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1 The Cultural Anthropology of American Jewry Walter P. Zenner and Janet S. Belcove-Shalin The anthropological study of American Jewry may sound to some like an oxymoron. Are not anthropologists supposed to journey to the remote corners of the earth and brave inhospitable terrain in search of the secrets of cultural life? Jews, by contrast, have been the quintessential urban dwellers, since the coming of the modern age, and as such, were unlikely candidates for ethnographic research. It is only in recent times that anthropologists began to set their sights on people and places in urban, western environments, which explains why the ethnography of Jewish life is a relatively new field, with roots extending no further than the late 1940's and with numerous gaps still waiting to be filled. The present collection of essays marks the boundaries of the emerging field of Jewish ethnography, elucidates various methods in which social scientists interested in Judaism approach their subject, and makes a modest contribution to our knowledge of modern Jewish culture. Since anthropology made its appearance as a discipline on this continent, anthropolOgists have made contributions to the study of North American society. In the early days, they did this primarily through the ethnological studies of American Indians and through physical anthropolOgical research. By the 1950s, there were enough studies in all branches of anthropology so that a special issue of the American Anthropologist, the leading journal in the field, was devoted to the "The U.S.A. as Anthropologists See It" (1955). One of the articles in that special issue, written by Melford Spiro, is on the subject of the "acculturation of American ethnic groups." Spiro notes the dearth of interest shown by anthropologists in the conflict of cultures at their own doorstep: "Apparently we prefer more exotic locales for our researches than South Boston or the West Bronx" (1955:1242). While he cites a number of studies dealing with "minority-groups," "race-relations," and what sociologists call "intergroup " relations, he is quick to point out that few ethnographers have actually tackled an anthropological analysis of culture and culture change. Spiro's review of the scant literature on ethnic groups 3 4 The Cultural Anthropology of American Jewry of European and Asian origin includes six publications devoted to the Jewish community. The most common theme he traces in these publications is the endogamy of the Jewish community which persists despite a high rate of acculturation. At the time in which this article was written, anthropology was in a rapid state of transition. Before World War II, hardly any ethnographic research was being done in communities which were not rural, kin-based, and non-western. Subsequently, cultural anthropology began to tum to the metropolitan areas of the world, including the United States. The :reasons for this change of direction (and heart) are complex. For one thing, anthropologists were following to the cities the tribal and peasant peoples whom they had previously researched. In part, they studied populations in the United States when they were inaccessible abroad, as in the case of the "cultures at a distance" research led by Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead during the Second World War and its aftermath. For some, the focus on American urban communities was a way of reflecting on one's past. Others took it as a preliminary step toward overseas research. A case in point is the research interests of one of the authors. As an undergraduate anthropology major and graduate student Zenner wrote an ethnographic account of a youth group to which he belonged, a family genealogy, a paper on the "transfer of status" by German Jewish refugees in the United States, and conducted a series of interviews with his father about the German Jewish situation before Hitler. His first funded research project was a study of Syrian Jews in Brooklyn in 1958 (Zenner 1970, 1983). Similarly, his colleague, Plotnicov, first published on New York City Jewish families (1968a, 1968b) before he went on to work in Nigeria, while another contemporary , E. Leyton, studied an extended family in Canada (1970) prior to his doctoral research in the north of Ireland. Even before anthropologists logy of American Jewry traditional folk societies basaed on I-you relationships and modem societies based on I-it relationships, for both humans and other creatures. This paradigm is used exphcitly or implicitly by various social scientists writing on North American and European Jewry (Sharot 1976 and Elazar 1976). Steven Cohen (1983), for one, unqualifiedly calls his study...

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