Jewish cultural studies, Vol. 2 9781904113461, 9781786949868

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ee ee JEWISH CULTURAL STUDIES

VOLUME TWO

The Jewish Cultural Studies series is sponsored by the Jewish Folklore and Ethnology Section of the American Folklore Society in co-operation with the Council on the Anthropology of Jews and Judaism of the American Anthropological Association. Members of the Section receive volumes as a privilege of membership. For more information see .

The Section is also the sponsor of the Raphael Patai Prize, given to an outstanding student essay in English on Jewish folklore and ethnology. The chapter in this volume by Gabrielle A. Berlinger of Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana (USA), entitled “770 Eastern Parkway: The Rebbe’s Home as Icon’, received the prize in 2007. For more information, see the website listed above or .

This volume has benefited from

the financial support of THE ROTHSCHILD FOUNDATION (EUROPE)

THE LITTMAN LIBRARY OF JEWISH CIVILIZATION

Dedicated to the memory of

Louis THOMAS SIDNEY LITTMAN who founded the Littman Library for the love of God and as an act of charity in memory of his father

JosEPH AARON LITTMAN W124 DVT NY

‘Get wisdom, get understanding: Forsake her not and she shall preserve thee’ PROV. 4:5

The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization is a registered UK charity Registered charity no. 1000784

JEWISH CULTURAL STUDIES

Jews at Home: The Domestication of Identity Edited by

Oxford - Portland, Oregon

The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization

The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization Chief Executive Officer: Ludo Craddock Managing Editor: Connie Webber

PO Box 645, Oxford ox2 OUJ, UK www.littman.co.uk Published in the United States and Canada by The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization c/o ISBS, 920 NE 58th Avenue, Suite 300 Portland, Oregon 97213-3786 © The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization 2010 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization The paperback edition of this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not,by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser A catalogue record for this book 1s available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Jews at home : the domestication of identity / edited by Simon J. Bronner. p. cm.—( Jewish cultural studies; v. 2) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Jewish families—Conduct of life. 2. Jewish families—Religious life. 3. Home—Religious aspects—Judaism. I. Bronner, Simon J.

BM723.J54.2010 306.6'9674—dc22 2009039576 ISBN 975-1-904113-46-1 Publishing co-ordinator: Janet Moth Copy-editing: Mark Newby Proofreading: Philippa Claiden Index: Bonnie Blackburn

Designed and typeset by Pete Russell, Faringdon, Oxon. Production: John Saunders Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by MPG Books Group, Bodmin and King’s Lynn

The editor dedicates this volume to the memory of eminent folklorist

RAPHAEL PATAI (1910-1996)

Author of

THE JEWISH MIND, ON JEWISH FOLKLORE and many other influential books on folklore and culture. A fund in his honour has been established by his daughters with the American Folklore Society to support a student prize and the Jewish Cultural Studies series. For more information, contact the executive director of the American Folklore Society at .

Editor and Advisers SIMON J. BRONNER The Pennsylvania State University

Haya BAR-ITZHAK, Haifa University, Israel Dan BEN-AMOS, University of Pennsylvania, USA

Matti BuNnzt, University of Illinois, USA MIKHAIL CHLENOV, State Jewish Maimonides Academy, Russia

SANDER GILMAN, Emory University, USA HARVEY E. GOLDBERG, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel KARL GROZINGER, University of Potsdam, Germany

RuTH ELLEN GRUBER, independent scholar, Italy FELICITAS HEIMANN-JELLINEK, Jewish Museum, Vienna, Austria BARBARA KIRSHENBLATT-GIMBLETT, New York University, USA

AnpDRAS KovAcs, Central European University, Hungary MiKxeEt J. Koven, University of Worcester, UK SUZANNE D. RUTLAND, University of Sydney, Australia JOACHIM SCHLOR, University of Southampton, UK LAURENCE SIGAL, Museum of Jewish Art and History, France STEVE SrtporRiNn, Utah State University, USA

EDWARD VAN VOOLEN, Jewish Historical Museum, The Netherlands JONATHAN WEBBER, University of Birmingham, UK

JENNA WEISSMAN JOSELIT, George Washington University, USA

MARCIN WopzINSk1, University of Wroctaw, Poland

Acknowledgements THIS VOLUME on being ina Jewish home and feeling at home as a Jew was prepared, appropriately enough, at home. I owe my family for giving me a space to work and a house they made a home. It became a living laboratory for this project as visitors regularly engaged us about the meaning of a Jewish home as structure and concept. I especially want to thank my wife Sally Jo Bronner, who, as editor of the Jewish newspaper Community Review, extended my range of fieldwork contacts, including children other than my own who talked to me with maturity well

past their years about growing up in Jewish and mixed-religion homes. I am srateful to Haya Bar-Itzhak, who, as visiting Fulbright Scholar of Humanities at Penn State University in 2007, greatly added to my thinking with impromptu office seminars. Other colleagues who formed a vibrant intellectual community and contributed ideas deserve credit: Michael Barton, Ed Beck, John Haddad, Yelena Khanzhina, Charles Kupfer, Neil Leifert, Ted Merwin, Cheri Ross, Yvonne Sims, Jose Vargas-Vila, and Eileen Zagon. I also appreciate the support of Penn State Harrisburg’s Chancellor Madlyn Hanes, School of Humanities Director Kathryn Robinson, and Director of International Programs Marie-Louise Abram

of my research and programming within the campus’s Holocaust and Jewish Studies Center. At the office, Iam indebted to staff members Carolyn Alton, Sue Etter, and Cindy Leach for handling many organizational details with efficiency and good cheer. In the community, I am indebted to several tradition-bearers who allowed me into their homes, gave me their time, and loaned photographs and documents: Rabbi Carl Choper, Rabbi Akiva Males, Rabbi Ron Muroff, Jennifer and Stephen Rubin, Michael Schatz, Linda Schwab, Patricia and Daniel Schwab, Carl and Beth Shuman, Alyce and Morton Spector, and Leslie and Ross Weiner. Beyond the community, I have had the privilege of working with a stellar international cast of advisers, who also served as reviewers of essays. I want to extend my special gratitude to advisers who served on the Raphael Patai Prize committee: Dan Ben-Amos, Haya Bar-Itzhak, and Steve Siporin. Other colleagues who provided professional service by evaluating manuscripts were Ronald L. Baker, Joelle Bahloul, Gloria B. Clark, Marcie Cohen Ferris, Eve Jochnowitz, Sergey R. Kravtsov, Charles Kupfer, Andrea Lieber, Vanessa Ochs, Daphne Patai, and Nelson H. Vieira. Matti Bunzl serves the cause well in his leadership of the Council on the Anthropology of Jews and Judaism. My appreciation also goes out to Tim Lloyd and Maria Teresa Agozzino, Executive and Associate Directors of the American Folklore Society respectively, for working so well with the organization’s Jew-

ish Folklore and Ethnology Section, sponsors of the Jewish Cultural Studies series. At Littman, Connie Webber, Janet Moth, Ludo Craddock, and Mark Newby

were a superb team; as people who think globally, they merit honour for being world-class.

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Contents

Note on Transliteration xi Introduction: The Dualities of House and Homein Jewish Culture 1 SIMON J. BRONNER

1 The Domestication of Urban Jewish Space and the North- 43 West London Eruv JENNIFER COUSINEAU

2 Every Wise Woman Shoppeth for her House: The Sisterhood 75 Gift Shop and the American Jewish Home in the Mid-Twentieth Century JOELLYN WALLEN ZOLLMAN

3 Reimagining Home, Rethinking Sukkah: Rabbinic Discourse and 107 its Contemporary Implications MARJORIE LEHMAN

4 From Sacred Symbol to Key Ring: The Hamsa in Jewish and 140 Israeli Societies SHALOM SABAR

5 770 Eastern Parkway: The Rebbe’s Home as Icon 163 GABRIELLE A. BERLINGER

6 From the Nightclub to the Living Room: Gender, Ethnicity, and 188 Upward Mobility in the 1950s Party Records of Three Jewish Women Comics GIOVANNA P. DEL NEGRO

CONTENTS

7 Samuel Rawet’s Wandering Jew: Jewish-Brazilian Monologues of 217 Home and Displacement ROSANA KOHL BINES

8 Home in the Pampas: Alberto Gerchunoft’s Jewish Gauchos 241 MONICA SZURMUK

9 Domesticity and the Home (Page): Blogging and the Blurring 257 of Public and Private among Orthodox Jewish Women ANDREA LIEBER

INTRODUCTION

10 Culture Mavens: Feeling at Home in America 287 JENNA WEISSMAN JOSELIT

RESPONSES

11 At Home in the World 295 DAVID KRAEMER

12 The Co-Construction of Europe asa Jewish Home 301 JOACHIM SCHLOR

13 Reflections on ‘Culture Mavens’ from an Australian Jewish 307 Perspective SUZANNE D. RUTLAND

14 There’s No Place Like Home: America, Israel, and the 316 (Mixed) Blessings of Assimilation MICHAEL P. KRAMER

15 The Last Word: A Response 324

Index 333

Contributors 227

JENNA WEISSMAN JOSELIT

Note on Transliteration THE transliteration of Hebrew in this book reflects consideration of the type of book it is, in terms of its content, purpose, and readership. The system adopted therefore reflects a broad approach to transcription, rather than the narrower approaches found in the Encyclopaedia Judaica or other systems developed for text-based or linguistic studies. The aim has been to reflect the pronunciation prescribed for modern Hebrew, rather than the spelling or Hebrew word structure, and to do so using conventions that are generally familiar to the English-speaking reader.

In accordance with this approach, no attempt is made to indicate the distinctions between alefand ayin, tet and taf, kafand kuf, sin and samekh, since these are not relevant to pronunciation; likewise, the dagesh is not indicated except where it affects pronunciation. Following the principle of using conventions familiar to the majority of readers, however, transcriptions that are well established have been retained even when they are not fully consistent with the transliteration system adopted. On similar grounds, the tsadi is rendered by ‘tz’ in such familiar words as bar mitzvah, mitzvot, and so on. Likewise, the distinction between het and khaf has been retained, using h for the former and kh for the latter; the associated forms are generally familiar to readers, even if the distinction is not actually borne out in pronunciation, and for the same reason the final heh is indicated too. As in Hebrew, no capital letters are used, except that an initial capital has been retained in transliterating titles of published works (for example, Shulhan arukh). Since no distinction is made between alef and ayin, they are indicated by an apostrophe only in intervocalic positions where a failure to do so could lead an English-speaking reader to pronounce the vowel-cluster as a diphthong—as, for example, in ha’ir—or otherwise mispronounce the word. The sheva na is indicated by an e—perikat ol, reshut—except, again, when established convention dictates otherwise. The yod is represented by i when it occurs as a vowel (bereshit), by y when it occurs as a consonant (yesodot), and by yi when it occurs as both (yisra’el).

Names have generally been left in their familiar forms, even when this is inconsistent with the overall system.

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INTRODUCTION The Dualities of House and Home in Jewish Culture SIMON J. BRONNER

THIS VOLUME addresses two related dimensions of the Jewish home: the physical and the metaphysical. Calling a house a home suggests an emotional connec-

tion to it that has been constituted by the shared history of the building and its occupants. When residents refer to a ‘Jewish home’, they may define their domiciles socially as Jewish because their families live there, but a cultural question is how ‘Jewishness’ is materially expressed to themselves and to others. For many Jews a mezuzah on the exterior doorway will most clearly mark the Jewishness of the home, as it fulfils the mitzvah to inscribe the Jewish prayer Shema yisra’el ‘on the doorposts of your house’ (Deut. 6: 9). Usually an oblong or cylindrical case

holding a handwritten Hebrew scroll, the mezuzah’s external decoration and material vary and can be home-made, but the object is still recognizable as a mezuzah by its placement on the doorpost. The mezuzah in Figure 1 was created

by American artist Shelley Spector for a 2008 exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Jewish Art entitled ‘A Kiss for the Mezuzah’ (Singer 2007). It shows artistic adaptation of traditional forms reflecting what one of the curators calleda modern attraction by Jews to mezuzot that ‘reflect their personality or the style of

their home in addition to their commitment to God’ (Agro 2007: 6). Spector’s mezuzah is personally significant because it is made out of a cigar-box owned by her father, relating to the parchment’s text from Deuteronomy It: 13—21 to teach God’s commandments to ‘your children... when you sit in your house and when you walk on the way and when you lie down and when you rise’. The title of her creation, ‘Honor to Carry’, refers to her Jewishness, of which she says: ‘it is an

honor to have inside me something so ancient and spiritual’, and that, like the mezuzah, she is ‘a carrier of tradition, connecting the past to the future’ (quoted in Holzman 2007: 8). The mezuzah is significant as it is usually the only Jewish artefact placed both outside and inside a Jewish home. Inside the house, artefacts of home religious observance—often designated as specifically for the sabbath, Hanukah, or Passover—are often displayed and

described by families as markers of identity, as well as being used for rituals. Because of their religious associations, these objects are often categorized by collectors as ‘Judaica’, whether they originate in the synagogue or the home, but in this volume the contributors are particularly concerned with the objects’ domes-

SIMON J. BRONNER

Figure 1 ‘Honor to Carry’ mezuzah (open, with ‘ | eal

klaf, or parchment scroll, showing). Photo > Wee

courtesy of Shelley Spector : NY Pe

tic context and use. Essays discuss objects that may not have the religious purposes or ancient lineage implied by the term Judaica, but that have been connected with Jewish ethnic domestic life in various communities. Shalom Sabar, for example, differentiates between the functions of the hamsa for synagogue and home, and interprets the transformation of its symbolic meanings from a protective amulet in Morocco centuries ago to a sign of Jewish nationalism on key rings and house decorations in contemporary Israel. The comedy records of Jewish artists examined by Giovanna P. Del Negro would not have been played in synasogues, but she argues that within Jewish American living rooms during the 1950s they became prized artefacts of Jewish identity for a post-immigrant Jewish middle class. The physical space of the Jewish house has often been overlooked in architec-

tural study because of its emphasis on form and typology rather than social process. The key material evidence in most architectural surveys is the form of the front elevation and the floor plan that constitutes the house type. This emphasis is evident in the standard reference work for ethnic architecture, the massive, 2384-page Encyclopedia of Vernacular Architecture of the World (Oliver 1997). Jew-

ish architecture is represented by synagogues in central Europe, South India, and Sri Lanka, and community institutions of kibbutzim and moshavot (co-operative settlements or farms with different degrees of collective ownership), but no references can be found to domestic housing presently used by Jews. A brief mention is made of districts historically identified as Jewish although Jews no longer live there, such as the San’a Jewish quarter in North Yemen, for which the author of the entry underscores the importance of typology by noting that the houses ‘rep-

THE DUALITIES OF HOUSE AND HOME resent a distinct typological group, although they are similar in many respects to the top-court houses found elsewhere in the country’ (Varanda 1997: 1458). This report emphasizing architectural form raises questions of contemporary adaptations that distinguish buildings as Jewish such as the houses in San’a ‘fitted with a top opening for the Feast of Tabernacles’ (Varanda 1997: 1459). Arguably, Jewish identity is apparent from examinations of architectural details and social use, and studies of Jewish material culture have often stood apart with this instrumental attention in an approach that could be called ‘contextual’ rather than formalistic because the studies typically focus on the social as well as physical circumstances of Jewish everyday life, especially in relation to non-Jewish neighbours (Bahloul 1996; Golany 1999; Kroyanker 1984). This volume’s focus on the domestic sphere also stands apart from much of Jewish studies, which affirms the synagogue as the ritual as well as the physical centre of Judaism. Often highly ornamented and visible on the streetscape, synagogues are artistically compelling and invite investigation by cultural studies scholars as conspicuous public hubs of Jewish activity (Kravtsov 2008). While

synagogues are certainly important institutions in the Jewish world, Jewish homes are often under-appreciated as physical and ritual centres, probably because of the prevailing assumption that modern Jews live in dwellings that have no distinguishing Jewish features or that they do not materially express their Jew-

ishness outside the synagogue (Hubka 2003; Krinsky t996; Sachs and Van Voolen 2004). Yet the home in cultural studies generally is viewed as crucial to the formation of cultural identity because of the inter-generational enactment of traditions and the lifelong construction of memory within its walls. Among the fields concerned for Jewish material culture, Jewish cultural studies can take the lead in consideration of the Jewish home as physical space in relation to other structures such as the sukkah and synagogue, as well as a social milieu in which selected objects play a major role. Besides interpreting the physical aspect of the Jewish house this volume also

considers the metaphysical or emotional one. This is expressed as ‘feeling at home’, a sense of attachment and comfort in one’s social as well as physical surroundings. That is hardly unique to Jews, but it arises often in Jewish discourse because of the Jewish experience of anxiety as a minority or immigrant community. Often the subject of literature and folklore, of visual and performing arts, the emotional side of home has been problematized as ‘at-homeness in exile’ in Jew-

ish studies, highlighting tensions between different heritages, including that between the biblical Promised Land and later diasporic locations such as the Pale of Settlement in Russia, from which Jews emigrated around the turn of the nineteenth century. The conventional Jewish historical narrative of expulsion, dispersion, and consequent exile provokes comment not only about where an emotional home is located, but also about whether one can be ‘at home’ in the diaspora (Gilman 2003: 4—5). Itis therefore common to hear the distinction between

SIMON J. BRONNER diasporic experience, as a peripheral or frontier heritage, and an ancient biblical homeland (or, to use a domestic metaphor, a historical ‘cradle’), with the pre-

sumption that on the frontier encounter and assimilation will lead to cultural exchange and loss (Gilman and Shain 1999; see also Sklare and Greenblum 1967). This version of Jewish exile from a historic centre implies cultural linkage as Jews disperse. It implies that Jews away from these historic centres still maintain a connection with, if not a longing for, the old country in the form of nostalgia or maintaining cultural traditions, rather than beginning anew by creating a sinsular Jewish culture. A more decentred version of exile, emphasizing the diversity of Jewish culture, is suggested by innovations in individual or domestic rituals, which mark

different brands of Jewishness in disparate locations (Gilman 2003: 6; Ochs 2007). A scholarly manifestation of this version is the investigation of Jewish communities as independent, living traditions with their own discrete cultural histories (see Mikdash-Shamailov 2001; Shwartz-Be’eri 2000; Slapak 2003), and itis amajor theme in works of literature, such as those from Brazil and Argentina examined by Rosana Kohl Bines and Monica Szurmuk in this volume, which explore the tension between feeling at home in an unfamiliar new world and Jewish historical desires to return from exile to a biblical homeland. Jenna Weismann Joselit (Chapter 10) is more forceful in her view of the discontinuity between life in the old and new worlds and between the synagogue and domestic life. She expands on the thesis she presented in The Wonders of America (1994) that an ‘independent sense’ of a singular Jewish culture was formed in the United States in the twentieth century. Family life in the home was a hallmark of this culture, she argues: ‘the community came together and coalesced around the ideal of a domesticated Jewishness in which the home and its inhabitants became the core of a modern Jewish identity’ (1994: 5). A similar view of Jews from Aleppo was provided by Walter Zenner, who was compelled to explain the distinctiveness maintained by members of the community as they dispersed because the group defied the scholarly expectation that assimilation would lead to cultural loss. He declares: ‘Rather than looking on the majority national community as the center into which one assimilates, each nation has many centers with which one may fuse or remain apart. In many though not all places, the Aleppan Jews have had the reputation for maintaining the home away from home’ (2000: 27; see also Sutton 1979). Zenner’s analytical strategy is to demonstrate cultural diversification by highlighting distinct daily customs, typically in the domestic sphere, and contrasting them with the uniformity of following Torah. Summarized smartly by anthropologist Jonathan Webber, the strategy reflects ‘the anthropologist’s idea of Jewish culture, in that it was about what people did and how they lived, and not necessarily about what people were supposed to do or how they ought to live’ (Webber 2002: 324). Extended beyond the anthropological emphasis on bounded, homogenous

THE DUALITIES OF HOUSE AND HOME sroups to temporary groups in complex societies that self-consciously create identities for members through adaptive customs and material markers, the revisionist critique of the representation of exile points to exceptional situations in which Jewish mini-cultures arise. Examples that have attracted scholarly attention include Jewish summer camps and youth movements, kibbutz experiences

for non-Israelis, Jewish community centres, and vacation communities that advertise themselves as homes away from home or as providers of an intense experience of Jewish belonging that one cannot get at home (Joselit and Mittelman 1993; Kaufman 1999; Richman 1998). Webber’s perceptive comment on the relationship between an emotional sense of at-homeness and galut (exile) is that ‘what happens at the level of assimilation, inconsistent though it may be, is not a reliable guide to the passions in people’s heads. “At-homeness in exile”, for example, can survive for centuries even after the people have left the country, as the poetry put out by Spanish Jews long after 1492 readily attests’ (Webber 2002: 324). At-homeness therefore lies behind the rhetoric about the dual sources of yearning for ‘homeland’ throughout modern Jewish history with reference to the roots planted by ancient residence or experience with the ‘old country’. Zionism (based on the ingathering of Jews in Erets Yisra’el, complete with frontier metaphors of halutsim (pioneers) and settlement in territories) exemplifies the historic homeland idea, and nostalgia for Jewish neighbourhoods is evident in the mythologizing of certain places as ‘where we’re from’ such as the Lower East Side of New York, the East End of London, the Pletzel in Paris, and the east European shtetl (Diner 2002; Kugelmass 1989; Polonsky 2005; Sternhell 1999). In public discourse, such areas are often referred to as ‘the old neighbourhood’, and sometimes recovery projects are proposed to restore parts of them. In the midst of the destruction of Jewish communities during the Second World War, the Yiddish Scientific Institute (YIVO) issued a call for a muzey fun die alte heimen (literally ‘a museum of the old homes’ or idiomatically ‘of the old country’). The top priority, according to the call, was to collect ‘photographs of the external look of the towns, villages, homes, institutions, weddings and modes of entertainment’, rhetorically linking the material and social aspects of community life, so as to ‘serve the pres-

ent and future young generations who want to continue spiritually to lead a Jewish way of life’. Referring to the disruption to inter-generational tradition associated with the domestic sphere, the result of the project according to the organizers would be ‘a closer family connection between the parents and their first generation American children and also grandchildren’ (YIVO 1944). If that call in 1944 looked back to a destroyed way of life, what about the estab-

lishment four years later of a new Jewish state in Israel, as Shalom Sabar discusses in his chapter? He describes modern Israel as struggling to achieve Jewish unity out of the multiple national ancestries, languages, religious differences, and beliefs absorbed by the nation-state (see also Bar-Itzhak 2005; Zerubavel 1995). Sabar traces the development of Zionism to embrace multiculturalism by

SIMON J. BRONNER the end of the twentieth century, particularly with the incorporation of mizrahi sroups (Jews from Arab, African, and Asian countries), to create a multicoloured social tapestry. He sees a sign of cultural change in the emergence of the decorative amulet called the hamsa, which has its roots in Morocco, as an Israeli national symbol. At a local level, the display of the hamsa in the entrance to the home has different material and emotional meanings. For Israelis of Moroccan descent it is connected to their heritage; for others it is connected to a post-Zionist Middle Eastern identity of joint Arab and Jewish creation. It also implies Jewish reflections on Western ideas of Jews as ‘oriental’ and on the orientalism apparent in the predominance of Ashkenazi culture when Israel was founded: cultural categories that divide Eastern and Western Jews and affect the idea of at-homeness in the

homeland (Kalmar and Penslar 2004). Responding to the theme of Jewish home—East and West, community and nation, village and city—contributors to this volume share an analytic interest in exploring Jewish domesticity, and the process of domesticating identity, inside and out.

Interiors and Exteriors The function of the synagogue as a house of worship may suggest that the home as a dwelling lacks religious significance. Yet the number of religious obser-

vances held at home in Judaism and the value placed on ethnic differences expressed in Jewish culture are reminders of the importance of the home not only in the way that Judaism is practised but also in the way that being Jewish is experienced. At the start of the twenty-first century, amid concerns that public displays of Jewish identity were not as noticeable or desirable as they once were, Rabbi

Andrew Goldstein emphasized the difference of a Jewish home in his popular children’s book My Jewish Home (2000). The cover shows a generic, single-family

house, but on opening the book one reads: ‘When you knock on my door, you know mine is a Jewish home. There’s a mezuzah on the doorpost. Now come inside.’ Goldstein identifies candlesticks and kiddush cups as religious items in the home, but also points to ordinary objects such as a barmitzvah photo, Jewish cookbooks, and an Israel travel poster as signs of being Jewish. Not all the reminders are visual; he writes: ‘On Fridays when we bake challah, I can tell by the wonderful smell in the kitchen that ours is a Jewish home.’ He closes the book

by asserting that ‘most important in my Jewish home are the people in it... my Jewish family’. By its design and message, the book underscores that the exterior of the house is not noticeably Jewish except for the mezuzah, but a Jewish environment is constituted by the practices and social attachments inside. Vanessa Ochs is an anthropologist who has expounded the idea that domestic practices in home interiors signify Jewish attitudes and contexts. Beyond the ritual objects of sabbath candlesticks and challah trays that fall into the commonly

THE DUALITIES OF HOUSE AND HOME recognized category of ‘articulate objects-—props, she writes, of Jewish observance which are displayed in the home—she refers to ‘Jewish-signifying’ material culture, often not noticed as such by the residents, such as an abundance of books and food and ‘shrine-like displays of photographs’ because they representa Jewish value placed on ledor vador (a Hebrew phrase meaning ‘from generation to generation’). She claims that piling up books and food ‘point{s] from one genera-

tion to another: family matters, love matters, keeping connections matters, increasing and multiplying matter’, and is historically contextualized by middleand upper-class Jews of the post-immigrant generations in the West as a response to an earlier culture of scarcity and restrictions on education in former east European homelands (Ochs 1999-2000: It). Another category in which the Jewishness of the interior is constituted is in ‘Ordinary Objects Transformed’, a range of objects that could be found in any home, but whose meanings and functions shift within the context of a Jewish home. As she explains: A dish is a dish, but in a Jewish home where kashrut (the dietary laws) is observed, the dishes of a certain color or pattern placed in a particular and separate cabinet become

and remain milchig (milk) dishes, and the dishes in another cabinet become and remain fleishig (meat). The telephone is a telephone, but when it’s being used by a Jew who is checking ona sick friend who lives far away, it is a klet kodesh, a holy vessel used in the practice of bikkur cholim, the commandment to connect to the sick. All of the equipment one uses in house cleaning—cleansing powder, mop, Windex, Pinesol, vacuum

cleaner—is just cleaning equipment. But in the Jewish home where Sabbath is observed by cleaning one’s home beforehand, we have again klet kodesh, holy vessels that create and point to the Sabbath, tangibly, experientially, and sensuously. (Ochs 1999-2000: II)

Sociologist Solomon Poll refers to the practice of imbuing ordinary objects with Jewish values and thus incorporating them into religious identity as an important adaptive strategy of the hasidim. It is hardly universal, though, among tradition-centred groups. He contrasts the resistance of the Amish to technology such as the automobile. Unlike the Amish, according to Poll, ‘the Hasidim will not necessarily think of an automobile as a means of getting themselves away

from the community and into the outside world, but rather as a vehicle that brings their children to study religion’ (1962: 229-30). In the computer age, questions arise about the role of the computer in Orthodox Jewish homes and asa potential threat to traditional values. Andrea Lieber in her essay on Orthodox bloggers shows that differences of opinion exist within various communities of

which these computer diarists are a part. She understands that non-Orthodox scholars may be quick to dismiss the possibility of computers being transformed into Jewish objects in a traditional domestic interior. Sociologist Samuel Heilman, for example, in his study of strictly Orthodox Jewry, describes his reaction to the home technology of Yisrael Eichler from the Belz court of the hasidim:

SIMON J). BRONNER Eichler sat ata computer workstation in the corner of his combination study and dining room. Next to the screen was a portable radio/tape unit along with files of papers, books, and clippings. The technology was the latest. This was not my grandfather; the scene before me resembled the view from my own desk! But Eichler’s room gave off a series of

alternate messages too. Holy books—seforim, as they were called—were one of its primary motifs. Along an entire wall of the room were shelves lined with bound seforim ... While in the past large libraries of sacred texts like Eichler’s might have been found only in the possession of rabbis or a yeshiva, today even the most simple Jew could own a collection of books that his forebears could hardly imagine. Having seforim spoke volumes. These were not books for reading; they were tomes to study, tools for worship, and the visible symbols of an attachment to Jewish tradition. They were the literal props of every haredi home. Interspersed and sparkling amid the brown bindings and gold letters were the other props of a traditional Jewish home: Sabbath candlesticks, Chanukah menorahs, a Purim megillah, silver wine goblets, anda dish for dispensing honey on the High Holy Days. Eichler might be up-to-date with technology, but as his appearance and his other possessions showed, he was something far more traditionally Jewish as well. (Heilman 2000: 96)

Heilman draws a sharp contrast between the computer from his secular world and Eichler’s religious one, but another interpretation is its incorporation into the ‘traditional Jewish’ interior as another tool to maintain Jewish identity.

The emphasis in Jewish museums, beginning in the nineteenth century, on displaying historic ‘treasures’ and ‘masterworks’ of Judaica, usually highly orna-

mented and articulate, has influenced the public understanding of traditional Jewish material culture (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998). If architectural scholarship has under-appreciated the Jewish home, history and art museums have been even less attentive to Jewish domestic life, which curators have tended to view as unworthy of display because it is ordinary and non-artistic (see e.g. Altshuler

1983; Berger and Rosenbaum 2004; Burman, Marin, and Steadman 2006: Cohen, Kréger, and Schrijver 2004). Museums of Jewish daily life are rare, because usually only synagogues, large public structures with spiritual symbolism, are considered worthy of preservation. One notable exception is the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in New York established in 1988, which includes a

Jewish household among the apartments shown. Although tenements are not Jewish dwelling types, they were the characteristic abode for the majority of Jews who came to America during the great wave of immigration from 1880 to 1920. Part of the interest in walking through the dark, dingy apartment preserved in the museum is the contrast with dwellings thought to be more typically Jewish in old

country villages or shtetls. The folk-museum movement, with its nationalistic purposes, began in the late nineteenth century with Skansen, the Swedish openair exhibition of buildings, but has rarely included Jewish environments, largely because the museums tended to promote the rural roots of a national culture rather than its ethnic components (Allan 1956; Michelsen 1966; Romanian National Committee 1966). Some indoor Jewish museums, such as the Jewish

THE DUALITIES OF HOUSE AND HOME Museum of Belgium and the Irish Jewish Museum, purport to represent ‘Jewish home life’, often with room settings for sabbath or holiday celebrations. The most active institution involved in ethnographic exhibitions depicting the daily life of

whole communities is the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, which has an ethnosraphic department, and, as Shalom Sabar shows in his essay, it has had a profound impact on promoting public appreciation for Moroccan Jewish domestic arts and identity in Israel. Special exhibitions have been mounted for marriage contracts, amulets, and other domestic artefacts, but they have been displayed as works of art rather than for the way they fit into folk life or a traditional environment (Sabar 2000). Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett has hypothesized that this tendency to depict Jewish culture with masterpieces of religious Judaica derives

historically from nineteenth-century expositions in Europe in which Jewish exhibitors ‘framed the presentation of Jewish subjects in terms of art and civilization and secured for Judaism a central place in the history of religion’ rather than a place in multicultural societies (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998: 79). Modern Jews setting up households have received help from an abundance of popular manuals since the early twentieth century, commonly referred to in cultural studies as ‘handbooks’, ‘guidebooks’, or ‘advisers’. A check of listings on the

website of Amazon.com, the world’s largest bookseller, reveals more English titles for manuals for managing a Jewish household than for Christian or Muslim ones. This statistic may be a sign of more concern in Jewish culture for home observance, which often involves specialized procedures, or a need for more suidance in modern life, particularly for families living in non-Jewish neighbourhoods. They often imply that, in the West, new families establishing households are distant from parents and grandparents who in the past would have provided suidance on creating a Jewish environment. Several subtitles such as ‘A Guide for Jewish Living’ in Jewish home manuals create a duality between the synagogue

where one learns Judaism and the home where one lives as a Jew. The Jewish Home: A Guide for Jewish Living by Daniel B. Syme, for instance, is introduced with the adage that ‘the synagogue makes Jews’, but ‘a vibrant Jewish home is the seed-bed of Jewish culture, identity, and practice. A cardiac Judaism—‘I feel it in my heart’—is grossly inadequate. Only a Jewish life that is knowledgeable and rooted in Jewish history and practice can be truly authentic’ (Syme 2004: p. vii). Directed usually at the new Jewish parent, the manuals underscore the need for the home to have a special intimacy where Jewish identity can develop, unhin-

dered by a national culture deemed different at best and oppressive at worst (Abramowitz and Silverman 1997; Bloom 2006; Goldman 1958; Greenberg 1983; Greenberg and Silverman 1941; Kitov 1963; Kolatch 2005; Olitzky and Isaacs 1993; Reuben 1992; Shendelman and Davis 1998; Syme 2004). Quoting a 1930s handbook that states that ‘the function of the home must therefore be to transmit a civilization, to provide for the continuity of a cultural inheritance as well as an ethnological one’, Jenna Weissman Joselit concludes: ‘Whatever the

SIMON J. BRONNER physical setting—the tenement of the pre-World-War-I era, the modern elevator apartment of the interwar years, or the suburban ranch house of the 1950s—the home played host to changing notions of Jewish domestic culture. As the intimate site of acculturation, home served a symbolic purpose as well’ (Joselit 1990: 23). The symbolic purpose was to provide a modern Jewish identity, often creating a fortress of resistance to the cultural assault of the majority society, as well as providing food and shelter. The home was supposed to be the place where tradition would be passed on from one generation to another and children taught to be proud of their Jewishness and marry within the Jewish community. Among the manuals that have become hallmarks of varying senses of Jewish at-homeness in different generations are The Jewish Home Beautiful, by Betty D. Greenberg and Althea O. Silverman (1941), The Jewish Catalog, edited by Richard Siegel, Michael Strassfeld, and Sharon Strassfeld (1973), and Living a Jewish Life, by Anita Diamant (2007). The Jewish Home Beautiful, which figures prominently in Joellyn Wallen Zollman’s essay, appealed to Jewish women as homemakers,

but, more than that, it suggested social mobility from lower-class immigrant roots into middle-class America in its call for ‘gracious Jewish living’. Through the book’s many printings, the symbolic importance of the home as sacred haven in a hostile diasporic environment was emphasized in the preamble: It was the Englishman’s boast that his home was his castle. The outlawed, persecuted Jew could not make his home his castle; but he did more than that. He made his home his sanctuary. Because God had a great share in his little house, the Jew succeeded in transforming it into a great home. Because God was to be worshiped ‘b’hadrat kodesh,’ in the beauty of holiness, the Jewish home was to be holy and beautiful. (Greenberg and Silverman 1941: 17)

With the reference to the home as a castle, the writers, who demonstrated their table settings with fanfare in showy public demonstrations they called ‘pageants’, located the home as a Jewish sanctuary not just in Jewish neighbourhoods, but especially within non-Jewish environments as Jews moved into suburbs associated in popular culture with the white Protestant elite. The creation of

table centrepieces and the placement of dishes and utensils thus became the fulfilment of mitzvot at one level and at another showed that being Jewish could be modern and fashionable. In its elaboration of Jewish-signifying objects, The Jewish Home Beautiful was not novel, but it articulated for a post-immigrant generation the sense of culture as refinement, with its elitist connotations, that at the turn of the nineteenth century would prompt Jews to support the City Beautiful movement intended to create separation from the lower class widely perceived to be populated largely by ‘backward’ or ‘superstitious’ immigrants holding on to old-country traditions (Wilson 1994). Widely popular and written in the youthful spirit of the countercultural Whole Earth Catalog of the late 1960s, The Jewish Catalog sought Jewish renewal through

THE DUALITIES OF HOUSE AND HOME a more populist message. It rejected the elitist, materialistic undertones of the Jewish Home Beautiful with a call to get one’s hands dirty, to experience a vernacu-

lar ‘do-it-yourself’ Jewishness. Instead of promoting a consumerist Judaism of manufactured goods, arbitrated by elite authorities, the writers encouraged Jews to make things for themselves from their own designs. It was a call to counter consumerism by engaging with Judaism first-hand. For these writers, the Jewish home was constituted by sacred objects, beginning with the mezuzah, but also including the mizrah, a wallhanging in any medium, placed on the eastern wall of a room to mark the direction of Jerusalem. The implication was that emphasizing the home in Jewish observance was crucial to ensure Jewish continuity at a time when youth were rebelling against capitalism and the establishment. First published in 1991 and revised in 2007, the popular Living a Jewish Life (which received more attention when its author, Anita Diamant, scored an international bestseller with her novel The Red Tent in 1997), like most other manuals, carries the message that Jewishness begins at home. Unlike other manuals, however, Diamant gives biblical support to the ritual importance of the home in Judaism by writing that, with the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem, the ‘Jewish home became the new center of Judaism’ (2007: 15). It extends the emphasis in The Jewish Catalog of encouraging engagement in Judaism by active participation in hands-on projects rather than placing priority on Torah literacy in the synagogue. It defines the Jewish home not so much by ritual objects or home observances as by the values it expresses. More than The Jewish Catalog, it suggests that such expression can be individualized and invented in various ways. In her view, for example, a Jewish home can be characterized by hospitality. She extends the sacred obligation of hakhnasat orehim (the bringing in of guests), to include having an extra room for guests as well as inviting an out-of-town visitor to the Passover seder. Following her advice, the sense of hidur mitsvah, the commandment to make an object used for ritual purposes as beautiful as possible, can be extended into everyday, secular Jewish life in a poster of the Hebrew alphabet illustrated with bright, funny pictures as well as prints by Jewish artists such as Marc Chagall, Ben Shahn, and Chaim Gross (Diamant 2007: 19-20).

Myriad consumer catalogues in print and on the internet supported this cultural Jewishness. Cover designs for The Source for Everything Jewish, for instance,

depict home festival or life-cycle celebrations and promote products that either thematize the home or are intended for home consumption. The opening page of the early spring 2006 issue features a ‘Jewish Parents’ lithograph in which an English—Hebrew biblical quotation encircles a message ‘honoring the Jewish home’; according to the blurb: ‘As is customary among Jewish parents, you have created a home filled with love and laughter, integrity and learning, compassion and generosity. Your home remains a loving environment rich in Jewish traditions and dedicated to peace, hope and respect for all people.’ In answer to the

question: ‘Does the appearance of your Shabbat table need a little update?’

SIMON J. BRONNER suggesting the integration of Judaica with modernism, the catalogue offers a challah board and knife made from a ‘patented, highly polished blend of Space Age metals’. As a consumer catalogue, it also encourages gift-giving on home visits to other Jews, and especially for the woman/mother of the house, as indicated by selections of aprons, jewellery boxes, ‘Woman of Valor’ posters, biblical-heroine bookends, mother pins, and music boxes. Reminders of Israel as homeland abound, but one can also purchase a New York City skyline menorah and reminders of the east European shtetl in Yiddish-tinged art, books, games, and recordings. Home Jewishness often prioritizes the family in Jewish identity acquisition and emphasizes home as a location for social affiliation with other Jews. In the creation of family-centred events at home, such as a personalized naming ceremony fora girl (simhat bat), many Jews connect recent ritual innovations to tradi-

tional practices in the home, frequently associated with a maternal sense of nurturing. Especially central in tradition is the sabbath observance that inspires social bonding with family and guests. The traditional women’s role of lighting the sabbath candles and its symbolic importance in structuring time and ritual for Jews contributes to the maternal image of the home and the nurturing character of domestic Jewish culture. But home-based ritual extends beyond the celebratory; for example mourning occurs there, too, with the ritual process of ‘sitting shiva’ and covering mirrors. Social support at home, including friends and more distant family bringing food for the mourners, is crucial to the process. Underscoring this connection is the identification of a home visit to the bereaved as a mitzvah. Home is also a location for narrating Jewishness, especially evident in the tradition of conducting the Passover seder at home. The seder stresses the Exodus theme of finding the homeland after a period of wandering, and the differentiation of Jewish houses to avoid the plague of death for the firstborn. From this narrative basis, many advocates of Jewish family life have called for organized efforts to revive storytelling on Jewish themes, even if those stories do not derive from the Torah or the Talmud (Greenberg 1983; Maisel and Shubert 2004; Zeitlin 1997). Referring to such stories as ‘grandmother tales’, a name which suggests continuity and domestication from one generation to the next and from the old culture to new, anthologist Steve Zeitlin has brought together traditional storytellers with parents and teachers to what he calls ‘a mythic version of my grandmother’s kitchen table’ (1997: 17). It was a metaphor for ‘family life’, he writes, or memory socially enacted, evident in his quotation of a grandmother who relates: ‘A table with people. Everything I remember, the events of my life, holidays and

times of grief, news from the family, all the gatherings took place here at the kitchen table’ (1997: 17).

For many households, a ‘kitchen Judaism’ exists in which Jewish identity is most commonly enacted around special dinners—for holidays or social occa-

THE DUALITIES OF HOUSE AND HOME sions—or the consumption of Jewish dishes as comfort or heritage foods (Joselit 1994: 171-218; Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1989). They are often remembered as occasions to talk and tell stories, to eat and enact tradition, and are associated with srowth and social interaction, particularly for children (Reuben 1992: 75-108). Arthur Schwartz’s Jewish Home Cooking, for example, equates the Jewish home with ‘Yiddish recipes’ from eastern Europe, and comments: Food can connect us to our past. In fact, food is often our very last and only connection to our pasts, enduring long after the old language has been forgotten and other traditions have died. There’s many a Jew, for instance, who identifies as a Jew mainly through his or her love of pastrami, or potted brisket, or chicken soup with matzo balls. (Schwartz 2.008: Pp. Vii)

Ritualization of food for ethnic maintenance at special bagel-and-lox breakfasts or Israeli nights with falafel joins the meaning of food as sustenance to the maintenance of cultural vitality. The symbolism of food and food-related behaviour designated as ‘Jewish’ is also evident in kitchen accessories and decorative items. In the Source for Everything Jewish catalogue, one can purchase a soup bowl with the words ‘Jewish penicillin’ on it (referring to the therapeutic qualities of chicken soup), a romper with ‘got bagels’ embroidered on it, a matzah ball candle, a coffee cup with ‘no kvetching’ printed on the side, and a kitchen apron with printed Hebrew letters arranged in the form of an eye chart (Figure 2). In this

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SIMON J). BRONNER visual culture, designers depict a style of exuberant vocal interaction in Jewish dining that is associated with the intimacy and expressiveness of the Jewish home, as made famous by the split screen in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall (1977) showing the contrast between the sedate behaviour and refined dress and table setting of diners at a suburban Protestant repast and the noisy debates, coarse table manners, and informal attire at an urban Jewish meal. The significance of food as an ethnic marker is evident in the lively modern discourse on ‘keeping kosher’ as a daily reminder of the differentiation of Jews and non-Jews. Yet Jews often discuss whether following dietary rules can be divided between practices inside and outside the home, especially in stories of crypto-Jews who maintained Jewish customs in the privacy of the house (Jacobs 2002; Roth 1941: 178-80). Special furnishings and physical alterations are frequently necessary to create a kosher home, including the designation of separate

cabinets for dairy and meat dishes, and often the conversion of kitchens to include two separate sinks, countertops, dishwashers, and stoves: one for dairy and the other for meat (Appel 1978: 248-54). A widespread practice is to distinsuish sets of meat and dairy utensils using a colour scheme such as red for meat and blue for dairy (Kosher Kitchen 2008). For observant Jews who do not have daily access to kosher butchers, another kosher home marker is the addition of a deep freezer to store kosher meats delivered from large Jewish supply centres. Building on the concept of kitchen Judaism, several contributors to this volume discuss modern attitudes toward Jewish identity that could be called ‘livingroom Judaism’. If kitchen Judaism suggests that identity can be gained in the private sharing of comfort foods associated with the old country and family lineage, living-room Judaism includes displaying objects to present a contemporary Jewish face to visitors and sometimes to construct family or ethnic shrines signifying the importance of Jewish continuity (Figure 3). Living-room Judaism also represents a setting for conversations on Jewishness, such as book displays and television-watching that invite commentary on Jewish issues and values, or, as discussed in Giovanna Del Negro’s essay, the playing of records. Living-room Judaism is not necessarily secular, as Gabrielle Berlinger points out in her chapter when she notices the significance of displaying objects bearing the imprint of 770 Eastern Parkway, the home of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, to show subcultural affiliation. Sometimes these knick-knacks are referred to with the Yiddish term tshatshkes, suggesting that, although they may be ordinary objects, their assemblage is a Jewish practice. [shatshkes are often small trinkets, related to family or community experience, and distinguished from artwork hung on the wall or placed on a pedestal and meant to incorporate more abstracted Jewish symbols into a modernist sensibility or style. The living-room metaphor might be seen as designating a transitional space because it is part of the private house but is also public in the sense that it is reserved for receiving guests. It implies a self-styled sense of Jewishness because

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objects are arranged to show a cultural personality. A question taken up in this volume is how far this space extends and what occurs to the communication of Jewishness, individualized or socialized, when it is expanded. Del Negro, for instance, views the rise of the Jewish American nightclub comedienne following the Second World War as an extension of a living-room entertainment tradition

SIMON J. BRONNER presented to consumers. Even if some comediennes could make the move smoothly from ethnic schmoozing at home to entertaining unfamiliar club-goers on stage, they understood different cultural expectations in American society of the outspoken woman out by herself late at night, and Del Negro found that they brandished their Jewishness as a licence to broach taboo subjects. Del Negro asks

further about the implication of records as artefacts of inter-ethnic self-consciousness as Jewish humour moved on to the stage, since in the living-room tra-

dition performances often invoked self-deprecatory humour and sometimes caustically took shots at the majority culture. Andrea Lieber (Chapter 9) questions the border crossing between home and cyberspace that Orthodox women bloggers take, and how they negotiate this extension of domestic Jewish discourse with rabbinical authorities as well as with their husbands. In living-room Judaism, residents manage identity to an extent by choosing what they want to reveal of themselves, their heritage, and their faith. For Emily Haft Bloom, author of The Good Jewish Home, ‘the true beauty of being a Jew is the freedom to choose how you wish to live your life’ (2006: 9). Recognizing the do-

your-own-thing sensibility of arranging objects to show a Jewish profile, she responds with a traditionalist message in her twenty-first-century manual, declaring that ‘old traditions can enrich your family’s life’ (2006: 9). The addition of ‘sood’ to her title suggests that expressing Jewishness in the home is not a matter of decorating the domestic environment with Jewish material as much as creating what she calls a ‘template for existence’ with ritual observance (2000: 8). It is a message echoed in another twenty-first-century manual, A Handbook for the Jewish Home (2005), by Rabbi Alfred J. Kolatch, who begins with life-cycle rituals and dietary laws to show the importance of a total Jewish life lived within a household devoted to and ordered for that purpose.

Jewish home manuals often rationalize the need for advice on home life because of the effects of modernization, including the increased secularism and individualism which have resulted in reduced synagogue attendance. One of the uses of ethnographic studies of Jewish culture, however, is to test whether the display and consumption of Jewish symbols is actually a compensation for decreased synagogue involvement. It appears from the essays in this volume that various social and psychological correlations can be posited for the domestic environments that people create. Suzanne Rutland points to statistics showing that, as a national culture, Australian Jewry has maintained strong ties between home and synagogue, although Jenna Weissman Joselit observes that the emphasis on kitchen Judaism and living-room Judaism in American culture is a sign of the collapse of synagogue authority. Shalom Sabar in his essay, for instance, provides case studies of individual hamsa hangings as well as tracing the general tradition from Morocco to Israel so as to consider the social and psychological reasons that individuals have for their displays. In this regard, I might mention an example from my fieldwork in cen-

THE DUALITIES OF HOUSE AND HOME tral Pennsylvania. [tis typical in Jewish homes to reserve a cabinet or bookshelf in

the formal dining-room for displaying Jewish-themed art or Judaica. I have hypothesized that this strategy evolved because the formal dining-room, a space that emerged fairly recently, is associated with holiday observances and the iden-

tity of the family unit. Placed in the formal dining-room, Jewish-signifying objects invoke the heritage of the family with museum-like displays. The diningroom can be used for many of the activities typical of both kitchen and livingroom Judaism, and in many Western homes it is located between the kitchen and living-room. It is a place where guests are often present, and, as well as a table, it typically contains furniture such as cabinets designed to display objects. The display of ethnic symbols contextualizes dining as a cultural event, even if no holiday is being observed. Some objects stand out and become conversation pieces. In Carl Shuman’s home, for example, itis hard to miss his dining-room cabinet (Figures 4 and 5). He belongs to a Conservative synagogue in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and attends regularly. He does not see himself as an artist but was driven to

decorate his grandparents’ cabinet with reminders of his children after they departed for college. He explains that it expresses his Jewish identity in his home and honours his family lineage. At the same time, it turns conversation to his children as questions naturally arise about its design. In a modern home without a focal point such as a hearth or ‘front room’, it centres the house materially and binds the family to its ethnic identity. With interiors decorated by Jewish families showcasing Jewish-signifying objects, it is easy to lose sight of the exterior facades that could be characterized architecturally as Jewish. Apartment blocks constructed for Orthodox Jews in Israel have sukkah balconies (that is, the balconies are positioned in such a way that they are not overhung). Similarly, in London and New York, ground-floor extensions are constructed with roofs that open on pulleys for the same purpose, and lofts are converted into additional bedrooms so that growing families can be accommodated without having to move away from a district with established communal institutions. Historian Irwin Richman argues that the bungalows in the Catskill Mountains of New York constitute a vernacular Jewish house type adapted from the British use of the Bengali bungalow as a ‘low house’ or summer cottage (1998: 7). He points out that they differ in shape from the mainstream American image of the Californian bungalow with sloping roofs and eaves with enclosed rafters (see Lancaster 1985). The Jewish Catskills bungalow has a rectansular floor plan, a gable roof, and is set on concrete or wooden piers rather than a foundation. The builders placed the entrance at the gable end which faces the garden (Figure 6). A front porch leads into the kitchen and the bedrooms are at the back. Although parlours or living-rooms were added later, the traditional pattern in Catskills bungalows was to have the kitchen serve as a socializing as well asa dining space. Customarily Jewish bungalows are painted white with green trim and were built in clusters that came to be known as ‘colonies’. Oral evidence

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shows that they were perceived by an urban, immigrant generation as summer getaway houses similar to the garden houses outside the towns of central Europe. Perhaps this is why Richman claims that linguistically ‘bungalow is a very Jewish word to people who grew up in the New York City Borscht Belt sphere’ (1998: 8).

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essarily a Jewish symbol at this time, and although the maker of the cellar was most likely a Muslim, scholars suggest the plate could have belonged to a Jewish household (Bango Torviso 2003: 52, 54; Mann 1992: 227). It seems plausible that after the Expulsion of 1492 the exiled Sephardim carried the custom of using the hamsa for protection to their new countries (Herber

1927: 218; Hildburgh 1955: 78-9). This, however, has been hard to prove. No hamsas have been found among the Sephardim of Italy or of other west European

countries, such as Holland and England. Perhaps the reason for their absence from the last two stems from the fact that these are communities of former Anusim (forced converts to Christianity) who did not preserve old Jewish customs. Nonetheless, the hamsa was popular even in Sephardi communities that had settled in regions where this tradition was unknown among the local population—for example, the island of Rhodes. Obviously the hamsa and the belief in the power of the number five prevailed among the Sephardim who settled in Islamic regions (for example, Turkey, Syria, the land of Israel, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria), where they shared these beliefs with the local population.

The ‘Judaization’ of the Hamsa in Islamic Lands Outside the ‘Sephardi diaspora’ the hamsa was extremely popular among the Jews who resided in other Islamic lands, including Iran, Afghanistan, Bukhara, Iraq, and Kurdistan. In these lands the hamsa, in various forms and media, was com-

monly used both at home and in the synagogue. It appears on a myriad of

SHALOM SABAR Judaic objects, especially those pertaining to the life cycle—from paper and metal amulets to guard the newborn at home to attractive marriage articles such as illustrated marriage contracts, personal jewellery and amulets for protecting the bridal couple (Sabar 2002a, forthcoming). In the interior of the synagogue, hamsas decorated the most sacred objects, including silver Torah finials (rimonim; see Figure 4.2), Torah pointers, Torah ark curtains (parokhot), and Torah cases and mantles (Behrouzi 2002; Sabar 2000, 2002b).

