American Post-Judaism: Identity and Renewal in a Postethnic Society

Conclusion

Conclusion The challenge of writing a conclusion to this book is that in some way it is largely dealing with something that hasn’t happened yet. It is about the (trans) morphing of the “Americanization” of Judaism that is very much in progress, a process that I argue is more than the normative adaptation of current norms in tension with tradition. That form of “Americanization” is surely happening, as it always has. But I argued here that there is something more seismic happening , something that may very well change the way “Jew,” “Jewishness,” and “Judaism” are understood in America in the next half century. I do not provide a plethora of empirical data to make a case that postethnicity is indeed upon us. Others have done that. I begin with the assumption that postethnicity has arrived. Because of my training and inclination I chose to remain more in the theoretical realm of observing Jewish society in America through limited lenses, specifically the liquidity of Jewish identity in the early twenty-first century, and tried to make sense of trends and shifts as they unfolded . I liberally borrowed from the work of david Hollinger, Werner Sollors, and other social theorists to explore previous moments of change and development in American Jewishness that may look different through their lenses. I examined these shifts, in some cases suggesting their genealogies and, in other cases, what they may yield. Some of this required the tools of the historian to put together a cogent and plausible narrative of a past moment in time. Sometimes it required the intuition of the cultural theorist to see shifts and expose their complexity or perhaps predict the next stage of their development. And sometimes it required the reader of theological texts to see how Jewish thinkers understand God, the Jew, and the human and the ways these all affect the construction of their world. I tried to construct a story that considers the continuity of the American Jewish conversation in tandem and in tension with the new conditions that are creating a significant break from the past. Jewish renewal is presented here as offering a sweeping critique of Judaism and Jewishness, generating what I take to be a radical shift in Jewish thinking, identity, and practice in contemporary America. I do not mean Jewish renewal in the formal sense of a small but vibrant religious movement but rather as a broader phenomenon, as a trope I use to describe particular movements in contemporary Judaism that affect most existing denominations and secular formulations . I see Jewish renewal as a late twentieth-century articulation of what I called the second stage of disassimilation of American Jews, its constructive/ illustrative phase. This phase transcends the earlier romantic/nostalgic phase that dominated the America Jewish landscape in the 1960s through the 1980s Conclusion 241 when postwar third-generation American Jews were rediscovering their identity in the wake of identity politics and multiculturalism. At that time, Mordecai Kaplan’s reconstructionist critique of regnant Jewish life and practice combined with the counter-culture and the search for “roots” gave American Jews a renewed sense of pride in tradition. While renewal as a religious movement owes a great deal to classical reconstructionism , and in some way is an outgrowth of it, its innovativeness is how it absorbs and then transcends reconstructionism in various ways. For example, reconstructionist Judaism was instrumental in developing what has become known as the post-halakhic approach to Jewish practice, but renewal was able to infuse that post-halakhic perspective with an ethos fed more by a certain American refraction of Jewish mysticism and new forms of American occultism embodied in new Age religion. It gave the movement toward posthalakha a metaphysical foundation lacking in reconstructionism’s more sociological approach. While post-halakha is one way to label the ostensible move back toward “tradition” in non-Orthodox Judaism, I claim that it is not a move back toward “tradition” at all but a severance of law and obligation that infuses religious practice with a spirit that enables, even encourages, experimentalism, syncretism, hybridity, and a global consciousness defined as a strong obligation to be involved in the larger world. In addition, while reconstructionism views Jewish “peoplehood” and covenant as obligating Jews to extend themselves beyond the ethnic community, Kaplan’s Judaism remained quite ethnic, albeit not exclusively so. Maturing in the early stages of postethnic America, renewal breaks that barrier and experiments with ways to view Jewishness as something stemming from, but not...