Material Culture and Jewish Thought in America

1 The Material Self: Mordecai Kaplan and the Art of Writing

13 one The Material Self: Mordecai Kaplan and the Art of Writing Mordecai Kaplan’s diaries from 1913 to 1934 offer a window onto a tormented and lonely Jewish thinker. As a pioneering theologian, sociologist , and teacher of American Judaism in the twentieth century, Kaplan stood as a towering figure at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City (1909–1963), where he worked for a good deal of his very long life (1881–1983). Indeed, more than any other thinker of his generation, Kaplan tapped into and gave expression to enduring features of American Jewish experience. Yet even with the groundbreaking work, Judaism as a Civilization (1934), and his popular following, he felt marginalized and embattled throughout his life. To help manage and defend those professional conflicts, Kaplan turned to his journal1 to record his personal struggles and anxieties. In this material thing, Kaplan discovered and created an American Jewish identity through the art of journal writing. The editor of Kaplan’s diary, Mel Scult, has compared this “universe of word” to Kaplan’s penchant for mapping out ideas, and his reluctance to turn vision into practice. Words only, Scult argues, and not material things and projects, enliven Kaplan’s life: “Kaplan’s world was essentially a world of words, not things. . . . The words themselves become constitutive, become the totality. Once he had succeeded in stating the formulation, his task was completed.” Those words could “rescue the self from oblivion,” and even signify the heroic attempt to overcome human finitude. But Kaplan was still the prophet and far less the priestly builder of communities. The diary, Scult concludes, “is another dimension of his involvement in words, not things.”2 14 · material culture and jewish thought in america Yet Kaplan personified his diary as a material friend through whom he could engage and explore his ever present desire to create something permanent. The very materiality of language offered Kaplan relief from the fear of creative failure, together with hope of securing a home in America. To rephrase Scult’s critique, those words were Kaplan’s things, and he embodied what he calls his “self-aspect” in the material script. Journal writing is Kaplan’s performance of self in a material medium: the diary witnesses to the material existence of an engaged personality. Kaplan’s art of journal writing is a cultural strategy of belonging in America. By creating a distinctive personality in the diary entries, Kaplan employed the act of writing to perform and establish his American Jewish identity. Within those diary pages he would carve out space for expressive fulfillment: a performance of the self as a form of selfexposure . The journal allowed Kaplan to “externalize and render transferable ” those most personal features of the self. Frustrated by repeated attempts to instill those features in his children, Kaplan instead turned to his journal as a material substitute. As he transferred his desires and fears to the journal, he created more lasting impressions of the self. In this way, disclosing the self in writing satiated his longing for a presence and home in America. Kaplan’s readers become witnesses to his claim to America; the journal, in turn, serves as a material archive of Kaplan’s life. Indeed, Kaplan believed that only his journal verified his life as a real and meaningful one—so much so that he worried the journal could be misplaced, or worse, never read and so quite easily be forgotten and discarded. As material object, Kaplan’s journal became a commodity like any other thing. He could lose his American identity now inscribed in the material script. This sense of displacement, expressed so frequently within the journal , parallels much of Kaplan’s own personal history. Born the same year of the pogroms in Russia, Kaplan immigrated with his parents as part of the first wave of Eastern European Jewry to America in the 1880s. The anxious exposures of place, dwelling, and home, all so prevalent in Kaplan’s diaries, echo much of the immigrant Jewish experience. The increasing nativism in America during the 1920s marked immigrants as foreigners, and was an overt attempt to protect American culture from dangerous outsiders. Feelings of displacement and loss surface from within the Jewish presence in America, as they do in Kaplan’s journals. the material self · 15 But despite all this, immigrant Jews like Kaplan imagined a country open to their yearnings for a better life. Kaplan...