Drawing on the many Jewish sources available to them, the local sages (hakhamim?) succeeded in establishing a strong bond between the hamsa and Jewish religious practices. First and foremost, to any believing Jew the shape of the open hand immediately connotes the hands of the priests (kohanim) bestowing their blessing on the assembled worshippers. Though the custom of reciting the priestly blessing (Num. 6: 24—7) from the synagogue platform—derived from

the rituals of the Temple—is known from the Talmud, the positioning of the fingers is mentioned only in the gaonic period (seventh—twelfth centuries). Earlier generations had not yet adopted a uniform way of extending the fingers (Sperber 1989-2007: Vi. 23-34). The gesture known to us today—in which the priest’s

hand is outspread so that the second and the third fingers are held apart—was only one of the various forms used in the Middle Ages. Images of the priest’s hands spread in this way are known from fifteenth-century Italian Hebrew manuscripts, and the earliest depiction in printed books is found in the printer’s device

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ay ——_— = a Se x aa ra jw+--+ 5 i? oe 6) > @ ir ~ 4?>I p F ff oe \ Tv “ ; twentieth century, with a cast symbol pN/ LAD. "yA ey e\' SAN < , | (ZT baw AAW of a salamander. These amulets were ; Nyhae Sy ayen-1\s a PF e\\ B\/\i ; 7 7 71 Ni Sp ‘ 23 produced by Jewish silversmiths for as) Wh Me ENS. sale to both the Jewish and Muslim EWA VA P 4 a i (Ns . communities. The decorative motifs SL AN | Ae Za AION - \ J 92 \ NJ,Zii SNSh | GCA are typical of the city of Casablanca. Re War OMe Qe| IN | NZ

The salamander was atherefore symbol of Aya |BEEZ P SA VAN Bt)hamsa | Wr thy) BP sj L7AO :HCE x, alespS Pr,g£ ‘i renewal, and. this was m=) NI ENS ALN

: ; 7intended Fey RA nat 114 ke. Ne —|| (Ne ;|f probably forTfem use as = a birth ll | ‘ y BIZ LING SSS SUNN VAN . ( Dae RE rit Ra eeNai =| i tom A EN who re j Sra ae \ ee 7 . BS3 Collection, Tel Aviv - TRANOTE SiSe)7Ie=Ce PE CA ae 2 Pou fe CoA © - ~~ SESSwe Nee » fy ASA 24 © Se Ate Blad Bed , af: Beew Weer, a BeNOY ae iA NOY z - | atoI ‘ila cow nt Ly” * a - aa nia. f i am TR ue Badal Sa Figure 4.17 Traditional hamsas on Israel’s official stamps, 2006. Photo: Shalom Sabar

board, including the heads of the governmental Communications Office, were worried about the state employing an image associated with ‘superstition’. Rather

than speaking of the hamsa as a new symbol in Israeli society, I explained the importance of folk culture and its significant role in shaping Israeli identity in general. The authorities decided to issue a series of stamps—but instead of using new designs, they favoured traditional ones characteristic of three Jewish communities in Islamic countries (Figure 4.17). This example perhaps best reveals the place of the hamsa in contemporary Israeli society: a traditional object of sacred and protective significance, generally associated with the Jews of Islamic countries, which has been transformed, developed, and even secularized while preserving the essence of its original forms and symbolism.

Notes 1 Edot hamizrah, lit. ‘communities of the East’, refers to the Jews who lived in Islamic lands (see ). 2 Magqama is an Arabic genre consisting of rhymed prose and poetry. 3 In Sephardi and most Jewish communities in Islamic lands the title used was not ‘rabbi’ but hakham, ‘sage’. For example, the chief rabbi in the Ottoman empire was known by the title Hakham Bashi.

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THE HAMSA IN JEWISH AND ISRAELI SOCIETIES BAHROUZI, NITZA, ed. 1989. From the Remotest West: Ritual Articles from Synagogues in Spanish Morocco. The Hananiah Dahan Collection (English and Hebrew). Tel Aviv.

BANGO, TORVISO, and ISIDRO, GONZALO. 2003. Remembering Sepharad: Jewish Culture in Medieval Spain. Madrid.

BEHROUZI [BAHROUZI], NITZA, ed. 2002. The Hand of Fortune: Khamsas from the Gross Family Collection and the Eretz Israel Museum Collection (English and Hebrew). Tel Aviv.

BILU, YORAM. 2006. ‘The Rise of a New Negev Cult Center Today: Baba Sali’s Sanctuary in Netivot, Israel’. In T. E. Levy, ed., Archaeology, Anthropology and Cult, 75-92. London.

BRONNER, SIMON J. 1986. Grasping Things: Folk Material Culture and Mass Society in America. Lexington, Ky. CHAMPAULT, DOMINIQUE, andA. R. VERBRUGGE. 1965. La Main: Ses figurations au Maghreb et au Levant. Paris.

COHEN, ERIK H. 2003. ‘The Bitter and the Sweet: A Structural Analysis of Mimuna’. Journal of Ritual Studies, 17: go-8.

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DAVIDOVITCH, DAVID. 1968. The Ketuba: Jewish Marriage Contracts through the Ages (English and Hebrew). Tel Aviv. ETTINGHAUSEN, RICHARD. 1954. ‘The “Khams” or Hand Symbol’. Ars Orientalis, 1: 148-55.

GONEN, RIVKA. 1994. ‘The Open Hand: On the North African “Hamsa” and its Sources’. Israel Museum Journal, 12: 47-50.

—ed. 1999. To the Tombs of the Righteous: Pilgrimage in Contemporary Israel. Jerusalem. GRABAR, ANDRE.1968. Christian Iconography: A Study of its Origins. Princeton, NJ.

GUTMANN, JOSEPH, ed. 1970. Beauty in Holiness: Studies in Jewish Customs and Ceremonial Art. New York.

HALPER, JEFF. 1982. ‘The Saharanei as a Mediator of Kurdish-Jewish Ethnicity’. World Congress of Jewish Studies, 8:'79—-84.

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HILDBURGH, W. L. 1955. ‘Images of the Human Hand as Amulets in Spain’. Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 18: 07-89. HIRSCHBERG, HAYIM ZE’EV.1967. ‘The Fish in the Mosaics of the Synagogue at Naro and in Jewish Folklore of Tunisia and Tripolitania in our Times’ (Heb.). Eretz Israel, 8: 305-II. HUSS, BOAZ. 2000. Sockets of Fine Gold: The Kabbalah of Rabbi Shimon Ibn Lavi [Al adnei paz: hakabalah shel rabi shimon ibn lavi]. Jerusalem.

HUSS, MATTI.I99OI. ‘Critical Editions of Minhat yehudah, Ezrat hanashim, and Ein mish-

pat, with Prefaces, Variants, Sources and Annotations’. Ph.D. diss., 2 vols. Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

SHALOM SABAR JUHASZ, ESTHER, ed. 1990. Sephardi Jews in the Ottoman Empire: Aspects of Material Culture. Jerusalem. LACAVE, JOSE LUIS. 2002. Medieval Ketubbot from Sefarad. Jerusalem. LAUTERBACH, JACOB ZALLEL. 1970. Studies in Jewish Law, Custom, and Folklore. New York.

LUNCZ, ABRAHAM MOSES. 1882. ‘The Customs of Our Brethren in the Holy Land in Religious and Daily Life’ (Heb.). Yerushalayim, 1: 1-70. MANN, VIVIAN B. et al., eds. 1992. Convivencia: Jews, Muslims, and Christians in Medieval Spain. New York.

MARTENS, KAREN. 2001. “With a Strong Hand and an Outstretched Arm”: The Meaning of the Expression beyad hazakah uvizero’a netuyah’. Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament, 15: 122-41.

MATRAS, HAGIT. 2002. ‘The Khamsa in Contemporary Israeli Culture’ (Heb.). In Nitza Behrouzi, ed., The Hand of Fortune: Khamsas from the Gross Family Collection and the Eretz Israel Museum Collection, 26-37 (abbreviated English version, pp. 17*—20%). Tel Aviv.

MULLER-LANCET, AVIVA, ed. 1973. Jewish Life in Morocco [Hayei hayehudim bemaroko].

Jerusalem. OHANA, RAPHAEL. 1957 [1905]. Sefer mareh hayeladim. Jerusalem.

ONKENEIRA, YITSHAK. 1577. Ayumah kanidgalot. Istanbul. PEHA, YITSHAK. 1990. Sefer olei ayin [The Book of Those who Rise Above the Evil Eye]. Jerusalem. SABAR, SHALOM. 2000. ‘Torah and Magic: The Torah Scroll and its Accessories as Magical Objects in Jewish Culture in Europe and in Muslim Countries’. Pe’amim: Studies in Oriental Jewry, 85: 149-79.

—2002a.‘Childbirth and Magic: Jewish Folklore and Material Culture’. In David Biale, ed., Cultures of the Jews: A New History, 070-722. New York.

— 2002b. ‘The Judaization of the Khamsa: The Motif of the Magic Hand in the Thought and Folklore of the Jews in the Lands of Islam’ (Heb.). Mahanayim, 14: 192-203. — Forthcoming. ‘Words, Images, and Magic: The Protection of the Bride and Bridesroom in Jewish Marriage Contracts’. In Ra’anan S. Boustan et al., eds., Tradition, Authority, Diaspora. Philadelphia. SCHRIRE, T.1966. Hebrew Amulets: Their Decipherment and Interpretation. London. SHACHAR, ISAIAH, ed. 1981. Jewish Tradition in Art: The Feuchtwanger Collection of Judaica. Jerusalem. English translation of Osef feuchtwanger: masoret ve’omanut yehudit (Jerusalem, 1971). SPERBER, DANIEL. 1989-2007. Jewish Customs: Sources and History [Minhagei yisra el: mekorot vetoledot}, 8 vols. Jerusalem. VERBRUGGE, A. R.1958. Le Symbole dela main dans la prehistoire. Paris.

YA’ARI, ABRAHAM. 1939-40. ‘Priests’ Hands in Hebrew Printers’ and Authors’ Marks’ (Heb.). Kiryat sefer, 10: 259-69. YUCHTMAN-YAAR, EPHRAIM. 2005. ‘Continuity and Change in Israeli Society: The Test of the Melting Pot’. Israel Studies, 10: 91-128.

FIVE )

770 Eastern Parkway: The Rebbe’s Frome as lcon GABRIELLE A. BERLINGER ON 12 JUNE 1994 the seventh leader of the Lubavitch branch of hasidic Judaism, Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson, died in New York at the age of 92. The Lubavitch community, founded in late eighteenth-century Russia, mourned the loss of their leader of forty-three years, who died without leaving an heir to ascend his spiritual throne. Rebbe Schneerson, who pioneered outreach programmes in the Lubavitch community, had guided his followers in a worldwide mission to ‘create that dwelling place through the Divine service of the denizens of the lowly physical world’ where the Holy One would ultimately reside.' From 1951 to 1994 over 100,000 Lubavitch Jews had resettled, with the Rebbe’s blessing, from the community’s home base in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, to hundreds of locations across at least forty-six countries (Goldschmidt 2006: 113). What had been, in 1940, a self-contained immigrant community that practised its religion in seclu-

sion was by 2007 a worldwide movement using multimedia technology and accommodating globalizing trends to practise its faith and spread it throughout the world. The founding and expansion of a religious community are not new or unique

phenomena in Jewish cultural studies. What calls for analysis, however, is the question of how Lubavitch Jews have maintained their identity and practice during their growth, and realized the Rebbe’s vision of spreading holiness after his death by sanctifying new centres, or ‘Chabad houses’,? around the world. Here I will address the theme of the role of ‘home’ for Jews, by examining the ways in which Lubavitch conceptions of space, place, and spirituality are sustaining a core identity for Lubavitch Jews in the absence of a living leader.’ Since the Rebbe’s death, the act of sanctifying space through religious action has not only been a devotional practice; it has also performed a memorializing function. Central to the idea of domesticating Jewish identity through the conceptualization of home

developed in this study are eleven Chabad houses, among the hundreds that exist, that have been designed and built as architectural replicas of 770 Eastern Parkway, the structure that was first the physical home and office of the Rebbe and which later came to be the ‘spiritual home’ of all Lubavitch Jews.* My view is that these internationally dispersed reconstructions invoke the ‘sacred’ nature of 770 Eastern Parkway and invest the movement’s disparate spaces with a holiness that asserts, strengthens, and perpetuates its identity and faith.

— GABRIELLE A. BERLINGER

Pe AN ARN) , s gm XN > er aS | = y- eo A ——
gti

Figure 5.1 770 Eastern Parkway in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. This 1930s gothic-style building purchased by Rebbe Yosef Yitzchak Schneerson in 1940 has become the ‘spiritual home’ of the Lubavitch hasidic community worldwide.

770 as Spiritual Centre At the intersection of Eastern Parkway and Kingston Avenue in Crown Heights stands a three-storey, gothic-style, red-brick building numbered 770 (Figure 5.1). The ‘heights’ referred to are a succession of hills running east and west from Utica Avenue, over which Crown Street was extended in 1916. Tree-lined Eastern Parkway is the main thoroughfare in the neighbourhood, and Kingston Avenue, a

narrow street crossing it, is one of the main shopping areas, which includes a number of stores owned by hasidim. Across the street from the Lubavitch head-

quarters is a subway stop, from which Lubavitch members regularly travel between Brooklyn and Manhattan. The Lubavitch settlement began in 1925 when Israel Jacobson arrived in the United States from Russia and created a following

for Chabad hasidism. In 1940 the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe, Yosef Yitzchak Schneerson (now referred to as ‘the Previous Rebbe’), escaped the Holocaust in Poland and emigrated to the United States; his community subsequently followed (Mintz 1992: 139). Rebbe Schneerson purchased 770 Eastern Parkway, a former medical clinic, to be his new home and the community’s centre. Inherited

by his son-in-law and successor Menachem Mendel Schneerson in 1951, 770 has been and continues to be the spiritual and political centre of the Lubavitch community. Although there is no exact census of Lubavitch residents in Crown Heights, scholars estimate that there are between 14,000 and 20,000 living there, constituting less than ro per cent of the neighbourhood’s population and surrounded

THE REBBE’S HOME AS ICON by African Americans amounting to between 80 and 90 per cent (Adherent 2007). The Lubavitch population continues to grow because of a higher birth rate (between five and eight children per family) than the US average of under two per

family. Estimates of worldwide Lubavitch membership vary between 200,000 and 300,000, making it the third or fourth largest hasidic court (Adherent 2007). But, as Jerome Mintz observes in his survey of hasidism, ‘the court of Lubavitch is set apart from other contemporary Hasidic courts’, particularly in its global out-

reach programme. He points out that ‘Lubavitch is... the only present-day court that seeks out other Jews in order to awaken them to their Jewish heritage and bring them into the Orthodox fold’ (Mintz 1992: 43). In 1987 Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson delivered a speech at a farbrengen (Yiddish: ‘a joyous, informal gathering’) in which he said the Brooklyn location had been predetermined as a spiritual site. According to his interpretation, the name ‘Crown Heights’ was ‘prophesied’ in an ancient mishnaic text: quoting Rabbi Shimon, the Rebbe announced that ‘there are three crowns: the crown of Torah, the crown of priesthood, and the crown of royalty. But the crown of a good name rises above them all’ (Pirkei avot 4: 13). Henry Goldschmidt explains the Rebbe’s words by noting his reference to Rabbi Shimon’s use of the Hebrew verb oleh (‘rises above’). This choice of verb suggests that ‘the crown of a good name’ exceeds the other three in height and ethical value, making it the highest crown, or ‘Crown Heights’ (2006: 85). In addition to the name of its neighbourhood, the building’s number also had deep talmudic significance for the Rebbe. In a series of his speeches that were summarized, translated, and transcribed on the Lubavitch website ‘Sichos in English’, the association between 770 and the redemption of the Jewish people is explained. The website’s publisher framed the Rebbe’s words on this subject with the following preamble: What is the relationship between the miniature sanctuaries of Babylon and the Beis HaMikdash in Jerusalem? Since the Destruction, what is it that makes the Divine Presence choose to reside in particular sanctuaries? And how does this whole discussion in the Talmud find expression in our generation, on the eve of the Redemption? .. . [These questions are] particularly relevant today, when building operations are underway to expand the beis midrash of ‘770’ considerably.

Although the publisher posted this foreword in 1991, the Rebbe’s words that follow were compiled from speeches he had delivered in 1986 and 1990 that address how the building’s number aligns with Lubavitch Jewish beliefs and goals.° One passage in particular accomplishes this through an interpretation that uses gematriyah, or Hebrew numerology: The connection of the Previous Rebbe’s Beis Rabbeinu to the Redemption is reflected

in the very name of the building—‘770’, for that [is] numerically equivalent to the Hebrew word Tifratztah—meaning ‘break through’. On the verse concerning the birth

GABRIELLE A. BERLINGER of Peretz, the progenitor of the Mashiach [‘messiah’], poratzta alecha poretz, our Sages comment, ‘This refers to the Mashiach, as it is written, “The one who breaks through (haporeitz) shall ascend before them.” This is the task of Mashiach—to break through the barriers of exile and spread holiness throughout the world, as itis written, “And you

shall spread out vigorously (Ufaratzta) westward, eastward, northward and southward.””’

Furthermore, the number 770 is a multiple of the number seven. Our Sages teach, ‘All the sevenths are cherished’, and it has been explained that the preciousness of the seventh of a series is reflected in the Jewish people’s task of drawing the Divine Presence down to the earth, so that the Divine Presence becomes manifest as it was manifest in the Sanctuary.’

The Rebbe reads the building’s number as the numerical counterpart to Genesis 28: 14, which states ufaratsta yamah vakedmah tsafonah vanegbah (‘And you shall spread out vigorously westward, eastward, northward, and southward’). With this connection made between the building’s address and the prophesied dispersion, the Rebbe initiated Lubavitch outreach efforts around the world—the ‘Mitzvah campaigns’.

Beyond motivating the Lubavitch ‘spread’, this interpretation of 770 also implies the arrival of the messiah at this site in Brooklyn. A messianic minority within the Lubavitch community believes that the Rebbe was the messiah and awaits his return today. They promote 770 as a predestined spiritual centre through their interpretation of its equivalent in Hebrew numerology: beis moshiach (‘house of the messiah’). They thus believe that the Previous Rebbe’s decision to settle in Crown Heights was intentional and prepared the way for his son-inlaw to announce the redemption of creation from that particular location (Goldschmidt 2006: 110-11). Although the Rebbe himself never claimed to be the messiah, he did consider 770 Eastern Parkway a holy space. In a series of talks during the last years of his life, he explained that: In every generation there is a Beis Rabbeinu, ‘the house of our master’, a ‘sanctuary in microcosm’ which responds to the urgent needs of the generation and diffuses Torah instruction throughout the world. Thus it serves as the place where the Divine Presence is revealed par excellence. Since the Divine Presence is revealed for the sake of the Jewish people, it is in the house of the leader of the people as a whole, the leader of the generation who is ‘the heart of the generation’, that the Divine Presence becomes manifest during the time the Jews are in exile. The above concept allows us to appreciate the uniqueness of the Beis Rabbeinu established by the Previous Rebbe in America. Today, the largest segment of the international

Jewish community is found in America, and there is located the infrastructure for our generation’s Torah leadership. This country was therefore chosen as the place for Beis Rabbeinu, the center for Torah instruction for the entire world.’

THE REBBE’S HOME AS ICON The Rebbe here states that 770 Eastern Parkway is a sacred space because it is the house of a leader of the Jewish people—a statement that identifies the sacred with

the presence of a particular human being. This thought complements his belief that 770 Eastern Parkway was predestined as a spiritual site. Lubavitch Jews today draw upon both concepts—that 770’s sacredness is a prophesied condition of its

physical site (inherent sacredness) and that the holy person who inhabits that space makes it sacred (constructed sacredness)—to locate their spiritual centre in Crown Heights. Lubavitch Jews openly use the rhetoric of predestination to validate 770’s holiness, but there are other less divine, less frequently mentioned reasons for the Previous Rebbe’s choice of this site as the community’s home base. In a conversation with a messianic Lubavitch rabbi who lives in Kefar Chabad in Israel, I heard two of these explanations.'° The first is that the Previous Rebbe settled in Crown Heights in order to place himself at the centre of the largest Jewish diasporic population at that time, which was in New York. A second, more mundane explanation is that 770 Eastern Parkway had an elevator—an amenity the Previous Rebbe needed because of his frail physical condition. These more practical

reasons for the Previous Rebbe’s choice were relayed to me as incidental, however, and not as primary motivations for his selection of this site.

Although Lubavitchers consider the Crown Heights building their spiritual home on account of both its physical and metaphysical significance, its dilapidated condition does not reflect this idealized image. Located in an old urban neighbourhood, 770 has deteriorated during its sixty-seven-year ownership by Lubavitch Jews. Sue Fishkoff points out that the building is at the centre of an organization that raises almost a billion dollars a year, but it is ‘literally falling down’ (2003: 161). Furthermore, in 2004, its worn-out condition was accentuated by the Lubavitch community’s opening of a 50,000 foot square Jewish Children’s Museum, built at the substantial cost of $30 million, at 792 Eastern Parkway, just across the street from 770. Fishkoff attributes the building’s state to the Rebbe’s declaration that his aides should never ‘waste money’ on his headquarters: ‘Give it to my shelihim’, he ordered (Fishkoff 2003: 161). Shelihim, who travel across the world to spread their

faith, are described on the official website of the Chabad Lubavitch world headquarters as: ‘A team. Husband and wife. Shliach and shlucha. They are the emissaries of the Rebbe, the representatives of Lubavitch, the messengers of Chabad.’!! Shelihim spend millions of dollars building new Chabad houses, synagogues, or mikvehs (a bath or pool maintained communally for ritual immersion) to fulfil the Rebbe’s command that these constructions be ‘as aesthetically pleasing as possible’, but their own private homes are often modest, inspired by their Rebbe’s humble way (Fishkoff 2003: 161).

Regarding the site of their world headquarters in Crown Heights, Fishkoff observes that many of the emissaries ‘privately admit that they wish he’d picked

GABRIELLE A. BERLINGER somewhere a little less blighted, a little more green’ (2003: 318). This admission reveals that they believe the Previous Rebbe had a free choice when he selected Crown Heights as the site of their ‘spiritual home’. Despite its neglected physical state and urban setting, however, the political and spiritual centrality of 770 Eastern Parkway in the Lubavitch community retains its justification and meaning: first, because it is rooted in the geographical area that contained the largest Jewish diaspora in 1940, and second, because of its ‘sacred’ properties, both inherent and constructed, as the house of a Jewish leader. For most Lubavitchers, 770 is defined by its spirit, not its physical condition.

Well aware of their Russian immigrant roots (the movement was centred in Lyubavichi in imperial Russia, now part of Belarus) and questions of where they as Jews belong, whether in America or Israel, Lubavitchers regard 770 as their communal home, a symbolic centre of the movement. Fishkoff writes that 770 Eastern Parkway is ‘where Lubavitchers feel at home, it’s where their Rebbe lived and died. Even Chabadniks who didn’t grow up there feel a certain sentimental attachment to the place’ (Fishkoff 2003: 318). This attachment goes beyond sentimentality, however, as the relationship between Lubavitch Jews and 770 Eastern Parkway is a part of the connection between Lubavitch Jews and their Rebbe. In his article ‘Changing Israeli Landscapes: Buildings and the Uses of the Past’, Alex Weingrod remarks upon the ‘unique, wondrous aura’ of 770 Eastern Parkway for Lubavitch hasidim: ‘It is a special place because the Rebbe is there (although he does not actually live there), and therefore, in keeping with Hasidic religious beliefs, the structure itself partakes of the Rebbe’s holiness and sacred powers’ (1993: 373). Weingrod’s observation recalls the transference of sacredness from place to person that talmudic scholar Baruch Bokser and theologian Arthur Green ascribe to the Jewish history of exile. Without settled societies or permanent places of worship, Jews have been forced to create new sanctuaries for prayer in the private domestic space rather than in the public temple. They have preserved centres of spirituality by reassigning them from holy places to holy people.'? Green’s theory further asserts that the person’s environment consequently becomes sacred by relation. Goldschmidt also refers to this transference when he observes that Lubavitchers imagine Crown Heights as ‘nothing less than the spiritual centre of the Jewish people’ (2006: 110). Crown Heights is the community’s spiritual home because of the Rebbe’s presence, not the building’s location. He further explains the relationship between the hasidic community and geography by noting that hasidic communities have been and still are centred around their Rebbes: ‘For the Lubavitch hasidim, their Rebbe’s presence has always been the defining feature of Crown Heights, and this remains the case today despite his death in 1994’ (Goldschmidt 2006: 109). Goldschmidt recognizes the Rebbe, both living and memorialized, as the spiritual centre of the community. Although this relationship between holy person and holy place is a hallmark of Lubavitch Judaism, itis not exclusive to it. In his seminal 1959 book, The Sacred

THE REBBE’S HOME AS ICON and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, theologian Mircea Eliade describes the division of sacred and profane space in the universe. He defines the axis mundi,

or the ‘Centre of the World’, as a place of power that allows communication between this world and the cosmos. The imago mundi, or the ‘Image of the World’, he claimed, was the representation of the cosmos in earthly constructions (see Nelson 2006: 3). Eliade thus relates human beings to their environment by declaring that: The religious man sought to live as near as possible to the Center of the World. He knew... his

city constituted the navel of the universe, and above all, that the temple or the palace were veritably Centers of the World. But he also wanted his own house to be an imago mundi. And in fact, as we shall see, houses are held to be at the Center of the World and, on the microcosmic scale, to reproduce the universe. (Eliade 1959: 43)

In addition, as Eliade recognizes the house to be a microcosmic reconstruction of the universe, an attempt to locate oneself at the Centre of the World, Goldschmidt finds that Lubavitchers often refer to Crown Heights as ‘the Rebbe’s daled amos’, a Hebrew phrase suggestive of the home space: Daled amos is a phrase that draws metaphoric significance from the technicalities of Jewish law, where it refers to the minimum required breadth of a private home—four cubits, or daled amos. 'To describe Crown Heights as ‘the Rebbe’s daled amos’ is to define

the entire neighborhood as the Rebbe’s home—a private Jewish space, and a uniquely holy place for his Hasidim. (Goldschmidt 2006: 109)

Conceiving of the urban streets of Crown Heights as a holy domestic space is consistent with Eliade’s general theory that human beings strive to reconstruct the ‘sacred’ in their cities as well as their individual homes, and carries broader implications about the Jewish concept of domesticity.

Jewish domestic space is significant for the innumerable personal and religious rituals that it hosts. Drawing upon a historical narrative that connects the value of this home space with the Jewish past, Janet Belcove-Shalin remarks that the home ‘signifies both the personal niche one carves out in a given communal space and a transhistorical reality imbued with sacred meaning. It is a replica of the beloved homeland—Eretz Israel—and, ultimately, of paradise lost and regained’ (1995: 206). Joélle Bahloul also explores the relationship between history and Jewish home space in her study of a Jewish community of North African descent in France. By gathering narratives from members of this Sephardi community about their previous homes, Bahloul discovered that ‘the house, as it is meticulously remembered and described, represents the symbolic entrenchment in a social and geographical environment that disappeared from tangible experience’ (1993: 137). Bahloul interprets the home space and the community’s collective memory to understand their individual, cultural, and religious identities, but

relates them to a broader Jewish narrative as well. The larger social and geosraphical environment that has disappeared is Erets Yisra’el, and the Jewish

GABRIELLE A. BERLINGER home represents ‘paradise lost and regained’. For the Jews whom Bahloul interviewed, ‘architecture is a metaphorical construct that symbolically challenges the reality of deracination and detachment from the native land’ (1993: 137), and

memory is the tool that conflates time and place to make the Jewish home a sacred space. Similarly structured upon an ‘architecture of memory’,'? Crown Heights, considered as the Rebbe’s daled amos, thus also recalls Erets Yisra’el (Goldschmidt 2006: 110). As a migratory group in the twenty-first century, Lubavitch Jews associate sacredness with the person. ‘Home was simply where the Rebbe was’, writes Belcove-Shalin (1995: 219), and sacred space for Lubavitch Jews is thus located relatively, allowing for the group’s expansion while it maintains a strong localized sense of community. As a sacred centre, the Rebbe’s location in Crown Heights affected the social

organization of the Lubavitch community in many ways. With his efforts to spread Lubavitch Judaism by sending shelihim from Brooklyn into communities around the world, the Rebbe acted as ‘both a centripetal and centrifugal force on

his “Jewish neighborhood”—drawing it together in a concentrated pattern of settlement, while opening it up to a web of interconnected global spaces’ (Goldschmidt 2006: 111). This pattern of population distribution in the Lubavitch community embodies qualities of both the Diaspora (upper-case D), ‘a social group that has become geographically dispersed from a common ancestral homeland’, and the diaspora (lower-case d), the ‘figurative exile of the individual expatriate’ (Jackson 2006: 19). As the Rebbe simultaneously attracted and dispersed his followers, they formed a Lubavitch diaspora within the larger Jewish Diaspora. Although during the Rebbe’s lifetime Lubavitchers felt a tension between the desire to live near him in Crown Heights and to live abroad and fulfil his mission and that of their faith, Fishkoff has observed a change since his death—a consistent lessening of this tension. The ‘ideal’ among Lubavitch youths today, writes Fishkoff, is to become shelihim and leave Crown Heights (2003: 318). The community’s centre of gravity is moving as its population spreads transnationally. If

the Rebbe himself attracted, contained, and released the spiritual energy that pulsed through 770 Eastern Parkway while he was alive, how is the transference of sacredness from place to person to be maintained after his death? How are Lubavitchers to interact with this space today?

Fishkoff admits that the administration of the Chabad movement is in no danger of dissolution more than a decade after the Rebbe’s death, but she questions how the community will maintain unity without the catalysing leadership of the Rebbe at its core (2003: 276). Lawrence Schiffman offers one explanation, observing that, since 1994, Chabad has undergone a social transformation from ‘a group of Hasidim centred around a charismatic rebbe—the traditional Hasidic

model—to a synagogue movement based on a philosophy and liturgy, more like than unlike other mainstream Jewish denominations’ (quoted in Fishkoff 2003: 25). The increasing number of emissary appointments and Chabad centres

THE REBBE’S HOME AS ICON around the world signals a shift, to Schiffman, from an inward focus on the Rebbe in Crown Heights to an outward focus on the communities abroad. Although Schiffman’s observation may be accurate, he addresses only the outward pull of the tension that Fishkoff identifies. To fully understand the group’s post-1994 period of adaptation, the pull inward must be considered as well. Goldschmidt considers this pull in his analysis of the drop in attendance at the syna-

sogue in the basement of 770 Eastern Parkway since the Rebbe’s death. Lubavitchers are increasingly observing sabbath and festival rituals at home, he notes, without the Rebbe’s farbrengens in 770 to rush off to after dinner. The spiritual value of the domestic space, rather than that of the public synagogue space, has become more fully realized (Goldschmidt 2006: 121). Goldschmidt’s observation is the complement of Schiffman’s, applied to the Lubavitch community in

Crown Heights rather than to the Jewish population at large. Both authors acknowledge the social transformation of the community as it is growing without

a unifying leader and observe that, while Lubavitchers in Crown Heights are embracing home spaces to express their faith and remember the Rebbe, Lubavitchers abroad are practising their devotion and honouring the Rebbe by creating public spaces for learning and ritual. The family home is increasingly becoming the sanctuary in Crown Heights as the number of community Chabad houses increases abroad. Domestic and ritual spaces overlapped in function and meaning for Jews long before the Rebbe died. For Lubavitch Jews, however, a connection to the places that contain these spaces—the Rebbe’s ‘home’ and synagogue at 770 Eastern Parkway, and the Chabad houses and sanctuaries abroad—is critical. 770 has gained new importance since the Rebbe’s death as the preserved architecture of his spirit, and as the structure that represents their faith. In particular, this spiri-

tual force is manifested in eleven newly constructed Chabad houses where ‘sacred’ space is created by replicating the physical form of the Crown Heights ‘home’. These eleven centres symbolize a materialization of the spirit.

Contemporary Design and Living Memory In 1985 the Rebbe announced his wish for a new Chabad house to be built in Israel in the likeness of 770 Eastern Parkway. He asked for its exterior to reproduce as exactly as possible the facade of 770, and offered to pay for its construction. To ensure the accuracy of the reproduction, the Rebbe flew an architect into Crown Heights ‘to measure, sketch, and photograph every inch of the building’, imported special tiles from Holland, and commissioned artisans to mould and rebuild certain sections of the house (Weingrod 1993: 374-5). These measurements taken, the actual reconstruction of 770 in Kefar Chabad in Israel was completed in less than five weeks, after the Rebbe requested that all haste be made. Positioned on an open, elevated field by the Tel Aviv—Jerusalem highway so that it

L GABRIELLE A. BERLINGER

WE 1 \ 5 | fh eee 2 al b — i Pre ‘ | ial e: i | er Hi gt Ks , "eee Figure 5.2 The 770 Kefar Chabad near Tel Aviv, Israel. Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson commissioned this nearly exact replica of 770 Eastern Parkway in 1985. Its isolated and elevated position makes it easily visible from the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem highway. Unlike later Chabad houses that only replicate the original building’s facade, this early reconstruction also replicates the Rebbe’s office, the elevator, and the front foyer inside.

could be seen from all directions and at all times, the structure was isolated, except for a single tree planted in front of the entrance, exactly where one stands in Crown Heights, and displays no signs but the number ‘770’ on its doorway and entrance hall floor—exactly as it is displayed in Crown Heights (Figure 5.2). But why copy this structure so precisely in Israel? The Rebbe declared that he wanted to create a space for those Lubavitchers who could not travel to his Brooklyn building so that they might be inspired as if they had travelled there. Alex Weingrod analyses 770’s replication by seeking to understand the relationship between built structures and their underlying cultural conceptions (1993: 370). He recognizes that the Kefar Chabad building transcends time and place by creating an environment that evokes the spiritual experience nurtured in the Crown Heights 770: To be in the Rebbe’s building in Kefar Chabad—to be in 770 on a hot Israeli morning— is also to be in Brooklyn, and most important, to be close to the Rebbe... Both in discussion and in their published statements, [Lubavitch hasidim] attest to the power of the building to make them feel as if they were once again near to the Rebbe, as if they were, quite literally, back in the hubbub of activities as well as holiness that characterizes his court. (Weingrod 1993: 375)

Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett offers a perspective on this transposition of time and place. She argues that not being in the actual environment does not prevent one from having an ‘authentic’ experience: ‘One can trace Christ’s last steps anywhere, which accounts for the Stations of the Cross processions on Good Friday all over the world. And, more to the point, no one asks if the locations of the

THE REBBE’S HOME AS ICON stations are authentic’ (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998: 167). Just as Christians follow the Stations of the Cross to connect with Christ’s presence, although they are not in Jerusalem, so Lubavitch hasidim visit the 770 in Israel to connect with the Rebbe’s presence, although they are notin Brooklyn.

But why would a religious group founded in eighteenth-century Russia choose to replicate a building that was formerly a secular medical clinic in Brooklyn, instead of a Jewish sanctuary from its homeland? Weingrod addresses this question from two perspectives—the Lubavitch Jews’ and the Rebbe’s. First, he comments that 770 Eastern Parkway fostered a relationship between the Lubavitchers, the Rebbe, and Crown Heights. The Lubavitchers sought to connect with

the Rebbe and the environment that he made holy by his relation to it. Other hasidic groups have also reconstructed holy buildings, but theirs replicate former

east European synagogues, such as those in the Orthodox neighbourhoods of Jerusalem and Benei Berak, near Tel Aviv (Weingrod 1993: 383). Weingrod emphasizes the Lubavitchers’ connection to the holy person rather than the holy site as a historical characteristic of Jewish spiritual practice that is challenged by the hasidic groups who reconstruct their east European synagogues. The significance of rebuilding 770 Eastern Parkway to connect to the Rebbe is actually in line with a tradition of faith consistent throughout Jewish history. Second, looking at the question from the Rebbe’s perspective: Weingrod presents two hypotheses as to why he might have commissioned a replica of 770 to be built in Israel:

1. The Rebbe’s request anticipated his imminent arrival in Israel as a preparation to ensure the messiah’s coming. Since the Rebbe was connected to this redemption, and perhaps was even the messiah himself, his ‘home’ needed to be placed in the Holy Land.

2. At the time of the building’s construction, the Rebbe was 84 years old and without children or an obvious successor. This second building signalled an approaching period of autonomy in which the disparate hasidic communities would have to direct themselves. Both the 770 in Israel and the 770 in Brooklyn therefore symbolize the Lubavitchers and the Rebbe, ‘and both announce

the profound lesson that it will be necessary and possible for all of the Hasidim to discover ways to continue until, finally, the present Rebbe’s successor emerges’ (Weingrod 1993: 381).

These hypotheses, recorded in 1992, two years before the Rebbe’s death, reveal that the Lubavitchers’ move to Israel was significant as a reflection of the

community’s growth and movement, but equally so was consideration of its future. By engaging the past, present, and future of the Lubavitch community, both views interpret the Rebbe’s directive as preparation for a new phase in the community’s existence.

GABRIELLE A. BERLINGER Beyond hypothetical conjecture, a material indicator of the changing state of the Lubavitch community was visible in the landscaping around the Israeli '770. Weingrod notes that the replica, isolated on elevated ground so as to be easily seen from afar, ‘symbolizes Chabad in its continuing campaign for influence and effectiveness. This too is a claim to hegemony, to the rising eminence of the Rebbe and his followers: it is a statement about a political today and tomorrow’ (1993: 382). The Kefar Chabad replica reproduces the ‘sacred’ space in which the Rebbe presided in Crown Heights through decontextualization and evocative geographical placement. The architectural and spatial reconstruction renewed the community’s strength by expanding into a world beyond the Rebbe, and into a future with his memory in mind. Although the Rebbe asked that a replica of 770 be built in Israel, he did not make any more such requests after its completion. Hundreds of Chabad centres had been built by 1994, the year of his death, but only the Kefar Chabad building copied the architecture and design of the headquarters in Brooklyn so exactly. In the decades that followed his death, the Lubavitch community has taken his command one step further by itself, however, and constructed ten additional replicas of 770 Eastern Parkway in the United States, Canada, Israel, Italy, Brazil, Argentina, and Australia, with still more currently under construction in the United States, Chile, and Israel.’ Although they are all modelled on the Crown Heights original, these eleven Chabad houses span a spectrum of resemblance. Along this spectrum are the less embellished modern reconstructions in Haifa and on Gayley Avenue, Los Angeles (Figures 5.3 and 5.4); 770s starkly detached

from the aesthetics of their urban surroundings in Jerusalem and Sao Paulo (Figures 5.12 and 5.6); the expanded models on Pico Boulevard, LA, and on the Rutgers University campus in New Jersey (Figures 5.5 and 5.7); the close replicas

that sit amidst contrasting residential architecture in Buenos Aires, Milan, and Melbourne (Figures 5.8, 5.9, and 5.10); and a smaller reconstruction in a rural summer camp near Montreal (Figure 5.11). Although all recognizably echo the 770 Eastern Parkway design, these reconstructions range in architectural similarity and degree of integration into their surroundings. Analysis of the efforts to modify these buildings more or less aesthetically to match their distinct environments is warranted, but first, a more fundamental question begs explanation. If the Rebbe did not request additional reconstructions while he was living, why have Lubavitchers continued to build them after his death?

In a photography project entitled ‘770’, artists Andrea Robbins and Max Becher documented these eleven replicas (see Robbins and Becher 2006).'” Their series of images exemplifies how this building’s facade, reconstructed with cultural modifications to the 1930s gothic-style design, has become what one Lubavitcher in Indiana called an ‘icon’!® and another in the 770 in Kefar Chabad termed a ‘logo’.'” These two words, more commonly used in marketing rhetoric than to describe sacred Jewish architecture, convey the power of association that

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the image of the 770 Eastern Parkway facade has assumed in its continued replication.'®

Endowing the image of 770 Eastern Parkway with even more power—that of brand status—Lubavitch Jews began reproducing images of the facade on consumer products and religious paraphernalia after the replicas had been built. The image of 770 can be found on objects such as tsedakah (‘charity’) boxes,’ tefilin (phylactery) bags,*° a kosher wine label,*’ an Israeli stamp,’* and a miniature building in a child’s model train set.?? These objects are used in religious and sec-

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ular contexts, in private and public spaces, and by children and adults alike. The ‘branding’ of 770 on consumer items such as these raises two questions. First, how and why are Lubavitch Jews mass-producing an icon? And second, why this icon?

Insight into these issues can be gained from comparative research into Christian material culture, especially the iconography of holy figures. Studies in this area have explored the form and function of religious imagery and objects in the consumer marketplace and in traditional religious practice. In Material Christianity, Colleen McDannell examines popular Christian objects and asserts that, for Christian devotees, ‘holiness is achieved through proper behavior and not normally through the intrinsic meaning of an object. What is important is the promotion of the Bible. Fashion, advertising, popular culture, and style are merely

the medium for the message’ (1995: 261). Christian consumers embrace the commercial use of Christian iconography because items coded in this way act as sacred objects that awaken memory and define community affiliation (1995: 18). The physical, visible world prompts memory as a means to access a spiritual, invisible realm.

In Visual Piety, David Morgan similarly acknowledges the relationship between memory and imagery in Christian worship, but particularly in the context of the anti-iconic culture of American Protestantism. He argues that relligious imagery transcends the immediate circumstances by signifying across time and allows memory to mediate the relationship between a worshipper and God (Morgan 1998: 194, 207). The visual imagery triggers the memory, and the memory meets the spirit. Although Morgan refers to a Protestant system of be-

lief, this notion can also be applied to the anti-iconic tradition in Lubavitch

GABRIELLE A. BERLINGER Judaism. The image of 770 Eastern Parkway has become an icon of historical and cosmological consciousness, linking the past with the present and the physical with the spiritual world. But why this icon? Simon Bronner examines how material objects become representative of tradition, a process he terms the ‘touchstone effect’ whereby the touchstone is ‘a standard by which to express the reality of valued experience’ (2004: 6). Lubavitch Jews shared spiritual experiences with the Rebbe, and the reality of those experiences is ‘measured’ by their ‘touchstone’, the image of the

place where they happened—770 Eastern Parkway. While the picture of this building’s facade evokes an intangible environment and essence, it also grounds Lubavitchers in their physical setting. McDannell has observed that religious objects and landscapes indicate to Christian worshippers that they are part of a particular family or community (1995: 272), and the same is true for Lubavitch Jews. A wine label that displays the image of 770 Eastern Parkway or a local Chabad house that is modelled on its design signals and reinforces familial and community bonds. The more the image is reproduced, the more this icon acts as a socially cohesive force in the community, reaffirming relationships and group identity. McDannell also argues that the creation of religious meaning is a process of continual construction and reconstruction. Reproducing the Rebbe’s ‘home’ in various locations outside Brooklyn can be viewed as a kind of performance of constructing meaning, where religious meaning is renewed with each act or in each use. ‘Amid the external practice of religion—a practice that utilizes artifacts, art, architecture, and landscapes—comes the inner experiences of religion’ (McDannell 1995: 272). Replicating the image of a building that fostered a religious ‘inner experience’ on consumer products and in architectural design becomes a relligious ‘external practice’, or what in folklore may be considered a ritual.** Lubavitch Jews connect with their spirituality in the holy space that they shared with their leader. This place, in turn, becomes the icon that recalls that past, that has a centre of gravity in the present, and that strengthens their group identity for the future. In her discussion of sacred architecture, Lindsay Jones claims that, ‘especially where centralized authority is imperiled or expanding—most poignantly in relation to the processes of conquest and colonialism—mechanisms of ritual-architectural statecraft can become very important in establishing a persuasively clear sense of identity and legitimacy’ (Jones 2000: ii. 147). In the post-1994 Lubavitch

community, central authority was imperilled by the Rebbe’s death and then expanded with the intensification of the emissary movement. By salvaging the last physical vestige of the Rebbe, his home and ritual environment, and by renewing its spirit through architectural reconstruction, continued use, and iconic representation, Lubavitch Jews are asserting their identity and reaffirming their legitimacy in the landscape of Judaism.

THE REBBE’S HOME AS ICON

Conclusion: On the Sacred and Profane The experience of Lubavitch Jews with the Rebbe’s ‘home’ raises the broad question of how human beings in a religious community relate to the spatial and en-

vironmental structures that surround them. Scholars who have explored this question have discovered a range of possible answers, from the assertion that some parts of the world are inherently sacred and other parts are inherently pro-

fane, to the belief that the sacred is a purely human construction. Jews have embraced both perspectives, the former through symbolic interpretation of location through text, and the latter through the experience of exile, which demanded the transference of sacredness from place to person: from the sanctuary to the leader of the Jewish people. Here I have considered how these theories of sacred space align specifically with the Lubavitch world-view. Although the transference of sacredness from holy place to holy person occurs in Lubavitch Judaism as it does in broader Jewish history, this particular case demonstrates how that sacredness thereafter spreads out from the holy person (the Rebbe) and on to his environment (his place of residence). Secular spaces become sacred spaces in this extension, as the dwelling place of the holy leader becomes the ‘new Jerusalem’ (Green 1977: 330) and trans-

forms New York City neighbourhoods and east European villages alike into sacred sites of pilgrimage. With the Rebbe as the centre of spirituality, his environment becomes a spiritual home for his followers. 770 Eastern Parkway as the ‘spiritual home’ of Lubavitch Jews exemplifies this process as secular or ‘profane’ space that has become imbued with sacred symbolism.?? Ina press release for the ‘770’ photography exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York, one critic claimed that, ‘through repetition and unexpected juxtapositions, these photographs are inescapable reminders of the Hasidic community’s simultaneous resistance to assimilation and its claim to authenticity’.*° The photographs simultaneously brought into focus the worldwide recontextualization of 770 Eastern Parkway and framed the replications within the Lubavitch world-view. On its own, the gothic-style building is not of particularly unusual design, but set in Israel, Brazil, or New Jersey it becomes a distinctive sign. Simon Bronner calls this quality of an object’s incompatibility with its surroundings ‘resistance’, where the periphery and the centre define each other by their difference (see Figures 5.6 and 5.12). In between the process of physical and intellec-

tual resistance, the human mind seeks to explain the contrast through culture (Bronner 2004: 13). 770 Eastern Parkway is an iconic sight to Lubavitch Jews in Crown Heights, but, replicated in non-Lubavitch communities lacking gothic structures, it becomes a symbol to a broader audience. Given its resistance, the building implores viewers to make meaning out of its ubiquitous and decontextualized nature. This meaning translates into messianic anticipation with the 770 built in Kefar Chabad, and challenges the original urban context in the case of an

162 GABRIELLE A. BERLINGER

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Figure 5.12 Far view of the 770 built in Ramat Shlomo, Jerusalem. The stark contrast of the brick-red replica against the surrounding white buildings shows the ‘resistance’ of this reconstruction.

early miniature 770 post office built in Camp Gan Israel, Parksville, in the Catskills of New York State (Figure 5.13). Constructed in a field of evergreen trees in 1980, this post office was one of the first reconstructions and recontextualizations of 770 (although not a Chabad house). These and the later Chabad houses which replicate 770 Eastern Parkway create scenes of visual resistance that convey the message that Lubavitch community, identity, and culture are distinct from those of other Jews and non-Jews alike. For the Lubavitch hasidim, the association of sacredness with their last Rebbe has persisted even after his death, not only in his teachings but in the material surroundings that were inspired by his life. The ‘sacred’ ground of 770 Eastern Parkway may now be trodden in Milan, Montreal, and Los Angeles, because it revives the spirit of the Rebbe and the experience of his space. As one Lubavitch rabbi explained it to me, “770 embodies the cumulative presence of all the yidn [Jews], of the shekhinah [presence of God] in the world’.’’ This can be understood in the light of architect Louis Kahn’s statement that ‘architecture does not exist, only the spirit of architecture exists’ (quoted in Lawlor 1994: 9). For the expanding population of Lubavitch Jews in the twenty-first century, and in the absence of

THE REBBE’S HOME AS ICON

I Figure 5.13 A United States post office building constructed across the street from Camp Gan Israel in Kiryat Gan Israel, Parksville, New York. This post office was built in 1980 as one of the first replicas of 770 Eastern Parkway.

their Rebbe’s central authority, the increasing number of replicas of 770 Eastern Parkway has many implications for their future. With each new building, they not only renew their faith but affirm a sense of themselves as a people capable of uniting across time and space. Lubavitch Jews ground themselves in distant places, and build cohesion within their community by relying upon this vessel of the Rebbe’s spirit to remind them of his teachings and to sustain their core identity.

Notes The photographs in Figures 5.1-5.12 are by Andrea Robbins and Max Becher and are reproduced by courtesy of Sonnabend Gallery, New York. The photograph in Figure 5.13 is by Gabrielle A. Berlinger.

J ‘We are G-d’s Deputies’, Sichos in English website, , accessed 12 Apr. 2007.

2 ‘Chabad’ is an acronym from the Hebrew words for ‘wisdom’, ‘understanding’, and ‘knowledge’. A ‘Chabad house’ is a Jewish community centre that provides educational and outreach activities to the entire Jewish community. During his leadership, the Rebbe

GABRIELLE A. BERLINGER ‘called for the expansion of activities in existing Chabad Houses, and the establishment of new Chabad-Lubavitch centers wherever Jews live, in the cities, in the suburbs, on college campuses throughout the nation and around the world’ (, accessed ro Apr. 2008).

3 Iam grateful to the Lubavitch rabbis whom I interviewed in Bloomington, Indiana, and Kefar Chabad, Israel, for sharing with me their knowledge about Lubavitch Jewish history, belief, and social structure. I am also grateful for the many conversations I had with

Lubavitch Jews around the world through email and online ‘chatting’ via . At Indiana University, Professor Judah M. Cohen provided invaluable direction to my ethnographic research and methodology, and Professor Jason Baird Jackson

challenged me to consider this work within a wider discussion of ritual, tradition, and communication in the modern world. I am very grateful for their insights and my now broadened perspective. I would also like to thank my family and friends for listening to my

ideas, offering their thoughts, and joining me in this study. Joseph, in particular, gave meaning and spirit to this work. 4 770 Eastern Parkway was described to me as a ‘spiritual home’ by several of the Lubavitch rabbis with whom I communicated during this research.

5 The ‘Publisher’s Foreword’ of ‘A Sanctuary in Microcosm’, Sichos in English website, , accessed Oct. 2007. 6 As noted on the website: ‘An Adaptation of Addresses of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, on Shabbos Parshas Noach, 5747, Shabbos Parshas Pinchas, 5'751, 28 Sivan, 5751 and Other Occasions’. ‘A Sanctuary in Microcosm’, Sichos in English website, , accessed Oct. 2007.

7 ‘A Sanctuary in Microcosm’, Sichos in English website, , accessed between March and June 2007.

8 The ‘Mitzvah campaigns’ were initiated under Rebbe Schneerson’s leadership to engage Jews in ritual observance every day and on the streets. An excerpted description of this effort on the official site of the Chabad Lubavitch world headquarters reads: ‘Just a few short decades ago mitzvot and holidays were the private, quiet domain of the few. Then came the Rebbe’s “Mitzvah campaigns”, and Lubavitch literally took to the streets. “Did you put on tefillin today?” “Can I offer you Shabbat candles?” “Can I interest you in some classes on Judaism?” On Wall Street in New York, in London’s Piccadilly Circus, and in Tel Aviv’s Dizengoff Square, Jewish pride and Jewish precepts came out of the closet forever ... For countless individuals and families, that mitzvah in-the-street was the first step on the road to an intensified identification with Jewishness, with Jewish education and Jewish observance’ (Chabad Lubavitch Global Network website, , accessed Oct. 2007).

9 ‘A Sanctuary in Microcosm’, Sichos in English website, , accessed between March and June 2007. 10 Personal communication with a Lubavitch rabbi at “770’ in Kefar Chabad, Israel, 31 May 2007.

11 ‘Shluchim—the Emissaries’, Chabad Lubavitch Global Network website, , accessed Nov. 2007.

12 Bokser (1985) recognizes the moment of exile as the moment of change when ‘sacred

THE REBBE’S HOME AS ICON space’ extended beyond the temple. Within Judaism, rabbis reaffirmed the importance of the Torah as a new focal point, and like other thinkers of antiquity, Bokser notes, the rabbis embraced the search for sacred space throughout the world in a manner that enabled the sroup to function without a single centre. Sacredness could be located anywhere because it needed to be. It was a human manifestation motivated by religious fervour and historic reality. Arthur Green (1977) also analyses how a history of exile influenced the Jewish concept of ‘sacred space’ from medieval and post-medieval Jewish sources. He claims that the use of the imagery of sacred space in another realm is especially apt for the Jews given their continual geographical displacement.

13 This phrase was coined by Bahloul in her larger study, The Architecture of Memory (1996).

14 This information is provided in the introduction to the online photography exhibition ‘770’ by Andrea Robbins and Max Becher: , accessed May 2007.

15 This series of photographs taken in 2005 was part of the artists’ larger project to document what they call ‘the transportation of place—situations in which one limited or isolated place strongly resembles another distant one’. These situations are all over the world and ‘accumulating and accepted as genuine locales’, they explain in their artists’ statement: . Through documentary projects such as ‘770’, Robbins and Becher seek to understand the ‘place out of place with its various causes and consequences’. 16 Interview in Bloomington, Indiana, 25 Apr. 2007. 17 Interview at 770 in Kefar Chabad, 31 May 2007.

