Introduction: Forward through the Past: American Jewish Uses of Tradition

Abstract

Introduction: Forward through the Past:American Jewish Uses of Tradition Hasia R. Diner (bio) and Gennady Estraikh (bio) From the turn of the twentieth century through the 1940s and 1950s American Jews, particularly those who did not define themselves as religiously observant and obliged to maintain inherited, halakhically proscribed behaviors, engaged with and created new forms and formats which they understood to be Jewish, in both spirit and content. Although the more observant elements of the American Jewish population disdained or dismissed any tinkering with established practice, those who engaged with novelties and inventions considered them legitimate and more, to be essential to the preservation of Jewish life. These millions of men and women had experienced the great migration from Eastern Europe and the planting of new and permanent homes in America. They produced a crop of American-born children, participants in American public life and consumers of American popular culture. They underwent a complicated period of adjustment, lived through the relative prosperity of the 1920s, the Depression of the 1930s, and watched or even witnessed the cataclysmic events in Europe—the Holocaust—which forever changed the face of the Jewish world. Whether new immigrants to the United States or their children, they incorporated elements of normative Jewish practice into their personal, and more importantly, communal lives, at the same time that they set about the process of innovation and redefinition. They did not abandon the symbols, rites, and sensibilities of traditional Judaism wholesale, but rather molded them to fit their modern, American selves. They contemplated the future of Jewish culture but in their contemplation, they invoked the past. They found ways to incorporate the past as they lived in the present. They did not all agree as to which elements of the past ought to be invoked and maintained and which not. As they disagreed among themselves politically and culturally, they dipped into the trove of Jewish themes in radically different ways based on their concerns in the present. The various ways that they found meaning in the past in order to guarantee communal survival provides one of the central motifs, if not in fact the central motif, of American Jewish history. [End Page v] The essays which follow in this issue of Shofar explore the ways and places in which this emerging American Jewish majority played with tradition, picking and choosing among its elements in order to create a communal culture. The scholars represented here consider such diverse media and matters as literature, theater, the Yiddish press, Yiddish radio, education and pedagogy, and the graphic arts. They examine the engagement between tradition and American realities as understood by newspaper editors, educators, rabbis, artists, novelists, playwrights, and others who spoke to the immigrant audiences and who reached out to their children. Spanning the ideological gamut from communists on the far left to the socialists and those who concerned themselves with the modernization of Judaism, these essays draw attention to the lack of a clear line between tradition and innovation. As a whole the essays in this issue do much more than just offer examples about how some American Jews drew upon tradition, obviously a complicated and complex concept, as they engaged with the process of innovating for the future. Instead, they upend the firmly accepted belief that "religious" and "secular" Jews stood on opposite sides of a thick and clearly demarcated line. These scholars, brought together initially for a one day conference at New York University, under the generous benefaction of the Goldstein-Goren Center for American Jewish History, challenge in their articles the tired convention that American Jews, the immigrant and first American-born generation, cast their lot with one or the other of these polarities. Rather, the individual essays interrogate this binary model, which has heretofore dominated the scholarly literature and more broadly, the popular communal memory. [End Page vi] Hasia R. Diner New York University Gennady Estraikh New York University Hasia R. Diner Hasia R. Diner is the Paul And Sylvia Steinberg Professor of American Jewish History and Professor of Hebrew in the Skirball Department of Hebrew and the Department of History at New York University. Her areas of research interest include American Jewish history, American...