Социология религии_общее (англ.) / Handbook of the Sociology of Religion

personal choices about religious identity and observance that Jews now feel comfortable making.

While Cohen and Eisen’s research adds a great deal to our knowledge of the lived religion of Jews in the United States today, it continues the dominant pattern of studying primarily Jews who are institutionally affiliated in some way (whether or not they are active participants). In contrast, my research attempts to illuminate some of the interesting features in the Jewish lives of those who self-identify as unaffiliated with one of the most major of American Jewish institutions – the synagogue. This marginal but diverse group can broaden our understanding of what it means to be Jewish in America, highlighting those normally outside of the spotlight. Attempting to define the contents of Jewish life outside of mainstream Jewish institutions, these Jews may, in fact, need to reflect on the meaning of Jewishness more than do affiliated Jews. My training as a sociologist of religion, rather than solely as a Jewish studies scholar, allows me to bring a fresh perspective to the study of contemporary Jewish life. By drawing on the current sociological and anthropological emphasis on lived religion outside of institutional boundaries, I hope to shed new light on the constructions of Jewish practice, identity, and meaning among a group of Jews who consider themselves marginally affiliated.

This study is based on twenty-eight interviews in the Providence (Rhode Island) area. I gathered the sample by placing an advertisement in the local newspaper, The Providence Journal, calling for Jewish women and men who do not belong to a synagogue. I selected the interviewees from among the fifty callers who responded to my ad in order to have an equal number of women and men, and an age range that spanned people in their thirties through their seventies. Individuals younger than age thirty generally have not reached the life-cycle stage in which most American Jews join synagogues, so I excluded them from the sample. In general, I interviewed only those who had never belonged to a synagogue, with only two exceptions of individuals who did not disclose in our telephone conversation that they had belonged to synagogues in the past. Although individuals who answer ads are not representative of anyone other than those who feel they have something they would especially like to say on the subject, such individuals nevertheless provide narratives that can suggest insights about others in similar situations. My interviewees emphasized various reasons for not belonging to synagogues, especially that they hated the emphasis on money (i.e., dues and donations) in synagogues and that synagogues have become heartless businesses; that they find service “boring”; that they do not respect the rabbis in their communities; and that they find no meaning in synagogue attendance, especially in the worship services.

These interviews as a whole revealed that Jews who consider themselves marginally affiliated cannot rely upon any readily available, institutionally defined scripts through which they can create narratives about the meaning of Judaism in their lives. Instead, they each struggled to create coherent narratives of identity, in which they strove to clarify the distinctions they make between religion and ethnicity, and religious practices and cultural traditions. In constructing their narratives, my informants developed their stories by drawing on a wide variety of – and sometimes even conflicting – available sources and cultural scripts. My interviewees’ sensibilities as Jews are shaped by their family backgrounds as well as their own personal experiences and can be highly idiosyncratic. Each interviewee, in telling her or his own story, is attempting to create a sense of balance for her/his self. The very notion of balance, however, does not imply

some preconceived notion that to be Jewish one must follow a recipe – one ounce of law, two tablespoons of text, a pinch of tradition, some values and voila! While creating individual identities in the postmodern world is always a highly complex and ever-changing process, creating an identity as a Jew may be particularly complicated by the question of what Judaism actually is, a religion, ethnicity, culture, or history. Thus, creating an identity as a Jew is never achieved through a formula in contrast say, to the identities established in identity transforming organizations such as Alcoholics Anonymous.4

Nevertheless, the popularization of Jewishness, through the mainstream media, especially and through consumer culture in general, means that America itself offers a variety of ways to be Jewish without affiliating with a synagogue. Here, for example, I am referring to widely viewed movies on Jewish life and identity such as Spielberg’s Schindler’s List; Shoah; or Streisand’s performance in Yentl; popular literature by writers such as Chaim Potok; and various memoirs exploring newly discovered Jewish roots, as well as the availability of Hallmark cards to mark every Jewish occasion. Similarly, the prominence of Israel in daily news in America also offers a way of identifying as a Jew without any particular affiliation or engaging in traditional religious practices. These popularized ways of expressing “Jewishness” are etched into the very notion of a multicultural nation – one that, at least in some ways, values differences and tolerates and even encourages, identity politics. Living in a post-Shoah age also has a significant impact on contemporary Jewish identity and the ability to call oneself a Jew without belonging to a larger Jewish community. Jews today are aware that they would have been persecuted as Jews by the Nazis despite their lack of affiliation with institutional Judaism, and this knowledge creates the possibility for a new category of Jewish identity, independent of traditional Jewish observance or institutional participation.

