Hybrid Judaism: Irving Greenberg, Encounter, and the Changing Nature of American Jewish Identity by Darren Kleinberg (review)

It is certainly true that people thinking of themselves as” Jewish” in contemporary North America assert radically differing interpretations of the term. Is “Jewish” a religious expression? But, if so, how can it be defined? Is “Jewish” descriptive of an ethnicity? But, if so, can we give it any hard and fast definition?

Decried by some, embraced by others, the current diversity and fluidity of definitions of the term “Jewish” has given rise to a multitude of hybridities that in previous generations would have been dismissed as inherently absurd and self-contradictory. Nonetheless, numerous such hybridities have engendered communities that proudly espouse the possibility of being, for example, a “gay frum Jew” in print, on the internet and through social media. As well, the assertion of previous American Jewish “truths,” such as the rightness of Jewish endogamy and the wrongness of intermarriage, which served as the watchword of organized American Jewry across its denominational spectrum for nearly the entire span of American Jewish history, is now under serious challenge.

Hybrid Judaism: Irving Greenberg, Encounter, and the Changing Nature of American Jewish Identity takes the reader on an intellectual journey designed to both describe and contextualize the changes that have occurred in our understanding of American Jewish identity as it has been experienced and theorized in the past century. The author does so by largely focussing his narrative on the career and thought of Rabbi Irving Greenberg (b. 1933). However, the book is not really the presentation of a detailed intellectual biography of Greenberg, though there are certainly many elements of such an intellectual biography included in the narrative. It is also not primarily an expression of the author’s own spiritual journey, though the book also includes fascinating references to Kleinberg’s own spiritual itinerary.

This slim volume, adapted from Kleinberg’s doctoral dissertation at Arizona State University, first goes into detail about the ways in which American Jewish identity has been and is understood. Fully one third of the book is thus devoted to a series of essentially theoretical chapters. One deals with the history of the development of scholarly conceptions of the religious history of America. Another deals with Israel Zangwill’s portrayal of America as a “melting pot,” Horace Kallen’s assertion of cultural pluralism, and Will Herberg’s mid-century “triple melting pot.” A third chapter speaks of the contribution of Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s vision of multiculturalism and its critique by David Hollinger and his theory of postethnicity.

Part Two of the book mines the prodigious intellectual output of Irving Greenberg over several decades to explore the development of his “theology of Hybrid Judaism.” It is the author’s contention that Greenberg’s life and work anticipated Hollinger’s postethnicity theory and can be made to serve as a “theological basis for a more expansive understanding of religious identity” (63). Kleinberg speaks of Green-berg’s confrontation with the Holocaust and its implications for his self-understanding as an Orthodox Jew. He traces the development of Greenberg’s covenantal theology and the influence his participation in Jewish-Christian theological encounters exerted on the development of his thought. While never overtly abandoning his Orthodox origins, Greenberg’s intellectual and spiritual itinerary nonetheless transcended Orthodoxy in its narrow sense and came to embrace wider communities of Jews and non-Jews alike.

Kleinberg’s concluding contention is that Greenberg’s theological journey led him to “a transformational theology of encounter that I [Kleinberg] call Hybrid Judaism” (124). Kleinberg further asserts that this concept of “Hybrid Judaism,” grounded in Greenberg’s theology, is in fact the best way to attempt to understand the contemporary American Jewish phenomenon and “presents a vision for the future of the American Jewish community in particular and humanity in general” (125). It is significant that Kleinberg’s perspective is theological—a perspective most observers of American Jews all too rarely take into account...