18 While the dominant pattern in the architectural reconstructions thus far has been the replication of the facade of 770 Eastern Parkway, the building in Kefar Chabad presents the exception: its front foyer, the elevator, and the Rebbe’s office are also reconstructed exactly as they exist in the Crown Heights original.

19 For a sample tsedakah box, see , accessed May 2007.

20 For a sample tefilin bag, see , accessed May 2007.

21 For the “770’ wine label and wine review, see the ‘Shmais.com Wine Report’ website, , accessed May 2007.

22 For a picture of the stamp, see Hillel Fendel, ‘New Israeli Stamp Honors Chabad and American-Jewish Children’, , accessed May 2007.

23 See Jonathan Mark, ‘The Rebbe Keeps on Chugging’, , accessed May 2007.

24 For more on folkloristic conceptions of ritual and religious practice, see Messenger 1972; Rappaport 1992.

25 The ability of hasidic Jews to adapt modern-day trends and technologies to their religious tradition has been recognized as a strategy of their successful cultural survival. Without violating religious law, they embrace and sanctify elements of the secular world for their own use. In his study of the hasidim of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Solomon Poll contrasts

GABRIELLE A. BERLINGER them with the Amish, also a religious minority group, but one that rejects modern-day technologies for fear of assimilation and loss of group identity. The Amish forbid interaction with the ‘profane’ modern world and thus remain a more physically isolated and socially insular community than hasidic communities (Poll 1962: 8-11). 26 The Jewish Museum press release, ‘Photography and Video Projects by Thirteen Artists Challenge Conventional Ways of Representing Ethnicity’, 29 Aug. 2005: , accessed June 2007. 27 Personal communication with a Lubavitch rabbi, 25 Apr. 2007.

References ADHERENT. 2007. ‘Hasidic Jews’. , acces-sed 23 Jan. 2008. BAHLOUL, JOELLE. 1993. ‘Remembering the Domestic Space: A Symbolic Return of Sephardic Jews’. In Jack Kugelmass, ed., Going Home, 133-50. Evanston, Ill.

—1996. The Architecture of Memory: A Jewish-Muslim Household in Colonial Algeria, 1937-1962. Cambridge. BELCOVE-SHALIN, JANET S.1995. New World Hasidim: Ethnographic Studies of Hasidic Jewsin America. Albany, NY. BOKSER, BARUCH M.1985. ‘Approaching Sacred Space’, Harvard Theological Review, 78:

279-9): BRONNER, SIMON J. 2004[1986]. Grasping Things: Folk Material Culture and Mass Society in America. Lexington, Ky.

ELIADE, MIRCEA.1959. Ihe Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion. New York. FISHKOFF, SUE. 2003. The Rebbe’s Army: Inside the World of Chabad-Lubavitch. New York.

GOLDSCHMIDT, HENRY. 2000. Race and Religion among the Chosen Peoples of Crown Heights. New Brunswick, NJ. GREEN, ARTHUR. 1977. ‘The Zaddiq as Axis Mundi in Later Judaism’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 45: 327-47.

JACKSON, JASON BAIRD. 2006. ‘Diaspora’. In William M. Clements, ed., The Greenwood Encyclopedia of World Folklore and Folklife, i: Topics and Themes, Africa, Australia

and Oceania, 18-22. Westport, Conn. JONES, LINDSAY. 2000. The Hermeneutics of Sacred Architecture: Experience, Interpretation, Comparison, 2 vols. Cambridge, Mass. KIRSHENBLATT-GIMBLETT, BARBARA. 1998. Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage. Berkeley, Calif. LAWLOR, ANTHONY.1994. The Temple in the House: Finding the Sacred in Everyday Architecture. New York.

MCDANNELL, COLLEEN. 1995. Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America. New Haven. MESSENGER, JOHN C. 1972. ‘Folk Religion’. In Richard M. Dorson, ed., Folklore and Folklife: An Introduction, 217-32. Chicago.

THE REBBE’S HOME AS ICON MINTZ, JEROME R.1992. Hasidic People: A Place in the New World. Cambridge, Mass. MORGAN, DAVID. 1998. Visual Piety: A History and Theory of Popular Religious Images. Berkeley, Calif.

NELSON, LOUIS P. 2006. American Sanctuary: Understanding Sacred Spaces. Bloomington, Ind. POLL, SOLOMON. 1962. The Hasidic Community of Williamsburg. New York.

RAPPAPORT, ROY A. 19092. ‘Ritual’. In Richard Bauman, ed., Folklore, Cultural Performances, and Popular Entertainment, 249-60. New York. ROBBINS, ANDREA, and MAX BECHER. 20060. Brooklyn Abroad. New York.

WEINGROD, ALEX. 1993. ‘Changing Israeli Landscapes: Buildings and the Uses of the Past’, Cultural Anthropology, 8: 370-87.

SIX

From the Nightclub to the Living Room: Gender, Ethnicity, and Upward Mobility in the 1950s Party Records of Three Jewish Women Comics GIOVANNA P. DEL NEGRO Tuts EssAy explores the bawdy humour of Belle Barth, Pearl Williams, and Patsy Abbott, three working-class, Jewish, stand-up comics who were hugely popular in the United States in the late t950s and early 1960s. Largely forgotten or dismissed today, they released best-selling LPs known at the time as ‘party records’, which, though intended for respectable, middle-class consumers, were often sold under the counter and banned from airplay. The records were therefore typically enjoyed in the privacy of one’s home, and, by most accounts, the primary consumer was likely to be Jewish. The period in which these comics flourished was one in which many working-class Jews experienced upward mobility and suburbanization, the beginnings of the redefinition of Jews as racial whites, and substantial pressures to assimilate into mainstream American culture. Jewish identity was central to the routines of these comics, as was a highly sexual subject matter. Here I explore how this group of entertainers positioned themselves at the intersection of gender, Jewish ethnicity, class, and whiteness in the 1950s, as well as the significance that their humour had for both Jewish and non-Jewish audiences. With their earthy, shtetl sensibility and their smatterings of Yiddish, these performers, who attained their greatest popularity in their middle years, railed against societal mores that told them to be quiet, well-behaved, and sexually passive. Both in the means by which it was disseminated (LP records) and in its content, the trio’s comedy illustrated the importance of the home in negotiating Jew-

ish identity in 1950s America. Their party records pierced the boundaries of ethnic privacy by bringing the decidedly public setting of stand-up comedy performance into the living room. As these records were often played during cocktail parties or more intimate gatherings in suburban Jewish homes, they created a semi-public context of performance in the heart of the domestic sphere. Cheaply

THREE JEWISH WOMEN COMICS made and affordable, the party record fitted in perfectly with the more geographically dispersed suburban lifestyle of 1950s America that increasingly relied on mediated forms of leisure such as television. Unlike that more mainstream form, though, the party record was marked as transgressive. Often labelled ‘for adults only’ or ‘not for radio broadcast’, these ribald performances were as far from the television routines of Jewish but ethnically unmarked comics like Milton Berle or

Jack Benny as they were from the ethnically marked but non-threatening performance of Jewishness found in the suburb-era version of The Goldbergs, a popular sitcom about a Jewish American family.’ This interplay of public and private is further echoed in the themes that these LPs explored. On the albums, the trio dealt with sensitive issues not ordinarily discussed in public (fears of cultural loss, the sense of dislocation brought on by greater upward mobility, and concerns about antisemitism). Kept from the Jew-

ish public spheres of the synagogue and the cheder as much as they were censored from inter-ethnic dialogue by the Jews of the period, those themes were at the core of 1950s Jewish life and usually found expression only in the safety of the kitchen or parlour. Transgressing the divisions between public and private, these recordings announced a kind of comic return of the repressed, bringing private Jewish anxieties humorously to light and also offering non-Jews a glimpse behind the scenes of an ethnic culture that they were tentatively allowing into the American mainstream. As Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett has explained, storytelling in

east European Jewish culture has long been associated with women and the domestic sphere (1974: 284-5). This tradition, as well as that of the tough-talking, Jewish American ‘red-hot mama’ icons such as Sophie Tucker, gave the trio further licence to tackle these topics, and the unique public—private dynamics of the party record made it the ideal medium for the trio’s work. The albums that they recorded in their heyday were enormously popular with Jewish American audiences across the country. Belle Barth, who released eleven LPs with sexually suggestive titles such as If | Embarrass You, Tell Your Friends (After Hours Records, LAH 69), I Don’t Mean to Be Vulgar, But It’s Profitable (Surprise 169), and My Next Story is a Little Risqué (After Hours Records, LAH 69%), reportedly sold two million records in her career, while Pearl Williams, who released seven albums, including A Trip Around the World is Not a Cruise (After Hours Records, LAH 70), Bagels and Lox (LAFF 127), and Pearl Williams Goes All the Way (Riot Records, R309), sold over a million copies: maybe even

more given the recording companies’ habit of undercounting sales in order to avoid paying taxes and sharing profits with artists (Smith 1998). The least prolific of the cohort, Patsy Abbott, only recorded two party albums, Suck up, Your Behind (Abbott LP to00) and Have I Had You Before (Chess LP 1450). By the conservative

estimates of Michael Bronski, ‘taken together, the three performers may have released ... more than five million records’ (2003). At the peak of their careers, these comediennes played to sold-out crowds in the nation’s top venues and had

GIOVANNA P. DEL NEGRO huge followings. Barth headlined at Carnegie Hall, Caesars Palace, and El Morocco and owned her own Miami club named Belle Barth’s Pub. Williams, who commanded a salary of $7,500 a week, regularly performed at luxury hotels and swanky clubs like the Fontainebleau, Maxine’s, the Hotel Windsor, Chez Paris, and Place Pigalle (Viglucci 1984). After a successful run as a comedic singer on the stage and in the club circuit around the country, Abbott opened her own Miamiestablishment in 1958 called Patsy’s Place. In the first three or four decades of their careers, the trio performed regularly in different regions of the United States and Canada, but by the late tg60s they were most closely associated with Miami, Florida. During this period, a huge number of Jews migrated to the city, which they jokingly dubbed the ‘Southern Borsht Belt’ (Dash Moore 1992: 105-9), and many more went there for their holidays. In Miami, the trio found lucrative work catering to vacationing Jewish suburbanites, retired Jewish snowbirds, and transplanted second- and thirdgeneration Jewish Americans who nostalgically longed to remember the homes that their forebears had left behind. After the Second World War an increasing number of returning Jewish serviceman with highly specialized technical expertise and management skills were moving to distant parts of the country or into the suburbs to find well-paying jobs to support their growing families, and the party record at this time provided an important means of maintaining Jewish identity. Far away from the ethnic enclaves of their childhood, many homesick East Coast Jews found in these albums a way of feeling connected to their community. As Jenna Weissman Joselit’s study of the material culture of the Jewish home suggests, the cultural artefacts of Jewish interior decorating in the mid-twentieth century helped to express new forms of Jewish identity ‘that [were] less a matter of faith or a regimen of distinctive ritual practices than an emotional predisposition or sensibility’ that Jews believed they brought to their day-to-day activities and general outlook on life (1994: 6). For Joselit, these often overlooked yet cherished consumer objects brightened ‘the lives of thousands of American Jewish families, rendering Jewishness palpable’ (1994: 7). Arguably, the party albums of the era served a similar function for Jewish families by transmitting the sounds, images, and narratives familiar to Jews directly into their living rooms. The auditory complement to the visual decorations that Jews treasured, the party records offered a fresh representation of Jewishness and American life, one that was filled with novelty, excitement, and danger. In a way, both the colourfully illustrated party records and the tshatshkes (knick-knacks) of Jewish interiors were part of the material paraphernalia of the pioneering, identity-making experiments in Jewishness that were occurring throughout the nation—from the bucolic suburbs of New Rochelle to the urban and highway-bound neighbourhoods of Los Angeles. As the custodians of Jewish culture in the home, Jewish women were expected

THREE JEWISH WOMEN COMICS to preside over the practical chores of the household that were out of bounds for men, who were considered the breadwinners of the family. From the shtetl village of the Jewish immigrant past to contemporary hasidic Judaism, there is a longstanding Jewish tradition that has relegated women to the domestic and mundane spheres, and reserved for men the more intellectually demanding pursuits of Torah study and serious work in the public arena. By invoking the domestic markers of Jewish life—from holiday observances in the home to specific culinary practices, dietary laws, and marital relations—Barth, Williams, and Abbott

perceptively commented on the private concerns and desires of the Jewish American family in the post-war era.

Like the famous literary cohorts of the turn of the century, these comics all shared common historical and artistic bonds. All three came from similar cultural backgrounds, rose to popularity during the same period, released recordings on the same small group of independent record labels, had similar styles of performance, and dealt with similar themes in their humour. Furthermore, the entertainment industry saw them as connected. Articles in newspapers and trade magazines often discussed them as a group. They attended each other’s shows, referred to each other in their work, and sometimes discussed their relationship

on their albums. Barth and Williams even had their routines anthologized together in The Battle of the Mothers (Riot Records, R305) and Return Battle of the Mothers (Riot Records, R308), released towards the end of the 1950s. Despite their enormous success, these three comics have been largely written out of the historical record of American popular entertainment. Most anthologies of American comedy either ignore them altogether or discuss them only briefly,

and when they are mentioned they are often seen as lacking the serious artistic merits of their male counterparts (see Berger 1975; Nachman 2003).* What is perhaps most disturbing is the condescending attitude with which certain authors have written about them. Nachman dismisses them as ‘burlesque refugees’ with nothing to say, describing them as mere talentless hacks who were confined to the ‘sleazy-record ghettos of underground labels’ in order to eke out a living (2003: 212-13). One of the few writers to recognize their significance is Michael Bronski, who views their routines as precursors of critically acclaimed shows like Sex and the City that feature women discussing ‘everything from erogenous zones to how semen tastes’ (2003). In a recent article, journalist Nick Zaino

echoes a similar statement by applauding these comediennes for ‘breaking sround just by standing up and talking about sex at a time when women’s libidos did not make for comfortable conversation’ (2006: 74). Indeed, these trailblazers have helped forge the path for ethnically displaced comics such as Roseanne Barr, Margaret Cho, and Sarah Silverman, all of whom are unapologetically angry, naughty, sarcastic, and blue. Though the straightforward, aggressive, brazenly sexual, and scatological humour of the trio may have been a factor that kept them from garnering the praise that was showered upon other artists of the period, it is

GIOVANNA P. DEL NEGRO clear that their gender also played a part in contributing to their overall marginalization and relative obscurity. However, in the 1950s and 1960s they spoke richly to the issues of Jewish identity that were being negotiated in American living-rooms. Gathered in the new social spaces that replaced the old front parlour, Jews listened to comedy routines that used humour to deal with troubling topics. This allowed them to think about the cultural transitions between the ethnic and the mainstream, the urban and the suburban, the public and the private. In recovering these women’s

voices for the history of American performance I hope to reveal how these Yiddish-accented, saucy chanteuses and comedy outlaws used their bawdy humour to address conflicting attitudes about gender, sex, inter-group relations, and the politics of whiteness and ethnic integration in post-war American society.

Belle Barth Belle Barth, although not as widely recognized as other comediennes of her era, was in many ways a forerunner of contemporary stand-up comics. According to Linda Martin and Kerry Seagrave, she was the ‘first to use the format of short jokes, as opposed to the monologues of [Beatrice] Herford and [Ruth] Draper’ (1986: 141). Born Annabelle Salzman in New York in 1911, Barth, who took her first husband’s name, started her career doing imitations of Al Jolson and George Jessel and ‘devastatingly funny take-offs’ of strippers Lili St. Cyr and Gypsy Rose Lee (Martin and Seagrave 1986: 141). From the 1930s onward she got progressively raunchier, doing more and more risqué songs and X-rated material. Called the female Lenny Bruce (another Jewish comic) even though she preceded him, Barth periodically battled the obscenity laws in court. Banned from radio and television, she spent most of her career performing in nightclubs and hotels until she died in 1971.

In many ways the bawdy, brash, outspoken, and irreverent Barth emulated the style and attitude of the female vaudeville performers she saw at the B. F. Keith Theater while growing up in east Harlem during the 1920s. Dubbed the ‘Hildegard of the Underworld’, and the ‘Doyenne of the Dirty Ditty’, Belle Barth played the piano and sang in a gravelly voice. Mixing the red-hot mama style of performers like Sophie Tucker with that of more demure performers like Carol Channing, she often punctuated her sexually explicit jokes by affecting a childlike manner of speech reminiscent of Betty Boop.* Her trademark putdown, ‘Shut your hole honey, mine’s making money’, has been used by other comics such as Bette Midler, and Barth’s live LPs feature jokes that are scatological or sexual

in nature—jokes about haemorrhoids, rectal examinations, babies’ faeces, douching, masturbation, and intercourse. Excerpts from two of her party albums, If I Embarrass You, Tell Your Friends and

THREE JEWISH WOMEN COMICS I Don’t Mean to be Vulgar, But It’s Profitable will give an idea of the style and content

of her comedy. Describing the mayhem that ensues when a kosher chicken is snuck into the movies, Barth says: There was a woman, she was so kosher that she didn’t trust the cook in the kitchen. She sent her husband to a poultry market to bring her a live chicken. She wanted to kill it herself. On the way to the kitchen, he puts it under his arm, then he wanted to go to the movies, so he stuck it in his pants. You know, the chicken had to breathe. Two women sat next to him. One nudged the other, she said: ‘Sadie, what’s doing?’ Sadie, referring to the bulge in his pants says: ‘What are you so nervous. You've seen one, you've seen them all.’ The other says: ‘But this one is eating my potato chips.’ (If I Embarrass You, Tell Your Friends)

In another joke from the same LP, an unfortunate hunting accident is made even more absurd by the medical advice the victim is given: Here is a story about two men who went hunting. One was [a] little cross-eyed hunter. Shotgun went off, hit the guy in the citriolle—it’s Italian for cucumber. He had nine holes in it. He ran to the doctor. The doctor got scared and says: ‘I think I’ll send you to Schwartz.’ The guy says: ‘Who’s Schwartz, a specialist?’ Doctor says: ‘No, he’s a piccolo player, who'll show you how to finger it.’

In material such as this, Barth transgresses the boundaries of female decorum by doing the kind of absurd, sexual gags usually reserved for male comics. Of equal importance is the light touch with which she introduces Jewish identity, even when the joke’s content itself is not ethnically marked. In the chicken joke, Jewish dietary law is the impetus for the comic situation. Likewise, Barth allows the hunter joke to subtly allude to the tensions surrounding ethnic upward mobility by making Schwartz (an iconically Jewish name) appear to have a high-status profession (a medical ‘specialist’), when in fact he is a lowly musician. While Barth’s comedic repertoire is filled with absurdly sexual or scatological jokes—such as the line about the precocious child who complains about how he has to ‘share a breast with a cigar smoker’—her bawdy routines are interspersed with material that directly confronted issues of discrimination and assimilation. In I Don’t Mean to be Vulgar, But It’s Profitable, she says:

[This is a story] about the Jewish man who wanted to check into the Kenilberry Hotel [probably the Kenilworth Hotel] in Miami Beach, and the clerk says: ‘It’s restricted.’ The suy says: [With a Yiddish accent] ‘Who’s a Jew?’ ‘If you're not a Jew, you wouldn’t mind answering three questions’, the guy says. ‘Fire away.’ He said: ‘Who was our Lord?’ He says: ‘Jesus Christ.’ ‘Where was he born?’ ‘In a stable.’ ‘Why was he born in a stable?’ He says: ‘Because a rat bastard like you wouldn't rent him a room.’

Barth goes on to say: “Think if I get a nose job, I can work in the Kenilworth?’ There is applause and an audience member replies: “Touché.’ Barth adds: ‘You know what kills me, the rich Jews never know what I’m talking about. Yeah, you want to hear that, go to Miami Beach. [In a Yiddish accent] Very wealthy, she [a

GIOVANNA P. DEL NEGRO rich Jew] says: “I’m very sorry, I don’t know what your talking.” I says: “Where did you get the accent?” She says: “I travel.”

Barth’s commentary on the cultural amnesia of upwardly mobile Jews is unambiguous here: even as she attacks the antisemitism of the day, she skewers a

wealthy Jewish woman eager to forget her immigrant past. More subtle, but equally significant, is the ironically dishonest manner in which the wealthy female character tries to obscure her working-class roots. Her accent—long a mark of marginalization for diaspora Jews—she claims, does not come from any-

thing as lowly as immigration but from the archetypical form of leisure-class activity, tourism.

Pearl Williams The daughter of a Russian immigrant tailor, Pearl Williams, née Wolfe, was born in 1914 in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The former legal stenographer was an ageressive, zaftig,° husky-voiced, piano-playing comic with a penchant for

double entendres and naughty stories.” According to Miami Herald reporter Andres S. Viglucci, the 23-year-old Williams, who had aspirations of becoming a

lawyer, unexpectedly got a big break in 1938 during her lunch hour when she played piano for her friend’s singing audition. The agent was apparently so taken with her musical talent that he hired her on the spot, and ‘that same night she went on stage at the Famous Door, on 53rd Street, opposite Louis Prima’s Band’ (Viglucci 1984). Though she had no intention of going into show business, the $50 a week that she was paid to perform was almost three times her earnings as a legal secretary, and Williams, who came from a poor family, found it too attractive to turn down (Viglucci 1984).

From the outset of her career Williams sang risqué songs, but according to Andres Viglucci ‘it took a heckler and fourteen years for [her] to stumble on the style that made her big. “I remember someone once heckling me,” Williams said, “annoying me to death, and I said. ‘Oh, f— off.’ The audience screamed. That was

the start,” she said. “That was 1952 and no one was using that language”’ (Viglucci 1984). For the next decade she played to full houses at Maxine’s in the Bronx, even performing with Frank Sinatra, and in 1962 she released the first of her seven records. With her increasing popularity, Williams started headlining at the Aladdin and the Castaway Hotel in Las Vegas and numerous clubs in Detroit, Chicago, Toronto, and Montreal. Her first Miami engagement was in 1946 at the

Dempsey-Vanderbilt Hotel, and after doing regular winter gigs in Miami Williams eventually bought a home in North Beach, which she shared with her long-time friend Augusta Cohen.® Cohen was a waitress who worked at the Place Pigalle, a club where Williams spent the last eighteen years of her life as the main attraction performing to houses packed with busloads of Jewish retirees from

THREE JEWISH WOMEN COMICS nearby condos (Valbrun 1991; Viglucci 1984). After forty-six years of non-stop entertainment, Williams finally retired at 70; she died in 1991 following a battle with heart disease. In the opening lines from her best-selling album, A Trip Around the World Is Not a Cruise,Williams depicts herself as an entertainer and also a sexual being. ‘Good evening’, she says to the audience. ‘This is Pearl Williams, a raconteur, storyteller. I tell dirty stories, clean stories. I’m also a chanteuse, which is French for Cuervo [tequila]. I own a vibrator, French poodle, and I went out and got a Rotor- Rooter.’

Williams’s repertoire of jokes runs the gamut from tame to risqué to sexually explicit, and on many of her albums mild one-liners appear alongside X-rated material. The topics that Williams tackled in her stage performances were often

considered too lewd to mention in public—breasts, pubic hair, ejaculation, douches, knish (vagina), shlong (penis), and cunnilingus. But some of her jokes were tamer: “Take a hundred brassieres, [and] cut them in half, what do you got? Two hundred yarmulkes with chin straps’ (cf. Rosten 1982: 85); ‘You know something that a bird can do that a man can’t do? Eat with his pecker’ (Second Trip Around the World (Surprise 75)).

Deftly appropriating and inverting the canonical ‘wife joke’ from the Catskill comics of the period, Williams often makes the man the butt of her humour. In A Trip Around the World Is Not a Cruise, she nonchalantly says: “There’s a woman ironing her brassiere, and her husband says: “What the hell are you ironing that for? You don’t have anything to put in it.” The wife replies: “I iron your shorts don’t I?”’ At her raunchiest, Williams could compete with the dirtiest of comics: “You know how you can tell whether or not a girl is wearing panties? By the dandruff on her shoes.’ Or: ‘Did you hear about the broad who walked into a hardware store to buy a hinge and the clerk says: “Madame would you like a screw for this hinge?” And she says: “No, but I’d blow you for the toaster up there”’ (Second Trip Around the World). In another bit she explains: ‘Tonight I think Pll go home and douche with Crest [toothpaste]. It will reduce my cavity by 40 per cent’ (A Trip Around the World Is Not a Cruise). Touting the sexual prowess of French Canadian men she says, ‘Are[n’t] those French Canadian men gorgeous? They’re the only suys who know what your belly is for. That’s where they leave their gum on the way down. Oh that’s nothing, then they put ice in your knish; they eat you on the rocks’ (Bagels and Lox).

In performance, Williams typically underscored her punchlines with brief piano interludes and hummed recognizable tunes such as ‘Hava Nagila’. Her racier anecdotes, however, were ironically demarcated by demure sighs and a unique laugh that bears an uncanny resemblance to that of Fran Dresher in the hit American television show of the 1990s The Nanny (aired on CBS-TV 1993-9).

Indeed, her ironic sentimentality and melodramatic interpretations of standard Jewish popular songs, obscene puns, and energetic musical interludes capital-

GIOVANNA P. DEL NEGRO ized richly on her hyphenated Jewish American identity, and the broad humour

of the 1930s Yiddish theatre and the Borscht Belt tummlers (‘entertainers’, ‘tumult makers’) of the day. Her comedic toolkit contains a number of ‘definition’

jokes and sexually suggestive rhymes: ‘Definition of indecent? If it’s long enough, hard enough, far enough, then it’s in decent.’ ‘{[Sings] By the sea, by the C-U-N-T. Little friction in my diction, as a whole it’s a pretty big one’ (A Trip Around the World Is Not a Cruise).

The narratives Williams relates are filled with frustrated Jewish characters who speak with thick accents and joyfully mete out their own brand of social justice.” In Second Trip Around the World, the thwarted victim relishes the revenge that awaits the inconsiderate telephone operator who abruptly cuts him off: One afternoon there’s a little Jewish guy on the telephone. He’s talking long-distance to California. All of sudden in the middle of his conversation—he’s talking about a half a minute—he’s cut off. [Yiddish accent] ‘Hello operator give me back the party.’ She says: ‘I’m sorry sir, you'll have to make the call over again.’ He’s [he says]: ‘Operator, I’m entitled to three minutes. I was only talking half a minute. Give me back the party.’ She says: ‘I’m sorry sir you'll have to make the call all over again.’ He says: ‘Operator what do you want for my life? . .. I got no money, I’m broke, give me back the party.’ She says: ‘I’m sorry sir you'll have to make the call over again.’ He’s: ‘Operator you know what,

take the telephone and shove it you know where’, and he hangs up. Two days later there’s a knock on his door, and two big strapping guys are standing there. He says: ‘Well, what is it?’ They say: ‘We came to take your telephone out.’ He says: ‘Why?’ ‘Because you insulted Operator number 28 two days ago. But you have an alternative. If you [would] like to call up and apologize, we’ll leave the telephone here.’ He’s: ‘Just wait a minute, wait a minute. What’s the rush? What’s the hurry here?’ He goes to the telephone, he dials. ‘Hello. Give me Operator 28. Hello operator, remember me? Two days ago I insulted you. I told you, “Take the telephone .. .”.’ And she says: ‘Yeah.’ He says: ‘Well get ready. They’re bringing it to you.’

For middle-aged Jews in the 1950s, this comic narrative of working-class resist-

ance would resonate with the well-known ‘Cohen’ albums, a hugely popular series of comedy records released by Joe Hayman in the 1910s and 1920s. On discs such as Cohen at the Telephone (1913), Hayman would play the part of a heavily accented Jew calling his landlord or some other authority figure to seek redress for his grievances. While the telephone on those albums served as a means, quite literally, of connecting people across ethnic boundaries, the Cohen character’s Yiddish accent would consistently be misunderstood, and, as a result, his complaints would go unresolved. Williams and her audiences would doubtless have been familiar with the ‘Cohen’ series, and her ‘Operator 28’ narrative derives its power from inverting the classic routine. Here, the Jew’s frustration is transformed into retribution and the shame of accented English into an auditory icon of toughness and guile.

THREE JEWISH WOMEN COMICS Non-Jewish oppressors often took the form of belligerent Texans in the stories of retaliation that Williams told, and these aptly illustrate the aggressive style of comedy with which the three comediennes became associated. A little Jew walks into a hotel in Texas. He walks up to the desk and he says to the room clerk: [Yiddish accent] ‘Give me a room.’ And the room clerk says: ‘Sorry sir, no rooms.’ He’s: ‘Do me a favor, give me a room. I’m a traveling salesman. I’m so tired I’m falling from the feet. Give me a room.’ Room clerk says: ‘Sorry sir, no rooms.’ He says: ‘Please do me a favor. I’m so tired that my beardzall [testicles] are hanging to the knees, already sive me a room. Do me a favor, look on the list. Maybe you missed something there, maybe it’s my lucky day.’ The room clerk says: ‘Alright sir.’ He looks on his list and says:

‘Oh you're very fortunate sir, I have one room left on the twenty-second floor, 2204. Would you like it?’ He says: ‘Like it, love it. | don’t care if it’s a hole, if it’s got a bed. Give

me the room, give the key already.’ And the room clerk hands him the key, and as the little Jew is walking away from the desk, a big Texan walks in. A real big bullvan ['tall, strapping man’, six foot eight. He walks up to the room clerk. He says: [shouting] ‘Give me room.’ He says: ‘Sorry sir, I just gave our last room to the little Jew fellow over there.’ He says: ‘Who, him?’ He says: ‘Yeah.’ [The Texan] walks up to the little Jew, picks him up by his lapels to his eye level, and he says: ‘Listen you little rat bastard, give me the key to that room, and get lost. This is my room.’ The little Jew is scared, and he says: ‘Alright, alright I'll give you the key.’ The Texan puts him down and the little Jew gives him the key. And as he’s walking away he says: ‘I'll get even with you, big bastard you, I’ll get even.’ The Texan goes up to his room and goes to sleep. In the morning he wakes up and there is a big heavy load on his chest. He takes a look. There’s a manhole [cover] on his chest. He starts laughing and says: ‘Ah the little Jew wanted to get even with me.’ Gets up out of bed, picks up the manhole cover, walks up over to the window of the twentysecond floor, flings it out of the window. He’s walking back to the bed laughing. He gets back to the bed. There’s a big note waiting for him on the bed. It says: ‘And now you big

bastard you have fifteen seconds to untie the cord that’s attached to your beardzall.’ (Second Trip Around the World)

As in the ‘Operator 28’ narrative, the power relations of American society are symbolically inverted as the comic draws on well-known stereotypes. Here, the hulking Texan stands for the arrogance of mainstream white America, and the marginalized figure of the scrawny Jew uses cunning to outwit and emasculate him.

Patsy Abbott Raised in the Bronx, Patsy Abbott, née Goldie Schwartz, was born in 1921 and started her career as a vocalist with the Teddy King Orchestra. She originally billed herself as Midge Fellows, but later changed her name to Patsy Abbott ‘because she thought that it sounded funnier’ (Lacher 1985). She reportedly credits her training to the time she spent at the Catskill resorts, where entertainers were expected to present a fresh show every night (Meadows 2001). Early on in

GIOVANNA P. DEL NEGRO her career, she ‘sang popular songs to tourists, gamblers, and mobsters’ at the Paddock Club in New York (Lacher 1985). During the war, she toured with a USO

(United Service Organizations) unit and entertained the armed forces overseas (Borscht Capades 1951: 26). Though her co-starring role in the hit musical The Borscht Capades made her the toast of Broadway in 1951, a series of illnesses abruptly cut short her rise to stardom.'? It was while she was recuperating in Miami that she started doing one-woman shows at resort hotels and eventually decided to purchase her own nightclub, which she named Patsy’s Place and ran from 1958 to 1965. After suffering two strokes, Abbott finally retired from show business but continued to work locally as a theatrical coach, and in 1988 ‘she wowed the crowds again with “The Golden Girls of Music and Comedy” ... which became the longest, continuously running musical revue in South Florida’s history’ (Meadows 2001). She died at the Miami Jewish Home and Hospital in 2001, days before she was due to stage a show with fellow residents. Both Have I Had You Before? and Suck up, Your Behind avidly capture the com-

edienne’s ear for dialects, impromptu flair for a salty line, and gusto for singing lighthearted, lusty musical numbers. In her stage act, Abbott warmly dispensed philosophical wisdoms in a faux ‘high-class’ voice and showed off her sparkling evening gowns. She would frequently ask young married couples embarrassing questions. On her first party album, recorded live at Patsy’s Place, Abbott asks a bride: ‘How long have you been married?’ The woman replies: ‘A week.’ ‘May I ask you a personal question? Is it nice?’ The woman answers: ‘Yes.’ Abbott asks: What do you have to compare it to?’ Her jokes deal with married couples lacking in sexual excitement, Jewish holidays that interfere with the planning of weddings, infidelity, and birth control.’ On marital boredom Abbott says: “There’s a couple married for fifteen years ... Wedded boredom—but you know, bored or not you got to make hay. Comes time to make hay, and they’re in bed, one hour. Nothing happens. Finally she looks at him and says: “What happened, you can’t think of anybody either?”’ (Have I Had You Before?). Commenting on Jewish strictures on marriage, Abbott says: In [the] Jewish religion, you can’t get married, when you want to, right? See, you just go through the holiday. They got you by the holidays. Now they just go through tishabav. That holiday you can’t get married. And you can’t go swimming. It’s ridiculous that you can’t get married, and you can’t get wet. It is. Then you have a holiday like pesach and shwiez [Shavuot] where you can’t get married, and you can’t have any music played. And youcan’t get married without an organ. And if you're not Jewish, darling, it’s Lent, right, and you can’t get married. You gotta borrow somebody else’s. That’s why they got you by the holidays. (Have I Had You Before?)

Playing up her Yiddish accent to address the issue of infidelity, she tells the story of aman who comes home from work in the middle of the day to find his wife naked in bed:

THREE JEWISH WOMEN COMICS Man walks into his bedroom, twelve o’clock in the afternoon, his wife is lying in bed, stark naked, without clothes ... He says: [Yiddish accent] ‘What do you mean, twelve o'clock in bed without clothes? What are you, taking an airbath? What are you, posing for Rembrandt, Van Gogh? What do you mean twelve o'clock in afternoon, lunch? What do you mean, when you weren’t expecting me, maybe? Whose you were expected? Rockella Hudson? Or maybe Walter the Pigeon? I got a feeling something is dirty under the foot.’ Sure enough, [he] looks at the floor. There’s a half lit cigar. ‘Ah and where does the cigar come from?’ A guy comes out of the bathroom and says: ‘Havana.’ (Have I Had You Before?)

Abbott’s routines conjure up a plethora of recognizable Jewish characters who utter malapropisms and tell cautionary tales about counting their blessings, even

in times of economic hardship. This particular story calls to mind the Jewish stock character of the kvetch—the complainer. In Suck up, Your Behind, Abbott says:

People are complaining with two loaves of bread under one arm. I hear a man goes to temple every single day, and he’s praying to God, and he says: [Yiddish accent] ‘God, I’m here every day. Every day, I’m here. I know you by your first name. God. Got no second name. Everyday, I’m here. I want you to know I don’t have a job, and my children starving, and my wife is sick. But I don’t mind, mind you. I don’t mind, mind you. But why you see Feldman down the street who doesn’t go to temple, don’t go to church. He’s got

a mansion, with a Cadillac, with a Jaguar, [stuttering] his wife with minks, with chinchillas. Why he got? Why I ain’t got? Why? Why? Why should he have when I ain’t got? Why? Tell me why!’ All of sudden there is bolt of lighting and the voice out of the blue says: ‘Cause you're nudging me. That means you bug me, man.’

From a historical standpoint, the highly accented, jocular tales from the trio’s repertoires are not unlike the dialect stories about newcomers that, James Leary notes, circulated in the ‘oral tradition, joke books, the vaudeville stage, and sound recordings’ in the early twentieth century in the United States (1983: 201). As Richard Dorson observed over fifty years ago, the dialect story usually originates with ‘individual word-manglers who become the folk-heroes in an expanding cycle that incorporates outside stories’ and eventually gives way to the development of popular comic stock characters such as the Swedish Ole and Yon, or the Irish Pat and Mike, all of whom, Dorson believed, were related to the broader categories of the ‘fool’, and the ‘immigrant bumpkin’ (1948: 114). In keeping with this tradition, the Jewish American dialect story, Stanley Brandes remarks, relies on ‘humorous blunders caused by phonetic transpositions characteristic of Yiddish accents’ (substituting v for w) as well as the Yiddishization of English (1983: 235). Such humour usually addresses themes of antisemitism, cultural loss, and what Simon Bronner describes as ‘the reversal of the expectations of the immisrant’s assimilation’ (2006: 308)—a wish-fulfilment narrative in which representatives of the host country are so influenced by immigrants that they take on their speech mannerisms.’’ For Brandes, Jewish dialect jokes not only reveal

GIOVANNA P. DEL NEGRO concerns over oral communication and the social mores that baffled the Jews in the New World, they also illustrate deeper group anxieties that are ultimately made more tolerable through joke-telling and laughter (1983). Though many of the early Jewish dialect jokes were particularly appealing to second- and thirdgeneration Jewish Americans who could understand the Jewish references, the

persistence of the dialect joke for the fourth and fifth generations, Bronner argues, ‘suggests a different nostalgia-building function for a Jewish American culture whose ties to the Jewish community are strained’ (2006: 308). Here, the dialect joke expresses a failed attempt to conceal one’s Jewishness and pass as

non-Jewish, in which the ‘real or former identity [of the person is exposed] through accented speech patterns’ (Bronner 2006: 308). While Jewish dialect stories often derive their comic effect by parodying the manners and speech of Jews, it is important to keep in mind that these anecdotes can be told with tenderness or hostility (see Brandes 1983). In the mouth of an affable, non-threatening Jewish American comic, the dialect story can be seen as an affectionate display of ethnic solidarity, whereas the same joke performed by even the most skilled of cultural outsiders could be interpreted as insulting. Disputing the common interpretation that reduces all Jewish humour to self-mock-

ery and self-hatred, Dan Ben-Amos nuances scholarly understanding of this genre by suggesting that dialect jokes among Jewish Americans may simply serve as a means of distancing oneself from members of one’s own group with whom one does not identify. As Ben-Amos observes, ‘by introducing accents into their anecdotes, the narrators do not laugh at themselves altogether, but rather ridicule a social group within the Jewish community from which they would like to differ-

entiate themselves’ (1973: 125). Ultimately, although many of the ethnically marked performances of the early period highlighted the perceived intellectual inferiority and inarticulateness of the other, dialect stories, as Leary aptly points out, ‘are just as often produced by and for particular dialect speakers who value their community’s unassimilatable verbal peculiarities’ (Leary 1996: 201).

Late at night in smoke-filled nightclubs, these comediennes spoke candidly about sex, cursed in Yiddish, and openly criticized the hypocritical values of bourgeois culture. These tough working-class women not only condemned the oppressive, dominant gender ideology of the 1950s, they also highlighted the growing tensions both within the Jewish community and between Jews and non-Jews. Their bawdy party records offered the consumers of suburban America an opportunity

to enjoy the exciting and uncensored atmosphere of the nightclub while safely ensconced in the privacy of their own living rooms. They represented an alternative to mainstream forms of entertainment, which seldom acknowledged the

THREE JEWISH WOMEN COMICS existence of conflicting attitudes towards gender, sex, inter-group relations, and

the politics of ethnic integration. In some ways, these comics can be seen as enacting their group differences for a mass market and helping to make Jewishness more acceptable and assimilatable for the goyim. However, at this transitional moment in which Jews were being incorporated into the American mainstream, the insider knowledge displayed in these performances also served to reaffirm ethnic boundaries, and they cautioned Jews to resist the tide of cultural assimilation and avoid falling victim to a false sense of security. Asanumber of scholars have observed, the period after the Second World War was one in which Jews saw both upward class mobility and a redefinition of their identity as white ethnics, that is, ‘not quite white’ racial others (Brodkin Sacks 1994; Goldstein 2006; Lederhendler 2001). These two processes went hand in hand. Before the outbreak of the Second World War, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s policy of inclusive nationalism allowed Jews to begin to gain admittance to the public sector and government, and the growing antisemitism of the period led Jews to question race-based definitions of Jewish character (Goldstein 2006). With the

reduction of restrictive admission policies in universities and easier access to merit- and examination-based professions such as teaching, medicine, and law, Jews entered the middle class in ever-increasing numbers. As Karen Brodkin Sacks observes, the ‘whitening’ of Jews continued beyond the Second World War

with federal assistance programmes, which offered returning Jewish veterans cheap mortgages, and the GI Bill, which allowed them to pursue higher education and develop expertise in specialized occupations from which they had been barred and which were in great demand after the war (1994). Although these government programmes may only seem to speak to issues of class, rather than race and ethnicity, the pervasive discrimination of the day guaranteed a link between class, on the one hand, and race and ethnicity on the other. African Americans continued to experience exclusion in housing, education, and employment, while such barriers began to fall for Jews at this time. Asa result, Jews saw new opportunities for upward mobility that were unavailable to other, nonwhite, groups, and with this upward mobility came a new socio-political climate that defined Jews as an ethnic, rather than a racial, group. These conditions were grist to the trio’s mill and a preoccupation of their routines.

Quick to refresh the memories of successful Jews keen on forgetting the harshness of their working-class immigrant past, Patsy Abbott commonly used “You don’t remember?’ as a coda to her jokes. Here is an example from Suck up, Your Behind:

[Singing ina klezmer-style cadenza] There’s so much trouble in the world today, and the papers got so much to say. [Speaking] Oy! You pick up the paper, you want to throw up. It’s better [in] the old days. We took the paper, and we put it on the kitchen floor. Remember? Remember when we had wall-to-wall papers? You don’t remember the good old days? You had nothing to eat. Go ahead, remember. The only good thing about the good

GIOVANNA PP. DEL NEGRO old days is a bad memory. We used to have a toilet. We used to have a toilet in the hall. Remember the toilet in the hall, with the orange wrappers? You don’t remember? You was always rich? Go ahead. And you had great wrappers for the big tuches [buttocks]. If you wanted double-plied toilet paper you use the both together. You don’t remember? Ah. We used to go to the kitchen [and] tear a piece from the floor and the wall-to-wall papers. You don’t remember? There’s a man that had a toilet in the hall for years, and

he vowed himself that someday he’d make enough money to have a bathroom in the house. Today he’s a millionaire in Miami Beach. Got three toilets in the house. Ken nisht kaken. [To one particular audience member] That means he can’t have a B.M.

He can’t go to the bathroom. I’m explaining honey. If you listen to me darling, Pll explain everything. But if he’s [to another audience member] busy explaining to you, then you won't hear me explaining either. Understand? Thank you.

Here Abbott acerbically reminds Jews that, as Goldstein puts it, ‘despite the social and economic benefits whiteness has conferred upon them, [they will never] feel

the kind of freedom whiteness is supposed to offer—the freedom to be utterly unselfconscious about one’s cultural background’ (2006: 236). We know from the recordings that members of other European ethnic groups attended performances by the trio, and in many ways their anti-assimilationist message could be viewed as a kind of proto-multiculturalism for those who had recently crossed the colour line, such as Italian Americans.

Comic Transgressions While some second- and third-generation Jewish Americans may have nostalgically identified with the world that these comediennes evoked, reminding them of a way of life that was still vivid in their memories, many non-Jews in the audiences saw Jews as exotic. They represented a cultural other whose more assertive displays of identity could only be allowed to flourish in the marginalized atmos-

phere of after-hours nightclubs and underground record labels, even as their male Jewish counterparts found growing access to radio, television, and film. In the face of an increasingly sanitized, ethnically segregated media, the adult-oriented party records helped to fill a gap by providing an arena for the expression of an ethnically assertive counter-discourse that was once relegated to the privacy of the Jewish home. By tapping into an underserved consumer need, entrepreneurs from labels such as Chess, Laff, Surprise, Riot, Roulette, and After Hours, who were adept at bypassing censors, saw an opportunity to carve out a profitable market niche. In so doing, they inadvertently became what Joel Foreman would call ‘agents of cultural subversion’, by paving the way for the production and dissemination of cheap products that deviated from the norm (1997: 10).

Though many Jewish women of childbearing age in the post-war period sought to fulfil themselves through domesticity and grappled with what the Jewish feminist author Betty Friedan called the ‘nameless problem’ (the anomie of

THREE JEWISH WOMEN COMICS the suburban homemaker), their experience was coloured by lingering antisemitism and the growing vilification of Jewish women as materialistic, guilt-

inducing, status-seekers (Prell t990, 1999).'* In this era of ethnic social exclusion and female scapegoating, these brassy comics offered Jews a respite from the puritanical values of their middle-class suburban neighbours, who told them to suppress their Jewishness. These loud-mouthed nonconformist comics were not afraid to be ‘too Jewish’, and though they challenged the tenets of Jewish female modesty and cleanliness—edelkeit and kashrut (Cohen 1987)—their unorthodox career choices in many ways reflected the more egalitarian gender values of east European society (Hyman 1995). These ageing ‘ghetto girls’ turned ‘vulgar, garish, uncultivated .. . plebian ways’ into emblems of honour (Prell 1999: 23). And their racial ambiguity—neither black nor white—gave them the licence to tackle forbidden subjects. Their African American counterpart Moms Mabley, a wisecracking grandmother who lusts after young men, also enjoyed a huge following. Unlike the trio, Mabley, at the height of the civil rights movement, made a successful transition to television, appearing on afternoon and evening slots on the Merv Griffin Show, the Smothers Brothers Show, and the Flip Wilson Show, as well as a series of specials hosted by well-known celebrities such as Harry Belafonte. But in an era when Jewish women were accused of exacerbating the social ills of mass culture, encouraging the disintegration of the Jewish family, and havinga

tyrannical hold over husbands and sons, why did these three outspoken women have such appeal? If Jewish men during this period feared the emasculating power of Jewish wives and mothers, why did so many frequent shows by women who embodied many of the qualities that they resented (Antler 1998; Dundes 1985; Mock 1999; Prell 1990)? During a period when many Jews were enjoying unprecedented financial success but only a modicum of social acceptance, jokes about non-Jews, I would argue, provided an outlet for the frustrations that both male and female Jews faced daily. More generally, while the routines about impotence or philandering men served to deflate the male ego, these comics were less motivated by a desire to castrate men than by an impulse to ‘shock the audience with their naughty Jewish girl’ act (Cohen 1987: 112). The male discomfort brought on by the penis jokes, I suggest, was quickly mitigated by jokes about women’s sexual dalliances, cavernous knishes that threatened to swallow men up,

and nouveau riche Jewish wives who sought to hide their ethnicity beneath expensive minks. In these comic scenarios, both men and women were ridiculed, and everyone was criticized. The women’s negotiation of gender, ethnicity, and class is inextricable from their role as transgressive, trickster-like figures. Delivering their humour in a site associated with adult indiscretion (the nightclub), ata marginal time of day (with shows as late as midnight and 4 a.m.), and for audiences enjoying their annual Miami vacation, the women’s performances took place in a liminal space which

GIOVANNA P. DEL NEGRO encouraged both transgression and cultural reflexivity. Further, by commenting on their own performances with phrases such as ‘I know I’m weird’, the comics marked themselves as liminal. The socially insignificant scatological transgressions further served to frame their performances in this way. These many layered framings of their shows helped to prepare the crowd for the outrageous transsressions of gender and sexuality and the occasionally painful reflections on ethnicity and class that their jokes contained. Unruly red-hot mamas, the trio flagrantly embodied the carnivalesque—the spirit rendered into an expressive form of festivity to rewrite rules and ridicule beliefs—and in the erotically charged atmosphere of the nightclub they championed the principles of chaos, disorder, and excess, both orally and visually. Confronting the realities of the post-war era, they announced that they were not about to hide at home, and they used features of their identity that had been repressed— Jewishness and women’s sexuality—as weapons to mock social norms. These lusty, fleshy, menopausal-looking women with sequinned dresses and painted-on eyebrows who flaunted their girth to mitigate the threat of their jokes offered night-time revellers and party-record listeners a welcome respite from the drudgery of work and McCarthy-era paranoia bent on weeding out deviants and communist sympathizers.'° The advertising-driven dreams of domestic contentment and high-culture pastimes featured in the lifestyle sections of glossy 1950s magazines in many ways concealed the underground culture of more ‘adult’ forms of entertainment, such as Playboy (first published in 1953), which promised men visions of the good life, as well as the publication of the Kinsey reports of 1948 and 1953, with their scandalous assertions about the active sex lives of ordinary American women.'® These outrageously blue, sexually frank performers, who were far from sleek-looking classical beauties, obviously touched a nerve with middle-class audiences, who longed to escape the blandness of their white-collar existence and the climate of cultural conformity. The flip side of the idealized ‘shiksa goddess’, these outspoken, sexually voracious, zaftig women literally embodied Bakhtinian images of the grotesque, which, according to Peter Stallybrass and Allon White (1984), are defined by cor-

poreal bulk and bulging protrusions. The seemingly illicit world of wanton female sexuality and the disorderly conduct of the self-described maven on drek (expert on faeces)'” and her cohort offered many slumming middle-class patrons an opportunity to enjoy the rowdiness of ‘lower-class leisure’ without any discernible damage to their reputation (Spies 2004). Like the bodily functions that polite society locks away, the working-class roots of Jews in the white suburbs of America of the 1950s had to be hidden, and their ethnicity and difference sanitized. In this context, the trio’s scatological humour—no less than their workingclass dialect or omnipresent Yiddishisms—served as a metaphor for the return of the ethnic and class repressed. In their defiant ‘act[s] of verbal aggression [these comics can be seen as symbolically] hurling “shit”’, as Simon Bronner has said in

THREE JEWISH WOMEN COMICS his study of the Pennsylvania Dutch’s anal humour, ‘at the establishment that “looks down” upon them like dirt’ (Bronner 2007: 34). From a Freudian perspec-

tive, one can say that these three comics favoured the narcissistic pleasure of the id, instead of the restrictive societal control of the ego—choosing ‘vulgar’ base instincts and freedom over prudishness, censorship, and obedience to authority.'®

By denuding sex of its seriousness and bringing a uniquely female perspective to bear on the subject, these brash comics ultimately challenged the male-centric

visions of female sexuality which dominated vaudeville, burlesque, and the Borscht Belt. In the trio’s repertoire ‘badgering mother-in-laws, homely naggers, ball and chain wives, or dumb bombshells’ are replaced by strong-minded, wilful creatures who are always ready to surprise their opponent with a cheeky remark (Spies 2004: 45). Rather than playing the hapless victims of a male comic’s jokes or the recipient of various stylized forms of violence—rape, beatings, and even

killings!?—Barth, Williams, and Abbott cast themselves as the instigators of humour and mayhem, and in their topsy-turvy world annoying men are taunted by menacingly large mammary glands or all-consuming knishes. Here, exaggerated female body parts (oversized breasts, buttocks, and vaginas) conspire to

ridicule men and render them powerless. By playing on male fears about women’s sexuality and drawing on comedic devices that had historically been used by male comics to demean women, these comediennes strategically employ the masculinist tools of their trade to highlight the asymmetries that exist between the sexes. Under the subversive female gaze of these talented performers, allusions to orifices and overabundant attributes associated with the female form become a source of strength, rather than embarrassment, and terms which are generally used to objectify and silence women’s enjoyment destabilize the power and privilege that men exert on the public stage and in the wider patriarchal culture. In an article in the weekly newspaper the Boston Phoenix, journalist and cultural critic Michael Bronski briefly compared the fame of Lenny Bruce with that of the three comediennes. Fleshing out his comparison will put their work into perspective and draw together the themes of this discussion. Bruce and the trio were all mid-century, Jewish stand-up comics who used sexual and scatological language to address the politics of race and ethnicity. Bruce dealt more frequently with racism against African Americans than the trio; however, as I have shown, the women comics richly explored antisemitism, as well as complex issues of Jewish assimilation and upward mobility—topics not central to Bruce’s comedy. Further, the trio’s approach to gender was path-breaking. Although their work did at

times reinforce gender stereotypes, they also challenged sexism and offered women’s perspectives that were given little space in the public arena of t950s American popular culture. Some of Bruce’s work might be read as anti-sexist, but other passages reiterate traditional patriarchal ideas about gender and sexuality.

GIOVANNA P. DEL NEGRO In terms of form, Bruce experimented with improvisation, stream-of-consciousness monologues, and wordplay, while the trio’s performances offered the more traditional series of humorous stories and one-liners. The relative aesthetic success of these efforts is debatable. Both Bruce and the trio garnered big laughs, the easiest measure of a stand-up’s abilities. Bruce’s monologues often ramble, and, at least from a contemporary perspective, many are repetitious, as if he is casting about for themes and material. The trio, by contrast, were experts in the established form of the day—a form traditionally deemed only appropriate for men.