Thus, there is an intricate dynamic going on for my respondents. On the one hand, they have to do the personal and cultural work of fixing their identity in a coherent way that allows them to make sense of the contemporary disruption of religious and ethnic cultures. On the other hand, they are also exposed to other identity making tools – through movies, books, articles in the press, political ideologies – all of which give them, in a sense, a “cultural tool kit” (Swidler 1986) that aids them in creating a Jewish identity.

The Jews I am studying are establishing and creating some form of connection with their roots. Although my respondents do establish their identification with the history and culture of the Jewish people through some of their lived religious practices, they themselves see their practices as ethnic, cultural, and familial and not religious. In trying to understand the meaning, practices and establishment of “lived religion” among Jews, I am taking what my respondents say about what they are doing at face value and avoiding the debate about functionalist vs. exclusivist definitions of religion.

In this chapter, I illustrate the various ways that my respondents create ethnic as opposed to what they consider “religious” identities by weaving together certain practices that they can define as historical, cultural, or familial, with a sense of Judaism as an

4In reference to AA, however, even here it is important to note that individuals can, and do deviate from the prescribed blueprints. Modern and postmodern identities, in general, are difficult to construct in narratively coherent ways.

ethnic identification. For these unaffiliated Jews, the process of constructing a Jewish identity is itself a Jewish practice and one of the primary ways in which they live their religion, even if they define this identity in nonreligious terms. An interesting contrast between my study and the one conducted by Cohen and Eisen is that they found that 80 percent of their sample population identified being Jewish as a religious identity, whereas in mine, only ten of the twenty-eight interviewees did so. For many, ethnic pride was an important component of their Jewish identities. They emphasized how “immensely proud” they are of being Jewish and of the numerous accomplishments of Jews, such as the percentage of Nobel laureates, and the sheer raw ability to survive over millennia of persecution. For my respondents, this was an important reason to claim an identity as Jews, even if they do not see themselves as religious. These interviewees have a sense of awe for the history and accomplishments of Judaism and the Jewish people and want to feel tapped into that. And their narration of ethnic pride allows them to establish connections with this tradition and heritage they perceive as great, without their having to engage in any particular religious behaviors.

In one interview with a retired, nonpracticing seventy-year-old man named Mark, I asked, “What does it mean to you to be a Jew?” He answered:

It makes me immensely proud. I think that the contributions that Jews have made to the world, to society, and to culture, are just staggering. Um, I’m so proud to be a Jew. I think about who won the most Nobel Prizes. Who’s fought incredible odds against every kind of horrific enemy and condition and not just survived, but flourished and went on to do all these magnificent things. I mean, I just swell with pride when I think about it. I feel so badly when I hear all these stories about all these American Jewish kids who have no idea who they are, or what they are, or what they’ve come from. I remember somebody talking in the sixties about kids wanting to become, I don’t know, Buddhist or Maoists, who were Jews who had no idea who they were or what they were, the incredible, fabulous legacy, because they had had a bad way of being exposed to that, if at all. I’m lucky I was able to go forge my own way of learning about all that.

Most fascinating to me was the fact that nineteen of my twenty-eight interviewees explicitly emphasized a genetic notion of Jewishness. They stated that being Jewish is something one is born into and that has a hardwired genetic truth to it. Cohen and Eisen’s respondents, too, argued that Jewishness was not dependent on observance or education; “they are Jews because they are Jews, period” (2000: 101). Highlighting the genetic dimension is a particularly powerful way of claiming a link with this great tradition and people, without having to engage in any particular religious or other behaviors – it is simply seen as a native part of oneself. There is a fascinating slippage here between ethnicity and biology. Many of my respondents started out defining Judaism, for them, as an ethnic or cultural identity, but when asked to flesh out what they meant by that, they returned to some level of biological essentialism.

