Thinking Jewish Culture in America ed. by Ken Koltun-Fromm (review)

Drawn from a symposium held at Haverford College to honor the scholarship of Arnold Eisen, the chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, this set of eleven essays (with a postscript by the honoree) tackles one of the most elusive and absorbing issues to confront both historians and the contemporary Jewish community. Its civic status is secure; its economic signs indicate prosperity; its demographic base is, roughly, stable. Furthermore, the past that students of American Jewry explore offers plenty of evidence of the freedom to practice the Jewish faith and also of the autonomy to achieve not only comfort but even affluence. But the future will depend on the sorts of values to which Jews subscribe, on the ideas that will secure them a continuous and vibrant communal life on native grounds. Thus, culture matters. The meanings that it bestows, the sorts of religious and institutional purposes that can be envisioned and created, will surely determine the fate of American Jewry. This volume contributes to that task. Editor Ken Koltun-Fromm wants this book to be perceived as proposing “a cultural model in which Jewish identity is a contested performance worked out in local communities, in religious struggles, in material artifacts, and in ritual practices,” which might “inspire future performances of American Jewish culture” (6).

The title that Koltun-Fromm has chosen is a misnomer, however. Consider the following subjects: Martin Buber, Mordecai Kaplan and Emmanuel Lévinas (profiled in an essay by Akiba Lerner); Buber and Lévinas again (in an essay by Mara H. Benjamin); The Jewish Catalog (in a chapter by Ari Y. Kelman); and studies of Joseph B. Soloveitchik (by Jessica Rosenberg) and Michael Wyschogrod (by the editor himself). When Claire E. Sufrin’s chapter on religion and literature after the Shoah is added to this list, over half the essays can be classified as dealing with Judaic culture, even though that constitutes only one aspect of Jewish culture. The American thinkers whose writings are analyzed in this book are either Orthodox (Soloveitchik and Wyschogrod) or Conservative (Heschel) in affiliation or emerged primarily from the Conservative branch of Judaism (such as the editors of The Jewish Catalog). Reform Judaism, the largest denomination of all, is ignored entirely. Nor are secular expressions of Jewish identity considered, in Yiddish or in Hebrew.

Indeed, even though the editor defines American Jewish culture as “multicultural and even cosmopolitan,” this curious volume includes only two essays devoted to thinkers who could be categorized as secular (6). One chapter, by Leonard V. Kaplan, addresses the legacy of the poet Paul Celan, the survivor who chose to write in German and whose vital connection to American Jewry must be deemed remote at best. The other thinker is Philip Rieff, who was Eisen’s teacher at the University of Pennsylvania. Gregory Kaplan explores only the eccentric Fellow Teachers (1985), which in its mandarin hostility to the vernacular idiom of American Jewry fits uneasily into any dynamic notion of communal continuity. Fellow Teachers introduced the archetype of “the Jew of culture.” But one would never learn from Kaplan’s piece that Rieff’s model as the “leading American Jew of culture,” was Lionel Trilling, who disclaimed any identification as a “Jewish writer.”

Though “America” appears in the title of Koltun-Fromm’s volume, remarkably little attention is paid to the national setting within which Judaic thought is hammered out. Not even Noam Pianko’s contribution, on “Jewish Peoplehood and the Nationalist Paradigm in American Jewish Culture,” seizes the opportunity to speculate on the proper formulation of the sense of collectivity. The legitimation of diversity and the appreciation of pluralism came fairly late in American history, so that “people-hood” had to serve as a substitute for terms like “race” and “nation” in channeling the internationalist and Zionist allegiances that many Jews harbored. Yet Pianko fails to contextualize the patriotic pressures that obligated thinkers like Mordecai Kaplan to embrace “peoplehood.” Koltun-Fromm’s essay on...