In sum, there is much to respect and something to find fault with in both the politics and aesthetics of both Bruce and the trio. Despite their similarities, the critical reception of these comics could not be more different. In the years since his heyday, Bruce has been lauded by progres-

sive literary critics as an underground creative genius and a kind of political martyr. Conservative figures of the day excoriated him for using obscene lansuage, but history has looked kindly on him; his fame seems to grow and grow, and only celebratory visions of him remain. By contrast, the trio have been largely

forgotten, and when they are remembered they are most often written off as vulgar and insignificant. While Bruce’s routines offered more formal experimentation than did those of the three women, one thing is clear: bombastic, aggressive, and profane performances may draw the ire of conservative critics, but it is far more likely to be tolerated—and celebrated—by the progressive elite if itis coming from a man than from a woman. A further comparison with Don Rickles, the premier male insult comic of the day, makes the point clear. While never lauded as an avant-garde performer, his reputation as a ‘master’ of the traditional comic’s craft is secure. The trio were no less skilled in that style than Rickles, and they had the added benefit of offering rich insights into gender and sexuality. Had Rickles offered the same deft political analysis as they did, there is no telling how much praise would have been heaped upon him.’° Yet it seems that there was no room in the cultural imagination of 1950s America—or our contemporary cultural memory—for a mistress of aggressive Borsht Belt humour. Returning to the comparison with Bruce, there is a certain irony in the trio’s reception. While Bruce’s creative profanity brought him the acclaim of major literary critics, it also inspired the unwanted attentions of the police; such attentions made it impossible for him to work and arguably led to the psychological problems and substance abuse that killed him. While the trio were occasionally hassled by the police for their use of obscenities, their relatively marginal posi-

tion in American popular culture made them a far less attractive target to the authorities and enabled them to work with far fewer difficulties. In studying the careers of Barth, Williams, and Abbott, my goal is not merely to celebrate the work of performers who are forgotten because of their gender. Far more than simply seeking to give these women their due, I am interested in them

THREE JEWISH WOMEN COMICS because their performances offer powerful insights, not only into Jewish identity,

but also into class, assimilation, whiteness, and the role of the home in ethnic dynamics. Even as these women highlight the very real and suppressed cultural differences of Jews, their over-the-top acts also showed the constructedness of ethnic and racial identities. In other words, their humour focused on the tensions between being a Jew (with all the distance from mainstream American culture that it implied) and playing the Jew, being white and playing white,*! and the domestic sphere became both the venue in which these issues were played out and the set of symbols through which they were negotiated. The trio were not, I believe, performing any type of realistic Jewish identity that they would straightforwardly embrace off-stage. If one could ask Pearl Williams or Belle Barth if she thought that Jews were or should be hyper-sexual, loud, and crude, I doubt that they would say yes. On the contrary, these women’s parodies of working-class ethnic identity were reflections of the everyday, sometimes strained, performances of whiteness that they saw certain upwardly mobile Jews enact in the affluent,

assimilated suburbs. The trio saw with great insight the constructedness of proper, middle-class, white identity, for Jews and non-Jews alike. Projecting their voices into the living-room and the parlour, they reminded the new Jewish suburbanites where they had been and brought to light the parts of their audience’s lives that they found difficult to express to their neighbours. Drawing on both the traditional role of the mother as storyteller and the more recent image of the redhot mama, these comics carried the tensions of Jewish private life into the marginalized public space of the late, late night comedy stage, and then returned that public discourse to the domestic realm of the living room, where it could be safely acknowledged. To be sure, their routines were sympathetic to the pressures that Jews faced in the ethnic and class environment of the era; even as their humour unmasked the constructedness of whiteness and Jewishness, they warmly recognized the social dilemmas that their audiences faced. Seen in this light, their live and recorded performance of ethnic working-class identity highlighted the everyday performance of whiteness in which Jews—no more than white Anglo-Saxon Protestants themselves—engage. At a critical time in Jewish cultural history, they left a legacy of telling a widening, more mobile audience to take them home.

Notes This chapter developed from a paper that I presented at ‘A Jewish Feminine Mystique? Jewish Women in Postwar America’, a conference held at New York University in February 2007. I would like to thank Shira Kohn, Rachel Kranson, Hasia R. Diner, and Shayne Leslie Figueroa, the organizers of the conference, for inviting me to participate. I would also like to thank Harris M. Berger, Simon Bronner, and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett for their insightful remarks on this work. The Race and Ethnic Studies Institute and the Glasscock Center for Humanities Research, both at Texas A&M University, provided support for this study, and for this lam deeply grateful.

GIOVANNA P. DEL NEGRO 1 Appearing in several incarnations, The Goldbergs first emerged as a radio show about a Jewish family living in the Bronx. The show made the switch to television in 1949, and after a few years the writers moved the family to the fictional suburban enclave of Haverville. With the suburbanization of this television family, the representation of Jewish difference was substantially diluted.

2 For a rich discussion of the social history of the Jewish mother figure in American culture, see Antler 2007.

3 For example, in a recent 659-page book by Gerald Nachman, Seriously Funny: Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s (2003), only three of the twenty-three entries are devoted to women—Phyllis Diller, Joan Rivers, and Elaine May. Likewise, The Last Laugh by Phil Berger (1975), one of the classic primers of the history of stand-up comedy, also fails to acknowledge these comics, and even academic and mainstream publications on Jewish

humour and the Catskill mountain resorts, a training ground for successful Jewish comics in the 1930s, fail to set the record straight. In Lawrence J. Epstein’s rich historical account of Jewish comics, The Haunted Smile (2001), Barth receives only a brief paragraph, and in two other well-known books on the Catskill resorts (Brown 1998; Frommer and Frommer 1991) there is no mention of these women comics ever performing in the region, even though, as the press of the day and their own albums make clear, all of them played the houses there. Though seminal works by Sarah Blacher Cohen (1987), June Sochen (1983, 1998), and Joyce Antler (1998) offer a feminist understanding of Jewish women in popular culture by featuring substantive discussions of key female comics, including Belle Barth, neither Mary Unterbrink’s Funny Women: American Comediennes 1860-1985 (1987) nor Denise Collier and Kathleen Becket’s Spare Ribs: Women in the Humor Biz (1980) hint at the important work of the trio. See also brief discussion of Barth in Horowitz (1997).

4 Though Barth, Williams, and Abbott owe a great deal to the sexually assertive, selfmocking, red-hot mama persona that Jewish entertainer Sophie Tucker made famous in the early years of the twentieth century, Tucker’s song lyrics and banter, although suggestive, were neither as overtly blue nor as sexually aggressive as those of the trio. While all

played independently minded, feisty older women with voluptuous bodies and healthy sexual appetites and all used Yiddishisms for comic effect, the trio were considerably more graphic. They also helped contribute to and build upon the Borscht Belt tradition of comedy most often linked with Jewish male comics of the Catskills, which was characterized by insults, fast-paced one-liners, and amusing anecdotes about deeply flawed whiners and losers who carry on, despite various forms of victimization, self-inflicted or externally imposed. Though these comics were not associated with the ‘hip’, new forms of stand-up comedy that emerged in the intimate clubs of New York, Chicago, and San Francisco in the early 1960s, they did pave the way for the rebellious, anti-establishment comedy that flourished at the time. The mixing of aggressive and childlike styles can also be found in earlier Jewish women’s performances, such as Fanny Brice’s ‘Baby Snooks’ character, a precocious 6-year-old who cleverly outwits the authority figures that surround her.

5 Similar versions of these jokes can be found in the oral tradition of the French Canadian, Cornish, and Finnish immigrant groups that Richard Dorson collected in his classic study of dialect stories from the Upper Peninsula region of Michigan (1948). Indeed, humorous anecdotes about racial discrimination are common to the folklore of many ethnic and racial minorities, including African Americans, who have an established repertoire of

THREE JEWISH WOMEN COMICS dialect narratives about oppressive slave masters and temperamental tricksters who sometimes play by and then invert the white man’s rules (Boskin 1987; Levine 1978).

6 Although the Yiddish word zaftig is used colloquially for ‘plump’, it literally means ‘juicy’ and connotes power, prosperity, and assertiveness—all features that these red-hot mamas possessed. I am using the word here in this sense and also in the more contemporary American usage. 7 Reporter Marjorie Valbrun observed that even though Williams ‘specialized in a brand of comedy that was then known as “venereal material”’ and used ‘foul language in her act... her fans never found her to be offensive’ (Valbrun 1991).

8 According to Michael Bronski, it was rumoured by novelist and historian Lisa Davis that Williams was a lesbian, although ‘because many of the informants were long dead he couldn’t confirm the claim’ (Bronski 2003). Williams was twice married and twice divorced.

9 Indeed, many of the Jewish stage performers of the period ‘employed Yiddish to establish a shared intimacy with their Jewish audiences’, and the use of earthy expressions helped to reassure them that they remained ‘faithful to the old plebian ways and bracing street vulgarisms’ from back home (Cohen 1983: 4). 10 The Borscht Capades was a breakthrough English and Yiddish variety revue directed by Mickey Katz, which featured folksy humour and bawdy songs. Katz, a clarinettist and bandleader, produced musical hit comedies such as Halvah Hilarities, Chanukah in Santa Monica, Matzoh Ball Jamboree, and Farfel Follies, and, as a member of the Spike Jones ‘School of Deprecation’, he recorded best-selling novelty records like ‘Haim Aften the Range’, a parody of ‘Home on the Range’, and spoofs such as ‘Herring Boats Are Coming’ (Frymer 1951; ‘Mickey Katz Is Dead’ 1985; Variety 1985).

11 The topics that Abbott explored in her comedy were tamer than those of Barth and Williams, and this was noted by the latter performer in a passage from her album Pear! Williams at Las Vegas: ‘She’s Doin’ What Comes Naturally!’ (Riot Records, R303) in which the comic engages in a dialogue with Barth, who is in the audience, and a member of the crowd. In this LP, Williams refers to Abbott as ‘a nice girl’. Describing the damage that she

and ‘her mother’ Barth could unleash upon the conservative television of their day, Williams sarcastically howls: ‘We’re doing the Tonight Show. We really are, honey. Don’t get hysterical. We’re going on television. We’re going to blow the entire network. She’ll take one end, I’ll take the other end. We’ll bring back radio. What are you worried about?’

When an audience member brings up Patsy Abbott, Williams tries to distance herself from that comic. The mere fact that she needed to do that, though, shows how these three were linked in the public imagination. 12 Though such dialect jokes were often seen as insulting to immigrant Jews, as Dan BenAmos points out, ‘the fact that Jews make [wisecracks] about each other demonstrates not so much [Jewish] self-hatred as perhaps internal segmentation of their society’. He writes: ‘the recurrent themes of these anecdotes are indicative of areas of tensions within the Jewish society itself, rather than the relations with outside groups’ (1973: 129-30).

13 Bronner also observes such humour is characteristic of second-generation ethnics who often feel guilty about abandoning their culture, but at the same time want to separate from it to achieve status in the new society.

14 According to folklorist Alan Dundes, the depiction of Jewish women as ‘bitchy’ prima

GIOVANNA P. DEL NEGRO donnas commonly featured in the post-war JAP (Jewish American Princess) joke cycle revealed a broader, deep-seated male resentment regarding the rise of women’s liberation and the ever-increasing pressures men felt to succeed in the workplace. As Dundes aptly observes, these jokes go beyond Jewish issues and provide a stereotype of ‘all upwardly mobile American females who may be dissatisfied with the duties of mother and wifehood’ (1985: 471), but who, in the eyes of the chauvinist, still insist on being spoiled and pampered. As Dundes writes, in these stereotypes ‘Women [are perceived as] want[ing] it both ways. They want equality but also want to be treated as something special. So the JAP represents the modern woman who wants to be taken care of—to be given unlimited credit cards and taken on glamorous trips—but who doesn’t want to cook or participate willingly in sexual intercourse’ (1985: 471).

15 Though Barth’s and William’s album covers were arguably unflattering and aged them significantly, Abbott’s had photos of the comedienne which makes her seem more diminutive. Barth’s If I Embarrass You, Tell Your Friends was released in 1961 when she would have been around 49 years old. Despite the hell-raiser glint in her eyes, the photo gives her face a leathery appearance and does not show her in the most physically attractive light. Barth, who found the album cover hideous, pokes fun at the photograph in one of her routines.

16 Whereas the mainstream media did project hegemonic ideas about gender, the contemporary revisionist perspective on women’s history espoused by Joanne Meyorwitz in her book Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945-1960 (1994) shows how the stereotypical visions of post-war gender ideology obscure the pockets of resistance and ambivalence women experienced during this era.

17 Well known for her scatological humour, Belle Barth described herself in these terms.

18 As Roberta Mock, quoting Stallybrass and White, perceptively points out, feared and beloved ‘““low-Others” are [often] rejected for reasons of prestige and status by the dominant culture, only to be included as “a primary eroticized constituent of its own fantasy life”’ (Stallybrass and White 1986: 5, quoted in Mock 1999: 109).

19 See Kathleen Spies on Reginald Marsh’s paintings of burlesque chorus dancers which depict men visibly aroused by women with oversized breasts and shapely derrieres (Spies 2004). According to Spies, Marsh’s paintings also reveal male aggression towards women

by showing them laughing at skits in which women are violently punished for minor infractions—reading film credits out loud or failing to ‘serve beans with an already hearty meal’ (Spies 2004: 45).

20 The context of sexism made the proscription against risqué material work differently for male and female comics, and, ironically, this may have made the trio more outrageous. By somewhat moderating his aggressive tone and accepting roles with no X-rated content,

Rickles was able to break into the lucrative fields of television and movies in the late 1960s. By this time, these media had begun to displace live nightclub performance from the centre of the American entertainment industry. Aware of their marginalization within that industry, the trio realized, I think, that television and the movies would never be open to them, and they embraced sexual and scatological humour as a means of securing a niche in live performance and underground records. For more on Rickles’s own perspective on his comedy, see his recent autobiography, Rickles’ Book (Rickles and Ritz 2007).

THREE JEWISH WOMEN COMICS 21 See Henry Bial’s book Acting Jewish (2006), which explores how Jewish performers manage their ethnic identity by using a set of aural and visual cues, that can be read as Jewish or non-Jewish, depending on the audience. Here, Jewishness is not a question of ethnic or religious affiliations, but a set of behaviours, gestures, and mannerisms that are acted out for viewers who can attend to or ignore messages expressing insider or outsider knowledge. Crucial to Bial’s argument is the idea that performance by Jews are often ‘doublecoded’: ‘performance can communicate one set of meanings to a Jewish audience, while simultaneously communicating another, often contradictory message to gentile audiences’ (2006: 3). For example, while Jerry Seinfeld’s relationship with his family might be read as Jewish, there are episodes from the show that are not explicitly framed in terms of religion or ethnicity; thus the ‘viewer is free to miss or ignore any implied Jewish references’ (Bial 2006: 2).

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, accessed 21 Feb. 2007. BROWN, PHIL. 1998. Catskill Culture: A Mountain Rat’s Memories of the Great Jewish Resort Area. Philadelphia. COHEN, SARAH BLACHER. 1983. ‘Yiddish Origins and Jewish-American Transformations’. In Sarah Blacher Cohen, ed., From Hester Street to Hollywood: The Jewish American Stage and Screen, 1-17. Bloomington, Ind.

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Writing Home

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SEVEN

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Samuel Rawet’s Wandering Jew: Jewish-Brazilian Monologues of

Home and Displacement ROSANA KOHL BINES Ahasverus did not know who he was, where he came from, not even if he was born. He only knew that he existed. SAMUEL RaweT, Viagens de Ahasverus

CAN LANGUAGE provide a home for Jews in the diaspora? The idea of a people bound together in galut (exile) by the power of God’s written covenant fostered the feeling of a Jewish community in no specific place. As long as the people held on to the Book, they were sure to be in God’s company anywhere. Redemption through return to the Holy Land was a project indefinitely deferred and always conditional upon the keeping of Torah and the high moral demands involved in obeying God’s words and commandments. Such a rabbinic vision of a portable Jewish home centred on the text is at once challenged and reactivated in a postHolocaust era, especially as interpreted by writers in the precarious condition of having been abandoned by God, ‘unhoused’ in the world, yet probing the possibility of being ‘at home in the word’.! For the displaced writer, language becomes a means to establish connections, gloss over discontinuities, and reclaim lost topographies, but also to proclaim disaffiliation, accentuate dissonances, and expose irretrievable losses. As Theodor

Adorno put it, ‘for a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live’, but ‘in the end, the writer is not allowed to live in his writing’ (Adorno 1951: 38-9). Adorno’s language was, of course, German, the language of Nazism, which only aggravated his sense of estrangement from a mother tongue manipulated for the exercise of power, discrimination, and murder. Thus being unhoused in one’s language becomes for Adorno a critical gesture against nationalisms, mother tongues, and coercive systems of identification. Adorno

has come to epitomize the nomadic intellectual, who opposes the politically dangerous discourse of ‘roots’ and ‘grounds’ with an ethics of ‘rootlessness’ and permanent movement. This quasi-heroic figure conflates with the long-standing

image of the Jews as the quintessential homeless wanderers, producing a compound character: the Jewish post-Holocaust diasporic writer.

ROSANA KOHL BINES The idealized post-Holocaust image of the Jews as master-movers between tongues, morally invested with the survivor’s authority to counteract the violence implied in oppressive discourses, has gained currency in contemporary thought. But when wandering, actual or literary, readily turns into virtue, cultural opportunity, and a critical stance against stable, authoritative regimes—of the state, of the mind, of discourse—one runs the risk of endorsing an aggrandizing epic narrative of Jewish homelessness that has little to do with the real, messy, Babelian stories of those living and writing in between homes and languages. In the tales written by the Brazilian Jewish writer Samuel Rawet we can distinctly hear the struggle between incompatible ideas of ‘home’ and ‘away’, of ‘mother tongue’ and ‘foreign tongue’, of ‘Brazilianness’ and ‘Jewishness’. The diaspora experience is never a happy celebration of deracination or an exercise in the freedom of unattachment. There is little room for mystification here. My argument in this essay is that his literature is a restless testimony to the risks of imagining home in a language not one’s own.

The Travels of Ahasverus Samuel Rawet was born in 1929 in the small Polish town of Klimontow. He moved with his family to Rio de Janeiro in 1936, in search of a better life. The family first settled in a poor, working-class area in the city, then gradually moved up the social scale. Rawet was offered the opportunity to pursue a college education and obtained a degree in engineering in 1953. In 1956 he published his first col-

lection of stories, entitled Contos do imigrante (Immigrant Tales), which is his best-known work.’ His debut book is considered to be the first solid literary manifestation of specifically Jewish themes in Brazilian letters. Before Rawet, many Jewish immigrants who arrived in Brazil in the first decades of the twentieth century had written their tales of struggle in the new country, but none of the tales had the literary quality and consistency that make for a work of art. As a matter of fact, the word ‘author’ would have been misplaced in the context of Rawet’s predecessors, because for the most part these pioneer immigrants did not aspire to write professionally, but rather to register and share their experiences within the confines of their own Jewish community, without much concern for artistry or for reaching a larger Brazilian audience. That is why, when Contos do imigrante was published, it created such a buzz in both the Brazilian and the Jewish specialized press. It was indeed the first time that crucial Jewish themes such as the Holocaust, the fate of deported Jews, and the cultural clash in the tropics had been so painstakingly addressed in Brazilian literature. However, the fact that Rawet’s work was ground-breaking did not help him in the long run. If anything, the role of pioneer left him in a lonely predicament. He had, after all, inaugurated a new tradition, that of a hyphenated Jewish-Brazilian literature, but Brazilians themselves were not used to seeing their culture as

SAMUEL RAWET’S WANDERING JEW hyphenated. From colonial times on, Brazil developed a strong national identity as a successful blend of indigenous, Portuguese, and African cultures. In this idealized melting pot, each culture should gradually disappear to give way to a

unified national whole. There was no room for cultivating particularities or cultural incompatibilities. National identity relied strongly on a sense of cultural harmony and integration. In this sense, Rawet’s tormented prose, occupied with the maladaptation of Jewish immigrants wandering aimlessly on the streets of Rio de Janeiro without finding a resting place they could call home, was quite unsettling. Critics were ata loss when it came to situating Rawet’s work within the Brazilian national fold. Since the Jewish trait was so evident, how could his literature read as ‘Brazilian’ proper? Did it accommodate that inassimilable ‘Jewish’ difference into the allencompassing discourse of Brazilian nationality? Rawet’s fiction posed serious

challenges to the very notion of Brazilianness, which was in need of urgent reassessment if it were to permit the disruption of the fake image of national harmony in favour of a more complex imagining of ‘home’ and the people living in it. The importance of Rawet’s work in Brazilian literature lies in his bold, unprecedented artistic gesture of populating the streets of Rio with a number of Jewish

characters with foreign-sounding, Yiddish names, who force entry into this sunny new city in the hope of conquering it, but who never quite succeed. In their

failed attempts to feel at home, these characters critically touch on a sensitive issue in Brazilian culture, shaking its long-standing image as a welcoming country with flexible boundaries and no sense of prejudice. For Samuel Rawet, the experience we call diaspora was indeed a lacerating linsuistic event. He was only 7 years old in 1936 when his family left Poland, so that Yiddish, his childhood language, was never a real consideration in his choice of a mature, adult language of artistic expression. The question for Rawet was not in

which language to write—Brazilian Portuguese was the obvious choice—but how to make that language speak of the culturally and linguistically ambiguous situation he perceived himself to be in.

How was he to write in Portuguese from a position of difference, without, however, glossing over the fact that he was an outsider to Brazilian literature? To forge an identity as an ‘outsider within’? Rawet needed to use Portuguese as both an entry to anda detour from a marked linguistic identity (N. H. Vieira1995: 1). In her introduction to the volume Displacements—Cultural Identities in Question,

Angelika Bammer aptly describes the immigrant writer’s dilemma regarding language: ‘at once carrier of national and familial traditions and emblem of cultural and personal identity, language functions equally as an identity-grounding home under conditions of displacement and a means of intervention into identity-fixing cultural agendas’ (1994: p. xvi). If, on the one hand, to write in Portuguese meant to consolidate an identity as a Brazilian writer, Rawet’s ‘minor’ use of the language,‘ on the other hand, imprinted on his Portuguese what some

ROSANA KOHL BINES critics perceived as a ‘foreign’ diction, which never really allowed the ‘immigrant’ label to be completely removed. I will pursue these traces of foreignness in Rawet’s prose, and their connection to matters Jewish, by examining his 1970 novella Viagens de Ahasverus a terra alheia em busca de um passado que no existe porque € futuro e de um futuro que ja passou porque sonhado (Travels of Ahasverus to Foreign Lands in Search of a Past that

does not Exist because it is Future and of a Future that is already Past because it was Dreamed).° Based on the legend that the Jew who mocked Jesus as he carried the cross to his crucifixion was punished by being condemned to wander for all eternity in order to testify to the truth of Christianity, this is considered Rawet’s most accomplished work. The novella narrates in one long paragraph the many metamorphoses of Ahasverus, who keeps shifting identities as he travels across times, places, and languages.®

The tale opens as the narrator tries to capture the moment of Ahasverus’s transformation: In the fraction of a second he almost felt the portent of tears in an eye that was not now his nor yet that of Vicente, and in that eye not yet an eye, or already an eye, empty from eye to eye, in that interval he trembled so much that he was on the verge of being just tremor, but in that interval he remembered his name, and regained mastery of his body. (Rawet 19704: 16-17)

From the very beginning, Ahasverus’s metamorphoses are described as a series of incomplete and fragmentary mutations that occur in an indefinite linsuistic, temporal, spatial, and corporeal frame. The chameleon protagonist wan-

ders in undistinguished and ever pliable forms through places and times, undefined by clear-cut frontiers between ‘self’ and ‘other’, ‘now’ and ‘then’, ‘here’

and there’, ‘inside’ and ‘outside’. Everything takes place in a misty atmosphere that blurs all contours, tormenting Ahasverus with a perpetual doubt as to the reality of his own being: ‘He did not know if he was real, as the residue of a dream, if he was a dream, a residue of reality’ (Rawet 1970: 15). The disjunctive syntax

and syncopated punctuation structure Ahasverus’s hesitations as a compulsion to state and restate the images continuously, so that the reader is never granted the satisfaction of a clear picture or any sense of closure. We are left in that uncomfortable ‘between’ zone James Clifford writes about when he describes the diaspora predicament as ‘not so much where are you from, but where are you between’ (1992: 109). Ahasverus’s travels never raise the question of a fixed, predetermined origin, but mark instead a realm of conjunctures and intersections that is less an affirmative space for the enactment of simultaneous belongings than the anguished site for manifesting a difficulty about the very ‘uncertainty of belongingness’.’ From the outset, Ahasverus has a tortuous relationship to the Jewish tradition that should anchor him, but which becomes instead the very propeller of his interminable journey.

SAMUEL RAWET’S WANDERING JEW It is significant that Ahasverus’s first unaccomplished mutation is into the raven Vicente, which Rawet appropriates from Bichos (1940), a short story by the Portuguese writer Miguel Torga. In the opening scene we find the protagonist glancing through an open window, hesitant as to whether he should let himself materialize as Torga’s raven. Torga’s story reappropriates the biblical tale of Noah’s Ark, focusing on the raven who rebelled against the designs of God by refusing to perform the assignment, later given to the dove, of leaving the ark after the deluge in search of dry land where humanity, along with every preserved animal species, could start life anew. Vicente does not want to put his own species at risk by leaving the security of the ark for an uncertain destiny. Unable to refuse God’s command, he flies away, never to return. This act of insubordination marks the start of the raven’s lonely flight towards an autonomous existence unruled by God.

Likewise, what propels Ahasverus’s perpetual wanderings and mutations is the anguished awareness of the impossibility of a dialogue with God, already anticipated in the tale’s epigraph: ‘God expects everything of me. I expect nothing

of God.’ In his fragmented metamorphoses there is the express desire to distinguish himself from the absolute image of God. Although the novella is not situated in any one specific time or place, the epigraph, along with the initial reference to Torga’s rebellious raven, sets Ahasverus’s travels on the track of postHolocaust questions about the (absent) role of God during the Nazi genocide. Ahasverus feeds his incessant displacements on the acute conviction that ‘there are no longer deluges, arks, Noahs, not even God to defy’. Nevertheless, as Berta Waldman (1996) has observed, despite the assertive refusal of a relationship with a God who has deserted his people at the worst possible moment, it is always from within a marked Jewish tradition that Ahasverus attempts his many dislocations away from the negated heritage. The novella unfolds out of an intense sense of aggravation at having to keep oneself tied to a tradition that is experienced as meaningless and empty.® Rawet’s Ahasverus bears the weight of a Jewish past that does not allow him the freedom to transform completely into the insurgent Vicente: ‘I do not want to be Torga’s raven, I cannot be Torga’s raven, that goes against everything I| learned, against everything I was taught was right, I cannot be Torga’s raven’ (Rawet 1970Aa: 16).

Who speaks here? Ahasverus? Rawet? Whose Jewish identity is being implied as an impediment to leading a full existence deprived of God? The penultimate

metamorphic act in the novella stages the transformation of Ahasverus into Rawet: ‘And Ahasverus was Samuel Rawet, with plenitude, he wrote VIAGENS DE AHASVERUS EM BUSCA DE UM PASSADO QUE NAO EXISTE PORQUE E

FUTURO E DE UM FUTURO QUE JA PASSOU PORQUE SONHADO, and as

Samuel Rawet he fathomed the world.’ The willed intermingling of character, author, and narrator at the end of the novella encourages a retrospective reading in which autobiography and fiction collide to promote a tense conversation of

ROSANA KOHL BINES voices that never really amount to a perfect match, to a neat identification between Rawet and Ahasverus, but remain in ‘constant adjustment and disadjustment’.? Until his adolescence Rawet was thoroughly immersed in Jewish tradition: ‘Until I was about 15 I was religious; then I lost interest and no longer paid attention to it’ (cited in da Costa 1972). Since Rawet was born in 1929, his fifteen years of Jewish learning ended around 1944, towards the end of the Second World War, when news of the Nazi genocide was spreading.'° There seems to be an unspoken link between his willed retreat from leading a Jewish religious life and the Holo-

caust. I suggest that it is in the vacuum that he perceived as the death of God, announced in the deadly camps, that Rawet moves himself and his characters through endless peregrinations and ruminations in often urban and nocturnal spaces, where the cosmopolitan, anonymous travellers confront, with demanding consciousness, inhospitable and impersonal settings. The atmosphere in Rawet’s stories is generally oppressive, populated by ansuished characters, who cannot communicate meaningfully with those around them. They remain enmeshed in the complications of their own consciousnesses, laid open to the reader through tugging interior monologues, made up of questions about the fate of the solitary man vis-a-vis the ontological abyss. In Abama, for example, Rawet’s tumultuous prose, centred on the broken covenant with God, is voiced by a myriad of outcast protagonists, wandering the marginal streets of Rio and babbling disconnectedly, rehearsing the crudest language with which to bellow their doubts and grievances regarding their identities: ‘Tradition is this pile of shit, to be flushed down the toilet’ (Rawet 1964: 69).

In keeping with my earlier claim that language holds for Rawet the vital, if frail, promise of leading a meaningful life as a hyphenated Jewish-Brazilian writer, the question is raised about the extent to which he feels implicated in what he writes, inasmuch as language is perceived as that crucial criterion upon which membership of the Brazilian literary scene is granted or denied. Rawet’s novella

captures the ‘between’ moments of uncertainty and hesitation in language. To that purpose, the narrative fractures every statement, so that the one who speaks and the subjects who are spoken for are never identical: ‘Consciousness always

alert to its own movement, an eye within the eye, watched and watching, incapable, almost always, of assuming its own metamorphoses, or of discerning between what it thought as Ahasverus-while-Ahasverus, and what it was when it was not Ahasverus’ (Rawet 1970a: 15). This non-coincidence between the many Ahasveruses is spun by a third-person narrator, who moves ambivalently between the registers of the familiar and the alien, thereby adding to the dissociative chain of identifications at play in the novella. The fragmentation of narrative voices produces a lag that slows down the reading process considerably. The reader is puzzled by the narrative, and so is the protagonist. Ahasverus is completely disoriented regarding the basic markers of identity: time, place, and lan-

SAMUEL RAWET’S WANDERING JEW suage. In the course of his endless travels and transformations, he repeatedly questions his situation in parenthetical interventions—‘(in which land was hep); (had hea past, a future?); (in what language?)’ (Rawet 19704: 23). Much of the difficulty in reading the novella has to do with Rawet’s decentring, restless prose, that keeps on fragmenting and dispersing the signifiers without ever settling for any kind of synthesis. It is not surprising that his first critics often found his work hermetic. Representative of this view is an anonymous reviewer who stated in the prominent Brazilian newspaper O Globo, based in Rio, that Rawet wrote a ‘torrent of abstractions that dissolve into formulations more of the scope of the essay than of fiction’.'' Though it is reasonable to argue that the critics themselves were at fault, being unprepared to evaluate the radical strategies Rawet deployed somewhat avant la lettre, | do believe they hit the mark when they identified a crucial discrepancy in Rawet’s writing. Brazilian critic Luis Gonzaga Vieira pinpointed it when he observed that Rawet ‘speaks of the common man, but his terms are not common’ (1971: 4). Rawet’s Ahasverus has indeed all the attributes of acommon man. He is the

perfect antithesis of the legendary wandering Jew, traditionally depicted as a white-bearded, wise, omniscient traveller with a great talent for languages. Rawet’s Ahasverus is never sure of where, when, or who he actually is. He gets drunk, he curses, and he masturbates. He is a polyglot, for sure, but he is one who

misspeaks all languages on purpose, in a rebellious assault against propriety: ‘Conversing in metamorphosis. Ahasverus never had a problem with languages. He would come up to somebody, breathe in, breathe out, cast grammar to the winds, and start talking wrong on purpose’ (Rawet 1970a: 17). Not coincidentally, this excerpt echoes one of Rawet’s own autobiographical statements: ‘I am basically a suburbanite, the suburb is very much a part of me. I learned Portuguese on

the street, struggling and getting it wrong, and I think that’s the best school. | learned everything on the street’ (cited in da Costa 1990: 143). It is important to note that the ‘suburb’ refers to poor working-class neighbourhoods in Rio, situated on the city’s periphery. Nelson H. Vieira (I990: 5) compares these areas to the Lower East Side of New York in the early twentieth century, another area with a squalid reputation. Rawet’s statement implies that he is not only streetwise linsuistically but marginal socially. That an expressed anti-intellectual poetics, projected to create the semblance of streetwise, crude, unmediated language, comes across to the reader as a completely inaccessible idiom says much about Rawet’s difficulty in negotiating identity within the context of Brazilian literature. However much he wanted to write

a kind of prosaic Portuguese, like a true Carioca type,'? a Portuguese standing against what he perceived to be the empty babble of the intellectual, the image critics kept throwing back at him was that of the ‘illustrious foreign writer’.'° No doubt the fact that Rawet was born ‘in distant Poland’ (Engracio 1970) was a major factor in his being perceived as foreign. But it is mostly something about

ROSANA KOHL BINES the difficulty in reading his dense, meditative, slow-paced prose, that encouraged identification with the best of foreign literature. Kafka, Beckett, Joyce, Hesse,

Proust, Mann, and Borges are some of the authors to whom he is often compared.'* If some of his short stories deal with notions of the absurd, it is to Kafka

or Beckett that critics turn for comparative analysis. If the topic is ‘temporal confluence’, Proust is sure to turn up as a source of influence. Rawet’s exploration of the ‘infinitude of the interior world’ is seen as a legacy of Joyce, while the chaotic rhythm of his ‘psychotic’ prose is reminiscent of Artaud’s. There is noth-

ing particularly new, at first glance, about the fact that Brazilian critics sought artistic validation for Rawet’s work ‘elsewhere’, amid the best of world literature. This is a long-standing critical practice among Brazilian scholars, the origins of which can be traced back to the country’s colonial history and its imposed status as a subordinate, second-hand copy of European ‘higher’ standards. I would be underestimating Rawet’s critics, however, if I were to attribute their reverential use of world literature merely to an ingrained Third World inferiority complex. Rather, I will argue that if critics looked ‘elsewhere’ for literary affiliation, it is mainly because they were unable to envision a place for Rawet’s work within the Brazilian literary scene.

Intellectual or Rogue? Why were critics at such a loss when it came to articulating a Brazilian genealogy for Rawet? What rendered his work so ‘foreign’? I link these questions because the perception of what reads as ‘Brazilian’ is intricately connected, in opposition, to the perception of the ‘foreign’. In the classic essay ‘National by Elimination’

(1992), Brazilian literary critic Roberto Schwarz challenges the constrictive double bind that has regulated the discourse of Brazilian national identity since colonial times, in which one has to either settle for a direct imitation of cosmopolitan imports or seek to expunge all foreign influences in the name of a ‘pure’ local essence. The difficulty with Rawet’s work is that it cannot possibly be accommodated into that antagonistic scheme. How was the reader to situate the work

of a Polish Jew, writing in Brazilian Portuguese, on desolate immigrants and wanderers aimlessly roaming the streets of Rio? This is how the critic Eneida responded to the dilemma in a1956 newspaper review of Contos do imigrante: Arriving and leaving were imprinted on the sensitivity of the boy, who turned man and today is as Brazilian (I know him well) as any of us: he plays samba on a match box,

speaks our slang, dances to our music and sings—out of tune, it’s true—mostly on moonlit nights, Brazilian songs that speak of our sky, stars and mulattas ... The boy of yesterday was Polish, the man of today is Brazilian. (Eneida 1956)

Eneida tries to resolve her discomfort with Rawet’s immigrant biography by establishing a clear-cut division between the boy of yesterday and the man of

SAMUEL RAWET’S WANDERING JEW today. No traces of foreignness are allowed in this depiction of a pure Brazilian essence. The anxiety over the writer’s foreign past becomes evident in the exacerbated efforts at ‘selling’ Rawet as a true Brazilian hero. To that purpose, Eneida

mobilizes an incredible list of stereotypes, which she confirms are accurate because of her acquaintance with Rawet: ‘I know him well.’ This strategy suggests the extent to which the immigrant writer’s foreign birth was a sensitive issue and regarded with suspicion, so much so that the critic felt compelled to use her own

authority as a Brazilian national to confirm Rawet’s conduct as an authentic Brazilian.

It is noteworthy that, while Eneida is so adamant about identifying Rawet’s

persona as Brazilian, she is more reticent when it comes to evaluating how ‘Brazilian’ his writings are. Although the critic seems to have no doubts regarding Rawet’s proficiency in Portuguese—‘the person who wrote Contos do imigrante manages our and his language well’—she recognizes, with disappointment, that there is a difficulty about his language that is incompatible with the fluid Brazilian persona she has conjured up: ‘I think Rawet is trying to tell it differently, forgetting that what’s really good is to tell it plain and simple.’ Implicit in Eneida’s remark is a system of values that aligns what is ‘spontaneous’, ‘colloquial’, and ‘uncomplicated’ with what is ‘national’ and, by opposition, what is ‘elaborate’, ‘literary’, and ‘difficult’ with what is ‘foreign’. The search for an authentic Brazilian idiom, championed by the nation’s modernists in the 1920s, has been associated

from the start with an irreverent refusal of affectation and of highbrow, ‘intellectual’ prose—traits these modernists readily identified with classic European culture. In their anti-aestheticizing impulse, they sought to tone down the language of artistic expression. That meant not only the use of a prosaic vernacular, filled with colloquialisms and with phrases derived from popular and folk cultures, but also the incorporation of a corrosive, humorous, desacralizing tone, in mocking confrontation with the ‘serious’, ‘deep’, ‘white’ European culture. If I introduce the concept of race here, it is because it plays a crucial part in the articulation of Brazilian literary nationalism. In the lucid commentary of Brazilian critic José Guilherme Merquior, ‘glorification of racial mixing gets confused

with an impulse to national and continental self-legitimation’ (I990: 349).'° Brazilian modernists were as antagonistic to ideas of linguistic purity as they were to ideas of racial purity. An authentic Brazilian idiom would have to be voiced by an authentic Brazilian character, epitomized by Mario de Andrade’s Macunaima, a mestizo, a hybrid type, a mix of the white, African, and indigenous races (1993 [1923]). For centuries the mestizo was viewed as a product of the degeneration of races, as an inferior and unstable character, who was to blame for Brazil’s backwardness. Macunaima erodes the racist narrative from the inside, rereading as positive all the negative attributes conventionally attached to the mestizo. Macunaima is lazy, indolent, inconsistent, ‘a hero without any character’, but

these are the very qualities that make him conquer adversity and collect the

ROSANA KOHL BINES rewards.'® He is also an astute improviser, who finds his way out of every situation. Mischievous, he bears no moral weight. He mocks the status quo, manipu-

lating the law for his own benefit, without however demolishing or even questioning the given rules. Anthropologist Roberto da Matta, in his classic Carnavais, malandros e herois (Carnivals, Rogues, and Heroes), defines him as ‘a hero of the ambiguous zones of the social order, where it is hard to say what is right or wrong, just or unjust’ (1978: 14). Although Macunaima is a marginalized and dispossessed character, he refuses the part of the messiah, of the ‘social avenger’. The arbitrariness of Macunaima’s actions recalls that of the trickster hero, who also operates in a universe devoid of good or evil. Literary critic Antonio Candido has coined the phrase ‘the dialectics of roguishness’ (dialética da malandragem), to explain what he sees as a uniquely Brazilian narrative spun by a language of ‘corrosive tolerance’-—a humorous, irreverent, pliable language, that ‘smoothes edges and gives way to all sorts of accommodation’ (1993: 53). Both Da Matta and Candido use the malandro as a cultural trope for general considerations about the constitution of a Brazilian national character, ethos, and language. They demonstrate how pervasive the malandro syndrome is in Brazil’s sunny image as the country of samba and carnival, populated by sensuous mulattas and lighthearted, spontaneous people—a fun and unruly country, where anything goes to fulfil the impulse for immediate self-gratification. In comparison to this malandro rhetoric, Rawet’s sombre, bitter, meditative language, fathoming a nocturnal

and abysmal Rio, depicts another world.'’ His language is invested with the moral responsibility ‘to situate the space of the human in a chaotic and aimless world’ (Brasil 1970: 12), and as a result it is recognized as ‘foreign’ and seen as

an impediment to membership of the Brazilian fold. That is not to say that Rawet’s wandering vagabonds bear no resemblance to typical Brazilian malandros. Ahasverus, like Macunaima, is a marginal, unaccommodated character, who manifests an open disdain for order and privilege. Both types are adventurers and improvisers, wandering in and out of different situations, in a permanent state of movement. However, while the malandro, as Roberto da Matta qualifies him, is ‘a Being of the present time, and of contingency’ (1978: 233), Ahasverus, like all of Rawet’s protagonists, carries the weight of the past and of a history of persecution. The past is the propeller of Ahasverus’s wanderings. In the course of his endless metamorphoses, there are persistent questions about a certain ‘Nazarene’ (a clear epithet for Christ), that redirect the reader to the original legend of the wandering Jew, fated to march eternally as punishment for mocking Christ. Rawet’s

Ahasverus constantly fails to fully recuperate from his encounter with the Nazarene. The ‘original’ scene only appears in fragments, interspersed in the narrative as intermittent questions—‘When did he see the Nazarene? What relation had he, Ahasverus, with the Nazarene? He could say nothing, he knew nothing for sure’ (Rawet 1970a: 19). The narrative suggests that as long as these questions

SAMUEL RAWET’S WANDERING JEW continue to burst into his consciousness, as long as Ahasverus cannot recollect his past in full, the march and the metamorphoses will go on. My point is to underscore how much the narrator’s faulty, elliptical language has to do with a discontinuous relation to the past, to memory. For Rawet’s forsetful Ahasverus, the impossibility of remembering and, thus, of consolidating a biography for himself, reflects the impossibility of using language, in philosopher Michel de Certeau’s words, ‘to reiterate a membership and to provide a familial or social genealogy’ (1988: 313). Certeau’s phrase comes from his essay on Freud’s Moses and Monotheism, in which he claims that Freud’s writing of deferral, of forgetting, and of lapses originates in his foreignness with regard to the German language. Certeau locates in the brutal experience of oppression and departure, forced by Naziantisemitism, the source of such linguistic foreignness. The situation of being ‘the guest of the German language. . . only provisionally tolerated, always in transit’ (Certeau 1988: 317), produces a disjunctive relation between the writer and the language of expression: The work has no hereditary soil. It is nomadic. Writing cannot forget the misfortune from which its necessity springs; nor can it count on tacit, rich, and fostering ‘evidences’ that can provide for an ‘agrarian’ speaker his intimacy with the mother tongue. Writing begins with an exodus. It proceeds in foreign languages. Its only recourse is the very elucidation of its travels in the tongue of the other. (Certeau 1988: 319)

The impossibility of an ‘agrarian’ intimacy with the mother tongue is fully pertinentin Rawet’s case. Ina newspaper interview, Rawet commented that his first bat-

tle as a writer in Brazilian Portuguese was to overcome the despotism of the north-eastern literary giants. He was referring in particular to the great regionalist writers like José Lins do Rego and Graciliano Ramos, whose dry and economic prose, so much in concert with the bleak agrarian landscape and peoples of the Brazilian interior, was something entirely alien to the immigrant writer’s experience. Rawet manifests his acute awareness of the diaspora predicament in a statement about another Brazilian-Jewish writer, Clarice Lispector: Tam thinking of writing about Clarice... I find Clarice an exceptional figure for a number of reasons. The title of my study is ‘Adventures of a Jewish Conscience in Clarice Lispector’. This language-centred approach that is being applied to her does not seem very appropriate to me. They are studying the language as if it were intentional. But what happens with Clarice is a sort of particular consciousness that she has. A specific and completely different way of seeing reality. The surroundings she lived in until adult life, that all form a particular consciousness. And determine A paixdo segundo G.H. [The Passion According to G.H.] and A maca no escuro [The Apple in the Dark]. Clarice’s relationship with reality is not the same as José Lins do Rego’s. It can’t be. José Lins has a relationship with immediate reality. A cashew tree is a cashew tree. A farm is a farm. For Clarice, there often is no immediate cashew tree. She has to work internally to arrive at the cashew tree as cashew tree, in the context of Brazilian reality, of course. (cited in Conde 1971: 1)

ROSANA KOHL BINES It is revealing that Rawet would contextualize Lispector’s mediated relation with ‘Brazilian reality’ and language to her Jewishness (“The surroundings she lived in until adult life’). It is also telling that he should locate in that Jewishness the source of her uniquely ‘exceptional’ literature. What surprises me the most about Rawet’s productive take on the ‘adventures of a Jewish conscience in Clarice Lispector’ is that he cannot sustain the same positive note when it comes to evaluating the contours of his own Jewish consciousness. I am not thereby suggesting that he negates the Jewish facet of his fiction. Quite the contrary: it is precisely because he understood it so well, because he was so aware of the extent to which his Yiddish-speaking shtetl background intervened in his fiction, making it ‘foreign’, that he manifested an ambivalent attitude towards its Jewish element. For what made his writings ‘unique’ was, simultaneously, what cast him out of the Brazilian nationalist camp. It seems that, however much the immigrant writer expressed the desire ‘to manifest spontaneously the inside of the language, its popular roots, in the simultaneous genesis of idea, emotion and conscience’, what kept surfacing in his work was, by contrast, the avesso of the language, its inverted side (Issa 1970). By turning language inside out, Rawet surprises us with a wide spectrum of sounds and unexpected avenues of meaning, keeping the reader in a permanent state of alert. The process resembles what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘deterritorialized’ language, a writing that puts pressure on the conditions of linguistic stability, pushing language to its limits, to a line of flight that moves further and further away from an original ground of meaning, away from a marked linguistic territoriality. So instead of mimetic representation, language promotes what Derrida called ‘dissemination’. It disaggregates the one-to-one correspondence between a referent in reality, the word that names it, and the meaning ascribed to it, so that there is no longer such a thing as an ‘immediate cashew tree’. Words gush from Ahasverus’s mouth, in an attempt to probe the physicality of the familiar spaces which slowly, comma after comma, turn more abstract, until everything disperses: “The consonants and vowels, whatever they were, coordinated, subordinated, resorted to a logic of pharynx, vocal cords, lips, teeth, surrounding vegetation, homes, habits, costumes, tradition, migrations’ (Rawet 1970a: 17). That the list ends with ‘migrations’ is emblematic of the impossibility of the writer/character settling for ‘homes’ or ‘habits’. The sentence’s implacable rhythm further reinforces the inevitability of the deterritorializing path, from the angle of the displaced writer. For Rawet, as for Lispector, a cashew tree is never a cashew tree. Glossing over Kafka’s lucid apprehension of the Jewish writer’s predicament,'® Rawet’s language attests to the impossibility of writing Brazilian Portuguese, as well as to the impossibility of writing differently. How was he to sround an identity as a Brazilian writer by way of a language that marks deracination and the very impossibility of settling? Rawet’s fiction attests to the unfeasibility of that project, which it nonetheless fiercely pursues.

SAMUEL RAWET’S WANDERING JEW This sense of impossibility is fundamental to understanding the dilemmas expressed in Rawet’s use of language, for it is never only about a willed celebration of estrangement, an empowering affirmation of nomadism, or an expansive act of ontological freedom. Rawet’s language never loses sight of a horizon of belonging, powerfully present by default, as failure and as impossibility. The frustration that comes from not being whole or settled coexists with the vitality drawn from dispersion and mobility, forming a web of precariously balanced tensions. What is so compelling is precisely this ‘in-between’ state, this tenuous situation of intimacy, as Rawet balances the strategies of dispersal needed to create a ‘dias-

poric language’ with the antithetical struggle for an anchor. In his anguished ontological quests and centuries-old metaphysical interrogations, Rawet searches

for places in which to situate his conscience and sense of ethics in a world experienced as randomly aggressive and inhospitable: Is it enough to be born with a head, trunk, limbs, a cock or a cunt between your legs in order to be a man or a woman, is it? Is it enough to be born like that to be a man in general terms? Or do we have to be reborn, filtered by pain, in order to understand that the most you can do is formulate the question, without trying to obtain any solution to the problem, if there is a problem. To formulate the question, simply, and to spend life gathering from oneself fragments of answers. (Rawet 1971: 45-6)

At once nomadic and anchored, fragmentary and whole, blunt and nuanced, Rawet’s language has a bearing on all these poles without, however, settling on any one paradigm as a guiding model. His text remains open to an intermingling of antagonistic grammars. In Viagens de Ahasverus, this coexistence of disparate languages occurs most emblematically in a passage where the word ‘Ahasverus’ disintegrates into smaller particles, until the fragment ‘erus’ comes to view: “To manage to shift from that place to the very same place, he pronounced the word VARINA. And the word brought him back once again to NAZARE. Once again, to NAZARENO. Once again, to the word. AHASVERUS. AH. HAS. AHA. SVER. AHA. ERUS’ (Rawet 1970a: 29). Out of the break-up of the name, here standing

as a metonym for the dissociative strategies mobilized in the narrative at large, emerges a suggestion of ‘Eros’, the Greek god who came to symbolize, in a psychoanalytical frame, libidinal energy and desire. The arduous agenda of surveying the most abstracted and elaborate forms of writing also involves the most intimate and uncontrollable aspects of human sexuality.'” This textual openness is the source of both the vigour and the frailty of Rawet’s prose. For while he masterfully conflates disparate modes of writing, attesting to the violent internal battles for identity, he often fails to promote a critical dialogue

between the incompatible terms. The inability to build bridges between these extreme versions of the self and of the languages that name them—the inability to translate across differences—traps the writer in a predicament of alienation and isolation bordering on schizophrenia.

ROSANA KOHL BINES It is ironic that work so devoted to ideas of mobility and rootlessness should trap the writer in a reclusive, alienating predicament. In the last years of his life

Rawet lived alone in Sobradinho, a small satellite town on the periphery of Brasilia, estranged from friends and family, and deprived of a productive artistic environment. He grew intensely paranoid and developed a schizophrenic personality. His writings from that period are nearly unintelligible,*° in keeping with an earlier formulation that ‘the last instance of meditation is a torrent of disconnected words, a discharge with the severity of an implacable logic, that does not

permit any understanding, any link between the first and the second word’ (Rawet 1967: 113). This reference to disconnected words, written from a position of absolute otherness, reflects someone who has lost all connections.

Modes of Forgetting What of the link between the impossibility of using language to assert membership and the impossibility of remembering, of constructing a biography for oneself? In answering this question, consider one of Rawet’s recollections of his Jewish past: I was born on 23 July 1929, in a little town, almost a village, Klimontow, which at the time was a few hours from Warsaw by train or bus. It was basically a village of Polish Jews, and my parents were small storekeepers, very poor. I was 4 years old when my father went to Brazil; we stayed behind, waiting. I began my studies very early, as used to be common in Poland, in central Europe. The school was next to the synagogue. The first alphabet I learned was Yiddish—I did not learn Hebrew proper. I learned how to pray; someone would translate the whole sentence, in this case the prayer, the verse. | have a memory of life in the town, memory of winter, of religious life, memory of a world that no longer exists, and that interested me later because it was a world—I cannot quite place it—perhaps of the Middle Ages, or of the seventeenth or eighteenth century. But our situation in Klimontow was simply awful. We practically lived in expectation of a ticket to Brazil. My father had already been here for three years, when we finally came over, I was 7 years old, we arrived in 1936. So it was before the war—I don’t really remember if we left because of the war, I don’t think so—and the flow of immisrants from eastern Europe to America was very strong then. We probably arrived with

that influx. I have recollections of the early days in Brazil, and to this day I find them important. I arrived at Maua Square with the family, and my father had already rented a house in the suburb of Leopoldina, which we moved to. And until my early twenties, | lived in Leopoldina, Iam fundamentally a suburbanite, the suburb is very much a part of me. I learned Portuguese on the street, struggling and getting it wrong, and I find that to be the best school. I learned everything on the street.

Note how Rawet contrasts the private, orderly, and self-contained world of his Polish shtetl life with the public, bustling world of the streets of Rio. It is the very idea of ‘home’ that needs to be reshaped in the new environment. For the old ‘home’

meant the all-too-familiar world of Yiddishkeit, so melancholically depicted in

SAMUEL RAWET’S WANDERING JEW this string of images—‘a memory of life in the town, memory of winter, of religious life, memory of a world that no longer exists’. This last statement is doubly true. The homey shtetl that disappeared in Poland could not possibly be re-created in Brazil, despite the immigrants’ efforts to keep the tradition alive in the new land. The struggle for survival pushes Rawet away from the protective walls of his Jewish clan towards the busy and sunny streets of Rio, where he must sell clothes and appliances from door to door. ‘Home’ is now this wide, unpredictable space. In order to make sense of his new home, Rawet will make use of his old one, establishing clear-cut contrasts that speak eloquently of the disrupting experience of forced migration. None of the attributes that made up the old home are available to Rawet in his new Brazilian life. There is no winter, there is no small town, and there is no organized Jewish religious learning. These losses are simply irretrievable: no bridges can be built between such disparate ideas of home. What is challenging about Rawet’s

literature is that it leaves absolutely no room for nostalgia. He neither yearns for a long-lost home nor expects to reconstruct one in the new place. Quite the contrary: the attitude is one of dismissal of the old home. It is as if it were necessary to annihilate his old self altogether in order to be reborn in the new setting. He could envision no continuity. That radical sense of cleavage resonates strongly in Rawet’s work, forcing an antagonism between his Jewishness, associated with the Yiddish home, and his Brazilianness, identified, above all, with his newly acquired Portuguese language.

