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Part II Arenas of Jewish Life As a result of modernization, Jewish life was transformed from having a close connection with a communal body in a particular place and ties to similar communities elsewhere to something hard to pin down. Jews can opt out of organized Jewish life, even without formal conversion. They can ignore Jewish institutions. A whole range of people exist from the unaffiliated to people whose main concerns are Jewish. Most Jews work side by side with Gentiles and a majority may have Gentile neighbors even if some of these are segregated in their social lives. In North America, informal and flexible patterns of communal organization have developed. No single umbrella organization encompasses all of Jewry in the United States. While the situation in Canada is somewhat different, Jewish life there is also characterized by pluralism. In such a context, it is better to speak of Jewish arenas rather than a Jewish community. Certain places are marked as arenas of Jewish activity, such as the synagogue, the Hebrew school, the community center, and the cemetery. One of these, the community center, and perhaps others, are not even exclusively Jewish. In many places, large numbers of Gentiles are members and participate actively in the athletic and other leisure-time activities of the Jewish community center, just as Jews may be members of the YMCA or YWCA. Choirs in Reform temples often include Gentile singers, while Jews participate in church choirs. Still, Reform temples and Jewish community centers consider the maintenance of a distinctive Jewish culture as a goal and they are distinguished as "Jewish." Additionally, some Gentile-owned food processing enterprises sell kosher goods and accept rabbinical supervision. People move in and out of these arenas. Heilman (1976:229-233) has shown how some Orthodox Jews switch from standard English, which they use in their offices and places of work, to "Yenglish," a mixture of English and Yiddish, which they use while studying 137 138 II. Arenas of Jewish Life Talmud in their synagogue. Conservative and Reform Jews may light Sabbath candles and go to the synagogue on "Shabbat" and then enter the world of "Saturday" by going shopping in the afternoon. For the most part, our ethnographies describe the Jewish part of the arena. In the previous section, there were descriptions of a Hebrew school and a small synagogue. Here we find descriptions of several such institutions. The family is, of course, a key Jewish arena. For some Jews it is the one which is crucial and which colors attitudes toward all other institutions. Even if other ties have been broken, ties with one's kin may remain. While ritual is absent from many Jewish families, that is the crucible of identification. The family is also linked to the workaday world, as Silverman (below) shows. The synagogue and the Hebrew school are for most Jews only part-time arenas. In fact, even while Jews are within the synagogue, they are· engaged in activities which partake of the environmental culture. Synagogues must remain financially solvent. Thus the officers must bring business practices into this presumably sacred institution. As Schoem suggested, a congregational Hebrew school is expensive, even if it is run on the basis of low salaries for teachers. Its direction is thus limited by market forces. This is true of many aspects of synagogue life, as it is of other Jewish institutions, such as community centers, old age homes, and Jewish studies departments in universities. For many, these "facts of institutional life" undercut the value of tradition and community which these places represent. The actions of rabbis, teachers, and trustees often subvert their teachings. The Jewish institutions are also means for conveying aspects of the majority culture. Forty years ago, Reform and Conservative rabbis would commonly devote sermons to reviews of high quality books and synagogue adult education programs dealt with general, as well as specifically Jewish, topics. German refugees might go to temples to help perfect their English by listening to rabbinic sermons. This suited a second generation Jewish community which was still highly segregated and where many had no college education. Synagogues, like landsmanshaftn, played an important role in acculturation to high middlebrow and middle class life. Today synagogues and community centers are much more interested in preserving and propagating specifically Jewish themes. As Markowitz and others who have studied programs for the recent wave of Soviet emigres, judaization efforts are central thrusts in acculturation. This is also done for American-born participants in their...

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