In my conversation with Mark, I asked him, “Is Jewishness, or Judaism, or being Jewish something you’re born with?” He responded as follows:

Yes. Well, I think ethnically, everybody’s born Jewish. And I think we know about genetics. Certain things are going to have a tendency to be passed along, like intellect. I mean, since we are the people who first created the idea that to be holy you had to be, if you will, cerebral. Have you ever seen Fiddler on the Roof? My favorite

part . . . the best part, and I almost missed it, but when Tevya sings that stuff about if I were a rich man, and he says at the end, about if he could just study all day, if he could just study the Holy Books. . . . I’m getting goose bumps as I say this, and Tevya said, ‘That would be the greatest gift of all.’ That’s what makes Tevya such a great guy. That’s why you’re so drawn to him. He . . . I know it’s almost like a cartoonish figure, but it’s almost like the embodiment of the Jewish spirit. Yep. So I think that one can be born with those kinds of traits. Who we are has come through. I mean, there are people who have been Cohens [the name for individuals who are hereditarily members of the priestly caste] for thousands of years. So maybe there is, I don’t know, like a collective spirit. Who is it? Was it Jung that talked about that? The idea about collective spirit.

Cindy, a thirty-year-old single teacher, also expressed a “genetic” view of Jewish identity: “Yeah, I do think that we are better. I do have the notion in my mind growing up where on the one hand I was embarrassed to be Jewish, but I do think there is a supremacy thing, even though that is also a horrible thing to say . . . especially after what the Germans did to the Jews.”

In this quotation we see her ambivalence about a genetic argument. On the one hand, she feels that Judaism is inherited genetically and that Jewish accomplishments through the ages suggest Jewish superiority, but, on the other hand, she understands that such an argument can lead to profound racism.

One particularly sensitive issue in this genetic/ethnic view of Judaism is the question of conversion and whether, if Judaism is indeed inborn, a convert can ever truly be a Jew. Belinda, a fifty-year-old businesswoman, expressed this tension as follows: “Well, I don’t really think somebody can convert to Judaism. . . . They can convert to the religion, but they can’t convert to being a Jew, I don’t think.” Cindy, the thirty-year-old teacher mentioned earlier, similarly expressed uncertainty about the meaning and nature of conversion as an index of “real” Jewish identity. When she told me that she feels she has “something in common with all Jews,” I asked her what that was. She replied, “History, genetics, very specific genetics.” When I queried her in return about whether Judaism is something you’re born with she responded in a confused manner. “Unless you convert. There are some people who convert who are more religious than me. But they don’t have the genetics and I think that one of the important parts of being Jewish is the genetics. And it can get watered down, and then once it’s watered down, it’s less Jewish.” I asked, “So do you think if a Jew marries a non-Jew and they have children, the children have watered down genetics?” In response, she said, “Well yes, and no . . . I mean, yes and no. Yes and no.” Here, she demonstrated her lack of certitude by wavering back and forth three times! She continued, “Yes, but I guess it depends on the father and mother. If it’s the father who is Jewish, then yes, but if it’s the mother, then no.” In the end, she resolved her own tensions and contradictions in favor of the traditional perspective on Jewish heredity.5

One possible interpretation for this emphasis on genetics is that those who are unattached to a Jewish community put far more stock in being biologically Jewish – Jewish because they were born that way – than those who see their Jewishness mediated

5In traditional Jewish law, religion is passed down though the mother. Therefore a child born to a Jewish woman and a Gentile man is Jewish, whereas a child born to a Jewish man and a Gentile woman is not.

through institutionally defined religious activities, practices and, beliefs. Although they are not making any efforts to participate in any distinctly Jewish institutions that might shape their identities as Jews, “genetics” allows them to still identify as Jewish and have a sense of belonging to the group they refer to as “the Jewish people.”