Rawet contrasts the Jewish home centred on scholarship with a Brazilian streetwise attitude. The latter takes precedence when Rawet chooses the street, not the school, as the better kind of pedagogy. In his writings, the Jewish world of the Book and the Brazilian reality of the street are represented as extreme ends

of an irreconcilable personal dilemma, transfigured into an ethical statement. Each of these two disparate universes authorizes a distinctive persona. The bookish Jewish world energizes and isolates Rawet, the intellectual, avid reader, and sophisticated writer, possessor of a refined philosophical vocabulary.’* The Brazilian ‘real’ world shapes Rawet, the ordinary working man in touch with the ‘concrete’ aspects of reality.*?

There is an exemplary passage in Rawet’s 1970 autobiographical essay, ‘Devaneios de um solitario aprendiz da ironia’ (Reveries of a Solitary Apprentice of Irony), where he narrates a trip he took to Lisbon in a third-class cabin with manual labourers: ‘For a few days I managed to get close: they were carpenters, mechanics, disenchanted with America. Later I was stupid enough to start reading again, between binges. A barrier was created, | was aman who read’.** One of the ways to disengage his image from that of the cultured, ethereal intellectual was to concentrate instead on the real, carnal, sexual dimension of his own body, which he voiced in crude and often obscene language:

ROSANA KOHL BINES The man was normal. He liked an asshole, but mainly he liked having his dick sucked. Warning to those who sail the shitty seas of deep psychology: this is prose, delicious

prose, very Carioca, Brazilian, where curse-words, words reinforced by a greaterthan-usual ambiguity, are still words, human instruments, delicious, precise. (Rawet 1970Cc: 16)

Cursing is indeed recurrent in Rawet’s literature, deployed as a ‘Brazilian’ expressive/aggressive weapon against pretentious displays of erudition: ‘I regret not knowing Latin, otherwise ’'d make up one of those phrases about the nonsense spoken in its name. Since I don’t know Latin, I’m left with the magnificent vernacular: fuck you!’ (Rawet 1970¢: 24).

Rawet’s overt disdain for superfluous bookish erudition, which he connects with a Jewish tradition of learning, experienced negatively in the cheder,’? is manifest in this sarcastic recollection, not coincidentally phrased in elevated prose: ‘Ah, the snows of my childhood, oh, the sweetness of the stick beatings I got because I kicked a ball on the street. They told the bearded old man (there were already informers back then), and he went into a foaming rage in the room at the Synagogue building’ (Rawet 1970c: 10). Again Rawet stages the dichotomy between the constrictive space of Jewish scholarship, articulated in an affected language, and the free and fun space of the street, described in prosaic form. The fact that Rawet worked so hard to disentangle his image from his bookish legacy speaks much for his personal, troubled relation with his Jewish heritage, recollected with negativity, as well as for the contextual pressures for membership of a Brazilian cultural scene that so valorized the prosaic and the colloquial. Where Rawet sought to sound most ‘Brazilian’ he found the least receptive audience for his abusive, exalted language. Edward Said provides an insightful explanation for the apparent dilemma, when he speaks of exiles as wilful eccentrics who brandish their difference like a weapon, compelling the world to accept their right not to belong. On the one hand, exiles want to blend in and be accepted; on the other hand, they resist assimilation because that would mean relinquishing what makes them powerful, that is, their inassimilable difference (Said 1990: 144). If we agree with Said, we have to reinterpret Rawet’s overstated ‘Brazilian’ language—which one of his characters proclaimed with pride to be an idiom ‘without smooth ends, rude, with angled contours, and edges thinner than the blade of a knife’ (Rawet 1963: 25)—as a strident cry for belonging rather than an isolating strategy aimed at preserving his difference at all costs. Conversely, what I have identified as an impediment to inclusion in the Brazilian fold, namely the Jewish language of the ‘illustrious foreign writer’, has also to be taken as the very factor that attracted the interest of a select but enthusiastic Brazilian readership. It is also important to bear in mind that Rawet’s wilful detachment from a bookish Jewish tradition only comes into play in relation to the counter-model of the Brazilian malandro. He readily finds his way back to the ‘culture of the Book’

SAMUEL RAWET’S WANDERING JEW to manifest an angry opposition to the Jewish-Brazilian community, perceived as uncultured and materialistic. In this case, bookish culture serves as both a protective and a combative shield against stereotypes of Jewish avarice, which were in fact insidious in Brazilian society, as the following passage from 1933 ironically attests: Brazil should, thus, open its arms to Israel, at a time when it is persecuted in the Old World... the Jews can bring the Law and their gold to this side of the Atlantic. We possess, in heaven and on earth, a place for their God and for their money. Let them come with their books and their checkbooks. And they will find only friends—providing, it must be quite clear, they have not come to increase the numbers of hire purchase furniture salesman.

This comment, written during Gettlio Vargas’s dictatorship and dated the same year Rawet’s father emigrated to Brazil, reflects the ambivalent attitude with which Brazilian nationals ‘welcomed the undesirables’. As Jeffrey Lesser observes, during the Vargas era the collision between growing Brazilian nativism and increasing Jewish immigration activated a series of anti-Jewish sentiments

and stereotypes, which were deployed both negatively and positively, when it came to deciding which Jewish ‘qualities’ were advantageous or prejudicial to Brazil’s social and economic advancement. Lesser remarks how fluid and contradictory the perceptions Brazilians held towards Jews were, and how easy the shift was ‘between conceptions of Jews as useful to Brazil’s economic development and conceptions of them as harmful to its social development’ (1995: 123). In the passage quoted above, the activation of the old stereotype of the Jewish middleman as parasite, preying on the host economy and competing with Brazilian nationals,*’ coexists with the positive revalu-

ation of the so-called Jewish ‘expertise’ in money for the benefit of Brazilian society. Likewise, the image of Jews as inherently ‘bookish’ would fluctuate between positive and negative. On the one hand, it was perceived as a mark of a Jewish sense of superiority and of the Jews’ unwillingness to assimilate into Brazilian

culture. On the other hand, concurrent with the perception of an inassimilable Jewish cultural trace, there was also the conflicting assumption that the people of the Book and of the Law could in fact contribute to the refinement of Brazilian culture and ethos, as the passage cited above implies. Rawet reacts to these disparate visions of the Jews, particularly as they enact the critical intersection between the ‘people of culture’ and the ‘people of com-

merce’, by succumbing to some of the mechanisms of self-hatred. Sander Gilman (1986) explains the discourse of self-hatred as Jews’ internalization of the

image of themselves projected onto them by the reference group—in Rawet’s case, Brazilian society. Since the images of Jews generated within Brazilian discourses were quite contradictory, Rawet was confronted with a shifting set of values, which he, in turn, incorporated as a genuine expression of his own

ROSANA KOHL BINES internal conflicts with issues of Jewish identity. The nearly irreconcilable selfimages of the Jews, which he mobilizes in his fiction, are a sign of this implied mirroring game. Rawet seeks to distance himself from all the negative traits ascribed to things Jewish by transferring them to other Jews, against whom he will strengthen his distinctive sense of Jewish identity, composed only of those Jewish qualities labelled positive by the Brazilians. However, given that these positive/negative values oscillate considerably, he keeps moving in and out of conventional Jewish images—the intellectual, the pedlar, the wanderer, the persecuted, and so on—while alternating his capacities for adhesion and detachment, as a response to the mixed signs of Jewishness generated within Brazilian society.

Rawet wanders in a marked terrain of expectations. His successive metamorphoses are less a liberating experience of the multiple possibilities of selfhood than a strategy of survival, a way of not allowing himself to be ‘overdetermined’, reduced to a stereotype, or ‘overlooked’ in the sense of cultural and social disavowal (Bhabha 1994: 236). The mutable self strives to dodge the stereotypes

imposed by the dominant culture, in an effort to claim a space of permanent becoming: ‘Iam an eternal immigrant; I depart from me to myself, from my body to my body, mutable’ (Rawet 1970c: 59). Rawet is not always successful in sustaining that metamorphic state or in escaping the enclosure of Brazilian social discourses, with their projected stereotypes of both ‘Jewishness’ and ‘Brazilianness’. In Rawet’s often failed strategies of survival, made visible through the ‘imperfections’ of his style and through his uneven prose that switches registers from one line to the next, shifting brusquely from highly elaborate phrasings to the crudest forms of cursing, from the language of self-valorization to that of self-hatred, from detached affectation to the deepest manifestations of anguish, it is possible

to grasp the extreme contextual pressures exerted upon his writings. In these moments—when the narrative seems to be out of control, and explodes in outbursts of anger, or in hermetic utterances—in these fleeting moments, both the feebleness and the power of Rawet’s prose rest most tellingly. His language is at once thoroughly permeated by the conflicting narratives and demands stemming from the Brazilian surroundings and relentlessly striving for a line of flight, for an escape route beyond the constraints imposed by his new home. These two seemingly incompatible routes—the one pointing to a sense of being anchored in writing in Brazilian Portuguese, from the oblique angle of the Jewish immigrant, and the other, aiming at severing all familial, ethnic, national, and literary bonds towards the vindication of a position of disengagement?®—delineates a language of ‘betweenness’, that conveys imbalance or homelessness. The questions raised by Rawet’s writing are not ultimately about literature itself, but about life and the struggle to build a home in a new language. Between Jewishness and Brazilianness, between the intellectual and the rogue, between refined prose and cursing, between alienation and belonging, Rawet’s writing

SAMUEL RAWET’S WANDERING JEW struggles with stark antagonisms and offers no point from which to negotiate the impasse posed by his entangled situation as a Yiddish-speaking Jew writing in Brazilian Portuguese. To follow the extreme inflections and abrupt undulations of his language, moving from calm introspection to outbursts of anger within the space of a sentence, is to probe literature at the edge. His gesture is one of intensification of the impossibility of writing and of living between languages and cultures. For Rawet, there is no language that can spell the word ‘home’.

Notes This essay is adapted from my Ph.D. dissertation, ‘Post-Shoah Identity Between Languages’ (University of Chicago, 2001), supervised by Professor Sander L. Gilman, which analyses post-Holocaust writing through the work of Samuel Rawet, Elias Canetti, and Eva Hoffman. They all write from a place that is not home and in a language that is not their mother tongue, providing very specific post-war accounts of Jewish lives lived between places and languages.

dl In ‘Our Homeland, the Text’ (1985), George Steiner claims for the Jewish writer the double prerogative of being unhoused geographically but at home in the text.

2 Along with his literary activities, Rawet pursued a career as an engineer, aware of the fact that literature alone could not provide the financial support he needed. In 1957 Rawet moved to Brasilia, the nation’s new capital, where he joined the team of well-known Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer. In the 1960s Rawet travelled around Brazil and then to Europe, spending some time in Israel, where he worked with Niemeyer on the construction of the University of Haifa. Seven years after his first book, Rawet published Didlogo (1963), then Abama (1964), Os sete sonhos (1967), O terreno de uma polegada quadrada (1969), Viagens de Ahasverus (1970), and Que os mortos enterrem seus mortos (1981). He also wrote some early plays, which were not published, and some philosophical essays, which he published at his own expense. Rawet died in 1984, ina satellite city near Brasilia, alone and forgotten. An anthology of his fiction was published in 2004 (see also Rawet 2008).

3 I borrow this felicitous phrase from Professor Nelson Vieira, who has translated several of Rawet’s stories into English, culminating in the publication of the volume The Prophet and Other Stories (Rawet 1998). Thanks to Professor Vieira’s relentless efforts to bring Rawet’s

writings, which have been out of print for decades, to a wider readership, they have attracted new readers both inside and outside Brazil.

4 I use the term ‘minor’ after Deleuze and Guattari’s (1986) conceptualization of ‘minor literature’ as indicative of a disruptive, destabilizing potential at play at the heart of major, well-established languages. I use the term with restrictions, for while Rawet writes in Portuguese, the radicalness of his prose is traversed throughout by a reterritorializing impulse, concerned with questions of roots and of belonging in the Brazilian national fold.

5 Unless otherwise noted, all translations from Rawet’s work are mine, with the invaluable help of my University of Chicago colleagues Alice Musick McLean and Ana Maria Lima. I am particularly grateful to Peter Lenny for his suggestions and careful revision of all translated excerpts.

ROSANA KOHL BINES 6 The literature on the legend of the wandering Jew is vast. Some of the most important works are Anderson 1965, Hasan-Rokem and Dundes 1986, and Rouart 19838.

7 Nelson H. Vieira used as an epigraph to his essay on Samuel Rawet the following excerpt from Kurt Levin, quoted from Resolving Social Conflicts: ‘Not the belonging to many groups is the cause of the difficulty, but an uncertainty of belongingness’ (N. H. Vieira 1990: 1).

8 Rawet’s work proposes an impossible dialogue with a God he never ceases to deny. Rawet is indeed the agnostic Jew, obsessed with and tormented by the idea of God. Two of his works, the collection of short stories Didlogo and the autobiographical essay Eu-tu-éle (1971), are overtly inspired by the work of Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, whose seminal book I and Thou (first published in 1923) touches on many of the vital themes Rawet was to explore, negatively, in his own writings. Rawet often expressed his admiration for the work of Buber, who elaborates on the existence of mutuality between God and man, as well as on the modes for refining their conversation. When Rawet affirms the impossibility of dialogue between man and God, or between man and man, he feeds on Buber’s melancholy realization that every “Thow’ is bound to transform itself into an ‘It’, into a passive object. For the arrogant ‘I’ enacts a barrier between himself and the world about him, precluding a real relationship from being established between all of those involved in the act of building knowledge and consciousness (Buber 1958).

9 The Portuguese text defines Ahasverus as a creature em constante ajuste e desajuste. The neologism ‘disadjustment’ was suggested to me by Alice McLean.

10 Rawet gave this statement in an interview to Flavio Moreira da Costa in 1972. I came across this calculation of dates, connecting Rawet’s detachment from Jewish tradition with the end of the war, in Saul Kirschbaum’s MA thesis on Rawet (2000).

11 The critical observation was taken from a newspaper review entitled ‘Até onde avanca Rawet no terreno de uma polegada quadrada’? (Where Does Rawet Advance to in the Land of One Square Inch?), in reference to Rawet’s book of short stories O terreno de uma polegada quadrada. No authorial reference is provided. O Globo (Rio de Janeiro), 24 Sept. 1972: 5:

12 The term ‘Carioca’ refers to those born in the city of Rio de Janeiro.

13 This expression was coined by Arthur Engracio in a newspaper review of Contos do imigrante (see Engracio 1970). For the most part, the critical literature on Rawet’s work appears in scattered newspaper articles, gathered at the National Library in Rio de Janeiro. While this essay was in press a collection of critical reviews of Rawet’s work, digitized from microfilms stored in the National Library, was published (see Filho 2008). 14 Allusion to foreign writers as a critical strategy for evaluating Rawet’s work can be found in, for example, Brasil 1971, Gomes 1977, Szklo 1984, Polvora 1971, and Verdi 1989 among others. 15 The commentary refers to the work of the Brazilian social scientist Gilberto Freyre, author of the celebrated Casa-Grande & Senzala (1933), which inaugurated in Brazilian studies the idea of the mestizo as a positive component in the elaboration of a Brazilian national identity. Freire’s re-evaluation of the process of mestizagem (racial mixture), no longer taken as an obstacle to the ‘betterment’ of Brazilian society, but as the very reason for its richness and worth, has also generated the much-contested myth of racial democracy in Brazil. Freyre’s multifaceted work has been object of constant scrutiny by Brazilian scholars in the social and political sciences.

SAMUEL RAWET’S WANDERING JEW 16 Macunaima appropriates the narrative of the search for the Holy Grail. The protagonist of Mario de Andrade’s story is a hero without any character, who undergoes a series of transformations while travelling to the most distant corners of Brazil in search of the precious stone ‘Yuraquita’. During his travels, Macunaima meets all sorts of legendary Brazilian figures, composing a bricolage of Brazilian myths and cultural icons, which are depicted in a parodic mode. See de Andrade 1993.

17 In a 1979 interview with Danilo Gomes, Rawet describes his gloomy gaze towards the physical spaces of urban Brazil: ‘The little I have written showing the local environment [of Brasilia] cannot be distinguished from what I would write about any other city, Sao Paulo, Belo Horizonte, Rio. There is always some dark alley, there’s always a pathway to the bar, there’s always a prostitute and a pederast, a man and a woman, there’s always the interval between two loves, there’s always some defeat in the midst of some victory’ (Gomes 1979: 162-3; translation in N. H. Vieira 1995: 57).

18 Kafka writes on the situation of Jewish writers like himself, who are undesirable guests of the German language, which nonetheless remains their native tongue: “They existed among three impossibilities, which I just happen to call linguistic. It is simplest to call them that. But they might also be called something entirely different. These are: the impossibility of not writing, the impossibility of writing German, the impossibility of writing differently. One might also add a fourth impossibility, the impossibility of writing’ (Kafka 1977: 28).

19 This particular passage, in which the words NAZARENE and AHASVERUS appear connected, leads to the protagonist’s realization of his sexual desire for the long-lost partner, who has once left Ahasverus ‘with red lips and with a sweetness, numbing his penis’ (Rawet 19704: 42). The suggestion of a sexual encounter between Ahasverus and Jesus underscores the theme of homosexuality, which so troubled Rawet in his personal life. In 1970 he published a long essay entitled Homossexualismo, sexualidade e valor (Homosexuality: Sexuality and Value).

20 Iam thankful to the Brazilian writer Renard Perez, who gave me access to some of Rawet’s personal letters and unpublished manuscripts written during this last period of his seclusion. I would also like to acknowledge the generosity of Professor Bella Josef, of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, who kindly introduced me to Renard Perez.

pa Rawet gave this important statement in an interview with Flavio Moreira da Costa (see da Costa 1990: 142-3).

22 In Viagens de Ahasverus, Rawet betrays his erudition in the constellation of references to painters such as Utrillo, Picasso, Modigliani, and Chagall, and to writers such as Miguel Torga, Graciliano Ramos, Thomas Mann, Yehuda Halevi, Kierkegaard, Spinoza, and Nietzsche.

23 I write of ‘concrete’ aspects of reality as a pun on Rawet’s profession as an engineer, because he specialized in mathematical calculations of reinforced concrete. The figure of Rawet the engineer offers an interesting counterpoint to that of Rawet the writer.

24 Samuel Rawet, ‘Devaneios de um solitario aprendiz da ironia’. | am thankful to Clara Apelbaum, Rawet’s sister, for lending me a sample of this text, which appears in photo-

copied form, since Rawet could not find an editor to print it (see Rawet 2008). It is reported that Rawet sold many of his possessions, including an apartment, in order to fund the publication of some of his essays by a press he aggressively named Puta Que O

ROSANA KOHL BINES Pariu Editora (Son of a Bitch Publishers). Most of the out-of-print or unpublished Rawet material was given to me by Clara Apelbaum during our interview on 11 Nov. 1977. In 2008 I had the opportunity to edit and write the preface to an anthology of Rawet’s essays, with Professor José Leonardo Tonus (Paris IV, Sorbonne); this includes ‘Devaneios de um solitario aprendiz da ironia’ (see Rawet 2008). 25 The Hebrew term cheder refers to the elementary classroom for traditional Jewish learning typical of east European Jewish communities before the Holocaust.

26 I came across this precious quote in Kirschbaum 2000: 24-5. The original excerpt appears in de Campos 1933: 18.

Zi For a thorough discussion of the links between economic occupations and ethnic identities, particularly as they concern Jews engaged in moneylending and pawnbroking, see Zenner 1991. 28 Rawet progressively severed his links with his closest friends from the literary group Café da Manha, which in the 1950s provided a veritable home for Rawet, who by then was already estranged from his family over disputes about his father’s will. Rawet felt that his siblings had deceived him on the partition of the family’s patrimony.

References ADORNO, THEODOR. 1951. Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. Jephcott. London. ANDERSON, GEORGE K.1965. The Legend of the Wandering Jew. Providence, RI. BHABHA, HOMI1.1994. Ihe Location of Culture. New York.

BINES, ROSANA KOHL, and JOSE LEONARDO TONUS, eds. 2008. Samuel Rawet: Ensatos reuntdos. Rio de Janeiro.

BAMMER, ANGELIKA, ed. 1994. Displacements—Cultural Identities in Question. Bloomington, Ind.

BRASIL, ASSIS. 1970. Preface to Viagens de Ahasverus by Samuel Rawet, 7-13. Rio de Janeiro. — 1971. ‘Literatura brasileira hoje: As viagens de Samuel Rawet’, Jornal de Letras, 250: 1. BUBER, MARTIN.1956 [1923]. land Thou, trans. Ronald Gregor Smith. New York. CANDIDO, ANTONIO. 1993. ‘Dialética da malandragem’. In Antonio Candido, O discurso € a cidade, 19-54. Sao Paulo.

CERTEAU, MICHEL DE. 1988. “The Fiction of History: The Writing of Moses and Monotheism’. Inid., The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley, 308-54. New York.

CLIFFORD, JAMES. 1992. ‘Travelling Cultures’. In Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler, eds., Cultural Studies, 90-116. New York. CONDE, RONALDO. 1971. ‘A necessidade de escrever contos’. Correto da Manha/Anexo, 24(125) (Mar.): 1. Repr. in Francisco Venceslau Filho, ed., Samuel Rawet: Fortuna critica em Jornais é€ revistas, 239-40. Rio de Janeiro, 2008. DA MATTA, ROBERTO.1978. Carnavais, malandros e herdis: Para uma sociologia do dilema

brasileiro. Rio de Janeiro. Eng. trans.: Carnivals, Rogues, and Heroes: An Interpretation of the Brazilian Dilemma, trans. John Drury (Notre Dame, Ind., 1991).

SAMUEL RAWET’S WANDERING JEW DA COSTA, FLAVIO MOREIRA. 1972. ‘Rawet fala de Rawet’, Correio da Manhd (18 June).

—1990. ‘Andancas e mudancas de Samuel Rawet’. In Flavio Moreira da Costa, Vida de artista: Um livro de encontros e entrevistas, 141-0. Porto Alegre.

DE ANDRADE, MARIO.1993 [1928]. Macunaima. Belo Horizonte.

DE CAMPOS, HUMBERTO. 1933. Os Judeus na Alemanha no momento actual. Rio de Janeiro. DELEUZE, GILLES, and FELIX GUATTARI. 1980. Kafka: Toward A Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan. Minneapolis. ENEIDA.1956. ‘Encontro matinal’, Diario de Noticias (30 Mart.), 8. ENGRACIO, ARTHUR.19Q70. ‘O contista Samuel Rawet’. Jornal Cultura (Nov.).

FILHO, FRANCISCO VENCESLAU, ed. 2008. Samuel Rawet: Fortuna critica em jornais e revistas. Rio de Janeiro. FREYRE, GILBERTO (1933). Casa-Grande & Senzala. Rio de Janeiro. GILMAN, SANDER L. 1986. Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews. Baltimore.

GOMES, DANILO. 1977. ‘Na toca de Samuel Rawet, 0 solitario caminhante do mundo’. Minas Gerais: Suplemento Literdrio 12(544) (Mar.): 4-5. Repr. in Francisco Venceslau Filho, ed., Samuel Rawet: Fortuna critica em jornais e revistas, 323-39. Rio de Janeiro, 2008. — 1979. Escritores brasileiros ao vivo. Belo Horizonte. HASAN-ROKEM, GALIT, and ALAN DUNDES. 19806. The Wandering Jew: Essays in the Interpretation of a Christian Legend. Bloomington, Ind. ISSA, FARIDA.1970. ‘Os sete sonhos: Samuel Rawet’. O Globo (18 Apr.), 9. KAFKA, FRANZ.1977. Letters to Friends, Family and Editors. New York.

KIRSCHBAUM, SAUL. 2000. ‘Samuel Rawet: Profeta da alteridade’. MA thesis, University of Sao Paulo. LESSER, JEFFREY. 1995. Welcoming the Undesirables: Brazil and the Jewish Question. Berkeley.

MERQUIOR, JOSE GUILHERME. 1990. ‘Gilberto e Depois’, Critica 1964-1989: Ensaios sobre Arte e Literatura (Rio de Janeiro), 343-55. POLVORA, HELIO. 1971. A forca da ficcao. Petropolis. RAWET, SAMUEL.19506. Contos do imigrante. Rio de Janeiro.

——1963. Didlogo. Rio de Janeiro.

——1964. Abama. Rio de Janeiro. ——19067. Os sete sonhos. Rio de Janeiro.

——1969. O terreno de uma polegada quadrada. Rio de Janeiro. ——1970a. Viagens de Ahasverus a terra alheia em busca de um passado que ndo existe porque é futuro e de um futuro que jd passou porque sonhado. Rio de Janeiro.

—1970b. Homossexualismo, sexualidade e valor. Rio de Janeiro. Repr. in Rosana Kohl Bines and José Leonardo Tonus, eds., Samuel Rawet: Ensaios reunidos, 23-49. Rio de Janeiro, 2008.

ROSANA KOHL BINES RAWET, SAMUEL. 1971. Eu-tu-éle. Rio de Janeiro. Repr. in Rosana Kohl Bines and José Leonardo Tonus, eds., Samuel Rawet: Ensaios reunidos, 95-135. Rio de Janeiro, 2008. ——1981. Que os mortos enterrem seus mortos. Sao Paulo. — 1998. The Prophet and Other Stories, trans. Nelson H. Vieira. Albuquerque, NM. —— 2004. Samuel Rawet: Contos e Novelas reunidos, ed. André Seffrin. Rio de Janeiro. — 2008. ‘Devaneios de um solitario aprendiz da ironia’. In Rosana Kohl Bines and José Leonardo Tonus, eds., Samuel Rawet: Ensaios reunidos, 233-40. Rio de Janeiro. ROUART, MARIE-FRANCE. 1988. Le Mythe du Juif Errant dan! ‘Europe du XIX siécle. Paris.

SAID, EDWARD.1990. ‘Reflection on Exile’. In Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Cornel West, eds., Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, 357-06. Cambridge, Mass. SCHWARZ, ROBERTO.1985. ‘Our Homeland, the Text’. Salmagundi, 66: 4-25. — 1992. ‘National by Elimination’. In id., Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture, trans. John Gledson. London.

SZKLO, GILDA SALEM. 1984. ‘A experiéncia do tragico (recordando Rawet...)’. Minas Gerais: Suplemento Literdrio, 19 (950) (15 Dec): 2-4.

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VERDI, MARIA LUCIA. 1989. ‘Obsess6es tematicas: Uma leitura de Samuel Rawet’. MA thesis, Federal University of Brasilia. VIEIRA, LUIZ GONZAGA. 1971. Review of Alienacdo e realidade by Samuel Rawet. Minas Gerais: Suplemento Literdrio (22 May): 4.

VIEIRA, NELSON H.1990. ‘Ser Judeu e escritor—trés casos brasileiros: Samuel Rawet, Clarice Lispector e Moacyr Scliar’, Papéis Avulsos, 25: 1-20.

——1995. Jewish Voices in Brazilian Literature: A Prophetic Discourse of Alterity. Gainesville, Fla. WALDMAN, BERTA. 1996. ‘Ahasverus: O Judeu Errante ea errancia dos sentidos’. Letterature d’'America, 60: 5-20. ZENNER, WALTER P. 1991. Minorities in the Middle: A Cross-Cultural Analysis. Albany, NY;

EIGHT

;,

Home in the Pampas: Alberto Gerchunoft’s Jewish Gauchos MONICA SZURMUK

IN HIS 1934 OBITUARY of Shalom Aleichem, Argentinian writer Alberto Ger-

chunoff includes a rare personal reflection on his own life as a cosmopolitan Buenos Aires Jew: Very often late at night, after a day of deep identification with the Christian universal life of the metropolis and the country, I feel a morbid need for the ghetto. That is when I dive into the café in Corrientes Street where, between the noise of tea glasses and the bickering, I watch the transatlantic relocation of that fabulous and strange world. The mysteri-

ous desire for Jewishness is satisfied in me as if I was coming back from a trip to Warsaw, Bucharest, or Odessa. (Gerchunoff 1979: 69)

While Gerchunoff yearns for life in the ghetto—a yearning he himself describes as morbid—he depicts a lively, relocated Jewish life in Buenos Aires. This is not unusual in itself, but as his writing gained national attention he felt pressure to sever his local, ethnic ties. In 1934 he was working full-time in one of the most

prestigious newspapers in the country in addition to being appointed to the National Academy of Letters and enjoying intellectual celebrity status as a bestselling author. Despite being in the national spotlight, he defiantly maintained his ties to Jewish community life. He was seen almost every night in the cafés on Corrientes Street in Buenos Aires—the centre of cultural life at the time—sipping tea with young Jewish students as a mentor, sharing dinner tables with the most prominent contemporary Argentinian intellectuals, and entertaining European and Latin American writers. In 1910 Gerchunoff’s book Los gauchos judios became an instant best-seller and in 1955 was translated into English as The Jewish Gauchos of the Pampas (Gerchunoff t910; see Aizenberg 2000). Depicting an idyllic Jewish life in the Argentinian countryside, it was published with the official sponsorship of the gov-

ernment in celebration of the first centenary of the May 18ro revolution and Argentina’s independence. In a series of vignettes Gerchunoff showed that in working the land Jews had returned to a biblical way of life and had finally come home. His text received attention not just for its powerful narrative of immigrant

Jews making a home in Argentina but even more for the way in which it claimed Argentina as a Jewish homeland. The publication of the book opened up

MONICA SZURMU K a symbolic space for Jewish immigrants in the lettered culture of Buenos Aires and also in the future of the country. This is achieved not through a description of the cosmopolitan life of Jews in the city, as had Jewish modernist writers in other countries, but rather through a depiction of bucolic Jewish life based on a biblical model. Published at a time when realist literature with rural themes was emerging in Argentina in contraposition to more avant-garde forms, Gerchunoff’s first book presented Jewish rural life as a usable past—albeit contrived—for the Jews of Buenos Aires. To achieve inclusion in the literary and political world of the city,

Gerchunoff imagined a past rooted in Argentinian traditions and the Argentinian landscape for himself and, by extension, for the nascent Jewish community. This connection to the land distanced Jews from the antisemitic stereotypes of the time that portrayed them as money-hungry metropolitans. Gerchunoff’s literary strategy was not only to depict the land as ‘home’ but also to present Jewish women as the key to integration into modern Argentinian life. His female characters are used to bridge the old and new worlds. Gerchunoff was writing at a time when a great wave of immigration was signalling a change in Argentina’s economy and society. In the mid-nineteenth century the country’s leaders began to look to Europe as the source of a ‘civilized’ workforce to populate an empty land, thus reducing the influence of the country’s aborigines and turning Argentina into a modern, capitalist society. Between 1857 and 1957 Argentina’s open immigration policy resulted in the arrival of more

than 4.5 million Europeans. In the period t910-30 Argentina received more European immigrants than any other country in the world. These immigrants, many of whom were Jews escaping war and pogroms, contributed to the boom in population. Between 1895 and 1914 Argentina’s population doubled, from 4 million to 8 million residents. When the census of 1914 was taken, foreign-born individuals constituted 49 per cent of Buenos Aires’s population, and together

with their offspring (who were counted as Argentinians) they made up the majority of the population of the city (Avni 1991: 82). At that time there were 207,967 Jews in Argentina, or 9 per cent of the total immigrant population (Avni 1991: 85). Jews had begun to arrive around 1860, but the major impetus for Jewish immigration came in 1876 with the enactment of Argentina’s Immigration and Colonization Law, followed by the appointment in 1881 of a government official whose sole task was to attract Russian Jewish immigrants. Starting in the 1890s, Austro-Hungarian philanthropist Baron Maurice de Hirsch’s funding gave a boost to the London-based Jewish Colonization Association to establish agricultural colonies in the Argentinian countryside for Russian Jews fleeing persecution. Whereas Ashkenazi immigration was organized and funded by the Argentinian government and private Jewish agencies in Europe, Sephardim typically came without assistance or encouragement. The first Sephardim to arrive were

Moroccan Jews, who settled mainly in Buenos Aires and who made up the

HOME IN THE PAMPAS largest Sephardi group in 1910; they were joined later by Jews from Damascus and Aleppo. Nonetheless, Ashkenazim dominated the immigrant culture, and Sephardim never accounted for more than to per cent of the Jewish population (Brodsky 2004: 28). The Jewish experience in Argentina was usually characterized by rapid integration into national life and social mobility, despite several dark periods of antisemitism such as the targeting of Russian Jewish immigrants after the Russian Revolution, under the right-wing nationalist military governments in the 1930s, and during military rule from 1976 to 1983, when a disproportionate number of Jews were the victims of the junta’s state terrorism. The Argentinian Jewish population is notable because of its size. It is the largest in Latin America and third largest in the Americas as a whole after the United States and Canada. Scholars often note that, in comparison with other Jewish communities in Latin America, Jewish assimilation in Argentina occurred very quickly, so that within a generation Jews were considered established within society (Brodsky 2004). The Jewish community in Argentina is also distinct because of its roots in agricultural settlement. Pushed by pogroms in Russia and supported by Baron de Hirsch’s funding, the first group of Jews from Russia bound for the agricultural colony of Moisés Ville arrived in the port of Buenos Aires in 1890 accompanied by their rabbi. They went to the countryside of the province of Santa Fe where, after

much hardship, they were able to establish themselves and create a flourishing community. By the early t910s Moisés Ville had theatres, synagogues, schools, and a mikveh (ritual bath). Alberto Gerchunoff entered Argentina as a child in 1891 with an early group of Jewish immigrants sponsored by the baron. He lived briefly in the Jewish agricultural colonies of Moisés Ville and Rachil until the age of 13, when his widowed mother moved the family to Buenos Aires.

There are different versions of Gerchunoff’s date of birth. In his autobiography, he claims that his passport gives the date as 1883, while his mother claimed he was born in 1884 and ‘into the Yiddish language’ (Gerchunoff 2000: 126—

46). He worked in different trades in order to support his family while he attended the prestigious Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires, along with many of the most prominent intellectual figures of the time. At the age of 16, while still a student there and with the sponsorship of one of his teachers, Gerchunoff took Argentinian citizenship. In 1908 and 1909 Gerchunoff wrote a series of tales describing the Jewish agricultural colonies of the Argentinian littoral for La nacion, Argentina’s leading newspaper. In t910 Leopoldo Lugones, a prominent poet, invited Gerchunoff to

publish them together in a book celebrating the hundredth anniversary of the country’s independence from Spain. Gerchunoff added a few more stories and an introduction calling on the Jews of the pampas to display the Argentinian flag at their seder tables and to celebrate deliverance from Russia and independent life in Argentina. While some critics have called Los gauchos judios a novel, it is actually a collection of vignettes tied together by a shared landscape and the repeated

MONICA SZURMU K appearance of several characters. The landscape is that of the agricultural colonies of Moisés Ville and Rachil, which is further generalized as ‘the Argentinian landscape’ and ‘the littoral’. The narratives have an ethnographic quality, as Gerchunoff describes Jews engaging in cultural activities connected to life on the

land (milking a cow, sowing and harvesting wheat) or to ritual (a Jewish wedding, celebrations at the synagogue, singing Jewish songs). Part of the appeal of Gerchunoff’s work for Argentinian readers is its reference to popular costumbrista literature steeped in the nineteenth-century Latin American tradition of depicting, often romantically, the everyday life of common folk. The significance of Los gauchos judios, in particular its coincidence with the cele-

bration of Argentinian independence, cannot be overestimated. The independence celebration was an occasion to showcase the successes of the young republic and to display Buenos Aires as a cosmopolitan city emblematic of a modern, cultured nation. Sponsoring Gerchunoff, a Jew from Buenos Aires, for the centennial publication was a government strategy to draw attention to the success of its integration policy, showing the assimilation of immigrant writers and artists into

the national culture. For non-Jews, the book stirred nationalistic feelings and reassured them that Jews were making a positive contribution to national life— especially those from Russia, who were often negatively portrayed as radical revolutionaries and anarchists. At a time of increasingly nationalistic sentiment, Gerchunoff wanted to convey that Jews were an integral part of Argentine society, not a threat to it. For Jews, the book rationalized Argentina as a place to feel at

home and put down roots after years of wandering, and presented the rural experience of the pioneering Jewish gauchos as a basis on which to build a new, urban, Jewish society with a distinctive Argentinian cast. In his autobiography Gerchunoff presents his life story as a classic rags-toriches tale of the impoverished guest benefiting from his host society. He boasts of being embraced by Argentina’s lettered and political culture and travelling to

Europe as a representative of the Argentinian government. With his rise from poor immigrant child to patriotic diplomat in less than twenty years, Gerchunoff invites his Jewish countrymen to follow his example: move to the cities, study, be accepted in the liberal professions and in public service. The prerequisite for this speedy social ascent, he insisted, is to embrace the language and literature of the host country.

Although not a native speaker of Spanish, Gerchunoff became a prolific author in the language, receiving critical acclaim from the country’s established literati. Although he frequently relied on Jewish themes, he wanted to be recognized as an Argentinian writer, not pigeonholed as a Jewish one. Between 1910 and 1936, when the second edition of Los gauchos judios appeared, he published seventeen books as well as hundreds of articles, including reflections on Jewish contributions to Argentine literature. Yet he did not abandon his native Yiddish and authorized Yiddish translations of Los amores de Baruj Spinoza (1932), as

HOME IN THE PAMPAS Borukh spinosa’s libe (1933), and The Jewish Gauchos, as Yidn gautshn (1952).

Although he did not write in Yiddish, he campaigned to popularize Yiddish literature among Latin American readers by translating several Yiddish texts into Spanish, including Estanislao Przibiszewsky’s Nieve (Snow; 1930). Besides writing a tribute to Yiddish writer Shalom Aleichem, he also venerated Isaac Leib Peretz as a master poet (Gerchunoff 1952). As literary critic Maggi Salgado

Gordon (1992) points out, Gerchunoff viewed himself as a bridge allowing cultural interchange between Jewish and Hispanic cultures, which led to a vibrant cultural blend. He wrote that the first Spanish poets were Jews, suggesting that in Argentina Yiddish-speaking Jews from Russia could recover the use of a language which had been theirs for centuries (Gerchunoff 1952). If its Jewish heritage endowed the Spanish language with an ethnic expressiveness, then the

Russian immigrants writing in Spanish received Spanish lyricism in return (Gordon 1992: 289). He was less optimistic later when he wrote about the disillusionment caused by anti-Jewish riots in 1919 and attacks against Jews reminiscent of the old world they thought they had left behind (Gerchunoff 1937; Gordon

1992: 289-90). If Gerchunoff’s campaign to popularize Yiddish literature among Latin American writers did not take off, he was more successful in other respects. It was through Los gauchos judios that non-Jews recognized the Jewish presence in Argentina and came to see them as compatible with Argentinian political goals. Writing in 1950, as Argentina’s Jewish population was reaching its peak, Louis Nesbit was representative of literary historians in beginning the modern story of Argentinian Jewish letters with Gerchunoff and his view of the land and the country as a Jewish haven. Writing in Hispania and addressing teachers of Spanish language and literature, Nesbit proclaimed that ‘Los gauchos judios of Alberto

Gerchunoff ... constitutes the cornerstone of Jewish-Argentine letters. In the twenty-five tales comprising this volume we have the oath of fidelity of a son of

Israel, raised under Argentinian skies, who sings in gratitude for liberty and abundance’ (1950: 314). The cornerstone metaphor was apt not only because it recognized Gerchunoff’s contribution to Argentina’s Jewish literature, but also because of the book’s role in the construction of an ethnic strategy for Jews within Argentine culture. The book also received recognition internationally as a Jewish text, suggesting that it established new themes as well as reflecting traditional Jewish concerns such as exile and homecoming. At the end of the twentieth century, when many ‘Hundred Greatest’ lists were being compiled, Gerchunoff’s book earned a place in the ‘Hundred Greatest Works of Modern Jewish Literature’ selected by an international panel of judges (National Yiddish Book Center 2001). It was not only as a written text that the book was influential in inscribing Argentinian Jewish experience in the public imagination. In 1975 a popular movie entitled Los

MONICA SZURMU K gauchos judios, directed by the renowned Juan José Jusid, was produced by the Argentinian media company Film Cuatro (it was released on DVD in 2002). More than merely reflecting Jewish sentiment twenty years after the first efforts at rural colonization in the midst of a Argentinian nationalist movement, Los gauchos judios also created a strategy that allowed for the recognition of the Jewish contribution to a modern, cosmopolitan country. Argentinian Jewish intellectual Bernardo Verbitsky, for example, reflected that, for second- and thirdgeneration Argentinian Jews, Los gauchos judios was the symbolic equivalent of

first ‘citizenship papers’ (1965: 85-7). From this perspective, citizenship is equated with cultural as well as political participation in society. Arguably, Los gauchos Judios naturalized the presence of Jews in Argentina, but political struggle for ethnic civil rights continued throughout the twentieth century.

Verbitsky was referring to the impact of the 1910 edition,’ but critics have noted that, in the 1936 edition, Gerchunoff was no longer as ebullient about the Argentinian homeland, although the Russian shtetl is still depicted as a dreary, impossible place for Jews. In the later edition most of the Yiddish and Hebrew words that appear in the original version are translated, and explanations have been added to give the text a more neutral stance. A few more vignettes have been added, and some material cut, including the story of the preparation for his barmitzvah. Gedali, the wise elder in charge of this, reappears in the later version (in a story called “The Silver Candelabra’) as a comic character who does not know the ways of the world. Finally, in the 1936 edition instances of inter-ethnic violence and mistrust are more frequent. In my discussion here, based on the 1910 Spanish edition, I will argue that the book symbolically constructs Argentina as a Jewish homeland by showing the advantage of a hybrid identity. There is a hint of this in the title: for many readers

‘Jewish gaucho’ is an oxymoron, a contradictory combination of the bookish Ashkenazi Jew and the outdoor adventurer—herder—hunter. Whereas the Latin American gaucho riding across the pampas is seen as a counter to Europeanizing influences, the Ashkenazi Jew was often viewed as foreign, far from the Spanish heritage of Argentina. Hybridization ultimately occurs in the lettered world of Buenos Aires, which is connected with rather than alienated from the land. Life in the Argentinian pampas functions as an echo of the Jewish past. In depicting Argentinian Jews making an honest living from the land, Gerchunoft’s text protects them from the accusations of corrupt urban business practices that were prevalent in the antisemitic literature of the late nineteenth century. Critics have often compared Los gauchos judios with other gauchesca literature, such as that of Ricardo Guiraldes, who also wrote idealized coming-of-age stories set in the pampas and gained a place in the literary world of Buenos Aires while,

according to some critics, advancing a romantic nationalism (Menton 1955). Some have taken a negative view of Gerchunoff’s work, such as the prominent Marxist critic David Vifias, who took Gerchunoff to task for his support of a ‘melt-

HOME IN THE PAMPAS ing-pot ideology’ and identification with nationalists (Vinas 1975).? Gerchunoff has also been examined by postmodern critics for his ‘negotiation’ of identity (Aizenberg 2000; Huberman 2003; Kandiyoti 1998). Having located Gerchunoff’s book within the context of Jewish experience in Argentina, my reading here focuses on his use of gender in relation to his broader theme of home and homeland. His Jewish characters can be both traditional (the men) and modern (the women). They can live in the countryside but acquire an urban identity if they so desire. They can be distinct but still pass within the host society. They are trained in the countryside in homogeneous Jewish communities in order to succeed in the heterogeneous cities. Arguably, Los gauchos judios offered urban Jews who had never lived in the agricultural colonies an opportunity to feel connected to a Jewish Argentinian community united by a shared heritage of exodus to a promised land adapted to a modern setting. Within Argentina a Jewish identity can be said to be ‘performed’ in literature as well as in home life.* As acornerstone of Argentinian Jewish literature, Los gauchos judios is sometimes referred to as the first great literary prose work in Spanish after the expulsion from the Iberian peninsula in 1492.’ Following the theme of displacement and home, itis also, as Leonardo Senkman has pointed out, ‘the first great literary expression of the American rural utopia for the Jews fleeing tsarist oppression’ (1988: 3). Although Gerchunoff’s writing draws on the tradition of Yiddish literature, he capitalizes on the important literary heritage of Jewish writing in Spanish. His book is therefore a composite text that brings together elements (formal,

thematic, linguistic) from different traditions. These traditions are woven together by the thread that unites much of nineteenth-century Latin American literature, a love story that combines the desire for an erotic outcome with a political

investment in the future of the nation. According to Doris Sommer, the happy home, symbolized by a satisfying sexual relationship, is a metaphor for a unified nation. She claims that ‘romantic novels go hand in hand with patriotic history in Latin America. The books fueled a desire for domestic happiness that runs into dreams of national prosperity; and nationbuilding projects invested private passions with public purpose’ (1991: 7). In Los gauchos judios this is represented by the desirability of inter-ethnic sexuality, whereby loving women are the key to the integration of Jews into Argentine society. Jewish women desired by Argentinian men become a sign of approval of the Jews; in this relationship Jewish women gain sexual as well as cultural satisfaction. The key to ethnic acceptance, the text

claims, is to adopt the host society’s ways, and the host society is marked as socially male and politically hegemonic.

Gerchunoff acknowledges the tradition of Jewish literature in Spanish by including Sephardi Jews in his narrative, and he strives to create a sense of Jewishness that brings together Ashkenazim and Sephardim. Two Moroccan Jews appear in the narrative in privileged places of authority and knowledge: the

schoolteacher Rabi Ben Azan (p. 93) and the cultured Moisés de Urquijo de

MONICA SZURMU K Albinoim, who is invited to be part of a divorce tribunal (pp. 123—3).° Judah Halevi

is mentioned twice (pp. 51, 74) and schoolchildren sing a ‘ballad of the Spanish Jews’ taught at the school by a Moroccan teacher (p. 93). Moroccan Jews served as teachers in the first schools organized by the Alliance Israélite Universelle in the littoral colonies. These Moroccan teachers taught Ashkenazi children Hebrew,

Spanish, Jewish history, and the subjects of the French curriculum, until the Argentinian government took over the schools in the mid 1910s (Brodsky 2004: 23). Gerchunoff does not appear in the rosters kept at the archives of the Alliance Israélite Universelle in Paris, but he surely attended schools organized by the Alliance. By the time he arrived in Buenos Aires at the age of 13, he had the level of education required to enter the most prestigious school in Argentina, so it is certain that he had received formal schooling in Spanish in the colonies. National and ethnic issues met in the publication of Los gauchos judios. As we have seen, its release in April 1910 coincided with the celebration of the national centennial, but for Jews the timing of its publication was also significant as it occurred during Passover. Gerchunoff combines the two festivals, appealing to the nationalist spirit while including direct references to the Passover Hagadah. The epigraph of the introduction is an excerpt from the Hagadah, described as the ‘Passover prayers’: ‘With an outstretched arm the Lord delivered us from the Pharaoh, in Egypt’ (p. 39), a theme which runs throughout the text as Gerchunoff compares immigration to Argentina with return to the Promised Land. The fragment concludes with the first line of the Argentinian National Anthem (‘Hear O Ye Mortals’). The celebratory spirit is a call to Argentinian Jews and recent Jewish immigrants: Behold my brethren from the cities and the colonies, the republic is celebrating its great feast, the paschal feast of liberation. Bright are the days and sweet the nights; hymns rise up to departed heroes; voices of jubilation reach the skies, hued blue and white like our flag. Meadows come alive with flowers, fields with green. Remember, how back in Russia, ye set tables to celebrate the ritual of Passover? This is a greater Passover. Rest your plows and deck your tables. Cover them with cloths of white. Sacrifice your choicest kids, set out the wine and salt of benediction. Generous is the flag that succors the ancient hurts of our race that binds its wounds with maternal care. Wandering Jews, tortured and torn, redeemed captives, let us bend the knee beneath the unfurled banner; in unison, beside choirs bejeweled by light, let us intone the song of songs that begins thus: ‘Hear O Ye Mortals...’ (p. 39, emphasis added)

In this passage we see Gerchunoff as narrator using pronouns to position himself alternately inside and outside the collective formed by his Jewish ‘brethren from the cities and the colonies’. In the second paragraph he shifts to the outside of the collective by referring to ‘our’ flag, a possessive adjective that includes Argentinians but excludes Jews who still do not speak Spanish or know the lyrics to the

HOME IN THE PAMPAS anthem. In the following paragraph, he again looks into Jewish life from the outside, excluding himself from the Passover celebrations in Russia (in the body of the book, however, he uses the first person often, and always describes events in Russia as an eyewitness). He reclaims the first person plural to include himself in ‘our’ race and in his own plea for participation in the celebrations of the centennial: ‘let us bend’, ‘let us intone’. Gerchunoff requires his readers to interpret the texts from their own cultural position. The passage reads differently for a Jewish reader, who would recognize the allusions to Passover, than for an Argentinian reader, who would be familiar with Argentinian patriotic symbols but probably ignorant of the details of Jewish ritual. Most of Gerchunoff’s readers in 1910 were non-Jewish and hence he annotated the religious practices and folkways described in the text. If these annota-

tions appeared to be an effort to make the work accessible to non-Jews, the profusion of Yiddishisms and Hebraisms privileged Jews. This has often been overlooked, particularly because the version of the text on which most critical scholarship has been based is the 1936 revised edition.

