I'll take Manhattan: reflections on Jewish studies.

Moore, Deborah Dash

AN INVITATION FROM MOSES RISCHIN TO REFLECT UPON the renaissance of Jewish studies from my "own personal, academic, intellectual, and cultural history" took me by surprise. That there has been a renaissance of Jewish studies in the past decade cannot be doubted; neither can its impact upon the lives of those of us working in the field be questioned. Yet at a conference on "Regional History as National History" organized by Rischin for the annual meeting of die American Jewish Historical Society and sponsored by the Western Jewish History Center of the Judah L. Magnes Museum -- who would be interested in my idiosyncratic perspective? Was there room in such a context to explore the issue of the renaissance of Jewish studies from a point of view consciously derived from my personal, academic, intellectual, and cultural history? When I realized that I would not be alone, and therefore my own slanted view would be complemented by other interpretations, I recognized that these reflections might in their sum prove to be more than their individual parts. In addition, as Rischin undoubtedly surmised, enough time has passed so that my own personal history is now part of a larger academic, intellectual, and cultural historical moment that may illuminate a transition from one era to another. Indeed, my own history is certainly regional history.

I was born and bred in New York City. In those years, the 1950s and 1960s, we called it "the City"; no other modifier than the definite article was needed. There was only one City, and I grew up as close to the center of Jewish life outside of Israel as you could get. Living in such a Jewish place clearly colored my perceptions of the possibilities and potentials of Jewish studies. There were still over two million Jews in New York City (a population then roughly equal to that of the State of Israel) and they were approximately 25 percent of the city's residents. "As no other city is, New York is their home: here a Jew can be what he wants to be," a Fortune magazine article put it in 1960.(1) However, it is not enough to know that I grew up in the City, because the City is a big, diverse place made up of distinctive neighborhoods, each with its own personality. I lived on the edge of Greenwich Village, or, what we called "the Village." Like "the City," there was only one Village. When I was growing up and people asked me where I lived, I usually answered: "In the City, in the Village." (I used to stretch the boundaries. Nowadays the neighborhood is called Chelsea, which was its real name back then, but back then Chelsea had no panache, despite the Chelsea Hotel.)

What did it mean to grow up in the City, in the Village? It meant growing up on sidewalks, which was where we played ball and hopscotch, skated, biked, jumped rope, and generally hung out. It meant learning to use public transportation, buses and subways -- certainly before one's teenage years. It meant living across the street from industrial buildings -- in my case a bindery factory and a printing plant -- and having one's father walk to work. It meant living on one floor (something my students today have difficulty imagining) in an apartment building. And that meant when it was raining out, you could go visiting friends without getting wet. (This is beginning to sound like the modern marvels of Kansas City in the musical "Oklahoma.")

There were disadvantages to city living, I'm sure. There were also bars and flophouses and cheap hotels across the street. The pleasures of the corner drugstore, with its soda fountain that could be entered directly through its back door from the lobby of my apartment building, had to be weighed against the fact that if I wanted to see a tree and some grass, I had to walk a quarter of a mile to the nearest park (if Union Square may be so called). The city was also a dangerous place. My mother regularly used to call our attention to a terrible mugging, or a horrible rape, or a deadly assault. The point of these news stories, I think, was to breed in me and my sister a healthy sense of fear and caution, so that when we wandered around the city -- aboveground and underground -- we knew the dangers lurking and were ready to face the perils. Needless to say, because we were prepared, nothing ever happened. That, I suspect, was the point. Yet one knew when one was tempting fate. lake the time I chose to walk down a long, deserted, dimly-lit stretch of subway tunnel when I saw approaching me a man wearing a raincoat. Or the time I agreed to visit the apartment of an artist and poet who sat down next to me in Washington Square Park where I was sketching. Yet I survived the tunnel walk and I managed to extricate myself from the artist's apartment. For all its dangers and temptations, the city was the best place in the world to grow up in, we were convinced. Where else could you see live theater on student discounts? or free Shakespeare in the park? or listen to jazz and folksingers in cafes? or visit art galleries and museums? The ones who were deprived, we were convinced, were those who grew up in the suburbs. My parents, but especially my mother, loathed the suburbs. In our house it was an epithet: "Oh, he or she is from the suburbs," dropped witheringly. It explained everything from bad manners to wrong politics, from skewed values to poor taste. I was a city girl, one of the elect.

Given this upbringing, it is not surprising that I fell in love with the City as an urban place, but also as a Jewish one. I went to public high school and only many years later did I learn that the decision to close the public schools on the Jewish holidays had been made as recently as 1960. I took for granted the equal time given to Jewish holidays, the equal respect accorded them with Christian holidays. Perhaps this was also because my family was so American. The only link to an immigrant past was my grandmother, on my mother's side, who had come over at a young age -- from England. My other grandparents were born in the States. No one spoke Yiddish, though we were taught Hebrew. This meant that Jewish learning carried no associations of foreignness; it was part of one's American heritage, though it was carried out under sectarian auspices. I went to Hebrew high school, a supplementary school under the auspices of the Society for the Advancement of Judaism, where I imbibed Reconstructionism as my religious tradition. There I studied Tanach, Mishnah, Hebrew, and Jewish history. I remember finding Hebrew high school more intellectually stimulating than public high school and more academically rigorous.

