Class, Networks, and Identity: Replanting Jewish Lives From Nazi Germany To Rural New York (review)

The failure of Jewish social scientists and historians to document adequately the rural experience of Jews in America is a serious omission in the historiography of the American Jewish experience. Thus, I rejoice in every new published book which focuses on America's rural Jews and their communities. Rhonda Levine's Class, Networks, and Identity: Replanting Jewish Lives From Nazi Germany to Rural New York, is the latest, as far as I know. It deals with German Jewish cattle dealers who settled in south-central New York after leaving Hitler's Germany.

In her introduction Levine describes her method of collecting and analyzing data. By her own account, her book depends largely on the forty unstructured interviews she conducted, which, she says, allowed her to insert herself into the interviewees' world "as opposed to moving them out of their world and into the world of the sociologist and subjecting them to a set of standardized questions" (p. 4). There is something quite naive about this premise. If interviewers insert themselves into the interview, the responses may be biased. Before an interview takes place, the investigator must know something about the subject and what basic questions need to be answered. But, even with carefully constructed interview questions and perfect methodology, one can never assume that the oral interview results in reliable information. People often make up that which they need to believe. Where possible, records must be ferreted out to corroborate oral history. I propose that consulting primary sources is a necessary beginning for any investigation.

The author asserts her book "helps to enrich sociological theory" in its description of the lives of refugees who came to America in the shadow of the Holocaust. Unfortunately, Class, Networks, and Identity suffers from academic jargon which impoverishes the text, distances the reader from the subject, and reduces the farmers she is studying and their life style to sociological subjects. Levine seeks to explain the manner in which rural German Jewish refugees from the Nazi period replanted their lives in south-central New York "by linking the microlevel of the individual to the macrolevel of the social structure" (p 2). 'Micro' and 'macro' concepts are repeatedly used throughout the book; the self-conscious use of the language of sociology gets in the way of the story and the reader's understanding. Levine claims her book "is an affirmation of sociological imagination," and demonstrates her assertion that "various strands of sociological analysis can be woven together to explain specific cases" (p. 3), a concept she repeats several times. Within three paragraphs, we get: "It is the sociological imagination's way of bridging the microworld of the individual and the macroworld of the social structure....[The farmers'] experience can enrich our understanding...by integrating the macroworld of the social structure with the microworld of the individual" (p. 3). One wonders whether the writer would have better served her readers' imaginations if she simply reported the stories of the people she interviewed.

In fact, she does that well when discussing the social life of the farmers (chapters 5-7). However, her analysis of women's roles is questionable. Levine opens chapter 6 with the statement: "This chapter highlights how women's reproductive work was essential in creating a community that also served to maintain and convey a Jewish identity" (p 113). The only kind of reproductive activity of which I am aware is that of bearing children, a task limited so far to women, and certainly necessary to the future of Judaism. I found the subsequent discussion of German Jewish women on the farm rather gratuitous and the generalizations made about women's and men's roles on the farm to be inaccurate. To cite one example, the author generalizes when she hypothesizes that while the men worked the farm, the women catered...