, sad to say, more than a hint or two of anti-Semitism entered the mix.

More disturbingly still, the emergence of a real divide between the Jews who favored an eruv and those who did not also made itself sharply felt. The Jews who fell into the latter camp formed a group called “Jewish People Opposed to the Eruv,” to press their claim that the eruv was a potential affront to the values they held dear. We have a right, they said, “not to be confronted on a daily basis … by the permanent display on multiple public utility poles of a deeply religious and sectarian symbol of a particular religious belief that they do not share, and in some cases find offensive.”

The carefree days of summer, anyone?

Heat wave

joselitJuly 21, 2013November 16, 2017Leave a comment

In preparation for a series of talks on American Jewish history that I’ll be giving next month, I went digging in the archives to see what I might learn about how earlier generations of American Jews, especially our immigrant forebears, coped with the heat.

Summer day — 'It's Hot!' Flickr/Eric Konon

Like us, they took off for the beach and the mountains, creating new Jewish communities wherever they vacationed. And, like us, they spilled a lot of ink talking about their experiences. Year in and year out, as regular as the tides, articles appeared in the English language and Yiddish press that took the cultural temperature of the Jewish summer resort.

These sociologically-attuned pieces paid attention to what people wore and what they talked about, noting how some young women on holiday “appeared in different garments at least four times a day,” while their male counterparts talked only of “pinochle, Wall Street and the hotel menu.”

In the years prior to World War I, when vacationing was still something of a novelty, comparing notes on what went on in hotels with a Jewish clientele with those establishments that catered to non-Jewish guests was a topic of abiding interest. If you could “inject a bit of reticence, round off the edge of refinement and put on a coating of social veneer,” there wasn’t too much of a difference, concluded one keen-eyed observer of “seaside types.” The Jews, like their gentile counterparts, knew how to have a good time.

While some applauded this development, others expressed disdain, wondering whether Jewish values went out the window come June, July and August. “Summer works its metamorphosis, completely and effectually effacing all that is self-respecting, restraining and elevating in the life of the Jew,” hotly observed Esther Jane Ruskay early in the 20th century, singling out the Jews of Arverne, New York, for their cool disregard of the Sabbath and their avid embrace of the good life.

Ruskay’s article, which she titled “Summer Resort Judaism,” will be one of the texts I look forward to drawing on next month. I suspect that its juicy prose and hard hitting indictment of American Jewry will make for good conversation. But then, my interest in Ruskay’s piece is personal as well: My grandparents, you see, were among those who summered in Arverne.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

joselitJanuary 21, 2013November 16, 2017Leave a comment

Ever since I began this blog a few years ago, I’ve developed the habit of squirreling away things -- a chance remark, a funny incident, an enlightening news article -- for future use. This week’s post, in honor of Tu B’shevat, the New Year of the trees or Jewish Arbor Day, draws on one of those finds: a piece in the New York Times about one orthodox Jewish community’s sensitivity to its fruit trees.

Inspired more by the dictates of halakha (Jewish law) than by the promptings of eco-consciousness, the residents of Borough Park, Brooklyn, it turns out, are reluctant to chop down the mulberry trees in their neighborhood lest they “tamper with God’s property.”

What makes this practice even more commendable is that space in Borough Park is in short supply. Once upon a time, way back in the 1920s, its verdant, leafy streets and capacious single-family homes drew thousands of upwardly mobile, middle class New York Jews. Far more heterogeneous than it is today, Borough Park afforded a congenial environment in which Conservative Judaism as well as Zionism took root.

That would change with the influx of frummer yidn, or ultra-Orthodox Jews, in the 1960s. Bearing large families -- demographers claim that Borough Park has the highest birthrate in the city -- they transformed the neighborhood’s composition as well as its infrastructure. A former byword for the good life, Borough Park is now renowned as a citadel -- and an unusually crowded one, at that -- of Orthodoxy.

Living cheek by jowl isn’t usually conducive to embracing Mother Nature, nor is traditional Judaism, which, historically, places more of an emphasis on internal rather than external matters. Under the circumstances, then, the concern displayed by contemporary Borough Park residents for their physical surroundings is to be applauded.

Identity politics

joselitJanuary 13, 2013November 16, 2017Leave a comment

Just when you think there’s little out there that can take you by surprise, along comes the very latest iteration of the so-called “Jewish question”: widespread -- and impassioned -- public speculation as to whether Downton Abbey’s newest character, Martha Levinson, the mother of Lady Cora Crawley, is -- or is not -- Jewish. Casting a gimlet eye on the way in which she speaks her mind, holds her fork, relishes her food and swans around swathed in fur and baubles, some fans of the show read Levinson’s behavior and appearance as that of a nouveaux riche American while others interpret it as Jewish.

Martha Levinson. Source/Downton Abbey site

Who’s to say? It’s at this point that things get really intriguing as each side marshals the very latest scholarship to shore up its position, calling on historians to comment on the goings-on within the fictive world of Downton Abbey.

