Jewish America: The Visible Domain

Abstract

the Twentieth Century, Andrew R. Heinze. Princeton University Press, 2004. Material girl Madonna changes her name to Esther and tattoos a Hebrew name for on her upper arm. George W. Bush, in the wake of 9/11, calls for a crusade against terrorism, to salvage democracy from evildoers. Corporate executives and consumers use the language of the sacred to describe products, from the holy water of Coca-Cola to the sacrosanct McDonald's french fry. Advocates of genetic engineering insist that cloning and the reprogramming of DNA is the first serious step in becoming one with God (qtd in Chidester 65). What these snapshots of the American mass public sphere capture is its peculiar blend of modernity and tradition, of secularism and religiosity, of the material and the spiritual. They register how thoroughly infused with religious discourses and practices are the modern emblems of American progress-of democracy, capitalism, and science. Yet, until recently, many Americanists overlooked this melange of modernity and religion in American culture. We are rich in studies that foreground gender, race, and, to a lesser extent, ethnicity and wrote Jenny Franchot in 1995, But where is religion? ... Do we want to continue believing that philosophical critiques of Western Christendom and of Western liberalism have invalidated religion as a subject of serious inquiry? (834). While intellectual historians, scholars of religion, and anthropologists have produced rich studies of America's religious traditions, Franchot charged, Americanist literary and cultural critics pushed religion into an invisible domain. Our dominant critical narratives all too often equated modernization with secularization, charting, from the Colonial era to the present, America's gradual withdrawal from religion. At the same time, our emphasis on gender, race, class, ethnicity, and sexuality as determinants of