Americans have often had an ambivalent and contested relationship with nostalgia as a condition of acute homesickness. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Americans of European descent considered homesickness for Europe a mark of a refined character. By the time of the market revolution in the nineteenth century, however, white American men idealized the self-made man, who conquered his homesickness and whose rugged individualism supported capitalist activity.33 Nostalgia’s medical associations proved surprisingly resilient, too. As late as World War II, the U.S. Surgeon General included nostalgia on a list of contagious disorders that might “spread with the speed of an epidemic” through induction centers.34
But even as some Americans—especially male intellectuals—have eschewed nostalgia in favor of personal histories emphasizing rugged individualism, sentimentality and nostalgia have long been an essential part of American Protestant piety. Sentimental materials are those that “appeal to tender feelings” to solicit an ethical or political response.35 Sentimentality blurs the boundaries between recognized categories of spirituality, religion, literary culture, and popular culture. In the nineteenth century, this was particularly evident in Christian writings by and for middle-class women that aimed to reshape American morality. The broadly popular materials of sentimental novels, poems, and hymns established Protestant women as religious leaders by presenting them as moral authorities. Harriet Beecher’s Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin is only the most famous example of this genre.36 Sentimentality and nostalgia would remain essential to American evangelicalism through the present day. For American Protestants, sentimentality and nostalgia strengthen emotional connections to leaders’ religious messages, identify the family as a sacred but fragile nucleus of Christianity, and fuel political efforts to influence national mores.37 American Jewish nostalgia would draw on this American Protestant legacy by making similar connections between emotion and morality, emphasizing the sanctity of family, and linking religious nostalgia to American patriotism.
In addition to its American Protestant roots, American Jewish nostalgia has deep roots in nineteenth-century European Judaism. Nostalgia for imagined Eastern European shtetls (Yiddish for “town”; used to refer to small, predominately Jewish towns) can be traced to nineteenth-century Europe, when Jews entered mainstream European society as recently emancipated citizens.38 Where nineteenth-century American Protestant sentimentality was largely the work of nineteenth-century female writers, men generally created nineteenth-century European Jewish nostalgia. Male writers and artists who had left small, predominantly Jewish towns for cosmopolitan Western European cities and had shed traditional Jewish religious practices repeatedly reminisced about the religious practices of their youth and their immediate and distant ancestors. As these enlightened Jewish men de-emphasized traditional ritual observance, they awarded nostalgia “a centrality that it likely never before possessed” in Jewish practice.39 Memories of pious forebears were essential for Jews forging new, modern Jewish identities.40
In the United States, Jewish nostalgic materials began to appear with increasing frequency after World War II. In the wake of the destruction of European Jewry, the term “shtetl” began to appear untranslated in non-Jewish languages, including English, much more frequently.41 For most American Jews, like nineteenth-century European Jewish writers and artists, shtetl nostalgia has been a means of yearning for a time and place that they have not personally experienced. “Shtetl” came to stand in for an increasingly nostalgic vision of European, particularly Eastern European Jewish life, generally imagined as a lost world that had been backward, pre-modern, and impoverished but warm in community spirit. Nostalgia for nineteenth-century European shtetls—itself originating in the nineteenth century—blended neatly with American Jews’ mourning for communities destroyed in the Holocaust. Images of shtetls and urban ethnic neighborhoods, writes historian Hasia Diner, “could be found almost anywhere. Their images ran through the imaginative world of American Jews as instant mnemonics of places that everyone knew, but, ultimately, few had lived in.”42 By 1955, one writer observed, “the wave of nostalgia was overwhelming. Memory of the shtetl, which for decades had been relegated to the back of the mind . . . now came into its own in the thinking of American Jews. It was recalled vividly and with love.”43
By the 1960s, American Jewish nostalgia blossomed. As American studies scholar Matthew Frye Jacobson documents, since the 1960s a white ethnic revival has recast mythological American origins from Plymouth Rock to Ellis Island, emphasizing Central and Eastern European immigrants who came to the United States between 1880 and 1924. White Americans increasingly identified themselves with ethnic minority statuses based on ancestral national origins, as in Polish Americans, Italian Americans, and Irish Americans.44 Ashkenazi Jews, those of Central and Eastern European origins, enthusiastically embraced this idea, substituting Jewishness for European nationalism. The white ethnic revival helped American Jews to frame Jewishness as an ethnic difference while they benefited from the gains of increased recognition of Ashkenazi Jews as white.45
That is not to say that earlier generations of American Jews were not nostalgic. Americans have a persistent popular belief in “Hansen’s Law,” historian Marcus Lee Hansen’s 1930 assertion that what the second generation wishes to forget the third wishes to remember. In fact, the second generation forgot considerably less than later generations presumed they did. Examining newspaper accounts, public monuments, pageants, parades, and children’s books of the early and mid-twentieth century, Jacobson finds that, “whatever death or slumber ethnicity was supposedly ‘revived’ from in the ethnic revival, the hiatus could not have been very long.”46 What is different since the 1970s is not that American Jewish nostalgia exists, but how it has been organized and standardized and how it has become a central way of being Jewish. At the same time, a belief in Hansen’s Law shaped Americans’ understanding of the ethnic revival of the 1960s and their continued “rediscovery” of communal pasts in the subsequent decades. For Ashkenazi Jews and other ethnic Americans, these rediscovered histories are frequently stories of the hardship and deprivation of earlier generations and their subsequent economic success in the United States. The nostalgic longing for recovery of a European and immigrant American past is coupled with a narrative of progress, underscoring a fervent if unstated hope that perceived upward economic trends of American Jews will continue in the future.
American Jews’ nostalgia for Eastern European origins is not totally distinct from another major focal point of American Jewish communities since the mid-twentieth century: support for Israel. In traditional Jewish models of longing for the biblical Land of Israel, those living outside of the region were living in the diaspora or, in Hebrew, galut (golus, in the Ashkenazi Yiddish pronunciation), an inherently negative term suggesting spiritual diminishment and exile. In traditional liturgies and mystical texts, Jews have expressed a yearning to return to Zion under the guidance of the Messiah. At the same time, Jews have been far more at home in the diaspora than this trope would suggest, creating vibrant communities around the world that influenced and were influenced by the cultures surrounding them.47 Following the establishment of the State of Israel, American Jews and others reorganized their communities to make support for Israel into a civil religion—in which nationalism functions as a religion—around which they could build Jewish identity within and beyond religious institutions. Mainstream American Jewish organizations have encouraged Jews to connect to Israel through philanthropy, education, tourism, lobbying, and business ventures.
American Zionism provided a model of a religiously inflected attachment to place that Jews practiced through consumption, one that mitigated the traditional understanding of galut as spiritual exile. From the 1950s and 1960s onward, American Jews purchased “Israeli patina menorahs and mezuzot, olivewood ashtrays, letter openers, and coins fashioned into keys chains and jewelry.”48 American Jews used Israeli objects as tools used to build American Jewish communities, providing shared physical and emotional connections to a distant place. (Some American synagogues