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151 Religiosity Symbolizing Ethnicity A common argument among American Jewish sociologists has been that Jewish ethnicity is the major basis of the religious behavior of American Jews. This argument was particularly persuasive when religious pluralism was far more legitimate in American society than ethnic pluralism. In his classic work, Protestant, Catholic, Jew, Will Herberg noted that the considerable increase in church and synagogue membership in the late 1940s and 1950s, which some referred to as a religious revival, paralleled migration to the suburbs in the late 1940s and 1950s. Herberg viewed the increase as an attempt by those who had moved from ethnic neighborhoods to combine their identities as Americans with loyalties to their ethnic backgrounds . He believed that the “return” to religion was especially common among third-generation Americans. They had grown up in families that had adopted American secular culture, and because ethnic culture was unacceptable as a basis for identification in America, religion became the focal point of their identity, both as Jews (or Catholics or Protestants) and as Americans. However, a number of facts, such as the absence of an increase in religious observance, appeared to point to ethnicity, not religiosity, as the real foundation of the religious revival among Jews. That many Jewish parents joined a synagogue only when their children reached the age for Sunday school appeared to demonstrate that an important function of the synagogue was to instill a Jewish identity into the next generation and lessen the chances of intermarriage.1 Ideas similar to those of Herberg were expressed by Nathan Glazer in his book American Judaism, published in 1957. According to Glazer, the real basis of the “religious revival” that focused on the synagogues and temples after World War II was not a “strong religious drive” but ethnic Jewishness. The ancient notion that the people of Israel exist to serve the religious law had been reversed; it was now the law that served the people.2 The turn to the synagogue to express ethnicity followed the decline, beginning in the early 1930s, of the secularist Jewish movements 7. formulations of ethnicity and religion regarding american jews in the writings of american sociologists 03 Part 3.indd 151 9/20/10 10:25 AM 152 cha p te r 7 of socialism, Socialist Zionism, and Yiddish culturalism. In the interwar period, the rise of nonreligious Jewish educational and social centers appeared to support the view that future Jewish life in America could be built on a variety of Jewish expressions , secular as well as religious. However, the demands of the wider society for ethnic integration, together with the general decline in America of socialist and atheist ideologies, left religion as the only way for American Jews to express their ethnicity.3 Ethnic pluralism appeared to gain more legitimacy in the late 1960s, but the theme of Jewish religious behavior as an expression of Jewish ethnicity continued into the 1970s. Marshall Sklare, the most prominent sociologist of American Jewry at that time, wrote that it was a general characteristic of the American social structure “for ethnic differences to be expressed and sustained as religious differences” and that this was especially so for American Jewry. The Jewish religion may be “the prototype of an ethnic religion,” and therefore it was hardly surprising that in the American context “the specific character of American-Jewish religious energy is more ethnic than religious.”4 If religion was an expression of ethnicity among American Jews, it was not always clear what dimensions of ethnicity religion was expressing. It was not an ethnic culture, because only remnants remained of an ethnic culture that had been differentiated from religion and based primarily on the vernacular Jewish language (Yiddish). Two interrelated dimensions were more important than ethnic culture: ethnic social ties (sociation) and ethnic identity. Ethnic social ties were emphasized by Charles Liebman, who wrote about what he regarded as the ambivalent American Jew. Liebman regarded the essence of what he called the folk religion of American Jews to be their social ties to each other. The distinguishing mark of Jews in American society was not how they behaved or what they believed but the fact that they associated with other Jews. Religious observances that required regular practice and that would have been obstacles to the integration of Jews into American society, such as Sabbath observance, a strict observance of the Jewish dietary laws, and family purity rules, had been abandoned. American Jews desired both their survival as a distinct group...

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