Jewish Families

3: In a New Key

3 In a New Key This is the last chapter, but only of this book: its goal is to make you wonder, learn more, and perhaps even think of doing research like the scholars you’ve been meeting in these pages. To cite what is admittedly quite an “un-Jewish” image, it’s just too tempting to say that this chapter cannot help but be Janus-faced, looking simultaneously toward the future and toward the past, like that Roman god of doorways, of beginnings and endings. As we’ve seen, scholars who write about the Jewish family in the past make their studies contemporary in various ways—most prominently, dedicating them to various members of their own families or invoking the relevance of their research findings for shared concerns about where “the Jewish family” is heading today. Similarly, thinking about how the keyword “family” is changing in Jewish studies has a dual meaning. The assumptions we make and the techniques we use when studying Jews distant from us in space and especially in time are always changing, and thus our keys to unlock the doors to there and then must be recut. At the same time, perhaps more immediately and insistently, ideas and realities about what Jewish families are or might be now and in the foreseeable future are changing even more rapidly. Scholars must learn to work with ever more flexible and contingent notions of what “family” might mean, or we risk falling behind the reality—declaring, for example, the Jewish family to be on the way out while at least some Jews outside the academy think it’s fine for Jewish families to be way out there. Actually, well beyond but encompassing the question of the definition of the family, one of the signal recent changes in scholarship about religious, ethnic, and other group identity is to focus more on self-ascription—the way members of the group define themselves—rather than trying to come up with better “objective,” external, one-size-fits-all definitions imposed 111 from outside. This tendency may have something to do with the profusion of dispersed and rapidly shifting networks of communication in which individual and group identities are nurtured today. Thus, drawing on the model of collaborative software-development efforts by any number of participants whose only connection to each other is virtual, media scholar Douglas Rushkoff has promoted the idea of “open source Judaism” (2003). In this view, no one is the final or even necessarily a privileged authority in saying what or who is Jewish. Rather, these are questions to be determined by all who gather, from time to time, under that collective name. In this perspective, it’s hardly surprising that the roster of participants is self-selected, as well as constantly and rapidly changing. Similarly, in a book with the provocative title New Jews: The End of the Jewish Diaspora (2005), historian David Shneer and sociologist Caryn Aviv make a strong claim that what’s “Jewish” is what people called Jews do, that Jewish places are wherever people called Jews happen to find themselves , and that rapid transformations of the structures and expressions of Jewish life may be signs of vitality rather than signs of crisis. Of course, neither do the participants in Rushkoff’s idealized virtual seminar intend to invent and reinvent Judaism, nor are Shneer and Aviv’s new Jews necessarily also creating Jewish families. And many, probably most, of the people in the world today who are creating Jewish families accept some version of traditional Jewish authority. (Let’s call that, to continue and extend Rushkoff’s analogy, “copyrighted” rather than “open source” Judaism.) These people certainly see their Jewishness as closely tied to their ancestors and to the descendants they hope to have. Nevertheless, to the extent that Jewish identity becomes an increasingly transient thing, bearing less of the aura of permanence and continuity it once had, the same will be true of the Jewish family. That is, both scholars and community members may become less invested in the notion that there is anything like a core or a normative form of Jewish family down through the millennia—a tendency that we’ve already seen in much of the scholarship reviewed so far. At the same time, such Jewish families as are created are jewish families 112 likely to become more transient phenomena. They will be increasingly determined by...