How would the gaucho have been interpreted by readers? In nineteenthcentury Argentina the gaucho was the subaltern figure of the countryside. Argentina, unlike all other Latin American countries, has no mythical indigenous figure around which to build narratives of nationhood. The gaucho occupies that space. A nomadic male, usually of mixed blood, he roamed the Argentine landscape on horseback during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, often employed and protected by local landowners. The gaucho was drafted into the army to fight for independence from Spain and later on in civil skirmishes. By the end of the nineteenth century he had become a manual labourer on large, enclosed estancias (ranches). The negative associations of the term gaucho (lawlessness) faded, and its positive connotations surfaced in Argentinian lettered culture, turning the gaucho into the quintessential representation of the nation (Ludmer 1983). Immigrants to Argentina recognized the centrality of the gaucho, and every immigrant community created its own version and celebrated national

festivals by dressing their young men as gauchos and their young women as chinitas, the gaucho’s loving partner. Jews were no exception, and all the colonies

had their own festivals with Jewish gauchos and chinitas singing traditional countryside songs and dancing to folk music. It is not surprising, in this context, that Gerchunoff chose the figure of the Jewish gaucho as his own idealized version of the assimilated Jew. In the book gauchos are idealized and Jewish gauchos embody the collective return to life in the land. Some elders in Gerchunoff’s text use gaucho as an insult hurled at young people who give up Jewish practices. The ritual slaughterer, for example, exclaims: ‘in Russia we lived badly, but we feared God and followed his Law. Here, the young people are turning into gauchos’ (p. 61). The omniscient narrator keeps reminding his readers, however, that the payoff of assimilation is

MONICA SZURMU K moving away from a society where Jews are discriminated against into a modern country where they can be enfranchised citizens and where they can work the land as their biblical forefathers did. Gold is repeatedly used to mark the moral division between usury, the profession Jews were restricted to in pre-emancipation Europe, and working the land in Argentina. Gerchunoff counters the antisemitic literature that blamed Jews for controlling the international flow of gold. In Los gauchos judios, none of the Jews ever enters into contact with gold; however, the word oro (gold) appears as a metaphor for wheat, thus giving ‘gold’ new connotations in connection with the

Jews and marking the transition between being an east European Jew and an Argentinian one: You revive their [your forefather’s] labors under a sheltering sky, as your hands bind blond sheaves shimmering in a sea of golden wheat [en llamas de oro ondulante| toasted by your brothers and blessed by the patriarch hand of a father no longer a moneylender ora martyr as in Besarabia. (p. 48)

Jews are shown removed from capitalist speculation, and engaged in invigorating, productive physical activity. In the following passage we can observe the satu-

ration of golden colours and the deployment of images where precious pearls turn into metaphors for wheat, flowing in abundance like life-giving water: The large drum of the thresher began to turn, and grain came spilling out like a shower of pearly raindrops falling from the sunny sky, like a stream of clear’ water descending from the biblically blessed firmament. Moisés extended his hand, and let his fingers luxuriate in the cascade of yellow wheat. “Take a look, my dear ones,’ he finally murmured to his wife and daughter. “Take a look. This wheat is ours.’ (p. 62)

This excerpt also brings to the forefront Gerchunoff’s efforts to present Jews as hardworking gauchos in harmony with bountiful nature and morally inspired by the land. Gerchunoff claims that this connection to the land is biblical and part of the Jewish pattern of life. Centuries of diasporic life had separated the Jews from the land, and yet in Argentina they had a chance to return to their ancestral attachment. Jewish women in Los gauchos judios easily find their way back to the ways of the land: both young and old women have a direct connection to nature, they perceive changes in the weather and move in unison with them. Jewish matrons transmit oral tradition, a tradition with deep roots in agricultural life. Jewish women also have the gift of language that gives them access to an Argentinian future. Like much of the literature of the period idealizing country life, Los gauchos judios was written in Buenos Aires by a writer who had forever abandoned agricul-

tural and manual labour. Following the mood of the time, Gerchunoff did not write about Jewish farmers but rather of ‘gauchos’, and he relied on the fascination that the gaucho produced in urban audiences and on the weight of the oxy-

HOME IN THE PAMPAS moronic title and its multiple possibilities: gauchos who are Jewish, Jews who act like gauchos, gauchos who pray like Jews. The Jews, who in late nineteenth-

century antisemitic literature represented corrupt capitalism and decadent modernity, perform a new role dressed as gauchos—that of steadfastness, continuity, immanence. Like the gauchos, Jews have a home in the open pampas. The Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges observed that the characters that appear in Gerchunoff’s book are really farmers, not gauchos, since they are sedentary and live with their families in organized communities, while the gaucho is predominantly a nomadic figure.® For Gerchunoff, however, the term gaucho had a symbolic connotation absent from ‘farmer’. In Los gauchos judios, Argentina replaces Palestine as the Promised Land.’ This substitution is introduced in the very first chapter of the book, in a section called ‘Genesis’. The elders in Russia are discussing immigration to Argentina

supported by the philanthropic efforts of Baron Maurice de Hirsch. Rabbi Yehudah Ankroi is passionate about the plan, and travels to Paris to discuss it with Hirsch himself. On his return he paints a wonderful picture of an Argentinian future, and ‘his emotion-filled voice trembled, as when he preached in the temple about the Promised Land’ (p. 42). In a sabbath debate, Ankroi makes the comparison more evident: When Rabbi Zaddock Kahn informed me about the immigration to Argentina, I forgot

the return to Zion in the midst of my joy, and remembered the words of Yehudah Halevi: Zion is wherever peace and happiness reign. We’ll all go to Argentina, and go back to working the land and shepherding our flocks, which the Most High will bless. Remember the words of Zeroim, the first book of the Mishnais: Only those who live of their flocks and their harvests are pure of heart and worthy of eternal Paradise. If we go back to that way of life we will be returning to our original path. May I live to kiss the earth of the new land, and to bless my children’s children under its skies. (p. 44)

The book divides the history of the immigrants into three periods: the past, which was a time of oppression in tsarist Russia comparable to the enslavement of the ancient Israelites in Egypt; the present, which is life in a pluralistic society reminiscent of the social harmony among Jews, Christians, and Muslims in medieval Spain; and the future, where Argentina replaces Erets Yisra’el as the Promised Land and where Buenos Aires represents everything that is dynamic and good. Freedom is presented as beyond language, as a feeling that can be shared and

understood even without the linguistic skills to make the connection. The book concludes with a celebration of independence from Spain in the colony of Rachil: the Hebraist Rabbi Israel Kellner teaches ‘a lesson about a people’s right to freedom’ attributed to the talmudists of Segovia (p. 169). A young man translates the gist of the speech to the colony’s police chief who in response sings a few stanzas of the Argentine national anthem. ‘The Jews did not understand what he was saying’, the narrator tells us, but the sound of the word ‘liberty’ rekindled bitter

MONICA SZURMU K memories of centuries of suffering. With their hearts and their mouths, just as they did in the synagogue, they responded with a resounding ‘Amen!’ (p. 169).

Naomi Lindstrom has observed that Los gauchos Judios presents us with a lyrical and rhapsodic evocation of life on the land (1986: 231-5). This representation is filled with nostalgia for a social order perceived as more primitive and is transmitted as an idealized master narrative, although it may be suspect as reality.

Gerchunoff’s nostalgia for the land is akin to his nostalgia for childhood, as a space forever lost. In order to keep this nostalgia vivid, the author introduces a series of semi-illicit love affairs between women and undesirable suitors. These men are not accepted by the women’s parents: in one case because the man is a poet, in another because he is poor and the woman has a rich fiancé, in the third because the suitor is a non-Jewish gaucho. All three relationships prosper, yet there is no clear indication of how successful they can be: we last see the couples eloping on horseback leaving a cloud of dust behind. The most emblematic of these scenes takes place during Passover: The colonists ran out of the synagogue, and what they saw horrified them: Rogelio galloping furiously on his powerful steed, with Miriam sitting behind him. The couple flew by as if driven by the wind, the gaucho erect and tall, Miriam, staring defiantly at the astonished crowd with her hair flying all around her. By the time the onlookers recovered from their shock, the runaway pair was lost in the distance, leaving behind them huge clouds of gold-colored dust. (p. 80)

When Gerchunoff describes women and men, he uses the gender stereotypes that circulated in Europe and Argentina at the time. Jewish men are shown as backward-looking or old-fashioned, with attitudes that need to be shed, while the women are dynamic, looking to the Argentinian future. Following a convention of the time, Jewish men appear dark and feminized, as somewhat repulsive and unattractive figures. Women are sketched as pale (whitened), comely, and desirable. Representative is the description of Raquel in a vignette suggestively named ‘Fresh Milk’: And down by the picket fence, its poles twisted like wizened carob pods, the girl is milking the gentle cow. She bends, and as her fingers squeeze the magnificent udders they

let forth a stream of foam. In the soft light of the autumn dawn the girl’s full, firm breasts shine through her parted blouse like fruit ripened by a summer sun. Drop by drop, with a soft music that keeps time with the girl’s breathing and the cow’s quiet snorting, the milk fills the pail.

Dark waves of hair fall over her shoulders as she works, and her peasant garb sheaths the luscious fullness of a body punctuated by generous hips, displaying the rhythmic lines of a rustic clay amphora. The clear light of dawn accentuates her eyes— eyes as blue as the Holy Virgin’s—and her upturned nose captures all of her race’s innate charms. (pp. 47-8)

In the Jewish association of milk and honey with home, Israel as the Promised

Land is replaced by Argentina. Gerchunoff describes Raquel as the model of

HOME IN THE PAMPAS desirable femininity in nineteenth-century Argentina, namely European and white, and also associates her with one of the most revered figures of Christianity—the Virgin Mary, particularly as represented in European art. The comparison of the woman’s body to the mud amphora, typical of agrarian societies, recalls the life Jews returned to in Argentina. The juxtaposition of the young woman and the cow suggest that the production of sweet milk—a reality in the cow—is a promise in the body of Raquel, pointing to her capacity to procreate and to produce milk to nurture robust Argentinian citizens. The elopement of Raquel with Gabriel in the vignette called, in homage to Cervantes, ‘Camacho’s Wedding’, illustrates ‘American love’,'° women’s increased freedom in the New World, and the importance of language, since the phrase used to describe Raquel’s relationship to Gabriel is that they ‘understood each other’ (se entendian). The fiancé chosen by her parents has serious problems with the language, and stutters during the wedding ceremony. Gabriel, on the other hand, has a beautiful singing voice and speaks clearly and eloquently.

That the book is an exercise in mixing cultures is evident in the multiple sources Gerchunoff uses, mostly Yiddish, medieval Sephardi, and Golden Age Spanish literatures with the rural tradition of Argentinian literature in the backsround. At regular intervals elements of country life appear: cattle, grain, the profound blue of the morning. Yet the land is reinscribed as biblical in the same way

as Jewish women are represented as versions of the Virgin Mary. Gerchunoff therefore places himself as a mediator between cultures, as an interpreter of cultural traditions that take on different connotations in new settings and yet retain the strength of the cultures they draw upon. Women are much more capable of coping with these new situations, whereas Gerchunoff’s male characters are more resistant to change. Women blend in; any attempt by men to assume an Argentinian identity looks ridiculous. Jewish men’s Spanish comes out as gibberish. The women, however, are always eloquent and attractive, always desirable, always available, always understanding and understandable. The desirability and availability of the women in the novel point to a demographic solution to the Jewish problem—intermarriage and assimilation. Gerchunoff’s master-narrative evolved over time from advocating assimila-

tion as the route to a happy home to an ethnic self-consciousness that must constantly renegotiate its identity. The Promised Land as New World homeland slipped from his grasp. Los gauchos judios arguably also escaped his control, for it took on a life of its own. It has inspired stories of integration that keep getting replayed in popular culture. Promising social harmony within a modern, liberal state, these versions of Los gauchos judios lack the depth of Gerchunoff’s questioning: how to combine multiple identities, how to create spaces where alterity is respected, how to overcome prejudice with creative energy, how to feel at home as both a national citizen and a member of an ethnic minority. Jews have often

invoked Gerchunoff’s development to highlight the need for negotiation;

MONICA SZURMU K non-Jews have condemned him for his nationalism. A close reading of Los gauchos judios reveals that, even early on, the negotiation between ethnic home and assimilated state was being rehearsed in the dialogue between men and women on the land. Ina country in the making and a city that imagined itself modern and cosmopolitan Gerchunoft’s Los gauchos judios was used as a prop in the staging of both integration and difference. Caught between nostalgia for ghetto life, success in the modern metropolis, anda childhood spent in rural areas of Russia and Argentina, Gerchunoff was inseparable from the city of Buenos Aires and the nuanced tones of porteno (someone from Buenos Aires) Spanish. When he died in 1952, none other than Borges, the renowned Buenos Aires man of letters, defined him as a quintessential porterio, as a person who exudes belonging to a place, someone

who, in searching for space for himself as a Jew, had initiated an association between the city and its Jews that lives on and colours its political, social, and cultural life (Borges 1979: 13). Even if Gerchunoff himself had doubts, Borges sanguinely presented him as proof that Jews had come home in South America.

Notes I am grateful to the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute for a fellowship that made the research for this essay possible. I also want to acknowledge Eva Guelbert de Rosenthal, director of the Rabbi Aaron Halevi Goldman Communal Museum in Moisés Ville, for her generosity, and the wonderful volunteers who keep the heritage of Moisés Ville alive. For insightful comments on previous versions of this essay I am grateful to Edna Aizenberg, Marcelo Bergman, Sandra McGee Deutsch, Helen Epstein, Satil Sosnowski, and to my colleagues in the Social and Cultural History Seminar at Instituto Mora. I thank Simon Bronner for his very careful reading of my work and for making sure the final version said what it needed to say.

1 For an analysis of Gerchunoff’s self-presentation in this text, see Degiovanni 2000 and Szurmuk 2004.

2 Overall, there have been ten editions of the book in Argentina and several others in the rest of Latin America.

S| Vinas’s reading of Los gauchos judios has defined the way the book has been read from the 1970s to the end of the twentieth century. Some authors have used Vifias as a starting point to trace Gerchunoft’s disappointment with nationalism in the 1930s and 1940s. See e.g. Senkman 1988.

4 Graciela Montaldo has observed that, for Argentinian writers of the first two decades of the twentieth century, the countryside functions as a mirror that ‘makes them more Argentinian than ever. It was not enough then’, Montaldo continues, ‘to be Argentinian; Argentinity had to be performed’ (1999: 171; my translation).

5 The irony that an Ashkenazi writer immersed in Yiddish literature and culture revived Spanish Jewish letters has intrigued scholars. Saul Sosnowski, one of the founders of Latin American Jewish literature as a field of study, claims that Gerchunoff inscribes himself symbolically in the Argentine nation ‘with the Spanish language of which he had been

HOME IN THE PAMPAS metaphorically deprived during four centuries’ (2000: 263). Ilan Stavans affirms that Gerchunoff’s ‘lifelong project to turn Spanish into a home for the Jews, to acclimate the language not only to Hebraisms and Yiddishisms but to a Weltanschauung totally alien to it, went against the currents of history’ (2000: 119). Stavans’s essay was first published as an introduction to the 1998 edition of The Jewish Gauchos of the Pampas.

6 The English translations are from Aizenberg 2000. Page numbers in the text refer to this edition.

i I have modified the translation here. Aizenberg translates the original en clara casacada as ‘a stream of golden water’. I believe ‘a stream of clear water’ is more accurate.

8 For a discussion of the literary relationship between Borges and Gerchunoff see Aizenberg 2002. 9 According to Haim Avni there were striking similarities between emigration to Palestine and emigration to Argentina at the turn of the century. Both enterprises relied on the financial support of wealthy European Jews (from the Baron de Rothschild in Palestine, and the Baron de Hirsch in Argentina). ‘Moreover’, Avni states, ‘we know that some of the same figures were instrumental in organizing colonization in both countries and that many of the settlers in Argentina were emotionally tied to Palestine’ (1991: 40). 10 Riv-Ellen Prell claims that romantic love was one of the new themes of Jewish literature after migration to the United States while traditional arranged marriage was a constant in Yiddish literature in Europe. In the United States (and in Argentina), women aspired to a relationship based on love rather than a marriage of convenience (1999: 61-7).

References AIZENBERG, EDNA. 2000. Parricide on the Pampas? A New Study and Translation of Alberto Gerchunoff’s Los gauchos judios. Frankfurt am Main.

—2002. Books and Bombs in Buenos Aires: Borges, Gerchunoff and Argentine-Jewish Writing. Hanover, NH. AVNI, HAIM. I9OI. Argentina and the Jews: A History of Jewish Immigration. Tuscaloosa, Ala. BORGES, JORGE LUIS. 1979. ‘Borges conversa sobre Gerchunoff’. In Alberto Gerchunoff, Figuras de nuestro tiempo, 11-10. Buenos Aires.

BRODSKY, ADRIANA M. 2004. ‘The Contours of Identity: Sephardic Jews and the Construction of Jewish Communities in Argentina, 13830 to the Present’. Ph.D. diss., Duke University, Durham, NC. DEGIOVANNI, FERNANDO. 2000. ‘Inmigracion, nacionalismo cultural, campo intellectual: El proyecto creador de Alberto Gerchunoff’, Revista Iberoamericana, 606: 367-81. GERCHUNOFF, ALBERTO. 1910. Los gauchos judios. La Plata, Argentina; rev. edn., 1936;

trans. into English by Prudencio de Pereda as The Jewish Gauchos of the Pampas (Albuquerque, NM, 1955; 2nd edn., with a foreword by Ilan Stavans, 1998); trans. into Yiddish as Yidn gautshn (Buenos Aires, 1952). See also Aizenberg 2000. —1932. Los amores de Baruj Spinoza. Buenos Aires; trans. into Yiddish by José Mendelson as Borukh spinosa’s libe (Buenos Aires, 1933).

MONICA SZURMUK GERCHUNOFF, ALBERTO. 1937. Prologo’. In M. Gleizer, ed., Renacimiento de Israel Ludwig Lewisohn: Seleccionado y compilado por Ludwig Lewinsohn, pp. iv—xxvili. Buenos Aires.

——1952. El Pinoy la Palmera. Buenos Aires.

— 1979. ‘Schalom Aleijem’. In Alberto Gerchunoff, Figuras de nuestro tiempo, 01-9. Buenos Aires. — 2000. ‘Autobiografia’. In Ricardo Feierstein, ed., Alberto Gerchunoff: Judio y argentino, 126-46. Buenos Aires. GORDON, MAGGI SALGADO. 1992. ‘Alberto Gerchunoff and the “Bridge” on the River Plate’, Hispania, 75: 287-93. HUBERMAN, ARIANA. 2003. ‘Glosarios Culturales 0 aclaraciones que (des) articulan la identidad’. In Alvaro Fernandez Bravo, Florencia Garramuno, and Saul Sosnowski, eds., Sujetos en Transito: (In)migracion, exilio y didspora en la cultura latinoamericana, 2'71-95. Buenos Altres. KANDIYOTI, DALIA. 1998. ‘Comparative Diasporas: The Local and the Global in Abraham Cahan and Alberto Gerchunoff’, Modern Fiction Studies, 44: 77-122. LINDSTROM, NAOMI. 1986. ‘Los gauchos judios: The Rhapsodic Evocation of a New Jewish World’, Romance Quarterly, 33: 231-5. LUDMER, JOSEFINA. 1988. El género gauchesco: Un tratado sobre la patria. Buenos Aires. MENTON, SEYMOUR. 1955. ‘In Search of a Nation: The Twentieth-Century Spanish American Novel’, Hispania, 38: 432-42. MONTALDO, GRACIELA. 1999. Fabulas culturales y fabulas de identidad en América Latina. Rosario, Argentina.

National Yiddish Book Center. 2001. ‘National Yiddish Book Center Announces too Greatest Works of Modern Jewish Literature’. National Yiddish Book Center website, , accessed 12 Jan. 2008. NESBIT, LOUIS. 1950. ‘The Jewish Contribution to Argentine Literature’, Hispania, 33: 313-20. PRELL, RIV-ELLEN. 1999. Fighting to Become Americans. Assimilation and the Trouble between Jewish Women and Jewish Men. Boston.

PRZIBISZEWSKY, ESTANISLAO. 1930. Nieve, trans. Alberto Gerchunoft. Buenos Aires. SENKMAN, LEONARDO.1988. La identidad judia en la literatura latinoamericana. Buenos Aires. SOMMER, DORIS. 1991. Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America. Berkeley, Calif.

SOSNOWSKI, SAUL. 2000. ‘Fronteras en las letras judias latinoamericanas’, Revista Iberoamericana, 66: 191. STAVANS, ILAN.2000. The Essential Ilan Stavans. New York.

SZURMUK, MONICA. 2004. ‘Identidades en transito: La Autobiografia de Alberto Gerchunoff’, Brujula, 3: 11-25. VERBITSKY, BERNARDO. 1965. ‘Premio Alberto Gerchunoff’, Comentario, 12: 85-7. VINAS, DAVID. 1975. ‘Gerchunoff: gauchos judios y xenophobia’. In id., Literatura argentina y realidad politica: Apogeo de la oligarquia, 103-95. Buenos Aires.

NINE

Domesticity and the Home (Page): Blogging and the Blurring of Public and Private among Orthodox Jewish Women ANDREA LIEBER

Fancy SCHMANCY ANXIETY MAVEN, or ‘the Maven’ as she is affectionately

known to her online readership, is self-described in her online profile as an Orthodox Jewish woman living outside Brooklyn, ‘helping to bring Moshiach [the messiah] in her own special way’. A mother of five children, all under the age of 10, she is a ba’alat teshuvah' who embraced Orthodoxy as a young adult. She left college to attend yeshiva when she became observant. Since 2005 she has maintained an anonymous online diary, a web log or blog, where she chronicles the daily joys and frustrations of her life.* At times the Maven writes self-consciously about Jewish values and the expectations of her community; at others she reflects deeply on the range of feelings she struggles with as a young woman, wife, and

mother. Most of the time, however, the Maven’s readers will find her writing about the most mundane aspects of daily life: 6.59 a.m. Monday 29 Oct. 2007

Fancy Schmancy Complaining Maven

I haven’t been writing so much because I’m so overwhelmed with my life. Sometimes, I

feel like a hamster on a wheel. I’m running and running, yet not accomplishing anything.

Mornings are insane. Everybody needs everything all at the same time. Yaakov is daavening [praying], so it’s my show. Mommy, I want a vitamin. Mommy, help me get dressed. Mommy, help me make my hair. Mommy, put my tzitsis [garment with ritual fringes] on for me. Mommy, breakfast! When Yaakov takes them to school, it’s like this huge burden is lifted. The house becomes quiet. And the house—gevalt! It’s basically wrecked. It’s a mess. It’s dirty. And I have no cleaning help. And I try and try every day, but I can’t seem to get it all together. It’s like that old

joke: Cleaning the house while the children are young is like shoveling the walkway while it’s still snowing. And by me, it’s hailing.

ANDREA LIEBER In many respects, the Maven’s blog is just another ‘mommy blog’, a blogging sub-genre used by thousands of mothers who blog daily about parenting issues (Newman 2008). But certain features mark her writing as explicitly Jewish and specifically Orthodox. She uses untranslated Yiddish and Hebrew terms (daavening, gevalt, tsitsis), and even her English contains subtle Yiddishisms (‘by me, it’s hailing’ reflects the expression bei mir). That her husband’s prayer obligations

make him unavailable to help her in the busy morning hours points to a particular tension within the domestic sphere created by halakhically defined gender roles.

Like many mommy blogs, the Maven’s ‘home page’ is quite literally a page about home. She is exasperated by her ‘messy’ home and her inability to keep up with all the work required to establish a sense of order. Writing about the details of her domestic life, she exposes the labour required to create a Jewish home and belies the ideal image of the Jewish woman who effortlessly, enjoyably, and sinsle-handedly manages her household as the ultimate expression of her piety. Recording her feelings in the public arena of the World Wide Web moves the Maven’s concerns about her private life into the public domain. The blog is a public forum in which the Maven can air her ‘dirty laundry’ (the ultimate metaphor for the public display of what is private). Her blog also allows public readers into her private space, a world not typically accessible to community outsiders—or even to community insiders when her thoughts challenge communal expectations and cannot be shared readily with friends and neighbours. While the Maven writes about her real life in her real home, the blog also provides her with a virtual home in which she can voice her innermost feelings, protected by the anonymity of the medium itself. Unlike her real home, the blog is a controlled and orderly space, with entries organized by date and time, the contents of which are deliberately crafted. In the excerpt above, the Maven admits to feeling so overwhelmed by life and the demands placed upon her that she has been unable to write. And yet she does write, and it would seem that the act of writing about her emotional struggles through the blogging medium thus becomes a therapeutic mechanism for coping with them.’ A number of recent articles in English-language Jewish newspapers, in both the US and the UK, have announced the blogosphere—the world of discourse propelled by the technological innovation of blogs—as a new liberating arena for Orthodox Jewish women. In July 2004 Debra Nussbaum Cohen, writing for the online New York Jewish Week, proclaimed the ‘growing cadre’ of Jewish bloggers:

the ‘New Diarists’, whose writing ‘offers a peek into worlds that are closed to many and give a public voice to those who otherwise might not have one’. In a similar piece appearing in the Autumn 2004 Jewish Quarterly, a London-based magazine, Miriam Shaviv profiled female bloggers, suggesting that ‘by means of blogging many [Orthodox] women have found a way to circumvent restrictions placed on them by their social circles, and gain a strong public voice’. In August

BLOGGING AMONG ORTHODOX JEWISH WOMEN 2005 Izzy Grinspan wrote for The Forward an article entitled ‘Blogs Offer Glimpse into Hidden Corners of Orthodox Life’, in which she suggested that ‘online expression has signaled a change in the frum world” that gives Orthodox women a voice in public debate. And in February 2006 Marcus Freed wrote a short piece for the London Jewish Chronicle ‘How the Internet Is Lifting the Veil from Orthodox Jewish Women’, noting that the anonymity of the blogging genre paradoxically enables women ‘to elude the laws of lashon hara [‘evil speech’]’ and nonetheless speak their mind without fear of repercussions.”

The blog is consistently portrayed in the popular Jewish press as a vehicle for thrusting Jewish women’s voices into the public domain from which historically they have been marginalized. However, the sensationalist approach of these pieces greatly oversimplifies the dynamics of blogging and relies on an overly

rigid distinction between ‘public’ and ‘private’. Such journalistic treatments obscure critical elements of the blogging phenomenon. The blogs of Orthodox women are, perhaps, better understood as an expansion of the private sphere. Rather than breaking through the boundaries that separate public and private realms, these blogs represent the articulation of a new kind of ‘public’ private— one that facilitates an extraordinary opportunity for self-expression, but one that is not viewed consciously by the women who write them as compromising social or religious boundaries. At the same time, it is also clear that the veil of privacy, so essential to the genre, is an illusion that in fact masks the transgressive dimension of their blogging. These writers do not claim that their blogging is a feminist act and do not view it as such. Nonetheless, their public writing does subvert certain aspects of traditional Jewish gender roles and thus has consequences that, however unintended, have feminist implications. Orthodox women bloggers express a range of feelings about their blogging— some are admittedly ambivalent about the limitations of their Orthodox Jewish lifestyle, and others flatly deny the tensions highlighted by the popular media. Even when the blog is an expression of frustration with the community, the writers frequently use their websites to replicate the highly gendered conditions of their ‘real life’, and in many cases see the online community as an extension of the private, domestic sphere, rather than something that transgresses its boundaries. In this respect, the blogger’s ‘home page’ comes to serve as a site for pressing at the boundaries of domesticity but also for inscribing a new kind of ‘public’ private in the virtual domain.

Blogs and Boundaries Blogs are frequently updated and often contain hyperlinks to other sites of interest, photos, and miscellaneous commentary. First coined in 1997, the word ‘blog’ was at the top of Merriam-Webster’s list of the ten most looked-up words in 2004 (BBC News 2004; CBS News 2004). Although academic scholarship on blogging

ANDREA LIEBER is in its infancy,® the phenomenon has received a tremendous amount of attention in the mainstream press. Like other interactive web genres, such as listservs, chatrooms, and wikis,’ the blog is a key feature of Web 2.0, the internet’s ‘second generation’, in that it enables web users to create, rather than simply consume, the content available on the World Wide Web.

Web t.0 is a term generally used to describe the first generation of internet technology where most content was added to the web by programmers and where users functioned primarily as consumers of information. Advances in technology have enabled people without specialist knowledge of computers to upload information, resulting in the creation of interactive sites such as Napster, YouTube, and Facebook. Blogs in particular have played an important role in this techno-

logical shift, and the growth in use of the internet to create sites that simulate being in an informal community has significant social implications. Specialist commentators attribute the success of the blogging genre to the development of RSS (Real Simple Syndication) and permalink technologies. RSS is a technology that allows web users to be notified whenever there is an update of any kind to a particular webpage—producing what is known as the ‘live’ web or ‘incremental’ web.® Permalink technology allows the web user to refer to a particular entry on a blog or a specific news item in the online press and create a link

to that post. Tom Coates, a technology blogger, wrote that the development of permalink technology is what makes possible the layered, communal nature of the blog: ‘For the first time it became relatively easy to gesture directly at a highly specific post on someone else’s site and talk about it. Discussion emerged.

Chat emerged. And—as a result—friendships emerged or became more entrenched’ (Coates 2003). Because bloggers are active ‘linkers’—linking both to each other’s blogs and to sites of interest, they have a disproportionate effect on search engines, which use ‘link structure’ to identify sites of relevance to users (O’Reilly 2005). Thus their presence in cyberspace is of significant interest to those who use the web to market goods and ideas. Blogs have also been heralded as a democratizing force

in the popular media, because they provide an instant, published forum for lay individuals that circumvents any editorial or review process. Thus, individuals or sroups without a voice in mainstream media and politics have found a voice and an audience in the blogosphere (Barton 2005; Keren 2006). Journalists and technology scholars studying the phenomenon of blogging as a new form of expression tend to focus on what are known as ‘filter blogs’— sites that bring together links on a particular subject with commentary, and which are often political in theme. Filter blogs effectively ‘filter’ the World Wide Web for its

readers, serving as an aggregating agent. Many such blogs are supported by advertising and maintained by a staff of professional writers. My interest, however, is in the variety of blogs that consist of online diaries or

journals, often hosted by one of several online journal hosting sites such as

BLOGGING AMONG ORTHODOX JEWISH WOMEN , , or . These

blogs are sometimes supplemented by photos and short video clips, but their most important feature is the prose writing contained in daily posts.’ If political blogs merit attention because of the way they challenge conventional media hierarchies, personal blogs also deserve attention, in part because of their potential to subvert the distinction between public and private life and in part because this is a blogging medium that is heavily used by women (Herring et al. 2004). While traditional diaries represent a form of private writing that might come to be widely read through publication, blogs are journals that at once combine the intimacy of personal reflection in the diary format with the instantaneously and globally accessible arena of the World Wide Web. Although blogs can be interactive, allowing readers to post comments and questions that often encourage the development of online communities, the act of blogging is inherently solitary. In the process of blogging, the writer is physically separated from her interlocutors

and audience, and correspondence takes place in an asynchronous fashion. At the same time, blogs provide the illusion of face-to-face community. Bloggers frequently refer to the ‘friends’ they have made through their blogs—friends they

have never met and might never encounter in real life (Wright 2007). A blog might have millions of readers, or it might have none. They provide the illusion of intimacy, but are in fact fully public, and in the case of Orthodox Jewish blogs allow ‘outsiders’ a glimpse of what is ordinarily a rather insular world. Blogging by Orthodox women raises questions, because of the way in which Orthodox Judaism’s sense of female piety hinges on a public—private dichotomy,

a theoretical distinction that is pivotal to an understanding of gender roles as defined by Orthodox halakhah. Jewish law, enhanced by custom, locates women’s realm of power within the private sphere, symbolized by the home as the locus of her religious duties. Jewish law limits a woman’s role in the public domain on the

basis of a number of proscriptions derived from classical texts.'° In rabbinic thought, women may not serve as judges or as witnesses in a court of law, and in

contemporary times this proscription is sometimes extended to a prohibition against women serving on synagogue boards or as principals in Jewish schools (Ross 2004: 17). For a woman to hold such a position is viewed in ancient sources as compromising kevod hatstbur—the honour of the community. If a woman is visible in a public position, the assumption (of the imagined onlooker) might be

that there is no man capable of holding that office, a conclusion which could bring shame on the community as a whole (Biale 1995).

Laws of modesty (tseniyut) affirm that a woman’s true honour is her inner beauty—hidden from the public world and expressed in the frequently cited phrase from Psalm 45: 14: ‘The glory of the king’s daughter is within’ (kol kevudah bat melekh penimah). The concept of tsentyut also includes a sense of women’s

piety in which their absence from, or invisibility in, the public sphere is valued. The custom of dressing modestly and covering the hair in public is an extension

ANDREA LIEBER of this concept—a woman’s body is not to be displayed in public, partly so as not

to arouse sexual desire among men. According to the principle of kol ishah, a woman’s voice is also understood to be arousing to men, thus prohibiting women from speaking or singing in public. In some communities, it is even considered immodest for women to drive cars. In the realm of public ritual, symbolized by the synagogue, women’s power is explicitly limited. Because women are exempt from a category of religious obligations defined by the Mishnah as ‘time-bound positive commandments’, they are excluded from being counted in a minyan (prayer quorum), leading the community in prayer, and reading from the Torah or Haftarah. Although feminism has

penetrated the modern Orthodox community, resulting in many efforts to empower women in public synagogue ritual, such efforts are highly controversial and are nowhere near gaining universal acceptance in the broader Orthodox community. The public nature of blogs is ambiguous and raises questions about their audience. Is a blog public if it has no readers? Is a blog public if it does not appear ona Google search? In what ways are a blog’s public nature determined by its accessibility? The bloggers I interviewed all ascribed importance to the ‘comments’ feature of blogging software as evidence of readership. Unlike wikis, which do not distinguish between writer and reader and highlight instead the text produced by collaborative writing, the blog maintains a hierarchy of writer over reader (Barton

2005). A blogger can control whether readers are able to post comments, and some hosts even allow bloggers to restrict readers to a selected group. While the comments section of a blog might occasionally generate heated discussion, comments on blog diary entries are typically terse. And yet, the mere presence of a comment, however brief or critical, indicates an audience, and for many bloggers the idea of an audience is a large part of the genre’s appeal. Yet in bringing matters of private concern into the arena of public discourse, even theoretically, private matters become invested with public (and often politi-

cal) significance. Jurgen Habermas discussed this phenomenon in his classic analysis of the emergence of the ‘public sphere’ (1994). Habermas looked at the relationship between letter-writing (through which ‘the individual unfolded himself in his subjectivity’) and bourgeois diaries. He wrote: ‘the diary became a letter addressed to the sender, and the first-person narrative became a conversation with one’s self, addressed to another person’. In this respect, ‘subjectivity, as the innermost core of the private, was always already oriented toward an audience’ (Habermas 1994: 48-9). Matthew Barton uses Habermas’s work to talk about the significance of Web 2.0 technologies such as blogs and wikis in maintaining a critical ‘public sphere’ (Barton 2005; see also O Baoill 2005). He notes the similarity of blogs to Habermas’s understanding of diaries and letters as genres that produce an audience-oriented subjectivity through deeply personal writing. Barton suggests that, like diaries, blogs encourage the development of subject-

BLOGGING AMONG ORTHODOX JEWISH WOMEN ivity through self-reflective writing in a space that is public, yet fully controlled by the individual.

Women and the Web Blogging software enables anyone with access to the internet to publish a personal narrative on the web. Although studies of gender relations in cyberspace suggest that male dominance and the replication of patriarchal social forms are prevalent, there are ways in which the internet is a uniquely comfortable place for women to network, find support, and assert a feminist presence (Cherny and Weise 1996; Haraway 1991).

According to a study by a group at Indiana University, led by Susan C. Herring, about 50 per cent of bloggers are women (Herring 2003). Websites such as (‘The community for women who blog’), which counts

more than 10,000 women bloggers among its ranks, aggregate sites like and , and the recent proliferation of blogs dealing with women’s issues (the ‘mommy’ blog and the ‘pregnancy’ or ‘infertility’ blogs are a few popular sub-genres) suggest at least anecdotally that this number has grown in the few years since those findings were recorded. This increase in women’s activity as ‘prosumers’ (a neologism formed from ‘producer’

and ‘consumer’) of web content is paralleled in real life by the increase in and popularity of women’s writing in other media as well." In her essay ‘Always Already Virtual: Feminist Politics in Cyberspace’, Patricia Wise argues that the internet, and the virtual reality it provides, is an easy home

for women since they ‘are constituted as always already virtual in modern and postmodern epistemologies and power relations’ (1997: 79). Wise here relies on the use of the word ‘virtual’ in its pre-internet context, in which it meant ‘not quite there’, ‘not quite real’, or ‘that which is so in essence or effect, though not recognized formally, actually or by strict definition as such; almost absolute’ (1997: 79).

In this reading, Wise understands the position of women in modernity as analogous to the liminal nature of virtual online realities. Woman’s embodied presence is a fact, but her presence is written over by an absence of autonomy— women are present, but not fully so. Wise suggests that women ‘are not necessarily unsettled to find themselves in a space in which their subjectivity is virtualized, nor unfamiliar with the idea of imaginary fragmentation or dispersion’ (1997: 191). Wise employs this theoreti-

cal stance to argue that the internet is an ideal venue for women, because it presents a world that resembles the one women have inhabited throughout modernity. She locates the greatest possibilities for women’s use of the internet in translating women’s ‘multiple literacies and polyvocality’ (their ability to speak,

read, and write from multiple positions simultaneously—the very tools which have enabled them to function with limited agency within patriarchal culture) to

ANDREA LIEBER the virtual realm, in which complicated, multilayered identities are the norm (Wise 1997: 188). The reading of women as ‘always already virtual’ applies easily to the gendered

reality of women in Orthodox Jewish communities. Many (though not all) of the bloggers studied here work outside the home, and some have college educations and postgraduate degrees. They are by no means literally confined to the home or denied a public life in secular terms. However, in the context of their spiritual lives, their sense of religious identity, obligation, and womanhood very much depends on constructing a theoretical distinction between the public and private

domains. Indeed, there is a great deal of rhetoric in the traditional community that explicitly justifies women’s circumscription to the domestic sphere— elevating her role in the private realm as vital to the perpetuation of tradition, even surpassing the importance of men’s public role in the synagogue. Itis in this respect that halakhic Judaism virtualizes women in Wise’s sense—their presence is a necessary given, but it is written over by a lack of autonomy in Judaism’s public ritual spaces. The Orthodox women behind the blogs analysed here are not actively or consciously engaging in feminist activism through their writing. Not one of them isa vocal advocate for social or religious change in her community, and none is seeking to overturn the conventional gender roles that structure women’s lives or to challenge the patriarchal order in any way. None of the bloggers cited here has taken on the agenda of Orthodox feminism, which is a dynamic and rapidly expanding movement within traditional circles, and many women even use the blog as a forum for speaking out against liberal feminist positions (see Roller 1999).'* Indeed, many women in the Orthodox blogosphere reject the media’s suggestion that blog culture is a liberating force. In a post entitled ‘Funny, I’m not Wearing any Veil... Have You Seen a Veil>’, blogger Chayyei Sarah, ‘an Orthodox Jewish thirty-something living, playing, writing, and dating in Jerusalem’, writes a response to Marcus Freed’s piece on bloggers in the London Jewish Chronicle: Monday 27 Feb. 2006

The premise [of the article] is one I’m getting pretty tired of seeing in media coverage about Orthodox blogs. The gist of the article (stated and unstated) is this: Until blogs came along, the Orthodox community was so closed. There was no way to really get

to know any Orthodox people! Orthodox women in particular were shut up in their homes with no one to talk to and their lives were state secrets! But now, thanks to the internet, we're

learning fascinating things! Rebbetzins can have a sense of humor! Check it out at Renreb.com! Shomer negiah women [women who do not touch men other than their husbands] have sexual urges? Oh my God! Who knew? Get the details at shomernegiah. blogspot.com! And, whoa, Orthodox mothers in the Five Towns have political opinions. This is

BLOGGING AMONG ORTHODOX JEWISH WOMEN breaking news. The veil has been lifted! It’s a window into the Orthodox world! The internet is

Just amazing!

Chayyei Sarah resists the idea that her world is closed and points to the many ways in which Orthodox Jewish women have voices and are not in need of the emancipating power promised by the internet. Similar sentiments are expressed in the comments section of Orthomom’s blog. Orthomom is one of the bloggers featured in the London Jewish Chronicle piece, and several of her readers shared Chayyei Sarah’s sense of bewilderment at the overly simplified characterization of their lives: Sunday 26 Feb. 2006

Shifra said... It’s good we have blogging or else Orthodox women like us would never be able to speak our minds. Thank God the veil has been lifted—we’d been suffering in silence much too long! Gimme a break.

I think it’s great that you and the Rebbitzen are getting well earned press but man... someone needs to get out more. SephardiLady said... Veil? I express these opinions at the table. I’m sure that most of the female bloggers do to[o].

Hirshel Tzig said... Explain to me the great ‘freedom’ that’s is the blog. Are you trying to tell us that Orthodox Women are victims of the Taliban or some other terrible regime, and that their only outlet is the internet?

There is a heavy irony in Shifra’s suggestion that ‘someone needs to get out more’. Her comment effectively turns Freed’s article on its head by suggesting that the journalist is the one who is confined to the home and thus not sufficiently

worldly to understand the Orthodox Jewish blogging phenomenon. SephardiLady says that she already has a voice and uses it to expresses controversial ideas ‘at the table’, ironically a reference to the domestic sphere and thus the private realm after all. And Hirshel Tzig (presumably a male reader, though of course it is not possible to know), in his mocking comparison of Orthodoxy to the Taliban,

perhaps the contemporary regime most marked by repression of and violence towards women, denies Orthodox women’s status as marginalized in any way through the absurdity of the analogy. But, of course, the greatest irony is that this entire exchange is taking place ina fully public arena—accessible to anyone with an internet connection and a web

ANDREA LIEBER browser. So, although the writers here would resist the notion that they are transgressing boundaries in a radical way, and perhaps the anonymity and false intimacy of the blogging experience facilitates this fiction, in fact they are accessing a

much broader audience than they might have in any other forum within their communities. In spite of the resistance to that categorization, the bloggers’ writing might still be viewed as a feminist act, in that they are creating a new space for self-expression that at once affirms and also challenges the relation between public and private.

Why Orthodox Women Blog It is clear from even a brief perusal of blogs by Jewish women who identify themselves as Orthodox that, while most have not chosen blogging as a self-conscious foray into feminist activism, many do blog to overcome feelings of isolation and frustration with their lives and their communities. In fact, if we look at some of the inaugural entries or landmark posts where women reflect on their reasons for blogging, it becomes obvious that most women turn to blogging as a forum for self-expression and support. They appear to be motivated by a therapeutic need to ‘talk through’ their internal conflicts in their writing and seek support from sympathetic readers. ‘PerturbedMom’ is a recently single Orthodox mother with a degree in social work. In her inaugural post she writes: Wednesday 11Jan. 2006

Well, I finally did it. I made a blog. I never understood why people wanted one. Now | know! I feel it helps to vent and know people are reading and responding which gives a sense of support. Hence my blog name—TI have been overly stressed lately in regards to my daughter. She is a bright, beautiful, hesterical [sic] difficult child filled with many issues. She is in a special ed school and needs various supportive services. The most pressing issue is her toilet training. She is 4 and I have been working on this for a year

and half and I have had it... . My life is about my constant struggle to change and become a better person. The problem is I am very analytical which is great at times but also interferes. I over pressure myself. All support is welcome.

Like many other Orthodox Jewish women in cyberspace, PerturbedMom is in search of a community to support her in her emotional struggles. She does not talk about wanting to leave her community, and she is not openly critical. She is looking for meaningful connections but also finding relief in the expression of her feelings through blogging. Comments to PerturbedMom’s blog tend to be rather superficial, providing just a sentence or two of encouragement. This suggests that the real value in blogging is in the experience of self-expression itself: verbalizing feelings through the blog has the therapeutic effect of providing relief and is an antidote to depression.

BLOGGING AMONG ORTHODOX JEWISH WOMEN AidelMaidel, an Orthodox blogger who has received a lot of coverage in the media, also views her blog as ‘a place to vent’. AidelMaidel began blogging in 2.003, writing about her journey as a ba’alat teshuvah, her struggle with infertility, and the subsequent birth of her two daughters. Over time, however, the subject of the blog focused on her ongoing divorce, which is the issue that drew attention to her website. Eventually, partly as a result of the ongoing litigation with her ex-hus-

band, the older posts were removed from her blog. In her final post before the divorce, AidelMaidel expressed her deep connection to her blogging community, and her reasons for blogging: Friday 7 Oct. 2005

I’m so sorty.

I started this blog 2 years and 2 months ago. I intended it as my place to vent about all the things I couldn't talk about with the people in my real life. It grew from there to become a record of my trials and tribulations, my mazel tovs and my sorrows. It afforded me a platform from which to shout out to the entire world... while still protecting my and my family’s privacy. Unfortunately, this is no longer possible. I’ve realized that the wisest thing to do right now is, sadly, to stop my writing here. I will miss the refuge I have found here, and I will miss all the people who have become a part of my life through their comments and emails. I never met any of you, but I feel I know you and I appreciate the support and love you've shown me.

Any divorce is a personal tragedy and I would like to write about what I am going through now. But because I have children, I have no business indulging my need for an

outlet when the thoughts and feelings I might express here might someday hurt, embarrass, or otherwise be shared at their expense.

AidelMaidel initiated her blog in response to her desire ‘to shout out to the world’, and in the process of sharing her thoughts she forged meaningful connections with readers. Her subsequent decision to delete all of her past posts comes as a belated recognition of their truly public nature. The blog does not in fact safesuard the sense of privacy that enabled her to write. In removing the older posts

she reclaimed them for her private self and reflects here on her ambivalence about withdrawing from the blogosphere. What is particularly telling about this post is that AidelMaidel says that she would like to be able to write about her divorce, but her awareness of blogging as a public act prohibits her from doing so. Did it ever occur to AidelMaidel that she could write privately, in a conventional journal, and accomplish her desire to express feelings about her ongoing strugsles? Indeed, the loss of her blog means for AidelMaidel the loss of a specifically public voice and the loss of an audience, and without these it would appear that writing does not seem possible. It is clear that AidelMaidel does not see a conventional diary as providing the same benefits as blogging.

ANDREA LIEBER After a brief hiatus, AidelMaidel did in fact return to blogging to write about her dating life, her remarriage, and the adoption of her new husband’s children. Her homepage now features a regularly updated ‘child support’ calculator that computes how much she is owed in support by her ex-husband, a bold statement that draws attention to issues facing divorced women nationwide. AidelMaidel’s

consciousness of her blog as a public forum now makes it possible for her to make this decidedly political statement about her personal affairs. Nice Jewish Girl was the subject of feature articles in both The Forward and the New York Jewish Week. Blogging about her frustrations as a single Jewish woman bound by the Orthodox principle that prohibits physical contact with members of the opposite sex, ‘NJG’ calls her blog ‘her primal scream’. When she initiated the blog, she was 34 years old and had never been kissed. In one of her earliest posts, she explains her reasons for blogging: Tuesday 22 Feb. 2005

Writing is not my best skill. In high school and college I got OK grades in English, but there are other things Iam much better at. Writing does not come naturally to me. So why am I making a blog about something so personal? First, because in the last few years, being S.N. [shomer negiah] to me has become a little like living in jail. There is a world out there (my married friends, my not-frum friends) who are enjoying being sexual people, and I am imprisoned in my single, religious, Nice Jewish Girl life. Sometimes I think that if I do not have sex I will explode. Sometimes I think that if I do not find out what it feels like to have a man’s hands on me, I will go crazy. Maybe this blog is the explosion! Maybe after all I have gone crazy!

Another reason I am blogging is that I want support from other people who are in the same situation... | don’t know any other frum women as far as I know who own a vibrator for example. I have owned three and do not know how I would survive without it. What does that mean? Who understands?

Although NJG’s blog was featured in two national publications and is widely read and linked in the Jewish blogosphere, the author does not consider herself a ‘writer’. Her perplexing comment here about a lack of writing skills points to some broader theoretical issues in the study of blogging and other forms of computer-mediated communication. Text-based communication technologies blur the distinction between formal writing and speech. As email and text messaging emerge as preferred forms of communication, there is a shift towards textuality, a technological change that echoes the shift from orality to literacy in ancient times (Wright 2007). However, writing on the internet is governed by a different set of

conventions that sets it apart from formal ‘writing’ (Fernheimer and Nelson 2005; Wesch 2008), and it is ironic to see that NJG does not necessarily view her blogging as writing in the formal sense.

BLOGGING AMONG ORTHODOX JEWISH WOMEN Although blogs are clearly venues for writing, it is significant that these bloggers emphasize voice in their rationalizations for blogging. For each of these authors, the blog is a space ‘to vent’, ‘to shout out to the world’, or to utter a ‘primal scream’. The language of release is noteworthy, and shouting and scream-

ing are certainly not behaviours that conform to classic notions of female modesty in Jewish tradition. NJG in particular, declaring publicly that she has owned three vibrators and cannot talk about masturbation even among her female friends, expresses a strong desire to talk about her feelings. She is not necessarily in search of a public forum for her concerns, or interested in activism to alter the limitations of her community, but rather seeks a community of peers with whom to discuss private matters. In this respect, she is looking to expand her private world—to share private concerns with those who might be experiencing similar tensions. In his 2006 book Blogosphere: The New Political Arena, Michael Keren characterizes the blogosphere as a public space ‘situated in a zone between emancipation and melancholy’ (2006: 152). Blogs provide an unprecedented vehicle for self-expression in the public sphere (their emancipating power), yet blogging is a solitary activity that requires a certain withdrawal from the real world in favour of a virtual community. This detachment from the real is necessary to take a critical stance, he argues, but it also fosters a sense of isolation and melancholy.'*? He

writes that bloggers ‘are to an extent liberated and acquire a voice while their social and political impact is limited, largely because of the virtual nature of the endeavor’ (2006: 152). While Keren blames blogging itself as the partial cause of melancholy among bloggers, it is clear that in the excerpts reviewed here a certain sense of loneliness underlies the bloggers’ writing from the beginning. While there is a definite melancholic tone to many of the blogs I have seen by

Orthodox Jewish women, blogging provides them with a forum that leads to a self-actualization that is real and that combats the melancholy that comes from their sense of isolation. Rather than a retreat from the world, these bloggers are reaching out in search of community and support, not as an escape from the real world, but as a supplement to it. If Jewish law limits women’s voices in the public sphere, the blog provides a paradoxically ‘silent’ way for them to be raised. It may be that writing is so empowering precisely because it articulates voice in a way that is perceived as non-transgressive. Blog readers, then, experience this process

vicariously. Indeed, many women write that they were inspired to create their own blogs after a critical period of reading and commenting on those of other women. Blogs are usually, though not always, anonymous. For the bloggers I interviewed, anonymity is one of the more cherished aspects of the genre—it allows them to express without consequences opinions that are often not accepted within the circumscribed realm of their community, and it is this key feature that establishes the blog as a private space for the writer. As long as a blogger’s identity

ANDREA LIEBER is protected, she feels free to write without fear of scrutiny from those within her community. And yet the perceived sense of privacy afforded by anonymity is a fiction, as any material posted on the blog is fully accessible to anyone in the world with a web browser. In fact, it might be said that there is no true anonymity on the internet since one’s personal information and browsing habits are coded (through ‘cookies’ and IP addresses) into the very software that powers blogging programs and internet browsers. Anonymity also has the potential to mask gender. In some respects, internet culture resists gendering because of the way its participants can construct false selves or alter egos and experiment with false identities.'* This raises the question of what the concept of gender actually means in the disembodied realm of cyberspace. In other respects, the internet is a fertile site for exploring gender

construction, as online identity in general is so clearly a construct. Kressel Hausman’s concept of the blog as a ‘virtual veibershul’ is one such example of this

phenomenon.

The Virtual Veibershul Kressel Hausman is one of the more fascinating bloggers I interviewed in the course of my research. A ba’alat teshuvah in her late thirties, she married a ‘frum from birth’ hasidic man. Both she and her husband maintain a web presence through Jewish outreach sites designed to teach about traditional Jewish thought and practice. Kressel acknowledges that as a hasidic couple, their web use puts them in a very small minority in their community, and she has written publicly about her struggle to find a balanced place for the internet in her life. The technology of the internet, with its capacity to blur so many fundamental

boundaries, has posed an intense challenge to the Orthodox world. While hasidism and other forms of Orthodoxy have wrestled in the past to establish appropriate uses for technologies such as the telephone, television, computers, mobile phones, and recording devices, the internet presents a whole new set of dangers that are perceived as a threat to the stability of the home. At stake is the extent to which technologies facilitate exposure to secular culture, which can potentially threaten the insularity of the community (Poll 2006: 11, 217). Many studies of strict Orthodoxy have emphasized the community’s unlikely embrace of technology for business, education, and outreach purposes, noting the ability of the community to shape technology to suit its needs (Berkovic 1999; Heilman 2.000; Poll 2006) and even to sacralize the use of technology when employed for holy purposes, such as outreach and Torah study (Mintz 1998). While computers have been used for decades in hasidic communities for a variety of business purposes, the advent of the internet effectively transformed them from a useful business tool into a gateway to the secular world. In this respect, the internet is placed

BLOGGING AMONG ORTHODOX JEWISH WOMEN alongside television, which was banned from strictly Orthodox homes in 1975 because it threatened to import corrupting influences (Kelemen 2003). Kressel Hausman is motivated to blog from and about home by her passion for conventional writing: she aspires to be a professional writer and has had work published. Her interests have extended beyond writing about exclusively Jewish subjects, and she is presently engaged in writing Harry Potter fan fiction, which

she often posts on her blog for readers to critique. She still maintains her outreach website, Kressel’s Korner (), featuring articles she has written on various subjects of interest to Jewish women, although she no longer posts new articles on it. She also posts frequently to the collective website BeyondBT (), a blog and discussion site for newly

religious Orthodox Jews. From her outreach site one can link to the blog she maintains on , called ‘Aishes Chayil: Mi Yimtza?’ after Proverbs 31: 10. Kressel chose this title, which in its biblical context begins an ode of praise to an accomplished woman, because she is, as she puts it, ‘striving to find the aishes chayil within herself. She writes: ‘There are many translations of “Aishes Chayil”, most commonly “a woman of valor”, but I like the Artscroll’s “accomplished woman”’ (AishesChayil). Nearly all the bloggers I studied chose pseudonyms that mark the writer as

Jewish and female. As we have seen, many of the names are associated with motherhood or stereotypically feminine attributes: PerturbedMom, Nice Jewish Girl, AidelMaidel, ChayyeiSarah, Orthomom, AishesChayil. Both Kressel’s webpage and her blog are clearly marked as women’s spaces on the web. When you

first enter Kressel’s Korner, there is a prominent link announcing that it is the ‘companion site’ to Being Jewish, her husband’s outreach website, presumably fora male audience. Below that link is a heading that informs readers of her priorities, lest anyone think her web activity is causing her to neglect her more important responsibilities: What is the role of women in Judaism? Why is it different than that of men’s? Judaism recognizes women’s unique spirituality. This site explores these issues in depth. I very much appreciate email. I like to incorporate people’s letters into the site. However, if you decide to send me email, please be patient. I love to write, but I’m a mother first, so it might be a while before I answer. Those looking to be either a Shabbos guest or host vet top priority.