In contrast to my respondents’ ideas of religion/ethnicity as inscribed aspects of identity, Steven Warner’s (1993) important article offering a paradigm shift in the sociology of religion argues that religion is actually an achieved identity, a product of upbringing, social factors and personal identity development. The fascinating tension for my respondents is that although they claim ascriptive identities, they are also highly aware that religious or ethnic identities are also achieved. In fact, they themselves seek to construct these identities in ways that are different from the traditional definitions; they pick and choose from the available options in their traditions to craft new versions of the meaning of Judaism. The achievement component of identity is revealed in the multiple, varied ways individuals construct themselves as Jewish. Despite defining Judaism as an innate identity, independent of specific observances and religious beliefs, “ethnically identified” Jews can be seen as living their religion through their ongoing construction of ethnic identity. In a context in which simply “being Jewish” supplants particular ritual observances as the central meaning of Jewish identity, defining what “being Jewish” actually means is a complex and ongoing process. Negotiating the many, contested ways to be Jewish in contemporary America and creating their own understanding of the basis of Jewish identity becomes for these ethnically identified Jews a ritual of American Jewish practice.

My respondents’ claims about the centrality of genetics are being espoused in a social context in which many types of individuals, such as antiracists and feminists, are challenging essentialist views, arguing that identities are actually socially constructed. There are great political and economic stakes in the current sociological and political debates between the social construction of identities, such as race, gender and sexuality, and the essentialist view of these elements of identity. It is notable that in this era in which the role of genetics is an important and fiercely contested issue – for example, the contemporary dominance of sociobiology as a major paradigm in biological research and theory, and the widely debated reaction to the book, The Bell Curve (Herrnstein and Murray 1994) – my respondents nevertheless feel comfortable in claiming a genetic essence to their Judaism. This ongoing social dispute about the genetic components of identity nevertheless may further complicate my respondents’ attempts to define the roots of Jewish identity. In their study, Cohen and Eisen uncovered ambivalence toward the idea of an essentialist Jewish identity; while the respondents downplayed their sense of distinctiveness as Jews in their responses to the survey, it was revealed in the extended interviews. Despite some ambivalence about the source of Jewish identity, my respondents are clearly adapting the essentialist claim that “genetics” or history rather than rabbis or researchers define who and what is Jewish. By claiming their identity is ascribed, they are stating that the individual cannot be held responsible for it. This is how the gay Catholics in Michele Dillon’s (1999a) study of nonconformist Catholics talk about their sexuality – if it was simply a “construction,” then it could easily be changed.

The view that Jewishness is genetic stands in contrast to the argument articulated by about ten of my respondents that although being Jewish is not necessarily about

religion, it is also not about race.6 Several stated this position quite explicitly, while others referred to it through scoffing at the idea that there is such a thing as “looking Jewish.” A respondent named Judith, in response to my question, “Do you think of Judaism as a religious tradition, a culture, or an ethnicity?” expressed this idea as follows:

All of those things. There are two ways. Ethnicity is a good thing, a good word for what I had said before, that there were two ways of being Jewish. One is religious and the other is . . . well, some people say race, but I think the real way it should be looked upon is as a religion, or an ethnicity, because there will be less racism and hatred that way. If anyone can choose what religion they want to be [thus taking away the racial, genetic components] then you get rid of killing the way Hitler wanted to kill the Jews because they had Jewish ancestry.

However, it is significant that this same respondent, while acknowledging the danger of defining Jewish identity as a racial identity, also expressed (ambivalent) belief in a genetic component to Jewish identity. She said,

I feel to be a Jew is to be superior. That’s a terrible thing to say . . . I think if you take the average Jew, we’re much better educated. We’re much more knowledgeable about other religions. Many subjects. It’s incredible what people don’t know. I mean, maybe it’s because I’m Jewish that I think that Jews are that way, but I know from when I went to school, and from when my children went to school, that the most intelligent people were almost always Jewish, and I don’t know why that is. I don’t know if it’s genetics. My mother-in-law, who wasn’t born Jewish, and my sister-in- law, who wasn’t either, they’re both very intelligent people, too. So I don’t know if it’s genetics or if it’s upbringing.

These contradictory remarks – rejecting the idea of a racial Judaism but holding on to the possibility that Jews may be smarter than non-Jews – reveal a deep ambivalence about the source of Jewishness and highlight the discomfort that many Jews feel about the role of genetics in Jewish identity.

