The Life of Judaism (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Life of Judaism Riv-Ellen Prell The Life of Judaism, edited by Harvey E. Goldberg. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. 258 pp. $48.00. The growing number of courses in Jewish studies at colleges and universities in the United States brings with it the need for works on Jews that are broader than most [End Page 154] scholarly monographs. If one is to judge by the H Judaic list, our colleagues are regularly in search of works which will help students grasp the broad sweep of Jewish experience—historically, geographically and culturally. How does one communicate the complexity of Jewish experience in a class? How is it possible to teach a little bit about the Jewish people without teaching a great deal? At the same time another need exists. In addition to teaching about Jews as an historical people, a people who developed a religion and culture, and acted politically, how does one teach about how Jews lived? How do we integrate the terrain of anthropology? Is it possible to combine both the broad sweep of Jewish experiences with the lived reality of a Jewish cultural and social life? The University of California Press is suggesting it is with a new series on “the life” of religions. The series’ first volume was devoted to Buddhism, and Goldberg’s book is the second. The press reports that the books in the series will provide an “insider’s view into the ways world religions are lived and experienced.” It will offer books that focus on “the human dimension of specific religious traditions.” The effort is noble and one might suggest brave. Goldberg’s The Life of Judaism is a serious effort to provide this approach, and he is well placed to do this work. Harvey Goldberg is one of a small number of scholars who has labored over decades to create an anthropology of Judaism and Jews. His earlier collection, Judaism Viewed from Without and Within, published in 1987, remains still one of the most important and interesting books in this area. The Life of Judaism is certainly a good effort, and one that has worked diligently to be as inclusive in its definition of Jewish experience as possible. The brief essays selected by Goldberg cover a broad geographic spectrum and include Ashkenazim and Sephardim, Europe, the United States, Israel, and North Africa. The book draws on the fine scholarship on women and Judaism and includes articles by Susan Sered, Lynn Davidman, and Tamar El Or, who have worked in this area. The reader, then, will have the opportunity to learn about women as religious actors in the United States and Israel. Harvey Goldberg’s collection is certainly focused on Judaism as a “religion,” but takes up issues of identity, memory, and family which reflect the cultural meaning of Jewish life in the broadest sense. For example, the volume addresses the issue of the Holocaust in a variety of ways. Ismar Schorsch’s truly moving address delivered to the citizens of the German town which he fled as a child, and from which his grandfather perished having remained behind to continue to direct his school, is a remarkable distillation of family history, Jewish learning, and Jewish history. It is paired with an essay by Jackie Feldman that explores the author’s history as the grandchild of a person who died at Auschwitz who then studies Israeli student trips to Eastern Europe. The juxtaposition of a personal journey with an analysis of a nationalist and hegemonic understanding of the Jews of Eastern Europe is particularly compelling. [End Page 155] The majority of the essays address Jewish religious practice ethnographically. They focus on worship, pilgrimages, study circles, and life cycle rituals. Most of them are drawn from studies that will be familiar to scholars in the field, and they do represent important scholarship in the social scientific study of Judaism. Again, the book offers a clear understanding of the diversity of religious experiences, and one can learn about Moroccan pilgrimages from the pioneering work of Yoram Bilu, as well as Fran Markowitz’s wonderful analysis of a bar mitzvah of a child of Soviet immigrants in a Russian restaurant in...