Variable, Vital, and Frequently Chaotic: American Jewry

Dana Evan Kaplan's Cambridge Companion to American Judaism is a worthy addition to "Cambridge Companion" series that has made scholarly topics accessible to scholars and layman alike. In this volume, Kaplan, a visiting research scholar at the University of Miami and a rabbi in Albany, Georgia, presents essays on a wide variety of topics by an impressive array of scholars. The volume is divided into two parts, the first titled "Historical Overviews" and the second "Themes and Concepts." The second part includes sections on religious culture, identity and community, living in America, Jewish art, and a final one titled "The Future." Kaplan has successfully blended more traditional topics—for example, Lloyd Gartner on "American Judaism, 1880–1945" and Nathan Glazer, a pioneer in the field of American Jewish studies, on "The American Jewish Urban Experience"—with such less conventional topics as David Biale on "The Body and Sexuality in American Jewish Culture" and Biale's fellow Californian Murray Baumgarten on "American Midrash: Urban Jewish Writing and the Reclaiming of Judaism."

In his introduction, Kaplan explains his decision to use the term "American Judaism" in the volume's title. "In popular usage today, Judaism usually implies a broad sociological approach to the subject of Jewish life and culture, while the term Jewish Religion suggests a more specific concern with beliefs and practices that are somehow associated with a supernatural reality," he writes. "Understanding the subject in such broad terms, one can see that Jewish religion in America means much more than just religious rituals or belief" (p. 1).

The choice of "American Judaism" as his subject reflects an important recent trend in American Jewish studies. While the term "American Judaism" was used decades ago by Nathan Glazer as a title in his eponymous pioneering work of 1957, the term was most recently given popular expression by Jonathan Sarna in his monumental volume published in 2004. In the introduction to American Judaism: A History, Sarna writes: "The very term 'American Judaism' defies meaningful definition, for Jews as a people cannot be disentangled from Judaism as a faith." Sarna explains further in this vein that "social, economic, political, cultural, and psychological factors affecting religious life must be borne in mind."

This effort to frame the discussion of Jewish history in America as including religion as a part of the total Jewish experience represents, to my mind, a coming of age. No longer is the American Jewish experience portrayed such that Jews are merely an assimilated subset of American society. Today, Jews as well as those who study their experience in America feel comfortable structuring the discussion around the very religion that has stood for millennia as the foundation of the Jewish people. This necessarily allows for a broadening of the definition of American Judaism that includes all of the aspects of Jewish life.

Given Kaplan's decision to enlarge the picture of Jews in America, it is noteworthy that he avoids dividing American Judaism into denominational components. "Without underestimating the differences between the streams," he writes, "the scholars writing in this collection look at the totality of American Judaism rather than at its constituent parts" (p. 11). While the volume includes the essay "Jewish Religious Denominations," its author, Lawrence Grossman, coeditor of the American Jewish Year Book, believes that the denominational structure, while important historically, plays a far less significant role today as many Jews explore nondenominational religious settings. It is debatable whether nondenominational Judaism, or the more recent trend toward postdenominationalism, actually broadens the discussion, as Kaplan argues, or constricts it. The discussion, however, helps set the...