Thinking Jewish Culture in America.

Whitfield, Stephen J.

Thinking Jewish Culture in America. Edited by Ken Koltun-Fromm. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2.014. viii + 337 pp.

Drawn from a symposium held at Haverford College to honor the scholarship of Arnold Eisen, the chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, this set of eleven essays (with a postscript by the honoree) tackles one of the most elusive and absorbing issues to confront both historians and the contemporary Jewish community. Its civic status is secure; its economic signs indicate prosperity; its demographic base is, roughly, stable. Furthermore, the past that students of American Jewry explore offers plenty of evidence of the freedom to practice the Jewish faith and also of the autonomy to achieve not only comfort but even affluence. But the future will depend on the sorts of values to which Jews subscribe, on the ideas that will secure them a continuous and vibrant communal life on native grounds. Thus, culture matters. The meanings that it bestows, the sorts of religious and institutional purposes that can be envisioned and created, will surely determine the fate of American Jewry. This volume contributes to that task. Editor Ken Koltun-Fromm wants this book to be perceived as proposing "a cultural model in which Jewish identity is a contested performance worked out in local communities, in religious struggles, in material artifacts, and in ritual practices," which might "inspire future performances of American Jewish culture" (6).

The title that Koltun-Fromm has chosen is a misnomer, however. Consider the following subjects: Martin Buber, Mordecai Kaplan and Emmanuel Levinas (profiled in an essay by Akiba Lerner); Buber and Levinas again (in an essay by Mara H. Benjamin); The Jewish Catalog (in a chapter by Ari Y. Kelman); and studies of Joseph B. Soloveitchik (by Jessica Rosenberg) and Michael Wyschogrod (by the editor himself). When Claire E. Sufrin's chapter on religion and literature after the Shoah is added to this list, over half the essays can be classified as dealing with Judaic culture, even though that constitutes only one aspect of Jewish culture. The American thinkers whose writings are analyzed in this book are either Orthodox (Soloveitchik and Wyschogrod) or Conservative (Heschel) in affiliation or emerged primarily from the Conservative branch of Judaism (such as the editors of The Jewish Catalog). Reform Judaism, the largest denomination of all, is ignored entirely. Nor are secular expressions of Jewish identity considered, in Yiddish or in Hebrew.

Indeed, even though the editor defines American Jewish culture as "multicultural and even cosmopolitan," this curious volume includes only two essays devoted to thinkers who could be categorized as secular (6). One chapter, by Leonard V. Kaplan, addresses the legacy of the poet Paul Celan, the survivor who chose to write in German and whose vital connection to American Jewry must be deemed remote at best. The other thinker is Philip Rieff, who was Eisen's teacher at the University of Pennsylvania. Gregory Kaplan explores only the eccentric Fellow Teachers (1985), which in its mandarin hostility to the vernacular idiom of American Jewry fits uneasily into any dynamic notion of communal continuity. Fellow Teachers introduced the archetype of "the Jew of culture." But one would never learn from Kaplan's piece that Rieff's model as the "leading American Jew of culture," was Lionel Trilling, who disclaimed any identification as a "Jewish writer."

Though "America" appears in the title of Koltun-Fromm's volume, remarkably little attention is paid to the national setting within which Judaic thought is hammered out. Not even Noam Pianko's contribution, on "Jewish Peoplehood and the Nationalist Paradigm in American Jewish Culture," seizes the opportunity to speculate on the proper formulation of the sense of collectivity. The legitimation of diversity and the appreciation of pluralism came fairly late in American history, so that "people-hood" had to serve as a substitute for terms like "race" and "nation" in channeling the internationalist and Zionist allegiances that many Jews harbored. Yet Pianko fails to contextualize the patriotic pressures that obligated thinkers like Mordecai Kaplan to embrace "people-hood." Koltun-Fromm's essay on Wyschogrod's emphasis on election is open to a similar objection. The philosopher's insistence that "God's presence in a particular nation" (and no other) remains central to Judaism could only have been proclaimed by disregarding a democratic principle like the presumption of equality (285). Though Koltun-Fromm believes that "the implications ... for American Jewish culture" are "profound," he makes no effort to show how so ardent a case for chosenness can be squared (285). Hence American Jewry has distanced itself from the concept, as Eisen himself noted in the 1991 American Jewish Year Book.

If the very notion of an American Jewish culture requires playing off those two qualifying adjectives against one another, if scholars are obliged to demonstrate how a national ethos and the ideas of an ethno-religious minority relate to one another, then the most satisfactory essay in this volume is Einat Ramon's study of the "pragmatic theodicy" of Abraham Joshua Heschel. She notes that as early as 1930, while Heschel was studying in Berlin, he was reading William James. The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) would be iconic even if its author had only provided an anatomy of the immediacy of the feelings of ecstasy and dread that mystical and quasi-mystical states are reputed to induce. But James goes beyond such descriptions to argue for the effects upon personality--and therefore to encourage the quest for a possibly transcendent source that can instigate such experiences. That is why James's book must have mattered so much to Heschel. Ramon deftly shows how Heschel adopted the pragmatic method, insisting that faith ought to have consequences, whether in the fervor of prayer or in the imperatives of social action. Of course, he did not accept the radical empiricism to which James adhered (and which he denied bore a necessary relationship to the method of pragmatism). Ramon's examination of intellectual influence thus suggests how America made a difference in the shaping of Judaic thought, and also what the limits of such impact might also be.

Stephen J. Whitfield

Brandeis University