Ina similar move, AidelMaidel divides her ‘blogroll’ (a list of links to blogs recommended by the author) into two gendered categories: veibelach (little wives) and yingelach (little boys), indicating that even the World Wide Web has gender-appropriate spaces. In the spring of 2006, after attending a lecture at her child’s yeshiva in which a prominent rabbi warned of the various dangers of the internet, Kressel made the difficult decision to disable her web browser at home. Paradoxically, in order to

ANDREA LIEBER maintain her blog, she must now go outside the home, to the public library, to access the internet. In a piece she wrote for BeyondBT dated 30 May 2006, Kressel talks about what it meant to her to lose her blogging community, and in doing so, describes her blog in explicitly gendered terms: Cutting Connections: No More Web Browser in My Home

In 2005, I discovered blogging, which far surpasses the website in dearness to my heart. My personal blog has 74 ‘subscribing’ readers, most of whom are Jewish women of varying levels of observance. We read about each other’s lives, celebrate each other’s simchas, and support each other through the tough times. Baby pictures, daily gripes, Shabbos menus, divrei Torah [lit. ‘words of Torah’: discussions of biblical texts]—we talk about it all. I think of it as my ‘virtual veiber shul.’ I love my Internet friends. And now I was being asked to give them up.

The use of the phrase ‘virtual veiber shul’ is highly significant as a strategy for the ‘social shaping of technology’.'? For Kressel, blogging is not about breaking down

conventional boundaries of communication but rather about extending traditional ones. Her homepage replicates the gender dichotomy present in her own social world. Her webspace is, in her mind, a ‘women’s space’. Rather than breaking down boundaries, her website clearly affirms the very boundaries that structure her home life. Her online community is a ‘virtual women’s section’, playing on the gendered partitioning of the public space of the synagogue. She does not understand her online presence as entering the public arena but rather as repre-

senting an expanded private sphere—one in which she can have a more pronounced voice, and reach an expanded network of ‘insiders’. This gendering serves to disguise blogging activity as a public act, creating a fiction that circumscribes it within the domestic, female sphere. Yet, true to the concept of virtuality, the space of Kressel’s blog both is and is not as she describes it. The fact is that her writing is fully public—accessible to male and female alike. Her blogging is an activity she must pursue outside the home—in the public library—as her community frowns on the use of internet browsers at home. Kressel herself even acknowledges that, in this veibershul, traditional definitions of Jewish female identity do not apply. She writes on her blog for 28 May 2006: For those of you who don’t know Yiddish, a ‘veiber shul’ refers to the women’s section of a synagogue. In Orthodox synagogues, men and women sit separately for prayer services. ‘Veiber’ is Yiddish for ‘wives’ and ‘shul’ means synagogue. I know that some of you are not wives yet, some of you are not Jewish, and a few of you are not even female but you're all part of my virtual veiber shul anyway. (The truth is, the six men on my flist [friends list] are pretty inactive.)

In the space of Kressel’s blog, any reader becomes part of the verbershul—male or

female, Jewish or not. Her blogging community extends the bounds of this cir-

BLOGGING AMONG ORTHODOX JEWISH WOMEN cumscribed feminine domain to include anyone who would be part of it. On the one hand, this represents an opening up of Kressel’s world to include those who would not ordinarily be a part of it; on the other, in considering the blogging space to be a woman’s space she rejects the notion that her writing activity constitutes a fully public act.

In anti-internet polemics, the rhetoric of home and its preservation takes ona high level of symbolic importance. Although children are often cited as the people in the home who need protection from the internet, the web is also perceived as a threat to marriage and fidelity and is viewed as undermining communal leaders’ sense of control (Portnoy 2004). Given the extent to which women in traditional Jewish communities are charged with the duty of fostering a pious home environment, and the extent to which the internet is perceived as a threat to that very environment, women’s use of the internet in strictly Orthodox communities is itself a noteworthy phenomenon. In an address given on the eve of the Days of Awe, 2003, the Novominsker Rebbe, Rabbi Yaakov Perlow, issued a warning to those of his followers who have to use the internet for business purposes: The internet, with the flick of a button, invades a Jewish home, a Jewish soul, and makes

moral disaster . . . Create fences, strictures, around its use. Do not give it free rein! Remember that you are dealing with a force that contains spiritual and moral poison. Ask yourself further: must it come into your home—openly accessible to yourself and your children? (Perlow 2003: 9)

Despite the official ban on the internet in many communities, strictly Orthodox Jews continue to use the World Wide Web. In an effort to make the internet safe for Orthodox Jewish homes, a number of filtering programs have been developed to limit web browsing to approved sites, and rulings prohibiting use of the internet in isolation have also been promulgated. The provider of one such program, , which monitors and records web use, includes a warning on its home page discouraging the use of the internet even with the protection provided by this service: ‘Would you have a poisonous snake roaming around freely in your house because it is programmed and trained not to byte [sic], would your? We still strongly recommend NOT having Internet at all!!!’ Another service, , enables email access with limited web browsing, while offers limited high-speed internet services with filtering features to homes, schools, and businesses so as to allow concerned Orthodox believers to use the internet.

OnionSoupMix OnionSoupMikx, also an Orthodox ba’alat teshuvah and a married mother of four,

maintains a very different kind of blog. OnionSoupMix may not seem like a screen name that has any overtly Jewish or female meaning. However, instant onion soup mix is a key ingredient in the cooking of some modern observant

ANDREA LIEBER Jews. In this respect, I take the name to be a reference to this blogger’s domestic role in her household, with ‘Mix’ having the added connotation of an allusion to her conflicted feelings about her community. ‘OSM’ as she is known to her readers, has made a conscious decision not to blog about her children or her family life. Instead, she uses her blog to express openly her doubts about her faith and her criticisms of the Orthodox community in which she lives. OSM describes herself as an ‘Orthoprax’, meaning she ‘keeps everything’ (that is, observes all aspects of halakhah), but ‘believes nothing’. Although she dresses modestly and wears a wig, she is not sure that she believes

in the Torah. The issues she chooses to write about are issues she could not discuss openly in her community or even in her own home, and she often employs a dry and ironic humour to convey her critique: 12.56a.m. 4 Dec. 2007 Mixed Bag

I went to my son’s Chumash [Pentateuch] party recently. It was lovely. The little boys sang and received chumashim and the theme was derech eretz kadma le Torah [the way of the world precedes the Torah], which you know I liked.

In other good news, there were separate seating sections for mommies and tatties [daddies] and this helped me to prevent myself from fornicating in the auditorium aisles like I usually do at my children’s chumash parties.

In this excerpt, OSM criticizes the custom of segregating men and women at nonreligious events in Jewish communal settings.'® She appears to mock a typical ‘mommy blog’ by describing the ordinary act of attending a simple function at her child’s school and then continues in an ironic turn to voice a strong critique of sender segregation. While Kressel employs the rhetoric of the mehitsah (partition segregating men and women) in her analogy of the veibershul to talk about the women’s section of the synagogue as a nurturing private space for women, OSM here points to the mehitsah’s repressive function, and its power to marginalize women in the public domain. Rather than a blog about home, OSM’s homepage is a site devoted to challenging the strict norms of her community, and thus might be read as a threat to the stability of her home. This post in particular, in asserting a sexually aggressive wife and mother, inverts the logic often used to justify the

mehitsah, according to which it is a man’s sexual desires that must be kept in check by removing women to a separate seating area. Reading OSM’s entries, it becomes obvious that she is not fully ‘at home’ in her own home, and the blog provides a space where she can express herself freely and openly, one where she can get support from other sympathetic individuals. In this sense, OnionSoupMix has constructed a virtual home for herself online that represents a public ‘private’ space. In private correspondence, OSM has said that

BLOGGING AMONG ORTHODOX JEWISH WOMEN her ability to express herself online actually enables her to function in her real-life world, in spite of her ambivalence about Orthodox Judaism. She says that she was

far more frustrated before she began her blog because so many of her feelings were necessarily kept inside. By contrast with Kressel and the other bloggers discussed above, OnionSoup-

Mix does use her blog to critique her community and views her blogging as definitively public. Yet the anonymity of her blog tempers the public nature of her critique. It enables the free expression of her voice, but also deprives her of the full experience of subjectivity. In her case we see anonymity functioning as a vir-

tualizing mechanism: the agency in her critique must be concealed and as a result, itis not fully public—only virtually so. In the following post, OSM mocks a Jewish legal dispute in her community by assuming the identity of a rabbi. While amusing, this post is highly subversive in the way it pokes fun at both the halakhic process and the absurdity of the question

under consideration, which is whether a woman is permitted by Jewish law to shovel the driveway following a snowstorm: 04.06 p.m. 18 Dec. 2007 BREAKING NEWS: Urgent Psak Din[halakhic ruling]

A question has come up on a women’s forum regarding whether or not shoveling the driveway is a tznius [modest] behavior for a woman. PSAK DIN

In response to this, I, Hagaonit, Harabbanit {the great (female) rabbi] OnionSoupMix, have researched this issue extensively. I have read all the sifrei halacha [books of Jewish law] that address this timeless question and reviewed the numerous shailos [legal questions] and teshuvos [legal responses] that pertain to this sensitive matter.

OSM positions herself here as a Jewish legal expert. She claims to be both a gaon (‘genius’; ‘outstanding scholar’) and a rabbi, legal decisors of the highest authority, fully educated in the voluminous literature that can be brought to bear on the subject at hand. Noting that this question was raised on a woman’s forum makes the critique even more pointed: OSM is not just mocking male halakhic authority, but also the way in which women in the Orthodox community have internalized the male rabbinate’s concerns. Her hyperbolic suggestion that this is a ‘timeless

question’ and a ‘sensitive matter’ underlines the superficiality of the issue and mocks the seriousness with which legal authorities approach such minor legal concerns. Employing language typically used in praise of Jewish female piety, her parody continues: After an exhaustive study, I must conclude that shoveling the driveway is a coarse, unrefined behavior that does not befita Bas Yisroel [daughter of Israel]. Not only that, but

ANDREA LIEBER due to the darkness of this Golus [diaspora] and the depth of the depravity of the society

around us, I must inform you that women are also not permitted to move furniture, mow the lawn or take out the trash. Additional questionable behaviors include: washing the floor, vacuuming and possibly, according to some poskim [legal interpreters], folding laundry. A G-d fearing woman, a true Bas Melech [daughter of the King] will also recognize that the most tznius [modest] behavior includes sitting on the couch and eating chocolate bon-bons or pints of ice cream.

Whereas a traditional legal ruling of this sort might invoke categories like ‘daughter of Israel’ and ‘daughter of the King’ to remind women of their holy status and their resulting duty to uphold the standards of halakhah, here OSM invokes these terms to suggest that women be released from all forms of domestic labour as they do not befita truly pious Jewish woman. Of course, it is clear that

the rabbinic question at hand refers to a form of labour that necessarily takes place outside the house (hence, the perceived controversy over whether this behaviour is immodest). Nonetheless, OSM turns her critique of the legal process

into an opportunity to turn the system on its head—the very labours that are justified by rabbinic law as central to a woman’s piety (domestic labour performed inside the home) are instead here labelled ‘immodest’. She concludes her satirical post by mocking the way rabbinic authority invests the Jewish laws of modesty with heightened importance for the entire Jewish people: Although this psak may be hard to accept for some, we must always remember that the modesty of Jewish women is of utmost importance to Hakodosh Baruch Hu [The Holy

One Blessed Be He] and we must all sacrifice for the noble goal of preserving the Kedusha [holiness] of Am Yisroel [the Jewish people].

For all her dry, ironic humour and intelligent, articulate critique of certain practices within her community, OSM does not view her blog as a medium for effecting change, and she does not envision leaving her community. In fact, it is her blogging that enables her to perform her roles as wife and mother, in spite of her doubts. In a private email, OSM wrote: The blog is my outlet for my frustrations and I am typically able to be the ‘good’ frum wife and mommy as long as I know someone has heard my vent and knows how I really feel. Before I started the blog, I felt much more frustrated than I do now. However, it is very easy to get caught up the world of blogging where people who agree with you tend to post more often and your blog ends up being a fan club that you created. To prevent this, I try to welcome anyone else and encourage debate, especially from people who don’t agree with me. (22 January 2008)

OSM craves the debate and discussion that cannot take place within her community. In this respect, she very much seeks a voice that can be heard outside the

BLOGGING AMONG ORTHODOX JEWISH WOMEN confines of her social sphere. Here again, the blog provides a mechanism for coping with complicated feelings by extending the boundaries of conversation, and allowing the release of thoughts and ideas that would not be tolerated in her real-life community. And, at the same time, the expression of her opinions in this

forum makes it possible to return to the more constrained world in which she lives. She can tolerate her circumscribed role precisely because she has a place— a ‘public’ private realm of sorts—to articulate and share her subversive and conflicting feelings. The blogosphere, imagined as virtual veibershul for Orthodox Jewish women,

thus represents a more perfected private domain—a virtual space (a virtual home) in which women can really talk, without fear of judgement. Such talk brings conventionally private issues into the public sphere, and in this respect politicizes the everyday lives of women. Yet this politicization is not what motivates these women to blog, at least not consciously. In fact, it may be that the polit-

ical dimension of their blogging is an aspect that must necessarily be masked in order for these traditionally observant women to embrace the medium. Perhaps it is the self-actualization that comes from writing a blog that empowers women to be stronger actors in all aspects of their lives—both public and private—by providing a forum for the development of their own voice. None of the bloggers | studied were at all interested in leaving their communities out of frustration or breaking out of Orthodoxy to explore more liberal or secular communities. Yet all of them love to write and crave an expanded community where their voice can be heard and they can elaborate on their experiences. The blogosphere is a comfortable arena for this form of communication because it facilitates public expression, all the while masked by a perceived veil of anonymity that creates the illusion of privacy. This new public ‘private’ space thus constitutes a virtual home that challenges conventional ideas about domesticity in the Orthodox world.

Notes 1 Ba’alat teshuvah (lit. ‘master of repentance’): one who has ‘repented’ and ‘returned’ to the path defined by halakhah (Jewish law).

2 Details of the blogs cited in the text are listed below. S' There is an extensive literature on the emergent field of writing therapy. Within this area, there is a subfield concerned with internet writing and psychotherapy. Some theorists have argued that the anonymity of writing online best simulates Freud’s classic paradigm of the ‘analytic blank screen’ (Murphy and Mitchell 1998; Pennebaker 1997).

4 Frum: a Yiddish term meaning ‘religiously observant’. 5 Curiosity about hasidism as an insular, inaccessible world drives much of the popular interest in Orthodox blogs. Such interest is not a new phenomenon. Indeed, most scholarly work on contemporary hasidism has taken the form of providing a secular readership with an ‘inside’ view of the hasidic lifestyle, often from an ethnographic perspective. Classic examples include Eisenberg 1996, Harris 1995, and Heilman 1999. More recent

ANDREA LIEBER studies include Fishkoff 2005 and Winston 2005. Several studies have been specifically concerned with highlighting women’s experiences in hasidic communities. Davidman 1991, Kaufman 1991, Levine 2004, and Rotem 1997 are concerned with secular women who choose to live a strictly Orthodox lifestyle.

6 Recent literature on blogging includes Boxer 2008, Hewitt 2005, Keen 2007, Rodzvilla 2.002, Solove 2007, and Warnick 2007.

yh A listsery, or list server, is a program that automatically sends messages to multiple e-mail addresses on a mailing list; a chatroom is an online discussion forum (via keyboard) devoted to a specific topic, hosted on the internet; and a wiki is a collaborative website featuring the ongoing participation of multiple authors. The wiki format allows anyone to modify content that has been posted to the webpage, including the work of previous authors.

8 Perhaps the best synopsis of the significance of Web 2.0 is the five-minute video by Dr Michael Wesch, an anthropologist at Kansas State University, ‘The Machine is Us/ing Us’, demonstrates graphically the evolution of the internet, its increased interactivity, and the significant changes from Web 1.0 (Wesch 2008). 9 Newer subgenres such as ‘vlogs’ (video logs) are increasing in popularity, but I will not be discussing them here.

10 See the summary discussion in Ross 2004: 16-17 11 In their study ‘Women and Children Last: The Discursive Construction of Weblogs’, Susan Herring and her colleagues noted the strange paradox that, despite the substantial

presence of women in the blogosphere, public discourses about blogs tend to focus predominantly on adult males (Herring et al. 2004). £2 Within the Orthodox world there has been a proliferation of writing by women. Ina recent cover story for the Jerusalem Report, Netty C. Gross asks: ‘Does the exploding genre of religious women’s inspirational “chick-lit” reflect the flowering of a new, Ultra-Orthodox feminist consciousness?’ (Gross 2007). Gross reports the growing interest among publishers in this expanding market, citing sales in excess of 30,000 copies for some self-help books written by and for Orthodox Jewish women.

In her 1999 study of writing by strictly Orthodox Jewish women, Roller asserted that much of it is in fact reactionary—coming as a conservative response to liberal feminist arguments. Roller also identified two distinct voices in this body of literature—that of the ba’alat teshuvah (which often is preoccupied with refuting feminist claims, though taking the form of a ‘post modern, feminist self-reflecting narrative style’) and that of women who were raised in observant homes (‘aligned with traditional, masculine, universalizing narrative style’) (Roller 1999: 5-6).

ae Not surprisingly, Keren’s book was not received favourably in the blogosphere. Many bloggers voiced strong objections to his characterization of them (see Graveland 2007; Rettburg 2007). 14 Indeed, it might be said that all selves constructed and known online fall under suspicion. There is simply no way to know if an online persona is authentic or ‘real’.

15 There is a growing literature on the social shaping/structuring of technology (SST) (see e.g. MacKenzie and Wajcman 1999; Oudshoorn and Pinch 2003).

16 While Orthodox halakhah mandates the separation of men and women during prayer and other rituals, such as weddings, the practice of requiring gender segregation at other types

BLOGGING AMONG ORTHODOX JEWISH WOMEN of public assembly (lectures or cultural events) varies by community and is not mandated by Jewish law.

Blogs Cited Aidelmaidel. , accessed 15 Oct. 2006. AishesChayil: Mi Yimtza? , accessed 15 Oct. 2006. chayyeisarah., , accessed 15 Nov. 2006. Fancy Schmancy Anxiety Maven. (Blog) , accessed 15 Oct. 2000. —— (Profile) , accessed 15 Oct. 2006. Nice Jewish Girl. , accessed 15 Oct. 2006. Onion Soup Mix. , accessed 18 Dec. 2007. ORTHOMOM. , accessed 15 Nov. 2000. PerturbedMom. , accessed 15 Nov. 2006.

References BARTON, MATTHEW. D. 2005. ‘The Future of Rational-Critical Debate in Online Public Spheres’, Computers and Composition, 22: 177-90. BBC News. 2004. “Blog” is Picked as Word of the Year’ (Dec. 1). , accessed 15 Feb. 2008. BERKOVIC, SALLY. 1999. Straight Talk: My Dilemma as an Orthodox Jewish Woman. Hoboken, NJ. BIALE, RACHEL. 1995. Women and Jewish Law: The Essential Texts, their History, and their Relevance for Today. New York.

BOXER, SARAH. 2008. ‘Blogs’. New York Review of Books, 55 (14 Feb.). , accessed 14 Feb. 2008. CBS News. 2004. ““Blog” is the Runaway Word of the Year’ (t Dec.). , accessed 15 Feb. 2008. CHERNY, LYNN, and ELIZABETH REBA WEISE, eds. 1996. Wired Women: Gender and New Realities in Cyberspace. Emeryville, Calif.

COATES, TOM. 2003. ‘On Permalinks and Paradigms’ (11 June). , accessed 5 Mar. 2007. DAVIDMAN, LYNN. 1991. Tradition ina Rootless World: Women Turn to Orthodox Judaism. Berkeley, Calif.

EISENBERG, ROBERT. 1990. Boychiks in the Hood: Travels in the Hasidic Underground. San Francisco.

FERNHEIMER, JANICE. W.,and TOM J. NELSON. 2005. ‘Bridging the Composition Divide: Blog Pedagogy and the Potential for Agonistic Classrooms’. Currents in Electronic Literacy, 9. , accessed 13 Mar. 2008.

ANDREA LIEBER FISHKOFF, SUE. 2005. The Rebbe’s Army: Inside the World of Chabad-Lubavitch. New York.

FREED, MARCUS J. 2006. ‘How the Internet Is Lifting the Veil from Orthodox Jewish Women’, London Jewish Chronicle, 33 (26 Feb.).

GRAVELAND, BILL. 2007. ‘Author Laments Lonely Life of Bloggers’, Globe and Mail

(Toronto) (31 Jan.). , accessed 15 Jan. 2008. GRINSPAN, IZZY. 2005. ‘Blogs Offer Glimpse into Hidden Corners of Orthodox Life’,

Forward (26 Aug.). , accessed 15 Dec. 2007. GROSS, NETTY Cc. 2007. ‘Holy Laundry’, Jerusalem Report (23 July). , accessed 19 Mar. 2008. HABERMAS, JURGEN. 1994. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge, Mass.

HARAWAY, DONNA. J. 1991. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York.

HARRIS, LIS. 1995. Holy Days: The World of a Hasidic Family. New York.

HEILMAN, SAMUEL C. 1999. Defenders of the Faith: Inside Ultra-Orthodox Jewry. Berkeley, Calif.

HERRING, SUSAN C. 2003. ‘Gender and Power in Online Communication’. In Janet Holmes and Miriam Meyerhoff, eds., The Handbook of Language and Gender, 202-28. Oxford. —INNA KOUPER, LOIS ANN SCHEIDT, and ELIJAH L. WRIGHT. 2004. ‘Women and Children Last: The Discursive Construction of Weblogs’. In Laura J. Gurak, Smiljana Antonijevic, Laurie Johnson, Clancy Ratliff, and Jessica Reyman, eds., Into the Blogosphere: Rhetoric, Community and Culture of Weblogs. , accessed 15 Dec. 2006. HEWITT, HUGH. 2005. Blog: Understanding the Information Reformation that’s Changing Your World. Nashville, Tenn.

KAUFMAN, DEBRA R. 1991. Rachel’s Daughters: Newly Orthodox Jewish Women. New Brunswick, NJ. KEEN, ANDREW. 2007. The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing our Culture. New York.

KEREN, MICHEL. 20060. Blogosphere: The New Political Arena. Lanham, Md.

LEVINE, STEPHANIE W. 2004. Mystics, Mavericks, and Merrymakers: An Intimate Journey among Hasidic Girls. New York.

MACKENZIE, DONALD. A., and JUDY WAJCMAN. 1999. The Social Shaping of Technology, rev. edn. Philadelphia. MINTZ, JEROME.1998. Hasidic People: A Place in the New World. Cambridge, Mass. MURPHY, LAWRENCE J., and DAN L. MITCHELL. 1998. ‘When Writing Helps to Heal: E-Mail as Therapy’, British Journal of Guidance and Counselling, 2.6: 21-32.

NEWMAN, CAROLYN. 2008. ‘Confessions of a Mommy Blogger’, Wonder Time (Feb.): 92-9.

BLOGGING AMONG ORTHODOX JEWISH WOMEN NUSSBAUM COHEN, DEBORAH. 2004. “The New Diarists’, New York Jewish Week (9 July). , accessed 10 Dec. 2006. O BAOILL, ANDREW. 2005. ‘Weblogs and the Public Sphere’. In Laura J. Gurak, Smiljana Antonijevic, Laurie Johnson, Clancy Ratliff, and Jessica Reyman, eds., Into the Blogo-sphere: Rhetoric, Community and Culture of Weblogs. , accessed 15 Mar. 2008. O'REILLY, TIM. 2005. ‘What Is Web 2.0? Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software’ (30 Sept.). page=3>, accessed 25 Jan. 2008. OUDSHOORN, NELLY, and TREVOR J. PINCH. 2003. How Users Matter: The CoConstruction of Users and Technologies. Cambridge, Mass.

PENNEBAKER, JAMES. W. 1997. ‘Writing about Emotional Experiences as a Therapeutic Process’, Psychological Science, 8: 162-6. PERLOW, YAAKOV. 2003. ‘Recognizing and Dealing with Some Major Moral Hazards in Contemporary Society’, Jewish Observer, 36 (Nov.): 8-9. POLL, SOLOMON. 20060. The Hasidic Community of Williamsburg. New York.

PORTNOY, EDWARD. 2004. ‘Haredim and the Internet’. , accessed to Dec. 2000. RETTBURG, JILL. W. 2007. ‘Michael Keren: Bloggers are Melancholic, Politically Passive and Can’t Connect with Society’ (io May). p=2130>, accessed Io Dec. 2007. RODZVILLA, JOHN. 2002. We've Got Blog: How Weblogs Are Changing our Culture. Cambridge, Mass.

ROLLER, ALYSE. F. 1999. The Literary Imagination of Ultra-Orthodox Jewish Women: An Assessment of a Writing Community. Jefferson, NC. ROSS, TAMAR. 2004. Expanding the Palace of Torah: Orthodoxy and Feminism. Hanover, NH. ROTEM, YEHUDIT. 1997. Distant Sisters: The Women I Left Behind. Philadelphia.

SHAVIV, MIRIAM. 2004. ‘Internet Wanderings: On the World of Orthodox Female Jewish Bloggers’, Jewish Quarterly, 195 (Aug./Sept.). , accessed 10 Dec. 2000. SOLOVE, DANIEL J. 2007. The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet. New Haven. WARNICK, BARBARA. 2007. Rhetoric Online: Persuasion and Politics on the World Wide Web. New York.

WESCH, MIKE. 2008. The Machine Is Us/ing Us. v= 6emP4nkOEOE>, accessed 1 Mar. 2008. WINSTON, HELLA. 2005. Unchosen: The Hidden Lives of Hasidic Rebels. Boston.

WISE, PATRICIA. 1997. ‘Always Already Virtual: Feminist Politics in Cyberspace’. In David Holmes, ed., Virtual Politics: Identity and Community in Cyberspace, 179-90. London.

ANDREA LIEBER WRIGHT, ALEX. 2007. ‘Friending, Ancient or Otherwise’, New York Times (2 Dec.). , accessed 18 Mar. 2008.

Forum: Feeling at Home

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INTRODUCTION

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TEN

Culture Mavens: Feeling at Home in America JENNA WEISSMAN JOSELIT JUST THE OTHER DAY, | unexpectedly received a gift—and a rather handsome

sift at that: an approximately 300-page, beautifully photographed catalogue of the holdings of the National Museum of American Jewish History, a once modest institution now poised on the cusp of a major transformation. Collections: Celebrating the Cultural Heritage of the Jewish People in America, explains Gwen

Goodman, the museum’s executive director, is designed to ‘remind you that many of the objects you have in your home are historically important and can help people—Jewish and non-Jewish—to understand our shared past.... You are the steward of the Museum of You.’ Its glossy pages filled with images of one object after another—a Yiddish typewriter, circa 1925, a set of canasta cards produced by a Chicago branch of Hadas-

sah, circa 1960, a painted wood set of Ten Commandments tablets that once adorned a Philadelphia synagogue in 1918, the sheet music to ‘Under the Matzos Tree: A Ghetto Love Song of t907’—there’s no discernible sequence or pattern to the catalogue’s organization, at least none that I can make out. One item simply follows another in quick succession. But then, that is the point, I suppose. Rather than impose order and harmony on the whole, Collections takes American Jewry’s material culture—the variegated, improvisational, quirky, ad hoc mess of it all— at face value. When it comes to making sense of the objects featured in its pages, of fitting them into some larger conceptual scheme, of coming up with an overarching interpretation that will tidily accommodate card games as well as Torah arks, well, itis every reader (and ultimately, every viewer) for herself. This state of affairs is not simply an artefact of Collections or a by-product of the empowering ‘Museum of You’ sensibility, which the National Museum of Ameri-

can Jewish History seems roundly to endorse. On the contrary. This state of affairs goes to the very heart of the American Jewish experience, one that seems to

relish its idiosyncrasies and crotchets, indeed its very waywardness: for every American Jew who keeps kosher, there is an equal, or perhaps even greater, number who delight in the pleasures of pork; for every American Jew, male or female, who wears a yarmulke, there are many more who do not. Meanwhile, increasing numbers of young American Jews find occasional attendance at a Jewish film festival to be far more meaningful than belonging to a synagogue or contributing to

JENNA WEISSMAN JOSELIT the United Jewish Appeal; intermarriage has become normative while haredi (ultra-Orthodox) communities and their lingua franca, Yiddish, flourish. Go figure!

Under these baffling circumstances in which indices of dissolution are equally matched by indices of vitality, what are we to make of contemporary American Jewish culture, especially considering the status of American Jewry as the largest diaspora population in the world? Does it constitute a decided rupture with the past, an entirely new calibration of matters Jewish, or is it simply an expression of tradition in a new register? And what fuels the enterprise? Domesticity? Celebration? The marketplace? Ennui? A sense of history? It’s a tough call.

For when all is said and done, chances are we have more of a handle on, say, British Jewry in Georgian England or German Jewry during the Weimar era than on modern American Jewry; we are even able to identify what makes contempor-

ary Israeli society, surely among the most polyglot of cultures, tick. Not so American Jewry. Its fluid and simultaneous embrace of consumer culture and liturgical tradition, of ‘kosher cellphones’ and gay weddings, of Chinese food and ‘heirloom talitot’ (prayer shawls) that embed a photograph of a beloved ancestor in their folds—surely this is a culture that defies easy description. Still, it is not for want of trying. In The Wonders of America: Reinventing Jewish Culture, 1550-1950, I allowed how earlier generations of American Jews shuttled

actively, and guiltlessly, between the freedom to neglect and the freedom to observe Jewish ritual practices, generating a singular Jewish culture in the process. Kashrut gave way to kosher-style, the unassuming barmitzvah became an ‘affair’, while modest little Hanukah emerged as a full-blown occasion for giftgiving and the Passover seder as an exercise in family solidarity. Riffs on tradition rather than its replacement, these modern American Jewish rituals, for all their novelty, remained well within the acceptable parameters of the fold. Earlier generations might differ—passionately and vociferously—about how to institutionalize, elaborate on, and herald the values of community, endogamy, and Jewish peoplehood but, for the most part, they held them in common. Today’s scene is another matter entirely. Much as 1am tempted to see contemporary Jewish practices as the heirs to the commodified Hanukah and the domesticated Passover of yesteryear, as variations of degree rather than of kind, there

is something about the modern American Jewish experience circa 2009 that strikes me as downright revolutionary rather than evolutionary. But I cannot quite put my finger on it. Is it the way contemporary American Jews delight in the erasure of boundaries rather than their maintenance? In the display of a knowing and ironic sensi-

bility? In questioning, even subverting, the once regnant verities? In replacing consensus with fragmentation? Whatever the explanation, Jewish life today ain’t your grandpa’s Judaism—not by a long shot. A case in point: an exhibition at New York’s Jewish Museum of recent Judaica

FEELING AT HOME IN AMERICA acquisitions. A far cry from the array of kiddush cups, illuminated ketubot, and hanuktyot one typically encounters at most Jewish museums, the objects on view in the spring of 2007 included a carefully arranged display of 613 yahrzeit candles as well as a series of brightly coloured plastic casts of the one-armed Venus. Placing more of a premium on form than on function, on weighty, postmodern ideas about repetition and the body rather than on time-honoured notions of God

or tradition, these latter-day manifestations of Jewish ritual behaviour were intended to catalyse thought, not to inspire practice or engender familiarity. Years ago, an organized trip to the Jewish Museum by sisterhood and school groups— itself a form of ritual behaviour—was no mere visual experience or challenging intellectual exercise. With its overt appeals to history, emotion, and memory, Jewish museum-going was designed to inspire visitors to affirm, not just think about, their Jewishness, to leave the museum vowing to go out and purchase a kiddush cup or a hanuktyah all their own, preferably those stocked by their local sisterhood sift shop. Given what is on view these days, I cannot imagine too many American Jews making room at home for these newfangled avatars of Jewish ritual expression, even if they bear the imprimatur of the Jewish Museum. Books are another matter, especially when it comes to celebrating rather than frowning on or turning a blind eye to the variegated nature of the American Jewish experience. A number of recent titles do just that. Rejecting the conventional pieties and established protocols, they provoke, challenge, and call into question how American Jews have historically chosen to assert and fashion their identity. Take, for instance, You Should See Yourself: Jewish Identity in Postmodern America, a

collection of essays edited by Vincent Brook, a professor of film, television, and cultural studies at the University of Southern California and UCLA. Throwing away tradition and taking up the cudgels of postmodernism, Brook makes clear the book’s agenda right from the get-go: “To adopt a religion-informed stance... as a template for an exploration of postmodern American Jewish culture...is a non-starter. Postmodernism, if it means anything, means forgoing reductive categories, master narratives, and absolute truths, most certainly religious ones’ (p. 6). Accordingly, Brook and the stable of authors who figure in this volume much prefer to situate Jewish culture in terms of its relationship to film and television, dance and theatre. Away with the Torah and the Talmud, with traditional Jewish rituals and sensibilities, and in with ‘metaphorical Jews’ (p. 81), ‘Shlammer: A Gangster Vaudeville’ (pp. 143-6), and the ‘female sexual schlemiel’ (p. 226). Marcie Ferris and Mark I. Greenberg, the editors of Jewish Roots in Southern Soil: A New History, seem to be of a similar cast of mind. Although their mandate

has absolutely nothing to do with touting the virtues of postmodernism and everything to do with touting the virtues of geography and the singular culture that is Southern Jewry, the essays that take pride of place in this volume, like those in Brook’s collection, end up saluting the more quirky aspects of modern Jewish

life. Here, we meet up with rabbis who embrace the ‘circuit’ rather than the

JENNA WEISSMAN JOSELIT permanent pulpit, housewives who feel equally comfortable preparing ‘mother’s matza cake’ (p. 229) and ‘opossum with sweet potatoes’ (p. 230) and a Charleston family who, constrained by space and etiquette, constructed a miniaturized, dollhouse-like sukkah, replete with pine needles and Christmas lights, transforming the scale, context, and meaning of this millennial ritual along the way. Ultimately, Jewish Roots in Southern Soil is as much a paean to the imagination and creativity of American Jewry at the grass roots as it is a rousing salute to the South. By far the most unabashed, forthright embrace of American Jewry’s penchant for improvisation belongs to Vanessa Ochs, an anthropologist at the University of Virginia and a self-styled ‘ritual innovator’, whose guidebook Inventing Jewish Ritual is in many ways a lineal descendant of the storied Jewish Catalog of the 1970s (Siegel, Strassfeld, and Strassfeld 1973; Strassfeld and Strassfeld 1976, 1980). Picking up where that ‘do-it-yourself kit’ left off, Ochs’s account not only bears witness to and chronicles the variety of ways by which twenty-first-century Judaism is ‘being stretched by new practices’ (p. 118) but also champions them. This is no dispassionate, academic text but a sustained exercise in advocacy not unlike a lawyer’s brief. Whether sacralizing the menopause, memorializing the Holocaust, celebrating the union of gay couples, praying for the speedy and complete recovery of an ill friend, or placing a mezuzah in one’s car, the ‘new Jewish rituals cropping up around me were hardly affronts to God’, she cheers. “They were not dangerous Golden Calf-like practices heralding the demise of Judaism. They were blessings’ (p. 34). Likening these innovations to expressions of ‘minhag America,’ the name that Isaac Mayer Wise, arguably the pre-eminent architect of Reform Judaism in the United States, gave more than a century earlier to his resolutely modern siddur (prayer book), Ochs at once historicizes and legitimates them. ‘All these new American Jewish practices’, she explains, ‘are the handiwork of a generation that has not allowed anxiety about innovation to hamper ritual creativity. With verve, this generation has reshaped familiar practices and designed new ones’ (p. 34). These new practices are also ‘highly user-friendly’, in Ochs’s words (p. 50). Privileging novelty and accessibility in equal measure—apparently, with the right intentions, a lack of Hebrew or Yiddish or, for that matter, scant knowledge of Jewish history or a flimsy notion of God, need not get in the way of spiritual fulfil-

ment—Ochs also makes a point of abolishing age-old distinctions between ‘explicitly’ and ‘implicitly’ Jewish objects, between, say, a seder plate and a tambourine. ‘We need a nonhierarchical system that does not identify Jews or Jewish objects as being more or less legitimate or authentic’, she writes, offering in its stead an ‘alternative system of classification’ (p. 101) in which, under the right circumstances, even telephones and vacuum cleaners, the most quotidian of household goods, can be transformed into sacred ritual objects: The telephone is a telephone, but for the Jew who has a sick friend living far away, the phone is a holy vessel used in the practice of bikur holim, the commandment to connect

FEELING AT HOME IN AMERICA to the sick. All the equipment one uses in housecleaning—cleansing powder, mop, cleansing solutions, and a vacuum cleaner—is just cleaning equipment. But in the Jewish home where Shabbat is observed by cleaning one’s home beforehand, we have in the cleaning equipment holy vessels that create and point to Shabbat, tangibly, experientially, and sensually. (p. 107)

When phones and vacuum cleaners can be sanctified and individual autonomy enthroned as the ultimate arbiter, what lies in store for American Jews? We already have the ‘Museum of You’. Can the ‘Shul of One’ be too far behind? Where Inventing Jewish Ritual situates us squarely in the twenty-first century, A Living Lens: Photographs of Jewish Life from the Pages of the Forward thrusts us back in time to the days when its rotogravure section was eagerly awaited every Sunday by thousands upon thousands of avid Yiddish readers. A global resource, the Forward’s photographs—an estimated 40,000 of them—took the measure of Jewish life in the Old World and the New. Bathing beauties, striking workers, and ‘Interesting Jewish Types from Africa and Palestine’, scenes of toothbrush drills

and exercise classes, street demonstrations and movie stills, animated the Sunday supplement, underscoring the impact of modernity on Jewish life and, with it, photography’s powerful role in giving modernity a face. But as the Forward’s circulation dwindled, its once vibrant collection of images and the plates used to produce them faded from view, languishing, jumbled together in heavy metal cabinets in the newspaper’s basement. Until now. Rediscovered and catalogued by a new generation of journalists, writers, and archivists, some 500 images enliven the pages of A Living Lens. ‘Younger people who came upon the collection for the first time recognized its unmatched value as a detailed record of an entire century’, explains the volume’s editor, Alana Newhouse, the former arts and culture editor of the English-language Forward (p. 14), as she set about giving these images a second lease on life.

Organized chronologically, the photographs arrayed in this volume move from the turbulent early years of immigration to the seemingly triumphalist 1950s and beyond. Housewives in babushkas and plaid shawls, bearded men in derbies, Russian cinema stars in sharply etched bobs, sweet-faced child cantors, workers at the Gracette Dress Company, movie moguls, boxers, displaced persons, Zionist statesmen, halutsim in shorts—the full panoply of Jewish life, of its Sweeping aspirations and crushing disappointments, marches before us. It is enough to make you weep. But we don’t. Instead, we leaf casually, even knowingly, through the text, chuckling at this and that and occasionally, only occasionally, emitting a small sigh. It is an index of how far American Jewry has come from the people depicted in the Forward that our response to these images is so measured and remote. That is because what we see is not us; it is our ancestors. Given the passage of time and the comfort of cultural distance, we can afford to be gallant, perhaps even a tad cavalier, towards the past. With the exception of the hasidic and haredi communities whose manner of dress sharply distinguishes

JENNA WEISSMAN JOSELIT them from everyone else, American Jews no longer stand out as they once did, calling into question the promise of assimilability. These days, we are Americans, after all. Our language is English; we call the suburbs rather than the inner city home; we wear Chanel rather than shmattes; our children attend the finest universities in the land; and we have deep pockets. We’ve forgotten that Rabbi Kaufmann Kohler, the president of Hebrew Union College (and many others like him), had grave doubts about whether immigrant Jews and their descendants could ever possibly be at home in the United States unless they thoroughly reconstituted and modernized themselves. ‘There is no room for Ghetto Judaism in America’, he categorically declared in 1916. In the New World, there is no room for the ‘medieval garb’ of Judaism, ‘its alien form, its seclusiveness ... No, American Judaism must step forth, the equal of any church in broadness of view and largeness of scope... not as a mere memory of the past and a piece of Orientalism in the midst of vigorous, forward-pressing Occidental civilization’ (Kohler 1916: 200). Kohler’s concern, born of cultural anxiety, is, happily, no more. But a new one

has taken its place. These days perhaps the more pertinent issue is not whether American Jews are at home in America. It is whether American Jews, with their invented rituals, valedictory salutes to the sitcom, unusual appetites, and photo morgues, are at home with Jewish culture. Whatever that may be.

References BROOK, VINCENT, ed. 2006. You Should See Yourself: Jewish Identity in Postmodern American Culture. New Brunswick, NJ.

FERRIS, MARCIE COHEN, and MARK I. GREENBERG, eds. 2006. Jewish Roots in Southern Soul: A New History. Waltham, Mass.

JOSELIT, JENNA WEISSMAN. 1994. The Wonders of America: Reinventing Jewish Culture, 1850-1950. New York. KOHLER, KAUFMANN. IQ10. Hebrew Union College and Other Addresses. Cincinnati.

National Museum of American Jewish History. 2007. Collections: Celebrating the Cultural Heritage of the Jewish People in America. Philadelphia. NEWHOUSE, ALANA, ed. 2007. A Living Lens: Photographs of Jewish Life from the Pages of the Forward. New York.

OCHS, VANESSA L. 2007. Inventing Jewish Ritual. Philadelphia. SIEGEL, RICHARD, SHARON STRASSFELD, and MICHAEL STRASSFELD, eds. 1973. The First Jewish Catalog: A Do-It-Yourself Kit. Philadelphia.

STRASSFELD, SHARON, and MICHAEL STRASSFELD, eds. 1976. The Second Jewish Catalog: Sources and Resources. Philadelphia. —— — eds. 1980. The Third Jewish Catalog: Creating Community. Philadelphia.

FEELING AT HOME IN AMERICA

RESPONSES

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ELEVEN

At Home in the World DAVID KRAEMER

I HAVE CONSIDERED Jenna Weissman Joselit to be my teacher for a long time.

In her writings and lectures she unfailingly contributes a perspective or an insight that is original or uniquely discerning. When she speaks, we must listen seriously, for chances are we will learn from her something we would not have learned on our own.

So when she shares her alarm about the current Jewish condition in the United States, we must ask whether we, too, should feel alarmed. As she observes the present condition, noticing both the vibrancy and drift upon which many contemporary observers have commented, she gives voice to the question that nags at us all: ‘Does it constitute a decided rupture with the past, an entirely new calibration of matters Jewish, or is it simply an expression of tradition in a new register?’ Though her formulation may be neutral, she is not neutral with respect to the answer. According to her observations, contemporary American Jews ‘relish [their] idiosyncrasies and crotchets’; they ‘delight in the erasure of boundaries rather than their maintenance’; they ‘display. ..a knowing and ironic sensibility’; they ‘question ... [and] even subvert... once regnant verities’; they ‘replac[e] con-

sensus with fragmentation’. Summing up her evaluation of this condition, she declares: ‘there is something about the modern American Jewish experience, circa 2007, that strikes me as downright revolutionary rather than evolutionary’. Clearly, in her opinion, this is nota good thing, not ‘good for the Jews’.

I, for one, would certainly not dismiss the question. Nor am I sure that her alarm is unfounded. But it strikes me that her (tentative?) conclusion is a hasty one, based, perhaps, upon too short-term a view of Jewish history. For most of the examples she calls upon to illustrate or bolster her alarm, I can think of analogous

historical examples that work to strengthen Judaism and the community of adherents. In her critique of Vanessa Ochs, in particular, I think she arrives at her conclusion too quickly. Do we live in a period of flux and uncertainty? Undoubtedly we do. Is what we witness entirely different from what came before? The answer is not so clear.

I will begin with Joselit’s initial expression of protest against what she describes (correctly) as Ochs’s ‘advocacy’ of new ritual practices. Citing Inventing New Jewish Ritual, she writes, ‘Whether sacralizing the menopause, memorializ-

ing the Holocaust, celebrating the union of gay couples, praying for the speedy and complete recovery of an ill friend or placing a mezuzah in one’s car, the “new

DAVID KRAEMER Jewish rituals ... were hardly affronts to God... They were not dangerous Golden Calf-like practices heralding the demise of Judaism. They were blessings.”’ Now, this is an interesting and, in many ways, revealing list. To begin with, I know of no one today who would describe ‘praying for the speedy and complete recovery of an ill friend’—a practice the Hebrew name of which (mi sheberakh) many contemporary Jews know thanks to Debbie Friedman’s song—as an innovative practice (though, to be sure, like all practices, it once was). On the contrary, it is its very traditionality that draws many contemporary Jews to the synagogue to participate in this ritual when a loved one is ill. So why include this example in a list of proposed new rituals? Is this a mere ‘slip’? Slip or not, it is significant and appropriate, I think, that Joselit’s list includes the traditional and the not (yet?) traditional. This combination reminds us of the fact that all practices were once innovative. There was a period when the recitation of blessings was a newfangled practice, a period when many Jews would have resisted their recitation as a strange and even bizarre innovation. Yet, for later generations, the recitation of hamotsi is about the most traditional thing a Jew can do. The question in my mind is when, if ever, practices undergo the transition from newfangled to traditional. To understand what I am suggesting, consider Joselit’s other examples. It is

quite true that there is no known traditional Jewish practice marking the menopause. But there might have been (I mean this in the broad theoretical sense, notas a historical speculation). Many young women (and men) with inclinations similar to Ochs are today writing rituals to mark stages of pregnancy and childbirth. Yet they do so in probable ignorance of the fact that the Talmud pre-

scribes blessings or prayers to be recited at three stages of pregnancy (see BT Berakhot 6oa). If for pregnancy, why not for the menopause? What is the difference between the two? Well, in the world of the rabbis, the difference was that many women lived to experience pregnancy, while far fewer lived to experience the menopause. So perhaps the only meaningful difference is that one was common and the other not. Had women survived in significant numbers into their fifties in the ancient world, would the rabbis not have found ways to mark these transitions? I do not see why not. Or take the last example in her present list: placing a mezuzah in one’s car.

Here, again, I would ask, is it unimaginable, or perhaps predictable, that the rabbis would have required a mezuzah on cars—as on other dwellings—given the amount of time people spend in their cars? The mezuzah, for the rabbis, marks the minimally dignified dwelling (it requires a certain size, and so on: see BT Menahot 33b-34a); why not do the same with a car? And if the purpose of the mezuzah is to remind us of God’s words, should we not be reminded of those words in the place where many of us spend a good chunk of our time? This is, after all, the contemporary means by which we ‘walk by the way’ (Deuteronomy 6:7). Before there were forks and flat-plates, forks and flat-plates were not subject

AT HOME IN THE WORLD to the laws of kashrut and separated into ‘meat’ and ‘dairy’; when forks and flatplates came into common usage, they were (Kraemer 2007: 113-15). Why should the same sort of ‘natural’ extension not apply to the mezuzah and the car? Or take another part of Joselit’s critique. With some dismissiveness, she cites Ochs’s statement that ‘the telephone is a telephone, but for the Jew who has a sick friend living far away, the phone is a holy vessel used in the practice of bikur holim, the commandment to connect to the sick’. Her concern seems to be that a common object, a non-traditional, non-ritual object, is being deployed for ritual purposes and extended the honour of being a ‘ritual object’. But elsewhere, Joselit uses the hanukiyah and kiddush cup as emblematic of the category ‘traditional ritual object’ despite the fact that both are, at their origins, analogous to phones used to perform a mitzvah. The Hanukah lamp exemplifies this well. The hanukiyah is a latter-day invention (Braunstein 2007). In talmudic literature (and beyond), the lamps used for Hanukah are assumed to be common oil

lamps. What makes them ritual objects is not what they are but how they are used—when and where they are lit, with what intention, accompanied by the recitation of what words, and so on. An oil lamp lit on one of the evenings of Hanukah, after sunset but before passers-by have disappeared from the marketplace, on the left side of the door to one’s courtyard, with the recitation of the designated blessing, is a Hanukah lamp. If any of these factors is missing, then it probably isn’t one (see BT Shabat 21b—234a).

What this teaches us, of course, is that use might well transform the status of an item. And Jews (as other people) who repeatedly use something for purposes of performing a religious obligation tend to imbue it with a special status; we merely need recall the much later and once innovative ritual object, the wimple— a swaddling cloth which, because it was used for a bris and then for other life-cycle events, acquired a kind of sacred status—to appreciate the power of this dynamic. Ifa swaddling cloth and a common oil lamp can become traditional Jewish ritual objects, why nota phone? Joselit goes on to object to the fact that ‘Ochs also makes a point of abolishing age-old distinctions between “explicitly” and “implicitly” Jewish objects, between,

say, a seder plate and a tambourine.’ But, again, her chosen example does as much to challenge her objection as it does to support it. The seder plate is another example of what is, from the perspective of the Talmud, a latter-day innovation. The Talmud knows nothing of a seder plate. The foods placed on our seder plate

were, in the time of the Mishnah and the Gemara, served on small, personal tables to participants reclining around the triclinium (Mishnah Pesahim to: 3). When seder participants stopped reclining around the edges of a room and moved to sit around a central dining table, the personal table, with its by now highly symbolic foods, morphed into what we know as the seder plate. Like many other Jewish objects, when it began to be used, the seder plate was ‘newfangled’,

implicitly Jewish at best. Once again we are reminded of the fact that today’s newfangled is potentially tomorrow’s traditional.

DAVID KRAEMER But this still leaves us with a nagging question, for the fact is that all of these examples did undergo the transition just described—they became traditional. For this to happen, the practice of using a seder plate or a hanukiyah or a wimple had to cease being the practice of a ‘Shul of One’ and become the accepted practice of the synagogue—of the community of the many. But how do we know which of our new practices will undergo a similar transformation? The answer, of course, is that we do not and we cannot. Some of these practices will never be accepted by communities of adherents. But is this a problem? Should this mean that we insist upon the traditional and never celebrate the new and potentially traditional? The lesson of Jewish history, and particularly (it seems to me) of the rabbinic age, is that we should not inhibit ourselves because of the fear of ultimate failure, because stasis itself could lead to stagnation and even death. It is today recognized by most historians of the period that the rabbis (with their many new practices) were originally a very small group. This means that, early on, their practices (such as reciting specific prayers two or three times each day, separating meat and dairy, and so on) were the practices of the ‘Shul of a Few’. It took centuries— probably many centuries—for their practices to become ‘traditional’. Yet had they not become traditional it is difficult to know whether we would be here as Jews to discuss them. It is arguably the rabbis’ combining of the inherited with the boldly innovative (even if they sometimes ‘hid’ their innovations by claiming antiquity for them) that enabled Jews living in an age of challenge and frequent discomfort to survive as Jews into the coming era. In many respects, our age is not dissimilar from theirs. Should we ignore their model? Joselit also considers it worrisome that ‘American Jews no longer stand out as they once did’. That they do not stand out is undeniably for the most part true.

Having made themselves at home in America, most comport themselves as Americans in every sense of the word. But is this a new or unprecedented condi-

tion, as she seems to imply, or have we been here before? And whatever the answer to this question, is this reality in any case the cause for concern? There have been other times in Jewish history—perhaps many—when a Jew

would not have been visually distinguishable as a Jew, at least not easily so. Reviewing the evidence of Jewish visual distinctiveness (or lack thereof) in the early centuries of the common era, Shaye J]. D. Cohen sums up his judgement in these words: ‘Jews were not distinctive either by their looks or by their clothing. Jews of Antioch looked Antiochene, Jews of Alexandria looked Alexandrian . . . and the Jews of Rome looked like just another exotic group from the East’ (Cohen 1999: 34). This lack of visual distinctiveness is obviously a function of the fact that Jews in these places were largely accepted by surrounding populations and hence made themselves thoroughly at home. Like Philo (for example), they could be Jewish and fully Alexandrian at the same time. Now, one might argue that the relative comfort of Jews in their various homes in the centuries analysed by Cohen was somehow related (cause and effect? coin-

AT HOME IN THE WORLD cidence?) to the fact that, as Seth Schwartz has observed, most Jews in the Roman east were, in the second to the early fourth centuries (at least) essentially common Roman pagans (Schwartz 2001: 129-61). Perhaps, in other words, we should not take much comfort from the recognition that ‘we have been here before’. But the fact remains that Jews and their faith survived this period robustly, despite their

appearance not being distinctive and despite their full participation in the broader Roman imperial culture. If this was so then, why not again now?

None of this is to argue that there is no reason for concern in the contemporary American Jewish condition. Just because the multiple factors Joselit observes need not be the occasion for alarm does not mean that they cannot be. It is possible, for example, that the modern condition makes such innovation or radical acculturation more dangerous to Jewish long-term survival. When Jews lived largely among themselves, in what amounted to a home within a home, new practices could be assimilated as ‘Jewish’ with little discomfort, for actual community boundaries were powerful enough. But when Jews and others live in the same home, the Christmas tree might never become a Jewish symbol. It might remain a Christmas tree with all the religious symbolism that would entail. This fear, surely, should not be casually dismissed. But, again, the picture is not so simple. There were times in the past when Jews lived in ghettos (primarily in the period we call early modernity), but at other times they lived in Jewish neighbourhoods that were extremely porous—much as are Jewish neighbourhoods in the United States and Canada today. And the most

common condition of Jewish domicile throughout the Middle Ages involved small numbers of Jews living among larger numbers of non-Jews. In such settings, Jews often had no choice but to use the communal ovens of the surrounding community to bake their bread (Kraemer 2007: 132-3). Such communities were their homes, and their Judaism grew and changed in these settings just as it did elsewhere, often to the long-term benefit of Jewish practice and tradition. More than anything else, it is important to emphasize that, as we have seen, each of the examples Joselit deploys to buttress her argument for concern can just as easily be used to undermine it. Innovation may become tradition, and that tradition may become a central symbol of the Jewishness of future generations. Even the nature of the late modern condition in the United States may not argue for greater reserve. We could just as easily speculate that the situation in which Jews today find themselves calls for greater innovation, greater risk-taking, and more variety, for who knows which Jewish practice will take pride of place in the future? If survival is supported by competitive variety in the natural world, is the same notalso true in the cultural world (Taylor 1996: 53, 56-9)? The cases of a ‘once-upon-a-time innovative Jewish ritual Museum’ would

include objects such as a hanukiyah, a kiddush cup, a seder plate, a hupah, a mezuzah case, a Star of David, a yarmulke, arba kanfot, and so forth. Ochs and others help us understand that future curators of at least the American wing of

DAVID KRAEMER this museum might also add a tambourine, a ‘Miriam’s cup’, a seder plate with a space for an orange, and a telephone. Or they might not.