My choice of college reflected these concerns (and, with hindsight, the fact that my father, who went to an elite Ivy League school, was quite unhappy there as a Jew). I went to Brandeis University, where not only were there no classes on the High Holidays, but there were also no classes on Sukkot or Shemini Atzeret. At Brandeis I could take Jewish studies courses -- which I did -- along with my other courses. In short, it is only hindsight and a measure of consciousness-raising that made me realize that I was living in one of the few places where Jewishness and Americanness, Jewish learning and American studies, went hand in hand. That consciousness-raising took place at Vassar College, where I was hired as a member of the religion department, though I was quite obviously trained as an historian. There was a measure of poetic justice in my joining the Vassar faculty, since many years earlier Vassar College had refused to admit my mother as a student because it had a quota for Jewish students.

I had not been aware of the relatively fragile position of Jewish studies in America before I arrived at Vassar, because after Brandeis I had returned to the City to attend Columbia University for my degree in history. There Gerson Cohen and Ismar Schorsch appeared as much a part of the history department as James Shenton or John Garraty. Only in retrospect do I realize that my choice of field, American Jewish history, which came so naturally to me, a Reconstructionish fourth-generation American Jew, was actually a rather precarious choice, not quite at home in American history despite the rise of social history and something of a provincial cousin to Jewish history -- young, awkward, ill-mannered, unable to fit into the prepared seats without fidgeting. At the time, both Schorsch and Cohen encouraged me to pursue my studies, though I never learned any American Jewish history in any of the Jewish history courses I took. Similarly David Rothman, an American social historian, enthusiastically supported my research on New York Jews. Unlike Jewish history however, American history appeared to recognize American Jews, at least as immigrants. The Promised City by Moses Rischin was required reading in Garraty's course in the Gilded Age. Again, only in retrospect did I realize that this was the only book on American Jewish history that I read as a graduate (or undergraduate) student, though Aryeh Goren's New York Jews and the Quest for Community, which I first read as a dissertation, inspired me to pick up the story where Rischin left off.

And then I went to Vassar, not the only Jew on campus but the only visibly identified one. Of course, I didn't have a Jewish name, but a colleague, who arrived the same year in the anthropology department, did. For years people in the bookstore resolved the cognitive dissonance between my name and my identity by calling me Judith Goldstein, a more appropriate name than Moore for the only Jewish studies faculty member. Now Vassar is a peculiar vantage point, indeed, from which to watch the efflorescence of Jewish studies, especially for someone from my background. When I arrived on a nontenure-line position at Vassar there was no Hebrew offered; the history department refused to cross-list my courses; and I had to supply a reading list on the Holocaust to the professor teaching modern German history because, in the late 1970s, he thought there were no materials available. In short, Vassar challenged most of my assumptions about how Jewish studies was integral to the academy. Although I had only moved seventy miles outside of the City, I had moved into another world. (It was also, unfortunately, the suburbs.)

So I found myself a second intellectual home: the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. I joined the faculty. I discovered the world of Yiddish and left-wing politics (old left-wing politics -- I knew from my Brandeis and Columbia years about new-left politics). I watched in amazement as a meeting to plan an exhibit disintegrated over charges of who said what in August 1939 after the Hitler-Stalin pact was signed. And I did my best to stimulate an interest in New York Jews as a new focus for YIVO, a rich area of research worthy of its attention. Turning the institution's gaze away from eastern Europe wasn't easy, and though I organized some wonderful public conferences -- such as Culture and Community of New York Jews -- that drew some of the largest crowds YIVO had ever seen, and though I subsequently revived the YIVO Annual, I ultimately failed to shift the institution's gaze. At YIVO, though, I learned of a tradition of social science scholarship quite different from American sociology. This tradition reached out to ordinary Jews through contests, autobiography, oral history, and folklore, and its emphasis on non-elites anticipated research in American Jewish history.

After six years of involvement with YIVO, I returned to Israel for the first time as a scholar. I had visited with my family in the early 1960s, and again after the Six Day War, but for a whole decade I had not been there -- the decade in which I became an American Jewish historian. In 1981 I went to the World Union of Jewish Studies conference to give a paper and to participate in a workshop on teaching Jewish civilization in the contemporary era. For Israelis that era extends from World War I, and so included the interwar period of my research on New York Jews. The workshop drew young scholars from around the world and had a distinctly Zionist focus: by inviting us to participate, Israelis were demonstrating their centrality to Jewish studies teaching on a university level. It was an effective initiative that reached and stimulated me to redesign several of my courses.

