By claiming as religious those activities generally recognized as secular, I highlight the significance of shared meanings and practices for Jewish individuals, families, and communities. Like other Americans, American Jews are not necessarily very good at articulating and recognizing sacred practices, places, or narratives in their lives. Activities like eating Jewish foods may provide a connection to Jewish history through consuming traditional dishes. It often provides a community in the present, too, as one is surrounded by others doing the same thing—much like attending a synagogue, but with perhaps more immediate gratification.
In North America, both “religion” and “spirituality” have been identified with Christian notions of belief and theology to such an extent that both scholars and practitioners have failed to recognize the meaning-making practices of other traditions as religious.23 The inadequacy of common uses of these terms is particularly evident for traditions and practices that place little or no focus on theistic beliefs, as is the case for much of American Judaism. Examining the material religion and consumption of American Jewish nostalgia expands the concept of religion and demonstrates that religious meaning is contingent upon practices and narratives as well as beliefs and occurs in a variety of supposedly non-religious settings.
Susan King, an early leader in Jewish genealogy who developed online platforms connecting Jewish genealogists, told me that, for her, “doing the research and finding the truth is a spiritual journey.” She explained, “I am a Jew, I will always be a Jew, I just don’t have to practice all the quote ‘religious’ beliefs to be spiritual. . . . In this lifetime I have followed my truth. I have done service to the community.”24 For King, the work of Jewish genealogy, including both family history research and building online communities of genealogists, is the pursuit of her “truth” and sacred work on behalf of Jews living and dead. Like many other American Jews, King shies away from the word “religious,” which many American Jews associate with formal organizations and mandated activities, such as belonging to a synagogue and following dietary laws. Nonetheless, we can understand King’s work as religious because it provides existential meaning for her and her clients by placing them in a meaningful relationship with individuals and communities in the past and the present. King’s genealogical research is in line with an understanding of the religiosity of activities that provide social and existential meaning in Jews’ lives, even when they do not define those activities as religious.
Understanding nostalgic practices as religious activities challenges assumptions about the limited role of religion among non-Orthodox Jews in modern America. Doing so highlights normative practices that American Jews hold in common across and beyond the standard spectrum of American Jewish movements. The American Jews in this book identify with all and no denominational structures. They are people of all genders and all ages. They live throughout the United States and have a variety of economic situations. Nostalgia is a standardized mode of American Judaism that fosters a particular, affective response to the past, cutting across the statistical categories of religious affiliation, gender, class, and age that delineate American Jews.
It is not incidental that when I asked Robert Friedman, the former director of the Genealogy Institute at the Center for Jewish History in New York, how he got started as a genealogist, he began by explaining, “I didn’t have a particularly religious upbringing. I did have a bar mitzvah, but I didn’t really identify with the process, particularly.” Recalling this typical American Jewish experience, he laughed, and continued, “However, I was extremely close with my father’s parents, who were Hungarian immigrants who came to this country in 1921. And as I was growing up, my grandfather used to tell me all kinds of stories about the old country.”25 For American Jews, emotional engagement with ancestral pasts is a religious activity, one that can take the place of or exist alongside traditional religious practices.
Thematic research on nostalgia moves beyond the scholarly distinctions between Judaism and Jewishness and beyond the simplistic divisions between “religious” and “secular” Jews; these oppositions obscure the diversity of American Jewish practice. American Jews of all types of religious affiliation, including no affiliation, engage in ostensibly nonreligious activities that provide personally meaningful engagements with American Jewish pasts. Attention to American Jewish nostalgia identifies robust forms of religious meaning in works of public and personal histories, emphasizing the centrality of emotional and commemorative norms in American and Jewish religious practices and consumer habits.26 Studying the consumption of nostalgia reveals normative themes about historical periods, immigration, and religious practices often taken for granted in American Jews’ relation to history. Emotional connections to narratives about familial and communal pasts, and engagement with materials representing those narratives, are not merely cultural activities but religious ones.
Histories of Nostalgia
Like religion, nostalgia is a term that is often taken for granted but that has a complicated history. Scholars and cultural critics have referred to nostalgia and the related concept of sentimentality with derision, dismissing both as inauthentic and overly feminine emotions. At their worst, they may be considered “dangerous, like any ready-made emotion.” They have been dismissed as prefabricated feelings that allow the absence of individual, reflective thinking and subsequent abdication of personal responsibility.27 Philosopher Michael Tanner condemns sentimentality as a “disease of the feelings” and an “excuse for indulgence.” “The feelings which are worth having are those which it costs an effort to have,” Tanner proclaims.28 Recognizing nostalgia as a backward-facing sentimentality, historian Charles Maier calls nostalgia “coffee table longing” and a “stereotyped yearning.”29
In contrast, I argue that nostalgia is not merely reductive; it can also be productive. It reduces complicated histories to an accessible narrative, certainly, but it also produces personal and communal meaning for people of all genders. Even as critics disdain it as an inauthentic emotion, nostalgia fulfills individuals’ search for an authentic past, creating communal cohesion through shared religious affect and consumption. American Jewish nostalgia is “a structure of feeling,” an emotional reaction to the past that is learned and taught.30 While academics and others have disparaged nostalgia for its emphasis on exaggerated emotion, it is, in fact, a way of finding one’s place in the world and of laying claim to the past. The institutions of American Jewish nostalgia encourage their patrons to claim ancestral heritages in ways that are meaningful beyond simplistic divisions among religion, spirituality, and culture.
Though we take nostalgia for granted today as an emotion, it is, like religion, a supremely modern concept. Initially a diagnosable and curable disease, nostalgia was first identified by Johannes Hofer in his 1688 dissertation in Basel. Hofer diagnosed young Swiss mercenaries longing for their native land with a term he coined from the Greek nosos, return home, and algos, sorrow. Subsequent scholars and medics built upon Hofer’s “disorder of the imagination.” The Enlightenment-era neurologist Philippe Pinel described the symptoms, beginning with “a sad, melancholy appearance . . . countenance at times lifeless,” progressing to “a rather constant torpor” broken by fits of weeping while asleep. The worst cases refused to leave their beds, remaining obstinately silent and refusing food and drink, leading to malnutrition and eventual death. Unlike the more philosophical ailment of melancholia, which befell elite intellectuals such as monks and philosophers, nostalgia