Beyond the Synagogue: Jewish Nostalgia as Religious Practice by Rachel B. Gross

Abstract

Reviewed by: Beyond the Synagogue: Jewish Nostalgia as Religious Practice by Rachel B. Gross Cara Rock-Singer Rachel B. Gross, Beyond the Synagogue: Jewish Nostalgia as Religious Practice (New York: New York University Press, 2021) Rachel B. Gross’s Beyond the Synagogue: Jewish Nostalgia as Religious Practice is a crucial intervention into what can best be described as doggedly normative narratives of religious authenticity that have dominated the scholarship, and popular understandings, of American Jewish religion. Within religious studies and Jewish studies, the problematic fit of Judaism into the white, Protestant-inflected category of religion is well-established. Historians of American religion have drawn out the extent to which narratives of religious declension are predicated on androcentric and racialized assumptions about what religion is and where, how, and by whom it is practiced. Nevertheless, in American Jewish studies, these narratives persist. Beyond the Synagogue draws on lived religion methodology to rethink the divide between Jewish religion and culture as well as history and memory. Gross defines religion “as meaningful relationships and the practices, narratives, and emotions that create and support these relationships,” adapting Robert Orsi’s and Kathryn Lofton’s emphases on “relationships and structures” that bind people to kin and community, both living and ancestral (6). In turn, Gross sets her sights on “the mundane practices” and seemingly secular institutions engaged in “buying and selling certain items [that] connect[] people to religious networks through [End Page 138] affective norms” (7). The book argues that practices of “nostalgia for Eastern European Jewish pasts function[] as a mitzvah (literally, commandment),” a term she uses expansively to reflect the way the category is invoked in Jewish law (halakha) as well as colloquially to refer to “good deed[s]” (7–8). Based on ethnographic participant-observation, interviews, and close readings of material culture and digital media, Gross tells a new story of American Judaism as it has developed from the 1970s to the present that privileges emotional rather than textual claims to Jewish authenticity. In doing so, Gross paints a more inclusive picture of the landscape of American Jewish religion. The first chapter positions American Jewish religion within twentieth- and twenty-first-century social scientific and historical narratives about the decline of religious institutions, rise of the “nones,” and secularism and assimilation. Gross also historicizes nostalgia within modern gendered histories of Protestant piety, the white ethnic revivals of the 1960s, and US public history’s increasingly affective engagement with the past. She identifies the 1970s as a period of transformation in “how [American Jewish nostalgia] has been organized and standardized and how it has become a central way of being Jewish” (32). After laying out her methodological intervention and theorizing the category of nostalgia, the book proceeds through a series of four chronologically organized and thematically overlapping case studies. Chapter two examines Jewish participation in a popular American pastime, family genealogical research. Gross’s analysis reveals how the “shared religious framework of intimate and authoritative nostalgia,” whether drawn from family lore, ship manifests, or DNA evidence, is interpellated into Jewish “memorial activities, literary forms, and historical accounts” (43). In chapter three, Gross moves beyond the synagogue as such to examine synagogue restoration projects that gained momentum in the 1980s and 1990s. The chapter argues that heritage spaces are carefully curated to produce ambivalent “elegiac nostalgia” that celebrates financial progress out of poverty as it romanticizes spiritually rich bygone eras. At synagogues-turned-museums, which are haunted by ghosts of the past, docents, tourists, and attendees of prayer quorums negotiate knowledge, meaning, and proper practice. Chapters four and five focus on children’s material culture and Ashkenazi foodways, respectively. Though nostalgia is “often assumed to be a condition of aging,” Gross shows how in the first decades of the twenty-first century children and parents used books and dolls, especially those distributed and produced by PJ Library and American Girl, to form intimate, affectionate relationships to ancestors and their stories. Chapter five examines the twenty-first-century Jewish food revival, focusing on how restaurateurs have improvised on Jewish Deli cuisine. The “playful and campy nostalgia” (161) of culinary revivals centers the gut—the belly laugh or the full belly—as the way to the...