Perhaps the boots which made these grooves came from Minsk or from the shoe store on Essex Street. A prosperous man may have had new shoes. On the way to shul [synagogue] he may have stopped to have his shoes shined by Max the shoe shine boy, there with his shine box. A working man would have walked with his oft-mended shoes on his way to shul. Both walked through the snow in winter and the hot pavements in summer. The words and rhythm of Yiddish filled the [streets]. The Yiddish signs announced “Fresh fish!” “Fresh baked challah!” or “Pumpernickel and 3 pounds of potatoes for a penny.”3
Berken fills in her story with imaginative details about the lives of early congregants. She uses the floorboards to help visitors picture a lost world of the early twentieth-century immigrant neighborhood and develop an emotional relationship to it.
Tourists did not just happen to arrive at this synagogue and place their feet in the grooves of long-ago congregants. The Lower East Side has long been seen as an authentic site of emotional connection to American Jewish pasts. American Jewish immigrants began to move their families out of the crowded neighborhood for more spacious parts of the city and suburbs in the early to mid-twentieth century. Still, they kept thinking about the neighborhood, and some kept coming back. In the early twentieth century, those Jews who left the Lower East Side were replaced by new arrivals, until Congress severely limited immigration in 1924. Beginning in the 1970s and 1980s, as a white ethnic revival developed and many Americans turned their attention to their ancestries, American Jews thought about their former urban ethnic neighborhoods with nostalgic longing.
As part of this movement to feel a connection to the places where their ancestors had lived, worked, and prayed, the Eldridge Street Project began to raise money to restore and preserve the Eldridge Street Synagogue in 1986, and the building formally opened to the public as the Museum at Eldridge Street in 2007. Preservationists made careful and strategic choices about the building’s restoration, such as leaving intact the worn pine floorboards in order to foster a sense of physical connection with earlier generations. This book argues that the tourist activity of visiting the Museum at Eldridge Street—and the nostalgia it both inspires and is inspired by—should be understood as an American Jewish religious practice. Indeed, this book makes the case that American Jews participate in a broad array of ostensibly nonreligious activities—including visiting Jewish historic sites, conducting genealogical research, purchasing books and toys that teach Jewish nostalgia to children, and seeking out traditional Jewish foods—that are properly understood as religious. Understanding these practices as religious ones illuminates the ways many American Jews are finding and making meaning within American Judaism today.
The American Jewish Mitzvah
Although Jewish history in the Americas dates back to the earliest years of European contact with North America, the majority of American Jews are descendants of Central and Eastern Europeans who immigrated to the United States between the 1880s and 1924, often settling in urban ethnic enclaves like the Lower East Side. American Jews’ attention to these communal origins has increased steadily since the 1970s. Stories about Eastern European Jewish immigrants have become increasingly standardized by organizations such as Jewish genealogy groups, museums, publishers, and restaurants—and an expected emotional response to such stories has become standardized, too. Engaging with the standardized nostalgia for Eastern European Jewish immigration history should, I argue, be understood as an American Jewish religious practice.
Jews in many times and places have used physical materials and spaces to create communities with present-day co-religionists. This is certainly the case in the United States, dating back to the seventeenth-century origins of Jewish communities in the Americas in networks of Sephardi merchants.4 But items of Eastern European and immigrant Jewish nostalgia, such as the Eldridge Street Synagogue’s floorboards, do more than connect American Jews to their contemporary co-religionists. They are religious materials, providing powerful sacred meaning that actively places individuals in relation to past, present, and future communities. American Jews’ interactions with items and spaces invoke imagined communities that include both the living and the dead, providing meaning in the present by narrating the past. Through particularly American emphases on material culture and institutional organization, nostalgia—a wishful affection or sentimental longing for an irrevocable past—functions as religion for American Jews, complicating notions of a divide between Judaism, the religion, and Jewishness, the culture.
This book aims to shift where scholars and Jews identify American Jewish religion. Describing American Jewish nostalgia as an American Jewish religious practice matters, both because the term “religion” helps us to understand the practices and ideas that are meaningful to American Jews and because definitions of American Jewish religion have real-life implications. Religion is commonly understood by non-specialists to be a private set of beliefs and practices related to worship of a deity. In contrast, although belief in God is one aspect of Judaism, the existence of God may not be of primary importance to the religious identity and practice of many Jews.5 Religion serves to provide existential meaning, answering questions about life’s purpose. Jewish religion includes a broad variety of practices, both public and private, that connect Jews to present-day Jewish communities, inspire remembrance of ancestors, or involve traditional Jewish texts, rituals, or practices. Both explicitly and (more often) implicitly, such activities shape Jews’ imagination of past, present, and future Jewish communities and provide existential meaning for Jews.6
Since the mid-twentieth century, American Jewish communal leaders have worried loudly that American Jews’ religiosity is declining. These communal leaders define Jewish religiosity narrowly, in terms of practices that can be measured in sociological studies, such as attending synagogue, keeping kosher, or sending children to Jewish religious schools. In the decades since then, these fears have been seemingly confirmed in widely accepted social scientific studies that appear to demonstrate an American Jewish “continuity crisis” or a “marriage crisis,” the latter emphasizing communal fears about marriages between Jews and non-Jews.7 Dismay over intermarriage and its effects on Jewish religious continuity has been articulated in sociological language from the pulpit, by Jewish organizations, and in large-scale philanthropy. Proponents of the continuity crisis rely on divisions between activities seen as “good for the Jews”—largely those identified as religious Jewish practices, which these leaders want to encourage—and those activities seen as “bad for the Jews”—generally, cultural Jewish practices seen as encouraging secularism, assimilation, and intermarriage, which they want to discourage.8 These studies have guided the determination of which American Jews count, literally and metaphorically, and they have influenced the funding and aims of local and national Jewish communal organizations.
This book argues that the premise of American Jewish religious decline and the studies supporting a continuity crisis incorrectly identify the ways that Jews think about and practice Judaism in the United States. When Jewish communal leaders and sociologists distinguish between Jewish culture and Jewish religion, many of the ways that American Jews create individual and communal meaning in their lives are flattened or even erased. Rather than turning to—or turning only to—the institutions that have previously guided American Jewish communal life, such as synagogues, religious schools, Jewish community centers, and Jewish Federations, many American Jews are increasingly communicating Jewish values and ideas to their children by engaging with the products of museums, gift shops, restaurants, publishing companies, toy manufacturers, philanthropies, and other ostensibly secular institutions. These products are often described as Jewish cultural materials, but they are better understood as Jewish religious ones.
Religion is best understood as meaningful relationships and the practices, narratives, and emotions that create and support these relationships. Religious studies scholar Robert Orsi defines religion as networks of relationships among the living, between the living and the dead, or between humans and the divine, each of which may be highlighted to varying degrees in different contexts.9 While Orsi focuses on Catholics’ relationship to sacred figures, American Jews tend to emphasize other forms of religious relationships, such as between the living and their ancestors. “Whatever else religion might be, it is a way of describing structures by which we are bound