Apparently, I’m among those historians. Unbeknownst to me until a colleague brought it to my attention, my book, A Perfect Fit: Clothes, Character, and the Promise of America, was enlisted in support of the position that Martha Levinson is Jewish, through and through. Imagine that?!

The book, which explores the relationship between clothing and the moral imagination in modern America, does refer to a number of late 19th and early 20th century critiques of sartorial excess, including an editorial that appeared in the American Jewess of 1899 titled “Jewels No Longer Synonymous with Jewess.” Ironically enough, its ringing declaration that the American Jewish woman no longer had need for “glittering tinsels” because she had come instead to appreciate the “rich tints of her coloring and the brilliancy of her eyes” reinforced, rather than diminished, the connection between jewelry and Jewesses.

Can Martha Levinson be far behind? I’m not so sure. Scholarship is one thing, television quite another, and leapfrogging between them is not quite as simple as it may seem.

All the same, what with the considerable to-ing and fro-ing over the presence or absence of Jews at Downton Abbey, you have to wonder what’s at stake. Then again, perhaps it’s merely a new kind of parlor game.

Talking turkey

joselitNovember 18, 2012November 16, 2017Leave a comment

You know that Thanksgiving is just around the bend when Fairway on the Upper West Side of Manhattan starts to pile heaps of plastic bags of cranberries on one of its outdoor stands. That, and the twinkle of little blue lights on the trees that line Wisconsin Avenue in the Washington neighborhood of Chevy Chase, gaily announce the advent of the holiday season.

cornucopia — Cornucopia. Flickr/carmyarmyofme

In the wake of the devastation wrought by Hurricane Sandy, plump cranberries and little blue lights are a most welcome sight, a comforting reminder of the inexorability of the calendar and the warming prospect of holiday fun and joy.

Another source of comfort, all the more pertinent this year, is Gershom Mendes Seixas’s A Religious Discourse: Thanksgiving Day Sermon, a reproduction of which was recently offered for sale by Dan Wyman Books. (“A very important document, and increasingly difficult to find.”)

Delivered at a special Thanksgiving Day service held on November 26, 1789 at Congregation Shearith Israel in New York by the self-styled “Minister to the Jewish Congregation in this City,” and, like so many important sermons of its time, subsequently published in the form of a pamphlet, Seixas’s address encouraged its listeners to be good citizens, to support the Constitution, “to live as Jews ought to do in brotherhood and amity, to seek peace and pursue it.”

I had first encountered Seixas’s stirring words many years ago, probably when studying for my oral comprehensives. But in the years since, I had forgotten all about them until I came across the announcement of the pamphlet’s sale, prompting me to renew my acquaintance with the text.

Although the language of, and context for, Seixas’s sermon is that of the 18th century, the sentiments it expresses are well worth contemplating. Placed against the uncertainties, both meteorological and political, of our time, they continue to ring true this Thanksgiving, November 22, 2012.

Roots

joselitDecember 4, 2011November 16, 2017Leave a comment

Not since the 1939 debut of Sholem Asch’s The Nazarene: A Novel Based on the Life of Christ, has so much media attention been showered on the Jewish perspective on Jesus and the New Testament.

The recent release of The Jewish Annotated New Testament, an Oxford University Press publication co-edited by Marc Zvi Brettler and Amy Jill Levine, has generated considerable attention at conferences, in the press and online. When I asked Professor Brettler to account for the book’s success, he responded by saying that “this is a new era,” one in which Jews no longer regard the New Testament as “dangerous,” but rather as a text that is “important for Judaism.”

Seventy years earlier, Asch’s sympathetic treatment of Jesus rocked the Jewish community, some of whose members all but placed the once-popular author beyond the pale of social acceptance. Abraham Cahan, the editor of The Forward, led the charge, insisting that Asch’s yidishkayt iz yezuskayt, that his claims to Jewishness were actually those of Jesus-ness.

The Jewish court of public opinion indicted Asch on a number of counts. That the celebrated Yiddish writer chose to publish his nearly 700 page novel in English translation rather than in the original Yiddish was tantamount in many circles to his having given up on Yiddish as a viable modern language. Asch’s decision, explains literary historian Anita Norich, constituted a real breach in “literary decorum.”

Bad timing compounded matters. 1939 was not the time to call for a rapprochement between Judaism and Christianity. Worse still, Asch’s sympathetic treatment of Jesus and of the early history of the church seemed to suggest that he was guilty of proselytizing.

Where the American Jewish community virtually anathematized Asch and turned its back on The Nazarene, the non-Jewish community roundly applauded the novel as a “masterpiece,” lifting it onto the best-seller list.

I suspect it won’t be too long before Amazon recommends to its readers that when they purchase The Jewish Annotated New Testament, they add The Nazarene to their shopping cart as well.