That initial visit was multiplied, until I spent a Fulbright year at the Hebrew University and learned about the issues and methods of Jewish historians. Amazingly, in Israel they were interested in American Jewish history -- an interest focused upon Zionist politics, but the concerns of social history were recognized. Israelis also wanted to learn about America, and they held certain views of Americans and American Jews that often did not match the realities. I recall speaking at a conference on the new left, in honor of J. L. Talmon, about how one could be active in new-left causes and be a committed Jew. Judging by the questions I received, I hadn't convinced many in the audience. What I am suggesting, I guess, is that I have marched to the tune of a different drummer. In the 1960s and 1970s, before Jewish studies took off, I was deeply integrated into both Jewish and American historical study. Since the late 1970s and 1980s, during a renaissance of Jewish studies, I have been acutely aware of my marginality even as I recognize that I am standing in a place most observers would see as central. Certainly for the past three years, when I have served as director of American culture studies at Vassar, my name and my public identity appear to coincide -- even as Vassar has recognized that Jews, and Jewish studies, are integral to American studies. I suppose that I could call myself a border crosser since crossing borders these days has become quite popular, while marginality is so old-fashioned.

So how does this relate to Jewish studies as it has grown@, Well, Jewish studies is still not my New York City of the 1960s; that is, diverse, integrated, clever, street-smart, and idealistic. Indeed, I doubt it ever will be. But it has spread to all sorts of institutions and it does offer suburban students a taste of a rich and intense Jewish world. A handful get hooked and decide to study further. Even Vassar now has three faculty, two tenured and one not, teaching Jewish studies and Hebrew language instruction in the religion department. Indeed, religion departments have often provided more congenial homes for Jewish studies scholars than history departments (and I admit that I am disappointed in my fellow historians for their lack of vision and initiative). Religious studies scholars have evinced a healthy and growing curiosity about Jews and Judaism; they no longer see Judaism as prelude to Christianity but as legitimate and authentic in all its manifestations. Certainly the presence of a panel devoted to exploring the renaissance of Jewish studies involving five scholars -- including the diverse institutions standing behind each scholar -- suggests how much has changed in the past twenty years (or less), for most of us were innovators in bringing Jewish studies to campus. Yet I am impatient. Although I can't really expect the academy to duplicate the City in its fusion of creativity, promise and challenge, I do think it legitimate to ask why American Jewish history has fared so poorly in these years. Why is there only one chair in the field in a non-Jewish university? Why do gifted scholars go for years on nontenure-line positions? Why is the field still a stepchild of Jewish history and not, at least in this country, one of its cornerstones?

Look at what American Jewish history has to offer: New York City's skyline, as a metaphor, of course. Picture the famous skyline, symbol of modernity and of America to millions. What do you notice first? Well, if you're an old New Yorker like I am, you notice the Empire State Building. A classic. In terms of American Jewish history, the Empire State Building is immigrant history. Constantly revisited, it still has new treasures and insights to yield. Jews as immigrants occupy a secure and significant place in American history. Classic, one might say. And whatever new trends develop, one can find it worthwhile to mine immigrant Jewish history again. For example, women's history, or consumer culture, or domestic culture, or history of sexuality. But, some would contend that today the World Trade Towers have overshadowed the venerable Empire State Building. The twin towers can be likened to Holocaust studies. Burgeoning, they have acquired a legitimacy and centrality that casts a long shadow. These studies include political histories, communication studies, cultural studies work on memory, autobiography, monuments and museums, and public Jewish culture. This story may be replacing the immigrant saga as the Jewish piece of American history. Witness last year's PBS broadcast on America and the Holocaust, the first time its extensive American Experience series has focused on Jews. If the World Trade Towers and Empire State Building are the first sights to catch one's eye, then the Chrysler Building is a good second-time around favorite for its elegance, grace, and sophistication. I would liken it to the New York Intellectuals. Like immigrant history, the intellectuals are close to becoming a classic "community" (or "family" as they often refer to themselves), to be returned to for new insights. By contrast, I would liken American Jewish religious studies to the New York Public Library. Too short for landscape prominence, its rich resources rarely draw the first- or even second-time tourist. Yet what a wealth of material lies inside. Then there is the Statue of Liberty -- one of our most deeply contested sites. I would compare it to studies of Jewish politics, specifically relations of African-Americans and American Jews. Finally, we have 42nd Street and Times Square with its gaudy display of popular culture, a place where identities endure -- the Times Building, though the Times has not owned the building for years -- even as new names appear. This area is gradually receiving attention, especially from young scholars who are giving studies of popular culture new respect, while Times Square itself is undergoing rehabilitation.

With such a skyline, American Jewish history should be the hottest item on the block and Jewish studies programs should be knocking on our door wanting a piece of the action. We have intimate and daring stories to tell, funny and sad ones too, not to mention the powerful, dramatic, and trivial. Our own history is waiting for us to claim it and give it a place in our best universities so Americans can learn it, share it, wrestle with it. Were we to do that, then maybe Jewish studies would approach my New York City in the 1960s: integrated, energetic, visionary, and filled with boundless promise.

NOTES

(1.) Sam Welles, "The Jewish Elan," Fortune Magazine (February 1960): p. 134.