Material Culture and Jewish Thought in America (review)

The prevailing research paradigm for “normal science” in the academic study of religions has been modeled on methods prominent in the history of philosophy. Students of religion have therefore tended to privilege the reading of texts and to champion the interpretation of concepts, doctrines, and opinions. Recently, however, the research paradigm has drifted away from the history of ideas and migrated toward anthropology, ethnography, visual, and cultural studies. Artifacts and everyday practices rather than literary or theological texts now attract the lion’s share of scholarly attention. Rather than words in books, material culture excites investigators. Practitioners of the new paradigm populate the category of material culture with an exhilarating cornucopia of objects. Behind this methodology that embraces a broad range of goods and practices stands a well-founded theory: “. . . over the past few decades scholars of religion have looked to ritual, daily practice, imagery, objects, spaces, and bodies as promising ways of enriching and expanding the evidence for studying religions—not as systems of ideas or laws, but as lived, as intuited, as inconsistent, as adaptive.”¹ That this new paradigm for the study of religions has already enriched and expanded the study of American Judaism is undoubtedly well-known to readers of this journal who are familiar with the publications of such scholars as Jenna Weiss-man Joselit, Deborah Dash Moore, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, and Mark Slobin. What about the book under review? Does it partake of the new or old paradigm? Is the book focused on things or on “Jewish thinking about things”? (3) The “about” is decisive.

Except for the introduction, “Material Culture and Jewish Identity in America,” which offers a cursory sketch of the case for becoming “delightfully entangled in the web of material identity,” and Chapter Six, “The Material Gaze: American Jewish Identity and Heritage Production,” which discusses the “covers of Lilith magazine, Arnold Eagle’s photographs of Orthodox Jews in New York City (1935), and the three film versions of The Jazz Singer (1927, 1953, and 1980),” the bulk of the book subscribes to the principles of the old paradigm that prefers words to images or objects (12, 226). Preoccupied with texts and ideas, five of the six chapters are devoted to writers who pondered the ethical or religious significance of space and tangible things. Chapter subjects include Mordecai Kaplan, Edward Bernays, Joshua Liebman, Erich Fromm, Joseph Soloveitchik, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Anzia Yezierska, Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick, and Bernard Malamud. These chapters are meant to substantiate the incontrovertible claim that “American Jews produced second-order reflections on the nature of things and their material charms” (2). These chapters are also meant to assemble a convincing body of evidence for establishing the more provocative claim “that materiality lies at the core of Jewish thought and identity in America” (12). Assembling these data for proving the existence of “second-order reflections,” and proposing that these “reflections” qualify as core issues on the agenda of intellectual Jews living mainly in the northeastern urban centers of America roughly between 1920 and 1970 comprise this book’s contribution to scholarship.

The contribution would be more compelling were it not for a confusing use of crucial terminology. “Material” means different things when associated with witnesses in a court of law, manufacturers of goods and commodities, comedians performing onstage, and philosophers seeking antonyms for spirit or mind and synonyms for physical things or corporeal stuff. Contrary to its more restricted meaning among practitioners of the new paradigm, this book uses the term “material” profusely and expansively, exploiting its polyvalence to denote anything weighty or important, whether a memory of the traditional past or an actual, physical object. Like “material” on the pages of this book, the semantic range of “thing” is capacious. According to the author, who cites Emmet Fox without demurral, “thoughts . . . are things” (75). If “material” signifies anything important or causally potent and “thoughts” belong to the class of “things,” it is difficult to understand what the author intends by...