Reviewed by: Beyond the Synagogue: Jewish Nostalgia as Religious Practice by Rachel B. Gross Laura Yares Rachel B. Gross. Beyond the Synagogue: Jewish Nostalgia as Religious Practice. New York, NY: New York University Press, 2021. Pp. 272 pages. Hard-cover $39. ISBN: 9781479803385 Where do American Jews go to do Jewish? Where do they feel Jewish? Where are networks of Jewishly affiliated people most likely to be concentrated? Demographers, Rachel B. Gross contends, have tried to answer these questions too narrowly. They have looked for the numbers of Jews who regularly attend synagogue, who light candles on Friday nights, and who join Jewish institutions. Concomitantly, as participation in all of the above has decreased, they have sounded the alarm bells of American Jewish decline. In Beyond the Synagogue, Gross argues that this demographic handwringing may in fact be the result of looking for Judaism in all the wrong places. Her book contributes to a growing literature within the study of American Jewry that encourages scholars to look beyond the boundaries of ritual [End Page 261] practice and institutional affiliation to understand the breadth of ways that American Jews construct Jewish identities. Jodi Eichler-Levine, for example, has explored how women craft Jewish identities through creative arts, and Laura Arnold Leibman has powerfully illuminated the ways that objects can speak to the texture of Jewish lives richly lived.1 In this compelling new volume, Gross shows that the vitality of contemporary American Judaism can equally be revealed by looking at the various ways that Jews engage with the objects and affects of Jewish nostalgia. Those same Jews who have no interest in synagogue or their local JCC, she suggests, may nevertheless be avid patrons of their local deli, participate in Jewish genealogy, or enjoy reading Jewish stories to their children and grandchildren. There are many ways to enact, perform, and feel Jewishness, and Gross richly illustrates that activities grouped under the rubric of American Jewish nostalgia offer positive indication that the vital signs of American Judaism are robust. Gross theorizes that American Jewish nostalgic engagements are not deviations from religious activity, but in fact constitute religious practices in their own right. Rejecting bifurcations of Judaism into the mutually separate domains of religion and culture, Gross anchors her exploration of nostalgia within the framework of lived religion. Informed by the work of Robert Orsi and Katherine Lofton, Gross defines religion as “meaningful relationships and the practices, narratives, and emotions that create and support these relationships” (6) and American Jewish religion in particular as “the commonplace personal practices and feelings that are mediated and standardized by certain materials and institutions” (18). Examining nostalgia as a form of religious practice, Gross proposes, eliminates the artificial binary so often drawn between Judaism as religion vs Judaism as ethnicity, culture or heritage. When defined in terms of relationships enacted through affective bonds, she suggests, Jewish religion is capacious enough to include them all. Deploying a mixed methods approach to the study of Jewish nostalgia that combines interviews, ethnography, and analysis of material and digital culture, Gross illuminates the production of American Jewish nostalgia across four lively case studies. Her first investigates Jews who participate in genealogical excavation of their family roots as an “emotional and spiritual experience of Jewish history” (75). The second examines historic synagogues as heritage sites, tracing the ways that staff, docents, visitors and funders collectively shape historic synagogues into sites of shared nostalgia. The third case study illuminates the production of books and toys for children as pedagogic devices that teach longing for a communal Jewish past. The final case study dives into the nostalgic revival of the Jewish deli, and illustrates the various ways that food can serve as an entry point for nostalgia, as well as a focus of disputes over nostalgic authenticity. Gross deftly illustrates why we should take nostalgia seriously as a locus of American Jewish practice, and her work opens up a rich seam of questions for further study. Gross focuses on nostalgia for an Eastern European Jewish past, which she claims as a collective enterprise, a mitzvah, even, for American Jewry writ large. Yet her observations might fruitfully be compared [End Page 262] and contrasted with...
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Mar 31, 2021
Debora M D'Angelo + 3
Open Access
