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c h a p t e r 7 How Jewishness is Related to Family Patterns of American Jews The relationship between Jewishness and family behavior is complex. Family serves as a metaphor for the entire Jewish people: “From the Bible forward the Jewish people is portrayed at its core as a large extended family descended from the patriarch Jacob” (Berger, 2005, p. 1). Institutionally , especially as Jews lived as minorities for most of their history, from the destruction of Solomon’s Temple in 586 b.c.e. until the modern-day founding of Israel, the family was “in many cases, the primary vehicle for preserving distinctiveness from the majority culture” (Berger, 2005, p. 1), and still is, in many respects. Marriage and family are seen as part of the “sanctification of Israel” in the rabbinic tradition, and many rabbinic rules revolve around family ritual and behavior. “Among the most important of these [family-related] commandments are that: (1) men are to marry, (2) they are to procreate . . . and (3) they are obligated to teach their children about the religious traditions of Israel. (4) Women, as conceived by rabbinic Judaism, above all, are to attend to their children” (Wertheimer, 2005c, p. 245). In modern times Jews began to assimilate themselves into their surroundings : “ ‘Be a Frenchman outside and a Jew at home’ became the formula for successful integration, granting the family . . . an even more central role in the preservation of Jewish identity” (Berger, 2005, p. 11). Such an admonition may apply to either ethnic or religious identity, although the implication is that one should privatize religion while allowing ethnicity or nationality to be one’s public face. The tendency to privatize religion was thought to accompany modernization (Berger, 1967; Luckmann, 1967), which relegated it to the private sphere dominated by the family: “The private sphere may seem to be, in a macro sense, peripheral in the modern world, but it nevertheless is where a bedrock of mutually reinforcing relations between family and religion is found” (Pankhurst and Houseknecht, 2000, p. 24). The persistent and even resurgent presence of religion in public life, 152 jewishness and family patterns 153 even in an ostensibly secular country like the United States, challenges the notion of religious privatization, and the public functions of the family have been noted as well (Cherlin, 2005; Pankhurst and Houseknecht, 2000). So the mutually reinforcing relationship between religion and family, whether in the private or public sphere, is well established. Edgell (2006) and Christiano (2000), among others, discuss the persisting association between religiosity and traditional familism, albeit one that is challenged by contemporary economic pressures and practices both in the broader society and in individual families. At the same time, however, Christiano (2000) notes the opposite tendencies among Jews (e.g., delayed marriage, low fertility), which are not explained by demographic and educational factors alone. Family texts routinely point to ethnic patterns of variation in familistic behavior (e.g., Benokraitis, 2002; Eshleman and Bulcroft, 2006; although Jews are rarely considered a relevant ethnic group and are not described in either of these sources). Little research is able to juxtapose religious and ethnic identity within the same group in the same way that is possible among Jews, however. By using ethnic and religious, private and public indices of Jewish identity, we seek in this chapter to sort out the relationships between family behavior and various types of Jewish identity. In addition to the influence of Jewish religious and ethnic culture on family behavior, the norms of the broader society also have an influence on American Jewish life. The tendencies in contemporary U.S. society toward delayed marriage, high divorce rates, and small families are all evident among American Jews as well (Berger, 2005). Furthermore, the stress on individualism in the United States may well take its toll on the American Jewish family, as it has in the broader society (Bellah et. al., 1985/1996). As Cohen and Eisen (2000) found, contemporary American Jews are first and foremost motivated by a “profound individualism,” a “sovereign self,” yet their choices are often framed in the context of their family situations, which remain extremely important settings for practicing and actualizing their Jewishness. The issues that we address in this chapter are the extent to which family behavior patterns are related to the denominational and Jewish identity patterns shown in the preceding chapter, and whether the distinctiveness of American Jewish family behavior that we saw in comparison with the broader American population...

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