Jewish Buddhists, Gender, and Social Scientific Perspectives

In the cool, drizzling rain, I mill around outside the dining hall at Spirit Rock Meditation Center, a vipassana (insight) meditation center in Woodacre, California. The contemporary-style pagodas set in the green hillside give Spirit Rock the feel of a rustic Northern California resort infused with an Asian spirit. I am waiting to meet with Sylvia Boorstein, a leading Buddhist teacher at Spirit Rock and a committed, practicing Jew. She is currently leading a month-long silent retreat but has offered to break the silence to talk with me.

When Boorstein walks out of the dining hall, I immediately recognize her warm smile and spiky grey hair from pictures. Though short in stature at maybe five-feet tall, she has a big presence about her. She leads me to a small meeting room where she shares with me overwhelmingly pleasant stories of her childhood as a Jewish girl growing up in Brooklyn in the 1940s. Then she shares with me stories about her first encounter with vipassana Buddhism in her forties and her sustained dedication to Buddhist practice ever since. Both her Judaism and her Buddhism, she tells me, enrich and nourish her.

In her book, That's Funny, You Don't Look Buddhist: On Being a Faithful Jew and a Passionate Buddhist, she writes about how she translates between Judaism and Buddhism, calling her relationship to each her "two vocabularies of response."¹ As a practicing Jew and Buddhist, she moves between the modes of thinking and expression of both traditions, as if she were speaking two languages. She explained that she feels "completely part of the synagogue community" to which she belongs and that when she goes to an international Buddhist teachers' conference, for example, she also feels like herself. She told me, "I don't feel like a Buddhist who came to teach, or a Jew who came to teach. I feel like me. I always feel like I belong. … I just do not have any disjuncture about who I am."² She explains, with no compunction, that she is a Jew and a Buddhist, inextricably both. While she sees her book title (and herself) as having only two vocabularies of response, however, her use of the term "faithful" to describe her commitment to Judaism suggests that Christianity also informs her self-identification, even if she remains unaware of it.

I open with Boorstein's story to highlight the themes of multiplicity and multiple religious identities I saw during my three years conducting fieldwork on Jewish Buddhists in the United States.³ Past research has demonstrated that American Jews are disproportionately involved in (at least certain traditions of) Buddhism in this country. In his sociological survey of American Buddhists, James Coleman found that 16.5 percent of the people in his randomly generated sample of convert American Buddhists were of Jewish backgrounds.⁴ Similarly, sociologist Wendy Cadge found that nearly a third of those she interviewed at the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center, as part of her comparative ethnographic study of Theravada Buddhist organizations in the United States, were of Jewish descent.⁵ Through his research for his popular book The Jew in the Lotus, Rodger Kamenetz estimated that Jews represented about 30 percent of Americans affiliated with convert Buddhist groups.⁶ While scholars do not have precise statistics about the number of Jews involved in Buddhist communities in the United States, it seems safe to assert that the proportion of Jews in many Buddhist circles is disproportionate to the population of Jews in America.

This relatively recent appearance of Jewish Buddhists in the United States demonstrates that the category of Jewishness no longer exists separate and distinguishable from other religious identifiers, obscuring previously distinct binaries between Jewish and non-Jewish. Frequently, we read about, hear about, or meet people like Boorstein, who represent models of religiosity characterized by both/and rather than either/or. Be they Jewish Buddhists or Jewish meditators, Jewish yogis or Jews who practice yoga, or various types of interfaith families, the boundaries between Jewish and non-Jewish have grown increasingly porous. Just as we have learned from gender studies...