In terms of lived religion as worldview, I have found that religion and ethnicity, as described by my informants, are clearly not one and the same, although they are often construed as such in common parlance, theoretical models, and historical studies. My respondents have said, in effect, I may not be very Jewish if it means keeping kosher and attending synagogue, but if it means having a worldview informed by Jewish culture/history/values, then yes, I am. In other words, they are conscious that there are multiple ways of being Jewish and of defining the nature of Jewishness in contemporary American society. And they claim a sense of interpretive authority over Judaism which allows them to connect so many of their diverse experiences to it.

In this next section of this chapter, I focus on the practice dimension of lived religion. Whether or not my respondents see Judaism as genetic (although the large majority do), all of my respondents have found ways to practice their Jewishness through behaviors that lead them away from religion and closer to those that emphasize culture,

6While nineteen respondents expressed their belief in a genetic component to Jewishness, only three of these respondents used the word “race” to describe Jewish identity. This suggests the weight of the term race in our society and a general hesitance to use the word, even if implying genetic components of identity. No one used the word race who did not also use the word genetics.

history, and memory. For example, many of my respondents described reading Jewish books, or leaving Jewish books out for their children to pick up and peruse as ways they maintain their connection to Judaism. Renee, the mother of two young sons, described this in some detail: “What I do is put Jewish books out. They love to read when they’re eating breakfast or eating lunch. If we’re not as a family around the table, I let them read. Like one book was called I Never Saw Another Butterfly. It’s a book of poems and drawings by children during the Second World War. Very beautiful. Or just articles. I put things out so they get it that way.”

In general, my respondents were most likely to take on those ethnic practices that particularly involve memory, family, and historical and cultural traditions. For example, they mentioned practices including studying texts, liking Jewish language and songs and music, displaying Jewish objects in their home, or having nontraditionally Jewish rituals (for example, making every Friday night a “pizza night”). Such a lived religious practice continues the historical notion that Friday night is traditionally very important in Jewish religion but instead of observing it in the traditionally religious way (with blessings over candles, wine and Hallah [special bread] they reinvent the evening to satisfy their own contemporary familial needs. These practices are consistent with Robert Bellah et al.’s notion of participating in a “community of memory;” however, for my respondents this community is a historical and cultural one, not a distinctly religious one (Bellah et al. 1985). Here I choose to take my respondents at their word, without placing them into sociological debates about what religion really is.

Singing Jewish songs, even without understanding their meaning or context, is another practice of my respondents that makes them feel essentially linked to Judaism. Julia, a mother of one in her thirties, said that she sings Jewish songs to her little girl, “just because . . . just some songs I like.” When I asked her which songs, she replied,

Oh, I don’t know, one called Adon Olam [a traditional prayer from the Saturday services called Adon Olam], I don’t even know them by name . . . different parts of Saturday morning services that stay with me, just songs that I remember. And just because they have a lullaby effect, I would sing them to her when I was putting her down when she was little. I’ll sing them and it reminds me that I’m connected to this larger body, although I don’t have the beliefs, I’m connecting to that culture of the Jewish people.

Food rituals were mentioned, particularly by the women, as ways they keep their ethnic identification alive. Two women, for example, specified that they try to keep Friday night as family dinner night, although because they are so tired from the week their ritual is to serve pizza rather than the more traditional home-cooked meal. As Laura, a social worker in her fifties said,

We actually have . . . a year ago we started the ritual of Chinese food every Friday night, because I was too tired to cook dinner on Fridays. My husband declared, now that my oldest daughter is in college, that he’s sick of Chinese food so now, for the past two weeks, the ritual has become pizza.

Lisa, a woman in her sixties, confided that when she was a stepmom and had kids,

they loved pork and I would buy it but I never learned what to do with it. My husband would cook it because I didn’t eat it. So, even though I’m not religious, certain things remain for me and they are part of being Jewish that I got from my parents, even though I have no way to connect it and make sense of it.

