American JewBu: Jews, Buddhists, and Religious Change by Emily Sigalow (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: American JewBu: Jews, Buddhists, and Religious Change by Emily Sigalow Steven Kaplin Emily Sigalow. American JewBu: Jews, Buddhists, and Religious Change. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019. 280 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009421000374 In the first section of her 2019 American JewBu, Emily Sigalow plots a clear historical trajectory of both American Judaism and American Buddhism through the lens of Jews who, in a variety of ways, engage with Buddhism. Eschewing histories that begin with the 1960s counterculture, Sigalow locates the earliest American JewBus in the spirituality movements of the nineteenth century. Her story commences with Charles T. Strauss, born Jewish, who publicly converted to Buddhism in Chicago during the famous World's Parliament of Religions. Sigalow finds in Strauss a Jewish exemplar of Buddhist modernism—empirical, scientific, universal—and the American Buddhist turn away from Asian Buddhist traditions and metaphysics. In chapters 2 and 3, Sigalow traces a JewBu tradition of Buddhist modernization, from Buddhism-interested Felix Adler at the turn of the twentieth century, to Julius Goldwater, an ordained Buddhist priest who took primary care of three Buddhist temples in Los Angeles during the Japanese internment, to more contemporary Jewish Buddhist teachers like Sharon Salzberg, Joseph Goldstein, and Ram Dass, who have each been instrumental in spreading Buddhist-inspired meditation to a broad American audience. Thus, Sigalow argues, JewBus played an outsized role in shaping American Buddhism as modern. Sigalow makes this point without losing track of broader historical or theoretical trends; she intersperses her descriptions of well-known JewBus with analyses of colonialism and anti-Asian racism, as well as theoretical assessments of relevant terms like spirituality and syncretism. Sigalow uses these historically compelling early chapters to sidestep the pervasive question in other writings on JewBus (Why are so many American Buddhists Jewish?) in order to ask instead how the Jewishness of JewBus is relevant to their Buddhism. Sigalow conjectures that because modernism and universalism were particularly important to American Jews, American JewBus were especially ready to pick up on these elements in American Buddhism and fashion them into core elements of the American Buddhist tradition. Sigalow does not so much portray JewBus as distinct from other non-Asian Buddhist modernizers but as uniquely qualified agents of the burgeoning movement. In this sense, Sigalow reveals seemingly marginal JewBus to be central figures through which the historical development of Buddhism in America can be delineated. [End Page 492] The second section of American JewBu focuses more on Judaism. In the fourth chapter, Sigalow reveals ways in which the prevalence of JewBus helped create the conditions for the growth of contemplative Judaism in the second half of the twentieth century. For example, Sigalow notes a handful of conferences, including the meeting of a Jewish delegation with the Dalai Lama in India, made famous by Roger Kamenetz's The Jew in the Lotus (HarperCollins, 1994), that brought together Jews and JewBus invested in spiritual seeking. Sigalow finds within these gatherings evidence that Jews in Buddhist circles had significant impact on Jews attempting to fashion a Jewish spirituality. Sigalow more fully fleshes out this relationship in the fifth chapter, in which she recounts her ethnographic fieldwork in the Jewish Meditation Center of Brooklyn, by arguing that Jewish spirituality utilizes Buddhism's most significant practice—liberalized, universalized meditation—as its own core practice. The Jewish meditation of contemporary Jewish spirituality, then, was made possible precisely by the de-Asianized meditation made popular by JewBus. By taking meditation out of particular Asian contexts and presenting it as universally psychological and spiritual, JewBus helped to create the conditions for a notion of meditation onto which Jewish spiritual seekers could place their particular Jewish traditions (e.g., likening the quiet of Buddhist meditation to the Amidah prayer). The sixth chapter contextualizes the previous two by mapping the concept of Jewish Buddhist spirituality. To some extent, this is in order to contrast the emphases of JewBu spirituality with popular, Protestant-derived understandings of the term. JewBu spirituality is not, Sigalow argues, focused solely on interiority and self-improvement but is necessarily communal and thereby as external as it is internal. However, this chapter reveals that JewBu spirituality likewise functions as a critique of common...