Imagining the American Jewish Community (review)

To some, book titles with the verb "imagining" serve as cautionary signs that the pages ahead detour from reality, and instead navigate the world of fantasy. Imagining the American Jewish Community differs in this regard in its skillful interweaving of vision and fact. The result is an illuminating volume on what has been and what might become the shape of American Jewish community.

As an edited collection of revised papers from the "Imagining the American Jewish Community" March 2004 JTS conference, this book contains sixteen essays by leading scholars. Its four sections, "Reappraisals in American Jewish History," "Community on Display," "Women as Agents of Communal Reconfiguration," and "Community and Culture," present portraits of American Jewry that challenge existing paradigms in the field and examine the diversity of a community that has found itself duly inflected by changes in American culture throughout its history.

"Imagining" also conveys a sense of individualism and freedom that is central to a volume that takes voluntarism as a touchstone for American religious culture. The United States' voluntaristic ethos has consistently fostered "innovative communal arrangements," throughout Jews' 350-plus years in this country, both inside traditional Jewish institutional frameworks, and far outside their doors. Indeed, "Beyond the Synagogue" might well serve as another subtitle for this volume as the chapters take us to sites as wide ranging as marketplaces, sports arenas, board games, the internet, and the pages of American Jewish literature, to locate American Jewish community. Holly Snyder's chapter argues that the synagogue was not quite the core of social and religious existence for Jews in the colonial period that is claimed by the regnant historiography. The creative adaptability that has defined American Jewry since its beginning and which Jonathan Sarna has connected to the periodic revitalization of Judaism can be found in this early period of American Jewish history, too, Snyder demonstrates, if scholars accept the fractured nature of early American Jewry.

Photographers, memoirists, and novelists have perhaps best portrayed the integral role of the marketplace in creating Jewish community, but Hasia Diner's essay, "Buying and Selling Jewish," reminds readers of the extent to which commercial transactions marked a site as Jewish, creating community in the process. With the burgeoning of Jewish museums and exhibits in the past half-century, it is no surprise that the museum makes an appearance in this volume, but the rich history that Jenna Weissman Joselit details in her lively prose of curators' efforts to represent and provoke Jewish community is one of the many delightful discoveries in this book. One example was the path-breaking 1966 exhibit on the Jewish immigrant experience, "The Lower East Side: Portal to American Life" at New York's Jewish Museum—a turning point in museology, transforming notions of history and viewers' expectations. About "Portal," The New York Times raved: "Is it Art? Is it Jewish? Who Cares? It is long overdue."

In truth, many of the new sources for community in the volume are characterized by this mix of appreciation for Judaism's plasticity in adapting itself to a modern medium and ambivalence about the nature of Jewish content. Athletics is one arena where this tension has played out in recent years. Jeffrey Gurock's chapter, "Orthodoxy on Display in the Arena of Sports, 1920–2000," depicts a world whose varied attitudes toward the inclusion of American sports culture reflect its changing social norms. Gurock's work points to the importance of examining sports as a vehicle for expressing American identity. Groups who have felt themselves to be outsiders in American culture, such as Jews, women, and African-Americans, have often found the ability to prove their mettle in athletics.

What we find in all of these chapters is the lack of "overarching messages that might go beyond the interests of subpopulations" (p. viii). Marianne Sa-nua's essay on a Yiddish version of Monopoly for Satmar Hasidic girls reveals how one segment of American Jewry, in order to divert threats from...