As we have seen, my interviewees do not perceive traditional Jewish law as authoritative. They feel a great deal of freedom to decide what to observe and what not to observe from the gamut of traditional practices. Indeed, some even claim a link between practices derived from other aspects of contemporary culture (such as the New Age), or other religions (such as Eastern traditions), with the ways they construct themselves as Jewishly identified.

Sheryl, a single woman in her thirties, provides an interesting example of such religious bricolage. In response to my question of whether there are any rituals, of any kind, that are important in her life, she said,

Well, right now I am doing, I don’t know if you’ve heard of the book, The Artists’ Way – it’s a book to kind of help unblock your creativity and one of the things that they recommend that you do is morning pages. That when you get up in the morning you write three, non-stop sort of stream of consciousness to get all that, it’s like a brain dump, to get all that stuff that’s on your mind out onto the page and I’ve been doing that, it’s kind of odd, I started doing that and then I was reading the book about Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur and somewhere in the book they talked about at the beginning of the month before Rosh Hashanah how religious men would get up at midnight and start to pray because that’s when their minds would be the most clear. And I realized as I was reading that I had kind of started my morning papers on the first day of the month. . . . It is a very weird coincidence and doing them has really um made me see a lot more coincidence in my life, and I don’t mean necessarily I believe it’s coincidence. And that I continue to do this daily, it’s like the Jewish morning prayers.

Here she describes an example of a daily ritual practice that she links with Jewish memory and ritual although it does not derive from a specifically Jewish source.

Another important dimension of the ways many of my respondents construct their sense of ethnicity as Jews is by attributing their worldviews, values, and philosophy to insights from Judaism or Jewish culture. The interconnectedness between ideas and practices is explicit here, because respondents linked their worldviews and values to their daily activities. Several people related their leftist politics to their Jewish heritage, stating that Judaism is about a sense of social justice. A wonderful example of this can be seen in the story of a man named Ted. He was an extremely left wing political activist for much of his life. When talking about his life choices and Judaism, he framed it as follows:

So, you know . . . and like I said, my grandfather was active in the 1905 Revolution as one of the People’s Police. And he used to tell me about the 1905 Revolution and how it failed, but how it was wonderful when it was . . . when the people took over, it was like Nirvana, Utopia, whatever. I mean, it was the first time the Jews were free. And you know, what a wonderful time that was. And so what happened in the sixties to me was a replay of what my grandfather used to tell me, because there were occasions where we freed areas. We fought National Guard troops, we did . . .

there were lots of . . . I mean, I was reliving my grandfather’s life in a lot of ways.

Ted also related his activism to a Jewish value structure, saying:

It seems to me, and you probably know more about this than I do, that this idea about doing good deeds while you’re alive, that that’s all there is. First of all . . . well,

that’s one of the things. There’s no belief in afterlife as I understand in Judaism. People who have an afterlife belief that are Jewish are, to me . . . that’s not Judaism I believe in. It’s that we are here and we’re now. That we’re conscious beings and have an opportunity to do things that other people might consider good.

Yet even among those who did not espouse leftist political views, the majority of my respondents stated that being Jewish is about being a “Good Person.” They explained what it means for them to be a good person by describing practices such as volunteering at soup kitchens, with elderly people, and/or giving to a wide range of charities. Although being a good person is, of course, not necessarily a distinctly Jewish value, when pressed to draw connections between their values and being Jewish, they related them to a particularistic Jewish upbringing.

One such example can be seen in my conversation with Henry, a man in his forties. When I asked him, “What does it mean to you to be a Jew?” he replied, “It means it’s my culture and my background, if not my practicing religion. It’s still my culture and my background.” I then asked, “Can you say something more about what you mean by culture?” and he said:

We’re getting down to the down and dirty. By culture, um . . . [long pause] . . . I think it means having been given the identity of oneself as a Jew in all that that means, both as um, being Jewish and being set apart from other people in some ways. Certainly more as a child I felt that, and as a teenager. The teachings of what, um . . . I think by what our family expected of . . . . The way they expected us to live, which was in an honorable manner, and although they didn’t call it that, living by the Golden Rule. Um, helping others, doing mitzvahs, things for which you . . . I would say that’s another part of my life, of doing things for which I expect and want no reward, that kind of thing. So I would say those are things, although I think maybe other people of other cultures could say that, but I say that as a Jew because I was raised as a Jew. But why is it special because it’s Jewish? That I don’t know. It’s just my background.

