Divergent Jewish Cultures: Israel and America.

Seltzer, Robert M.

Divergent Jewish Cultures: Israel and America. Edited by Deborah Dash Moore and S. Ilan Troen. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. x + 358 pp.

This book of fourteen essays plus epilogue is the third in the series of Studies in Jewish Culture and Society published under the auspices of the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies of the University of Pennsylvania. The volume draws on 1996-1997 academic seminars on Israeli culture and society during the early years of statehood and on twentieth-century American Jewish culture and society. The result is a scattershot approach, skillfully organized under the headings "Establishing New Identities," "Contested Identities," and "Political Cultures." The whole is not greater than the sum of the parts; some of the parts, however, are of value to the historian of American Jewry.

Drawing to a large extent on the copious reservoir of turn-of-the-century East European Jewry, the "Jewish identities" of the second and third generations of immigrants to America and Israel have dramatically diverged according to the title of the book. Most of the papers articulate some of the circumstances that led each to emphasize quite different aspects of Old World Jewishness. An essay bringing together these elements is by Daniel Elazar, who discusses how four traditional "dimensions of Jewish political culture" (which he specifies as social justice, solidarity, universalism, and particularism) played out in the different contexts.

The studies on Israel and Zionism deal with assorted facets of what has happened to classical Zionism since 1948. Nurith Gertz writes that "a central dichotomy in Israeli culture between Diaspora Jew and Hebrew Israeli aires to eliminate Israel's culture's hybridity and consolidate a homogeneous Hebrew identity" (217)--which has not happened. The goals of Israeli educators, as depicted in S. Ilan Troen's essay, were frustrated by the unraveling of the collectivist values of socialist Zionism. Yoram Bilu describes the transplanted religiosity of Moroccan Jewry, which brought some of the tombs as well as the memory of their holy men to the holy land; Michael Feige analyzes the annual gatherings of the Israel Exploration Society, deliberately staged in development towns in the 1950 to forge a tangible connection of people to land. Several of the studies touch on the travails of the heroic Zionist ideal in literature. Calling for more "synchronic" approaches as to how political circumstances affected contemporaneous Hebrew writers to supplement the usual "diachronic" presentations, Arnold Band offers an acute literary analysis of the late works by Haim Hazaz. Jeffrey Shandler deals with what Zionism meant to an American Zionism characterized by him as an "impresario culture." The epilogue of the whole collection, appropriately, is an evocative memoir by Arthur Aryeh Goren narrating his involvement with Habonim, the Zionist youth movement. His piece touchingly conveys the idealism of American Jews swept up into the passions of the Jewish crisis immediately after World War II and what happened to their fervor when confronted by hard-nosed Yishuv youth leaders just before Israel was affected by the rampant individualism fostered by economic and cultural trends from the West.

In micro-historical studies, narrowly circumscribed material has to bear the teasing out of macro-historical implications. Beth S. Wenger uncovers how, in the course of several decades, the persona of Haym Solomon was exploited by various Jewish organizations to establish that there was a valued Jewish presence in the American Revolution. With characteristic wit, Jenna Weissman Joselit depicts changing attitudes, mainly by rabbis, to Jewish dressing up by much-criticized "ostentatious" turn-of-the-century matrons, by rabbis themselves in their dignified pulpit garments, and by informally garbed Jews in the synagogue more recently, each phase, she notes, expressing a Jewish desire to "fit in." Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett masterfully weaves together the idealistically assimilationist position of the anthropologist Franz Boas and his students in the twenties and thirties with a series of works that reversed the negative valence of the East European milieu: Bella Chagall's evocation in Burning Lights (1939) of the Vitebsk where she and her illustrious husband grew up; Maurice Samuel's 1943 construction of the "world of Scholem Aleichem"; Abraham Joshua Heschel's 1945 The Earth Is the Lord's with photographs by Roman Vishniac; Elizabeth Herzog's and Mark Zborowski's generic shtetl in Life Is With People (1952) that was funded by the Office of Naval Research and the American Jewish Committee under the guidance of Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict--culminating in the Anatevka of the 1964 Broadway musical Fiddler on the Roof that reached its even more deliberately universalized apogee in the 1971 Hollywood version filmed in Yugoslavia.

For historians of American Jewry especially useful is Ewa Morawska's comparative study of Jewish "ethnicization" in New York, Cleveland, Boston, San Francisco, Charleston, and Greensboro, North Carolina. She demonstrates how local context was crucial in determining the community's dominant form of Jewishness. Another instructive exercise in historical sociology is Ira Katznelson's survey of the transformed situation of American Jewry from the 1920s to the 1950s which resulted in the normalizing of Jewish ethnicity here.

The book makes quite heavy use of that vague term identity (which does have more careful psychodynamic and sociological usages) to convey the differing Jewish cultural styles of American and Israeli Jewry. Only in the last paragraph of their introduction do Deborah Dash Moore and S. Ilan Troen appear to pull back from intimating that these Jewries will move even farther apart. Almost in passing, the editors suggest that an emerging "new stage of 'normalcy'" between Diaspora and homeland might strengthen their "vital connections" in the future. To this one might add that if Israel can work its way out of a state of siege and if Diaspora Jewry does not fall prey to a devastating new wave of antisemitism (i.e., if they can become more "normal"), American Jewish theology and spirituality may have more to contribute to Israeli culture than old-fashioned Jewish secularism expected. So perhaps there will not only be divergence ahead, but some convergences as well.

Robert M. Seltzer

Hunter College and the Graduate Center of The City University of New York