These comments, which sound like “Golden Rule Judaism,” make me wonder whether in this respect Judaism is distinguishable from Golden Rule Christianity, a concept discussed by Nancy Ammerman (1997b). She argues that a significant number of Christians in the United States define the importance of religion in their lives as centered on their idea of the “Golden Rule.” This “Golden Rule” is an injunction to treat people well, to care for others, and to help those in need. They base their everyday values and actions on this principle and derive from its benevolence a basis for faith in God. My respondents’ references to the Golden Rule as a central Jewish value raise the question of whether being a good person as a Jew is necessarily distinct from what the Christians might claim characterizes the good person. In the 1950s, President Eisenhower was quoted to have said that he didn’t care what religion a person was, as long as s/he had a religion, thus suggesting a possible blurring of religious boundaries. Peter Berger, too, argued in the 1960s that because religions in a secular society are competing for the same audiences, who are free to pick and choose among available alternatives, their distinct contents and modes of presentation become blurred and less precise (Berger 1967).

In showing the ways individuals rely upon their own conventions, authority, and practices to establish their sense of Jewish identity, this chapter raises an interesting

sociological question about whether these multiple ways of being Jewish can be understood to be “really” authentically Jewish, or whether there is such a thing as a critical, essential “core” identity or a connection to specific ideas and/or practices that people must actively maintain if they are to call themselves Jewish. This also leads to the question of whether there is a core to any religion. As Robert Orsi has argued (quoted by Hall, 1997: 18) “The study of lived religion risks the exposure of the researcher. . . . Working on this intimate level, it is harder to avoid the question ‘so what do you think about all this ‘really’ ?” Clearly, the answer to this question depends on the perspective of who is being asked. There are important and interesting differences between the ways the custodians of religion, such as rabbis, priests, and ministers, frame the religion and how ordinary folks do so in their lived religion in everyday life. As a sociologist, I myself steer away from this question, recognizing the important influence that social location plays in any answer to this question.

What is clear from my research is that the religious and ethnic components of Judaism are not easily disentangled. Even those who do not meet the religious and institutional criteria (and what these criteria are is itself contested territory) for being a “good Jew” nevertheless create a lived Jewish experience and identity for themselves from their sense of an ethnic, cultural, historical, and familial heritage. Their selfidentification as Jews, and even as good Jews, is no less real than that of more traditional, affiliated Jews.

Within Judaism, there are critical issues at stake here, such as the question of “Who is a Jew” and how it defines who can become a citizen of Israel under the Law of Return (the policy that all born Jews can automatically become citizens of the state). In the United States, such issues are hotly contested among the Orthodox and the other denominations, with Orthodox rabbis not recognizing ordained Reform Jews as rabbis. This debate takes on great import in the case of conversion, for example, because if a woman is not “properly converted” according to an Orthodox standard, the Orthodox community may call into question the Jewishness of her children and whether these children can properly be married to other Jews! Obviously, the rabbis have a particular stake in the matter, which is framed by their dire concerns about Jewish survival in a country where intermarriage rates are rising. Individuals’ concerns, however, are about how they themselves and their children can live out their Jewishness, rather than about the legal aspects of religious continuity according to Jewish law.

For both the traditional rabbi and the unaffiliated Jew, the relationship between practice and identity is at the center of the search for Jewish meaning, although the nature of this relationship is interpreted differently by each. While the custodians of religions emphasize traditional practices and their observance as if these practices determine a fixed identity, such practices are in fact ways that people perform the identities that they are trying on. Identities are always in a process of construction, as each person continuously works to create the most salient meanings for their lives. What my research points out is that the relationship between Jewish practice and Jewish identity is mutually constitutive. While practices serve as a way for individuals to perform identity, the process of negotiating identity itself becomes a significant form of Jewish practice, particularly for those who are unaffiliated and for whom being Jewish is unconnected to traditional Jewish rituals and observance. Obviously, these processes of identity formation are not “rituals” in the same way that we normally