References BRAUNSTEIN, SUSAN. 2007. ‘Hanukkah Lamp’. In Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik, eds., Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd edn., viii. 333-5. Detroit. COHEN, SHAYE J. D.1999. The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties. Berkeley, Calif. KRAEMER, DAVID. 2007. Jewish Eating and Identity through the Ages. New York.

SCHWARTZ, SETH. 2001. Imperialism and Jewish Society, 200 B.C.E. to 640 C.E. Princeton, NJ.

TAYLOR, GARY. 1996. Cultural Selection: Why Some Achievements Survive the Test of Time—and Others Don’t. New York.

TWELVE

The Co-Construction of Europe as a Jewish Home JOACHIM SCHLOR

WHEN SIMON J. BRONNER asked me to contribute to this forum, | told him I was hesitant because I myself am not Jewish. Of course I know that, as he wrote to me, ‘it wouldn’t be a very objective field if we had only Jews talking about Jewishness’, and I do like what somebody once said: ‘in order to study or teach mathematics, you don’t have to be a triangle’. It just so happens that in the last ten or fifteen years—all over Europe, but especially in Germany—the non-triangles have been doing a lot of mathematics, and this phenomenon is worth considering under the rubric of ‘feeling at home’. In order to find some firm ground for my hesitating feet, I will base my discussion on the ideas and notions of Henri Lefébvre, Diana Pinto, Ruth Ellen Gruber, David Biale, and some others, whose texts I recently discussed with a group of students at the first Leo Baeck Summer University in Berlin. The main focus of my module at the Summer University was the notion of ‘Jewish space’ as a co-constructed field of cultural and political activity: can we call Berlin a ‘Jewish space’ (again), and what would that mean? What is ‘Jewish’ about, say, the Jewish Museum, the guided tour through a former east European Jewish quarter in the city, or a Max Liebermann exhibition in one of the many new bank buildings? We have learned from Henri Lefebvre, in his The Production of Space (1991), ‘that space is a social product’, that is, a complex social construct (based on values, and the social production of meanings) which affects spatial practices and perceptions, and that ‘the space thus produced also serves as a tool of thought and action; that in addition to being a means of production it is also a means of control, and hence of domination, of power’ (p. 26). This is true for all kinds of differ-

ent spaces. Still, when Diana Pinto took up this notion in the 1990s and presented us with her idea of Europe as a ‘third pillar’ of Jewish existence, next to

Israel and the United States, and with her notion of Europe as a new ‘Jewish space’, the question of domination and power was not the most urgent one (Pinto 2001). Instead, there was a general feeling that the fall of the Berlin Wall and the breakdown of communism, with the peaceful manner in which these events had taken place, the possibility of a peace accord in the Middle East, and the begin-

ning of a substantial immigration of Jews from the former Soviet Union into

JOACHIM SCHLOR Europe and especially Germany heralded a new era for Europe. More locally, sentiment was expressed that in the newly reunified city of Berlin Jewish life and culture would be an integral part of this new era. Not only would there be a heightened awareness of the Jewish contribution to European culture, but also a com-

mon endeavour to foster democracy and freedom in the post-communist countries of central and eastern Europe. True, Diana Pinto’s optimism before the new millennium was shattered by growing antisemitism—in western Europe even more than in the eastern parts—and by the second intifada, but still many

positive aspects remained: new Jewish communities were founded all over Europe; established communities were revitalized by immigration; Jewish schools and kindergartens arose; a number of universities across the continent created programmes for Jewish studies; and books on Jewish history and culture were being published in droves. The field of ‘culture’, in the broadest sense, was especially affected by this new development. Klezmer festivals were (and still are) being held; special celebratory ‘days (and weeks) of Jewish culture’ were (and still are) organized; new museums

were getting off the ground; and former synagogues were being turned into centres of culture, encounter, and information. Given the actual situation of many Jewish communities, it is perhaps no surprise that, among the leaders of many of these events and among the authors of many of the new books and the lecturers in many of the academic programmes, there was a substantial number of non-Jews. Ruth Ellen Gruber picked up Diana Pinto’s notion of the distinctive ‘Jewish space’, and published her book Virtually Jewish in 2002. Her journalistic work had her travelling all over Europe, writing about klezmer festivals and other such occasions, and following and even guiding groups of American Jews, and also Israelis and many others, on tours to (remnants of) ‘Jewish Europe’, from Prague

to Krakow, from Czernowitz to Odessa, from Wilna to Berlin, but also from Granada to Lisbon and from Venice to Rome. She stated that an important part of this new—or ‘virtual-—Jewish space in Europe was dominated by non-Jews. In her view, this can be seen as something positive. Obviously, there are some traces

of an artificial construction, which raises the huge (moral as well as financial) question of appropriation, and I will address that later; but on the other hand these festivals brought back Jewish culture—in a different form—to cities and regions where it had been nearly completely destroyed in the Holocaust. It confronted the non-Jewish inhabitants of Germany, Slovakia, Poland, or the Ukraine with the history of a Jewish presence in their countries and with the necessity of a continuous coming to terms with the past. Moreover, as we can learn from David Biale in his article ‘Confessions of a Historian of Jewish Culture’ (1994), this kind of ‘co-construction’ of cultures and identities is nothing new. ‘Dynamic interactions’, as he calls cultural exchanges

between Jews and non-Jews, can be found in every period of history from the

EUROPE AS A JEWISH HOME biblical texts through medieval philosophy to Zionism. Additionally, in this forum David Kraemer gives convincing examples of the way in which many aspects of what we call Jewish ‘culture’ have been heavily influenced by non-Jewish surroundings, from forms of settlement or traditions of clothing and food to, for example, the German Jewish Wissenschaft des Judentums (literally the ‘science of Judaism’, and philosophically the nineteenth-century movement premised on the critical investigation of Jewish culture using scientific methods to analyse the origins of Jewish traditions). So, is everything now fine? Iam not so sure. In July and August 2007 Berlin’s Humboldt University was the venue for the

first Leo Baeck Summer University. Jeffrey Peck of Georgetown University, author of a new and rather optimistic book, Being Jewish in the New Germany (2007), organized the event and managed to find support from universities in Israel, Canada, the United States, and Germany. Berlin has become an attractive place for academic research as well as for artists, students, and cultural bohemians. The city is lively, dynamic, on the move, forever changing. As I write, the city’s Jewish community has an official membership of 102,000 (compared to the pre-1989 figure of 12,000)—what better place could there be for a discussion of post-war and contemporary issues of Jewish life? But when we take a closer look things become more complicated, and I think

this is where Henri Lefébvre’s notion of domination and power comes in. The city has its own agenda where ‘things Jewish’ are concerned, and so has the federal government, and many other actors in the field. When the building of the Jewish Museum was discussed, one politician in Berlin wanted it to ‘contribute to the healing of Berlin’s wounded urban space’. This is the kind of wishful thinking we encounter quite often.’ The ‘return’ of Jewish life and culture, after the destruction, was meant to ‘mend’ or ‘heal’ something—Germany’s cultural her-

itage? The cityscape? The horrors of the past? In any case, Jewish culture and heritage can be used for non-Jewish purposes. In the museum itself, the permanent exhibition displays the story of ‘2,000 years of German—Jewish History —although there was hardly anything called Germany 2,000 years ago—but the Libeskind building is full of references to the Holocaust. The general presence or absence of the Holocaust, symbolized in the centrality of Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, is conspicuous in Berlin. This monumentis also

meant to be a place where state dignitaries can bow their heads and lay down wreaths, and at the same time, in former chancellor Schréder’s words, it should be a place ‘where people like to go’. There is also a huge number of smaller, local memorials, including the little ‘stumble-stones’ on the streets, in front of houses which bear the names of their former Jewish inhabitants and the date of their deportation. Many different narratives, some built in stone, others published in novels or poems or presented in movies and exhibitions, relate messages about destruction and loss; they convey the idea that ‘a new beginning’ and ‘a return of Jewish life’ are problematic.

JOACHIM SCHLOR At least this was the impression most of the students at the Leo Baeck Summer University had. One of the few non-Jewish students in the programme put it like this: Already in the first days of this incredibly enriching, but also personally extremely chal-

lenging, programme I realized that there are very rational reasons why Jewish life is hardly visible in Berlin. Wearing a kipah in Berlin, this self-proclaimed new capital of postmodern cosmopolitanism, where everybody seems to be able to live his or her own way of life against only one hegemonic perception of it, is not the same as in Israel or the United States. The kipah is a traditional symbol of being Jewish that again brings the past into the present and is therefore seen as better hidden. Discovering that itis still not possible to ‘really’ be Jewish in the sense of openly practising religious Jewishness in Germany was one of the rather sad experiences for me during the LBSU.

So, while it is very easy for a non-Jewish artist to play klezmer and sing Yiddish

songs—thereby appropriating Jewish culture, which is not unprecedented in musical history—it is not that easy for a Jew to walk through Berlin wearing a kipah. Even if this observation is not based on statistical evidence, the feeling of unease and unrest is widely acknowledged. For some, the ‘unrest’ can be turned

into something positive, when we take, for example, Meshulash, a group of mostly young artists who celebrate their Jewishness in and of the diaspora using the rhetoric of being ‘at home in homelessness’. For others, though, the former community chairman Heinz Galinski’s closeddoor policy of the Einheitsgemeinde (literally the ‘united community’)—discussing social problems privately within the Jewish community, and not letting ‘them’, the Germans, know about it—still seems a better way to deal with their Jewishness. Add to that the high and rising visibility of Muslim religious practice, from headscarves to mosque buildings, on the streets of Berlin, and a general hostility towards Israel among the Arab population of the city, and itis not so hard to understand why Jewish life retreats into, or rather stays within, private homes. The feeling of unease can be found especially among those members of the Jewish community who feel that their ‘normal’, everyday problems—schooling, finding kosher food, finding venues for weddings and other celebrations—somehow fall between the two blades of the shears, security restrictions and fear of anti-

semitism on the one hand, and non-Jewish appropriation and celebration of ‘things Jewish’ outside the community on the other.

There is another aspect that we have to consider in order to understand the situation in Germany. In terms of cultural heritage, especially language, many of the immigrants who went to Germany after 1990, mainly from the former Soviet Union, are culturally more ‘Russian’ than ‘Jewish’. When we ask what it means ‘to be Jewish in the new Germany’ we have to integrate this ‘Russian’ factor: both the wider German society and the Jewish community are challenged as they try to absorb this new group. Existing tensions between the ‘established’ German Jew-

ish community and Jews from the former Soviet Union could even lead to

EUROPE AS A JEWISH HOME division and an end to Einheitsgemeinde. To an outsider this might even look like a

healthy sign of diversity, but many people still fear the vulnerability that public debate about internal affairs may entail. In the end, I think, we have to ask the old questions. How can we describe the field of Jewish—non-Jewish interaction? Who are the actors? What is their agenda? Is there really a voluntary co-construction of the ‘Jewish space’? Is this interaction ‘dynamic’? What is the cultural meaning of all these festivals and museums and memorial trips, for both Jews and non-Jews in Germany? It does make sense to talk about constructions and projections and the fragmented existence of all of us—but people also want to live a life. This is

wonderfully illustrated in German-born Yehuda Amichai’s poem about Jerusalem: Everyday Life

Once I sat on the steps by a gate at David’s Tower I placed my two heavy baskets at my side. A group of tourists was standing around their guide and I became their target marker. “You see that man with the baskets? Just right of his head there’s an arch from the Roman period. Just right of his head.’ ‘But he’s moving, he’s moving!’

I said to myself: redemption will come only if their guide tells them, ‘You see that arch from the Roman period? It’s not important, but next to it, left and down a bit, there sits aman who’s bought fruit and vegetables for his family.’

In Berlin it is not the ‘arch from the Roman period’ but maybe the Holocaust Memorial on the one hand and the figure of the klezmer musician on the other, two symbols and images of what the outside world expects of Jews, how they should be, what they should look like, what role they should fulfil—making it hard for a person just to buy fruit and vegetables for his family.

Notes 1 Omer Bartov tells the story of how he once wondered aloud why Berlin was so provincial compared to London or Paris. His German friend answered curtly that the city had lost its cosmopolitan atmosphere ‘seit die Juden weg sind’, since the Jews went. In order to become cosmopolitan again, therefore, a Jewish presence has to be—imagined? Invented? See Bartov 1997: 210.

References AMICHAI, YEHUDA. 1997. The Great Tranquility: Questions and Answers, trans. Glenda Abramson and Tudor Parfitt. Lebanon, NH.

JOACHIM SCHLOR BARTOV, OMER.199Q7. ‘“Seit die Juden weg sind...”: Germany, History and Representa-

tions of Absence’. In Scott Denham, Irene Kacandes, and Jonathan Petropoulos, eds., A User’s Guide to German Cultural Studies, 209-26. Ann Arbor, Mich.

BIALE, DAVID. 1994. ‘Confession of an Historian of Jewish Culture’, Jewish Social Studies, I: 40-51.

GRUBER, RUTH ELLEN. 2002. Virtually Jewish: Reinventing Jewish Culture in Europe. Berkeley, Calif.

LEFEBVRE, HENRI. 1991. The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. London. PECK, JEFFREY M. 2007. Being Jewish in the New Germany. New Brunswick, NJ.

PINTO, DIANA. 2001. ‘The Third Pillar? Toward a European Jewish Identity’. In Jewish Studies at the Central European University (Public Lectures 1996-1999): Yearbook I. Budapest. , accessed 13 Dec. 2001.

THIRTEEN

Reflecti ‘Culture M| CTLECTIONS OFL CUulTure WlaVenls from an Australian Jewish Perspective SUZANNE D. RUTLAND AS I WAS GROWING UP in Sydney in the late 1950s, there was a saying that Australia was at least a decade behind America in all aspects of life, including

technology, fashion, and entertainment trends. Reading Jenna Weissman Joselit’s essay ‘Culture Mavens’ on the way that Americans feel at, and about, their home, I felt that Australian Jewry was not only a decade but possibly a whole generation behind American Jewry, if not more. I found it difficult to relate to the picture she was describing as, on the whole, Australian Jewry is still much more traditional in its Jewish lifestyles and choices. The largely religious Jewish day school movement, which attracts a high proportion of Jewish children, is a major factor affecting home practice, decoration, and observance in Australia. Since

there is a clear nexus between home and school, this adds to the distinctive element of Australian Jewry. In addition, the community is still largely an immigrant community, strongly informed by the Holocaust and Israel, and does not demonstrate the same varieties of Judaism that she describes. Certainly, the community has not experienced a ‘revolution’ since the watershed years of post-war survivor migration, the major transformative period of Australian Jewry, but rather an ongoing evolution since the 1960s, which has reinforced a range of Jewish experiences and approaches and has been reinvigorated by the more recent waves of immigrants, particularly from South Africa (Rutland 2001). Traditionally, Australian Judaism was much more conservative than Ametican Judaism, which historically was characterized by the rise of Reform Judaism and other movements which focused on cultural Judaism (Gurock 2008; Sarna 2004). Influenced by Australia’s colonial connection to Britain in the nineteenth

century, Australian Jewry assumed the assimilationist attitude attributed to Anglo-Jewry of being a Jew on the sabbath and a member of the general popula-

tion for the rest of the week. Thus the community practised a diluted form of Orthodoxy, which had a major impact on home life. Few Jews out of the small Jewish population of 23,000 in 1933 strictly followed kashrut laws, and there were no specifically kosher shops. Kosher meat was sold at a separate counter at the nonkosher butcher. At Christmas time, many Anglo-Australian Jews had Christmas

SUZANNE D. RUTLAND trees, and the main rabbi in Sydney even sanctioned this practice, as long as they put a Star of David on top of the tree. The first community mikveh, in Sydney, was not built until 1942. At the same time, the community opposed the development of Reform Judaism, which only emerged in the 1930s, influenced by an influx of German Jewish refugees. Conservative Judaism did not establish roots at all in Australian Jewry, either before or after the Holocaust. As a result, Australian Jewry developed the practice of ‘non-practising Orthodoxy’, with identity indicated by membership of an Orthodox synagogue, which most congregants did not attend, or attended only three times a year on the first day of Pesach, the first day of Rosh Hashanah, and Yom Kippur, so that they were known as ‘three days a year’ Jews. To a large extent this is still true, with most Australian Jews affiliating with Orthodox synagogues and sending their children to Orthodox schools, even though they themselves are not Orthodox in practice. This is significant, as there is often a disconnection between home and school. One factor which reinforces

this more conservative trend in home life is the fact that Jewish university students tend to remain living at home during their university years, unlike those

in the United States where the common pattern is for students leave home to attend college. The attachment to home until the age of 23 or more is reflected in the ongoing influence of Orthodox Judaism on homes, schools, and synagogues. In my most recent book, The Jews in Australia (2005), I include a table of the srowth of synagogues in Australia. In the period from 1945 to 1960 the number of synagogues in the two major centres, Melbourne and Sydney, doubled; the period from 1960 to 1980 was a time of consolidation when there was almost no srowth; but the period from 1980 to 2005 again saw very rapid growth, with the number of synagogues again doubling in both cities. This was without including the many shtieblakh (small synagogues) which have sprung up. The most recent srowth is very much a result of the impact of Chabad, which strongly informs Australian Judaism today, at least in terms of religious leadership. In terms of Reform Judaism, no new congregations have been established recently in Sydney and only one, associated with King David School, in Melbourne. However, a Conservative minyan (prayer group) has been formed at Sydney’s main Progressive campus, now called ‘Emanuel Synagogue’, while Melbourne has established a separate Conservative congregation. We therefore need to ask why Australian Jewry is so different from American Jewry, and whether that difference applies to Australian Jewish home life and family dynamics. Given that Judaism is very much a home-based, family faith, it can be presumed that external differences in

synagogue, school, and community structures both reflect and are reflected within individual Jewish families and their homes. The impact of the Holocaust is the defining factor for Australian Jewry, which is largely a post-Holocaust community, and has a deep influence on Australian Jewish identity. The majority of Jews are survivors or their descendants, and it is well known that Melbourne has the highest percentage of Holocaust survivors on

AN AUSTRALIAN JEWISH PERSPECTIVE a pro-rata population basis of any city outside of Israel. Most of the survivors who arrived on Australia’s shores, the ‘lucky country’ as it has been called, were determined to maintain their Jewish identity and ensure that Judaism and Jewish life survived despite Hitler. Whereas some survivors have maintained that identity

through traditional religious responses, some have moved to Progressive Judaism, and others have focused their Jewish affiliation on support for Zionism

and commitment to Israel or on social and cultural institutions such as B’nai B’rith.

The ongoing immigration to Australia of Russian, South African and, to a lesser extent, Israeli Jews reinforces these patterns. Some of the Russians and Israelis also come from survivor backgrounds, while South African Jews have become very involved in the issues of Holocaust memory, even though very few survivors were able to migrate to South Africa after 1945 because of the restrictive migration policies of the South African government. In 1936 the ship Stuttgard arrived in South Africa with mainly German Jewish refugees on board. Following the antisemitic outcry this unleashed, subsequent South African governments introduced severe restrictive quotas for Jewish refugee and survivor immigration. In the 1980s Australia became a favoured destination for South African Jews, because of quota restrictions in the United States and the fact that economic and social problems in the United Kingdom made it a less appealing destination. Many South Africans were attracted to Australia, especially Sydney, because of the similarities between the two countries: a warm climate, easygoing lifestyle, and good economic opportunities, allied with the lack of any language barrier and the fact that both are products of British colonial culture—it is noteworthy that Anglo-Jewish patterns of life are different from American Jewish ones. Its largely ‘Litvak’ background makes South African Jewry a fairly homogenous community (Tatz, Heller, and Arnold 2007). While few South African Jews are themselves survivors of the Holocaust, once they settle in Australia they become involved with Holocaust museums and memorialization: 90 per cent of Lithuanian and Latvian Jews were murdered by the Nazis, and they know that if their families had not migrated to South Africa between 1880 and 1920 they too would probably have perished during the Holocaust. The major symbol of survivors’ commitment to Jewish continuity in Australia is the Jewish day school movement, described by W. D. Rubinstein (1991) as the ‘crown of Australian Jewry’. As a result of the arrival of pre-war Jewish refugees and Holocaust survivors, as well as the impact of the Holocaust itself on the established community, the desire to nurture and protect the community’s Jewish identity became imperative, and Jewish schools were established and expanded rapidly, catering to a range of belief systems. In Melbourne around 65 per cent of Jewish children attend Jewish schools and in Sydney the figure is 62 per cent, with most children continuing to attend a Jewish school to Year 12. The Mel-

bourne schools range from Adass Israel on the extreme right through to the

SUZANNE D. RUTLAND Bundist secular Yiddish primary school, Shalom Aleichem. Polish Jewish migration to Melbourne was part of a process of chain migration—those family mem-

bers who had arrived in the city before 1939 sponsored surviving landsmann (people from the same shtetls and cities in Poland) to enable them to come and join them there after the war. More Polish Jewish survivors immigrated to Melbourne than to Sydney, and after 1945 twenty different landsmanshaften (hometown associations) emerged there under an umbrella federation. If one wants to see a reflection of Polish Jewry during the interwar years one should visit Melbourne, particularly its wide range of Jewish schools. Whereas the landsmanshaften may have disappeared, the ties to the shtetl heritage still operate there. In Sydney, the Jewish school system experienced rapid expansion in the 1970s

under the impact of South African immigration. This resulted in the rapid srowth of Moriah College, which remains loyal to its founding principle of Orthodoxy, and has emerged as the largest Jewish school in Australia today. It caters to children from pre-school to Year 12, and has a student body of over 1,800 pupils located on one magnificent campus in Sydney’s eastern suburbs (Rutland 2003). Australian Jewry has been able to develop a more comprehensive system of Jewish schooling thanks to a variety of factors. Separation between church and state is not as strongly entrenched in Australia as in the United States, and since 1973 the federal government has provided significant funding to the non-government sector, including Jewish schools, which have developed a reputation for academic

excellence. Schools such as Moriah are consistently ranked as among the top schools for university entrance. This is in direct contrast to the United States where, despite a small growth from kindergarten to Year 4, and in special education, the overall percentage of children attending a day school in most Jewish communities is still comparatively small, especially for the high-school years (Years 9-12) (see Schick 2005). The growth of Jewish schools in Australia has had a major impact on Jewish

home life. With such a high proportion of their children attending Jewish schools, there is a symbiotic relationship, with parents being directly concerned with their children’s education and the schools making efforts to reach into the homes of their students. This is done through sending home weekly newsletters and organizing functions, relating both to general and Jewish issues, that involve the parents. For example, Moriah College holds an annual siddur presentation for its Year I students, and parents are invited to come in before the ceremony and cover their child’s siddur to personalize it. Similarly, Emanuel School in Sydney holds a Tanach presentation, before which parents are invited to come and cover their child’s Tanach before taking it home to inscribe a personal message in it. The next day they attend the morning prayers, after which they present the new Tanach to their child. The messages they inscribe are often elaborate and emotional, referring for example to Jewish persistence across the generations. The

AN AUSTRALIAN JEWISH PERSPECTIVE following message was written by Alla Pilman, who left her home in Odessa, Russia, and migrated to Australia as a child: One did not advertise being Jewish in Russia. The children of my generation grew up without knowing our proud history, hearing the enchanting tales of miracles, gasping at accounts of persecution and misery, and rejoicing at the ultimate triumph of God’s chosen people. We knew we were Jewish only because our parents told us so. But even then, our relision was something to be concealed, enjoyed only in the circle of relatives and trusted friends. We celebrated Jewish Holydays on the approximate dates and the only way we knew how. We went to school hoping that no one will recognise us as Jews. Being a Jew in Russia was a stigma. Our precious Annie! You are a lucky girl, born in a lucky country. A country that recognises and encourages all religions. A country where you can be anyone you aspire to be.

Our darling, use that opportunity well. Learn about your heritage; the trials and tribulations of your people, and be proud to be a Jew. Let the Tanakh guide you to embrace a Jewish way of life, instil in you a desire for learning, and teach you to be charitable, compassionate and decent. After all, you, our children, are the future of the Jewish nation, you are our continuity.

Other ritualized events of this nature are organized by schools, including demonstration seders and sukkah competitions. Australian Jewish schools developed largely as a result of the efforts of lay

leaders rather than Orthodox rabbis. Apart from the ultra-Orthodox haredi schools, the leadership of the major school boards is in the hands of lay leaders who are elected annually by the parent body. As such, school governance of Jewish day schools is unusual since parents with voting rights who feel passionate

about their children’s education can influence the composition of their school board, with competing teams emerging when specific conflicts arise. This clearly has an impact on home life, as there can be vigorous debate in the home when the educational leadership makes controversial decisions. Parents with children in Jewish schools thus tend to be more involved with the schools’ day-to-day

management than do parents with children in other government and nongovernment schools in Australia (Rutland 2003). This system of lay leadership in Australian Jewish schools also contrasts with Jewish schools in the United States, which tend to be more influenced by rabbinical leadership.

The relationship between school and home is not straightforward, as most Australian Jewish schools see their mission as enforcing strictly Orthodox prac-

tice, while most of the students come from non-observant Orthodox homes. Although most Jewish educators are aware of this challenge, tensions can develop. Jewish Studies teachers try to promote observance in the home, encouraging practices such as lighting candles on Friday nights and observance of the festivals. In some cases, such practices can be easily introduced: children can

SUZANNE D. RUTLAND make their own menorahs and then light them over Hanukah, or they can introduce decorations they have made at school into the home for other festivals. But if they come home and demand that their parents make the kitchen fully kosher, or that they fully observe the sabbath, it can become a point of conflict between home and school. Holocaust memory informs much of Australian Jewry, both in the home and in its community institutions. In the 1940s, surviving Auschwitz was a motivating factor for the founders of Moriah College, and their children and grandchildren continue to have their Jewish identity moulded in the shadow of this catastrophe. Many of the Jewish history teachers are children of survivors who feel that the Holocaust is still ‘too close and too raw’. As Sophie Gelski (2008), a doctoral student of mine and herself a child of survivors, has noted, ‘even though it is over sixty years since the defeat of Nazi Germany and the liberation of the concentration camps, Holocaust survivors are still alive to tell their personal stories ... It is still “a living entity — a living history”.’ One memory-preserving activity which involves the home and indeed the whole family is the annual Year 10 Jewish history ‘roots’ competition, known as the Hans Kimmel Prize, after Dr Hans Kimmel, a controversial Viennese Jewish refugee lawyer who arrived in Australia in 1939 and fought to democratize the oligarchic communal structure. For this competition, students are given three essay topics relating to their own family story—the Holocaust, the migration experience, or the contribution of their family to Australian Jewry—alternatively, they can produce a family tree.

Interviewing parents and grandparents for this project has its impact on the home, as often parents and particularly grandparents tell their stories for the first time as part of this project. Similar competitions and projects are held in other schools (Berman 2001). A second key factor in Australian Jewish life is the commitment of most of the community to Israel and Zionism. On any criterion Australia ranks high in terms of Zionist endeavour and commitment. This includes aliyah rates, visits to Israel, the level of fundraising, Zionist education and youth movements, and the number of Australian Zionist leaders in Israel. In what many see as the post-Zionist era, Australian Jewry is one of the last bastions of traditional Zionism. Visits to Israel are a good indicator of the contrasts between Australian and American Jewry. Around 70 per cent of all Australian Jews have visited Israel, with quite a

high proportion returning for more than one visit. This proportion is much higher than that for American Jewry: over 40 per cent of American Jews under the age of 35 and almost 40 per cent of those under the age of 50 describe their level of Israel attachment as ‘low’; Go per cent have never been to Israel, and only 15 per cent have been more than once (Cohen and Kelman 2008). This symbiosis between Israel and Australian Jewry has a profound impact on

home life. For some participants, the Israel experience has a transformative effect, heightening their commitment to Jewish life in a variety of ways. As noted,

AN AUSTRALIAN JEWISH PERSPECTIVE most Jewish university students remain at home, or in their home city, for this period of their life and so continue to influence home life. One example of this is the life story of the late Dave Burnett, a leader of the Australian Union of Jewish Students, who died in January 2008 in a tragic accident in Petra. He came from an assimilated Jewish home, went to a government school, and was not Jewishly involved until he joined the student movement and visited Israel. This changed his life and he became one of the most committed Jewish leaders. His commitment affected his parents and, following his death, they have become dedicated to his ideal of creating a mentoring system for Jewish students, establishing a fund for this purpose. Attending a memorial service in his honour at the University of Sydney, with his grandparents, parents, and sister present, highlighted for me the connection between visits to Israel and the Australian Jewish home. The Maccabi Games is another significant story. Sport is central to Australian identity, and Jews in Australia reflect this culture, so that sporting organizations

play an important role in the community. In 1997, at the fifteenth Maccabiah, Australia sent its biggest contingent ever, with over 400 participants, only to be

met with disaster. The bridge that had been built across the Yarkon River collapsed as the team was marching across it for the opening ceremony. Four participants died—Lilly Bennett, Elizabeth Sawicki, Greg Small, and Warren Zines—while a fifth, schoolgirl Sasha Elterman, has since undergone a series of operations because of the effects of the pollution of the river on her lungs. The Australian team decided that, despite the tragedy, they would continue to participate, and the community has continued to send teams. Indeed, at the seventeenth Maccabiah, the Australian contingent, representing the ninth largest diaspora population, was the second largest diaspora team, with 550 participants, compared to the United States, representing a Jewish population fifty-seven times larger, which sent 720 participants. In contrast to the recent titles highlighted by Joselit, more representative of new Australian Jewish scholarship is New Under the Sun: Jewish Australians on Religion, Politics and Culture (2006). The three editors, Michael Fagenblat, Melanie Landau, and Nathan Wolski, of Monash University, Melbourne, who are

in my children’s generation, wrote the introductory chapter, entitled ‘Will the Centre Hold?’, in which they analyse the generational change that has taken place in Australian Jewry since 1945. They point out that those in the refugee/survivor generation brought up their children, the baby boomers, in homes where ‘Jewish-

ness was unavoidable’, even if the parents were not observant, because of the strong ethnic heritage they brought with them from Europe; the baby boomers thus ‘welded their Jewishness with their Australianness’. However, the editors ask, what will happen to the next generation, when ‘Jewishness has become a choice rather than a birthmark’? They query whether Australian Jewry will become like American Jewry, moving to ‘ever more individualised, even subjective forms of Jewishness for which the traditional touchstones—the mainstream

SUZANNE D. RUTLAND community, Israel and the synagogue—are increasingly irrelevant’. Alternatively, will Australian Jewish schools mould the next generation so that they remain in the traditional mould, or will the community become more polarized between the religious and the secular? The essays in New Under the Sun analyse the various elements of Australian Jewish identity and question and challenge accepted assumptions. In his chapter on Australian Zionism, Danny Ben-Moshe reflects on a survey he undertook of young Jewish Australians, which he entitled “The End of Unconditional Love’ as

he found that the younger generation are much more critical of Israel and its policy so that the strong Zionist orientation of the community is being challenged (Ben-Moshe 2006). Despite this, Australian Jewry, with its communal emphasis, still presents a substantially different profile from the individualistic American Jewry described by Joselit. So, what of the future? My general observation is that we in Australia (not just Jewish Australia) see ourselves as being ‘behind’ the United States, and we do

tend to follow American trends. However, in this specific case the question is whether the different migration history, with the impact of the Holocaust, day schools, visits to Israel, and different community structures, will mean that Australian Judaism remains different from American Judaism. There is no doubt that the percentage of young Jews intermarrying in Australia is very much on the increase for a variety of reasons, including ongoing acculturation and integration as they move away from the survivor generation and the challenges of finding a suitable Jewish partner. The community is also likely to be influenced by trends in America both because the US is home to the largest Jewish diaspora community and also because the wider Australian society is influenced by the United States: most Australian governments since the Second World War have seen the alliance

with the US as paramount to Australia’s security. On the other hand, South African migration since the late twentieth century has been a major influence. On the whole, South African Jews are becoming much more traditional, or Orthodox. The move to the religious right seems to be one response of Jewish South Africans to the high levels of crime in Johannesburg and Cape Town and their fears for personal safety and security. So it is possible that Australian Jewry will

follow the United States in the coming generation, but not to the same extent in terms of moving away from traditional Judaism to individualism, becoming cultural mavens, or intermartying.

Notes 1 Alla Pilman shared this message, written to her daughter in 2000, with educators, both Jewish and non-Jewish, who gathered for a demonstration seder on Wednesday 9 April 2008.

AN AUSTRALIAN JEWISH PERSPECTIVE

References BEN-MOSHE, DANNY. 2006. ‘The End of Conditional Love: The Future of Zionism in Australian Jewish Life’. In Michael Fagenblat, Melanie Landau, and Nathan Wolski, eds., New Under the Sun: Jewish Australians on Religion, Politics and Culture, 108-25. Melbourne. BERMAN, JUDITH E. 2001. Holocaust Remembrance in Australian Jewish Communities, 1945-2000. Perth. COHEN, STEVEN M., and ARI Y. KELMAN. 2008. Beyond Distancing: Young Adult American Jews and Their Alienation from Israel. Electronic publication. . FAGENBLAT, MICHAEL, MELANIE LANDAU, and NATHAN WOLSKI, eds. 2006. New Under the Sun: Jewish Australians on Religion, Politics and Culture. Melbourne. GELSKI, SOPHIE. 2008. ‘The Missing Paradigm: The Personal History of the History Teacher’. Typescript, University of Sydney. GUROCK, JEFFREY S. 2008. ‘American Judaism Between the Two World Wars’. In Marc Lee Raphael, ed., The Columbia History of Jews and Judaism in America, 93-113. New York.

RUBINSTEIN, W. D.199Q1I. The Jews in Australia: A Thematic History, vol. ii. Melbourne. RUTLAND, SUZANNE D. 2001. Edge of the Diaspora: Two Centuries of Jewish Settlement in Australia, 2nd edn. New York. —— 2003. ‘If You Will It, It Is No Dreanv’: The Moriah Story. Sydney.

—— 2005. The Jews in Australia. Melbourne. SARNA, JONATHAN D. 2004. American Judaism: A History. New Haven. SCHICK, MARVIN. 2005. A Census of Jewish Day Schools in the United States, 2003-2004. New York.

TATZ, COLIN, GILLIAN HELLER, and PETER ARNOLD. 2007. Worlds Apart: The Remigration of South African Jews. Sydney.

FOURTEEN There’s No Place Like Home: America, Israel, and the (Mixed) Blessings of Assimilation MICHAEL P. KRAMER

JENNA WEISSMAN JOSELIT feels that she is on to something, but she is not quite sure what to make of it. Contemporary Jewish American culture is just too variegated, too promiscuous, too contradictory to explain away with easy generalizations. What can you say about a culture in which ‘indices of dissolution are equally matched by indices of vitality’? In which intermarriage thrives and, at the

same time, ultra-Orthodox institutions flourish? In which ‘female sexual shlemiels’ share the cultural stage with (say) Holocaust museums? In which primers for inventing Jewish ritual share shelf space with the Artscroll siddur? In which one Jew serves a life sentence for spying for Israel while a professedly observant Jew runs for vice-president? In which Bob Dylan converts to Christianity and then shows up on a Chabad telethon? Come to think of it, the National Museum of American Jewish History—the ‘Museum of You’ with whose disorderly catalogue Joselit begins—is housed in the same building as Philadelphia's Congregation Mikveh Israel, which boasts on its website () that its decorous Orthodox prayer services ‘are virtually the same as during the eighteenth century’. How can you react to the baffling mess of Jewish Ametican culture, asks Joselit, but to lift up your hands and say, ‘Go figure!’? Frankly, it is hard to disagree. Jewish American culture has indeed developed in multifarious, even paradoxical, ways that have gladdened some, saddened others, and surprised many—and the panorama can be dizzying. It is easy enough to nod along with Joselit and, as above, to multiply ‘on the one hand, on the other hand’ examples. Even in my business (I teach literature) where we snicker selfrighteously at Irving Howe’s prediction in 1977 of the impending demise of Jewish American fiction (Howe 1977: 160-17), and smugly shep naches from the extraordinary proliferation of young, unembarrassed Jewish writers on the scene in America today—even here it is hard not to agree that the range of these writers, from those who lovingly reclaim Jewish tradition to those who emphatically reject it, neatly confirms Joselit’s initial observation. Think, on the one hand, of Dara Horn’s recuperative In the Image (2003) and The World to Come (2006) and, on the other hand, of Shalom Auslander’s rebellious Beware of God (2005) and Fore-

THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE HOME skin’s Lament (2007). (Io confuse matters more, whereas earlier writers such as Philip Roth and Saul Bellow eschewed the label ‘Jewish writer’, the aptly named Auslander writes a column for Nextbook.org, which bills itself explicitly as a ‘locus for Jewish literature, culture, and ideas’!) Think, too, of such previously unthinkable, culturally complex, envelope-pushing works as Rodger Kamenetz’s The Jew and the Lotus: A Poet’s Rediscovery of Jewish Identity in Buddhist India (1998), Rabbi Steven Greenberg’s Wrestling with God and Men: Homosexuality in the Jewish Tradition (2004), and even Kristina Grish’s Boy Vey! The Shiksa’s Guide to Dating Jewish Men (2005). Go figure. Bewilderment is a wholly appropriate initial response, even if accompanied by

a knowing, cynical wink. (No bewilderment, no understanding.) So I continued further into Joselit’s erudite kvetch, scratching my head and trying to make sense of it all. Then I came upon a statement that gave me pause. Unlike American Jewry, which ‘defies easy description’, Joselit writes, ‘we are... able to identify what makes contemporary Israeli society, surely among the most polyglot of cultures, tick’. Really? Maybe things look different from the other side of the world, but from where I sit—I’ve been living in Israel for over a decade—I cannot honestly see how contemporary Israel is any less variegated and any less baffling than Joselit’s America. Just to offer a very few examples: Can one thing explain a culture that has pro-

duced both Dana International, the transsexual pop singer who, when she won the 1998 Eurovision Song Contest, proudly paraded around with an Israeli flag, and the ultra-Orthodox Rabbi Moshe Hirsch, leader of the anti-Zionist Neturei Karta movement, who boasted that he was Yasser Arafat’s minister for Jewish affairs? Can one thing explain, turning to literature, Etgar Keret’s brilliantly terse,

irreverent, colloquial short stories of contemporary Israeli life (2004, 2005, 2007, 2008) and Haim Sabato’s reverential, elegant, legend-like tales of Aleppo and Jerusalem (2003, 2006)? Or the bold blasphemy of Yona Wallach (2006) and

the gentle mysticism of Rivka Miriam (2007, 2009; see also Jacobson 2007: 115-71)? Or the new five-volume encyclopedia of secular Jewish culture, published in (of all places) the holy city of Jerusalem (Yovel and Tsaban 2007), and the multi-volume bookshelf of traditional Jewish classics—from the Bible, Talmud,

Midrash, kabbalah, medieval Jewish philosophy, hasidic tales, to Bialik and Agnon—published in (of all places) godless Tel Aviv (Eichenwald 2008)? And how about this for baffling: I remember when I first arrived in Israel in the early 19908, the Shas party was rising to power on a platform of religion and ethnic

pride, shouting the atavistic slogan, lehahzir atarah leyoshnah, to restore the crown (of Sephardi Jewry) to its former glory, while all its candidates and operatives—Moroccan, Tunisian, Syrian, Iraqi, Yemenite, and so on—were dressed in the garb of Lithuanian yeshiva students: white shirts, black suits, black fedoras. Go figure.

No, I thought, it is not ‘variegatedness’ that distinguishes contemporary

MICHAEL Pw. KRAMER Jewish American culture, certainly not from contemporary Israeli culture. It is different in Israel, to be sure, but no more coherent. There, too, vitality and dissolution walk arm in arm, the avant-garde and the traditional, the Acre Fringe Theatre Festival and a Friday night tish in Me’ah She’arim. In the Jewish homeland, Jews wear their Jewishness as heavily or as lightly as they like, with beards and peyot or with piercing and tattoos, in Gottex bikinis or in sheitlakh, by joining the army or by refusing to, on a kibbutz or in a yeshiva. Some choose to renounce their Israeliness and prefer to identify only as Jews; other choose to ignore their Jewishness and prefer to be simply Israelis. On Yom Kippur, while many fast and pray and search their souls, others head for the beaches and think about throwing a New Year’s Eve party, what Israelis like to call ‘Sylvester’.

Okay, so Joselit was only using Israel as a rhetorical foil. Still, it got me thinking about the development of Jewish culture in America and its parallel development in Israel. And when I came upon Joselit’s second point, when she moves from ‘variegatedness’ to ‘newfangledness’, when she suspects that what she sees may very well be ‘a decided rupture with the past, an entirely new calibration of matters Jewish’, when she sneers, ‘Jewish life today ain’t your grandpa’s Judaism —not byalong shot’, I could not help but raise an eyebrow. Are American innovations really more startling than Israeli innovations over the last century? What was Zionism itself but a startling, revolutionary break with

the past? Have we forgotten how marginal the movement was; that Herzl was considered by many a madman; that a century ago Hebrew was (for the most part)

an esoteric, ritual language; that kibbutznik is a neologism that has only the vaguest etymological connection to the Yiddish word kibitz; that ‘Jewish farmer’ used to be an oxymoron; that the early halutsim revelled heartily in the fact that theirs was not their grandparents’ Judaism? (Remember the negation of the diaspora’) Hey, on Kibbutz Mizra they raise pigs! And on the other, religious, side of things, think of the ritual innovations: prayers for the Jewish state, or the Israel Defence Forces. Yom Ha’atsma’ut, Yom Hasho’ah, Yom Yerushalayim—new holidays, prayers, rituals, all radical when they were invented, many still quite controversial in some circles. Lag Ba’omer as a major holiday? The sacred rite of

the bonfire and the kumzits, of sitting around a bonfire and singing modern Israeli songs? True, most of the Zionist enterprise deliberately tried to link itself to the ancient past as it broke from the immediate past—as many invented rituals do. But, as Eric Hobsbawm argued, ‘novelty is no less novel for being able to dress up easily as antiquity’ (1983: 5), though it may mislead the casual observer. The Jewish state is not my grandfather’s Judaism, not bya long shot. Then I thought, maybe the problem has to do with my grandfather? Born near Lomze in Poland some time in the second half of the nineteenth century, my grandfather arrived at Ellis Island in 1912. A short, slight, middleaged man with deep-set hazel eyes and deeply held Jewish beliefs, he struggled to make a new home for his family in America, but he never felt at home there. His

THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE HOME was an Old World Judaism that refused to accommodate itself to the New World. To be sure, using him as a standard to take the measure of contemporary Ameri-

can Jewry makes a kind of historical sense: it turns out that his progeny range from the ultra-Orthodox to the intermarried (and now includes two sabra greatsreat-grandchildren), and no doubt embody all the variegatedness and newfangledness that has drawn Joselit’s attention and concern. Still, beginning the story with him guarantees a tale of declension, or at least of diversification and radical change. But what if we take the pekl of Jewish American history off the stooped, stubborn shoulders of my grandfather and place it elsewhere? What if we take as our base line, not my reluctant grandfather but his America-infatuated contemporary Mary Antin, the arch-assimilationist autobiographer whose The Promised Land (1912) was published the same year my grandfather first walked down Orchard

Street and Grand Street? What would the bricolage of contemporary Jewish America read like if we begin with the giddy young girl who gleefully threw away all the trappings of my grandfather’s Judaism like an old coat and, as hurriedly as

she could, embraced America with all the innocent enthusiasm of adolescent love? Would it still be a story of declension, or of continuity, or of awakening and return? And what if we begin even earlier, with the innovative cohort of Isaac Mayer

Wise and Kaufmann Kohler, as Vanessa Ochs in effect suggests (Ochs 2007: 11-15)? Is an orange on the seder plate a more radical break with the past than the 1885 Pittsburgh Platform, with its utter renunciation of Jewish nationhood and

its bold declaration that ‘all such Mosaic and rabbinical laws as regulate diet, priestly purity, and dress’ that were ‘apt rather to obstruct than to further modern spiritual elevation’ should be dumped in the trashbin of history?

Contemporary American Jewishness would surely look less startling if we began here. Like Antin, Wise and Kohler embraced America. Nevertheless, though they were embarrassed by the huddled masses of their east European co-religionists, they were not ashamed to be Jews. American Jews. Theirs was a deliberate theology of blurred boundaries: if they were out to Americanize Judaism, they also sought to Judaize America. (The ‘erasure of boundaries’, another of Joselit’s concerns, is hardly an invention of the twenty-first century.) They were not satisfied with the fact (as Moses Seixas wrote to George Washington in 1790) that it was okay to be Jewish in America, given that the government gave ‘to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance’ (Seixas 1790; Washington 1996 [1790]: 109). They refused to see even a benign separation between ‘Jew’ and ‘American’, effectively agreeing with the Puritans that America was the new

promised land, insisting that Americanization was the fulfilment of Jewish promise, that the Fourth of July was the antitype of the revelation at Sinai. In the generations to come, their followers eventually came around to Zionism—but so did America. No conflict there.

MICHAEL P. KRAMER They argued that Jews were always already at home in America, since America was founded on principles that find their source in the Bible. Theirs was a vision whose logic put the patriotic rhetoric of Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson in the mouths of the Maccabees (as in Wise’s novel, First of the Maccabees (1860)) and later spawned such works as Oscar Straus’s The Origin of Republican Form of Government (1885) and Milton Konvitz’s Judaism and the American Idea (1978).

It nurtured what Jonathan Sarna (1999) called the nineteenth-century ‘cult of synthesis’ and the contemporary phenomenon Sylvia Barak Fishman (2000) called the ‘coalescence’ of American and Jewish values. In short, it not only led to sociologist Steven M. Cohen’s titular question, American Assimilation or Jewish Revival? (1988), but made the answer an unequivocal yes. So construed, Jew-

ish American history makes Joselit’s final musing—‘These days, perhaps the more pertinent issue is not whether American Jews are at home in America [but] whether American Jews ... are at home with Jewish culture’—not simply rhetorical but irrelevant. Irrelevant, but maybe not insignificant. For Joselit may indeed be on to something, even if we give my grandfather a rest, even if Jews feel at home being both Jewish and American. What if we rephrase her musing slightly: these days, per-

haps the more pertinent issue is not whether American Jews are at home in America, but what it means for American Jews to be at home with Jewish culture. After all, whereas most contemporary American Jews may not practise my grandfather’s Judaism, neither do they champion Mary Antin’s blithe assimilationism.

The phenomena that perplex Joselit are located somewhere in between. It is important to note that the source of Joselit’s exasperation is not the mostly indisputable indices of dissolution—for instance, the rising number of unaffiliated and unidentifying Jews, or the decline in Jewish education among Jews, or intermarriage. (Nor, for that matter, does she seem to be cheered by the complacent avatars of my grandfather’s Judaism in Boro Park or New Square.) Joselit’s focus is precisely on the audacious and sometimes boisterous expressions of Jewishness in the kaleidoscopic middle, where vitality and dissolution, Jewish and American, meet in creative embrace, in (say) the comic crooning of Kinky Friedman and in the chutzpadic comedy of Sarah Silverman, in films such as the Hollywood production of Keeping the Faith (2000) and the independent Night of the Living Jews, which publicized itself as ‘Not Just Another Hasidic Zom-

bie Movie’ (2007). Itis to hybrid, pop-culture culture phenomena such as these— Jewishness in the American grain—that Joselit calls our attention, wondering whether or not this resurgence we are seeing is good for the Jews. There is an unprecedented comfort in these expressions of Jewishness, but what does the comfort mean?

It is to the value of these sort of hybrid phenomena that Gerson D. Cohen introduced us nearly half a century ago in his near-legendary address, “The Blessing of Assimilation in Jewish History’ (1997 [1966]). In the address Cohen, later

THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE HOME to become chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America (JTS), takes

a stand against oversimplified, breast-beating laments about assimilation, against a know-nothing approach to Jewish distinctiveness, by significantly entering into a dispute with the talmudic sage Bar Kappara, who argued that the Jews in Egypt were redeemed because they did not change their language, their names, and their dress; that, by extension, Jewish survival depends upon cultural separatism, upon what we now call difference. Cohen nimbly argues that the assertion is simply not true. To the contrary, he maintains, sticking too slavishly to grandpa’s Judaism can lead to cultural stagnation. Indeed, he shows in example after exam-

ple (as David Kraemer, also of JTS, similarly does in these pages) that Jews throughout history regularly adopted elements from the cultures of peoples among whom they lived, or who lived among them, and they not only survived but thrived. By implication, Cohen concludes, as Vanessa Ochs would also suggest nearly half a century later, American culture can also be the source of great creativity and energy for Jews, that assimilation can be seen as a blessing. But not always. Cohen is careful to import a significant distinction from the writings of Ahad Ha’am (one which he himself borrows from other late nineteenth-century thinkers). In his important essay, ‘Imitation and Assimilation’ (1975 [1893]), Ahad Ha’am distinguishes between a self-effacing imitation in which a people take on the cultural traits of another people at the expense of their own culture, and a competitive imitation, in which a people absorb and refashion elements of another people’s culture in order to reinvigorate their own. The result of the first is assimilation (the breast-beating kind) and cultural annihilation; the result of the second is cultural renewal. In Cohen’s terms, Joselit’s question is whether ‘the variegated, improvisational, quirky, ad hoc mess’ of contemporary Jewish America belongs in the first or second category—a question that has as many answers as it has askers. (Ask my grandfather, ask Mary Antin.) But there is one point that Cohen glaringly ignores in the Zionist thinker’s essay that can significantly recast Joselit’s ques-

tion. And I think, finally, that this is precisely the point we need to take into account if we want to take the measure of contemporary American culture—and Israeli culture, for that matter. For all his denigration of self-effacing imitation, Ahad Ha’am does not really see it as ‘a danger that the Jewish people must dread for the future’ (1975 [1893]: 100). He simply does not believe that Jews, as a people, will give up their Jewishness. Yet, surprisingly, he does see a far more serious danger lurking within competitive imitation itself, within, that is, the very process of cultural renewal—and, if I may jump forward a century, in the sort of

phenomena that furrow Joselit’s brow. Scattered as they are in communities around the world, Ahad Ha’am argues, Jews are very likely to reinvigorate themselves by assimilating their neighbours’ cultures. But what if they are too successful? What if they become French Jews, British Jews, Russian Jews, American Jews?

‘One can only fear’, he writes, ‘that their efforts may be dissipated in various

MICHAEL P. KRAMER directions ... so that in the end Israel will no longer be one people’ (p. 100). The greatest fear is not assimilation, he argues, but national fragmentation. For Ahad Ha’am, cultural renewal is a mixed blessing. His solution was ‘to turn eastwards, to the land which was our centre and our pattern in ancient days’ (p. Tor), not necessarily as a destination for aliyah but as a cultural homeland, a unifying counterweight to the cultural influence of the various countries where Jews may happily make their homes. As it turns out, many Jews around the world nowadays do indeed look to Israel to anchor their Jewish identities. (As for me, | voted with my feet.) But many do not, especially among young people (see Weiss 2007). Hence programmes such as Birthright and Masa. Political solutions aside,

however, the question we should be asking about contemporary American Jews—and, I might add, about contemporary Israeli Jews as well—is not how heavily or lightly they wear their Jewishness, whether they lean towards the tradi-

tional or the innovative, whether they prefer yeshivot or Jewish film festivals, whether they wear their Jewishness on their sleeves, or tattooed on their bottoms. Important questions, no doubt. But the first question we should be asking about contemporary Jews, however and wherever they may be, is whether their expres-

sions of Jewishness make them feel connected to other Jews, however and wherever they may be. The rest is commentary.

References AHAD HA’AM.1975[1893]. ‘Imitation and Assimilation.’ In Robert Alter, ed. and trans., Selected Essays of Ahad Ha’am, 107-24. Philadelphia. ANTIN, MARY. 1912. The Promised Land. Boston. AUSLANDER, SHALOM. 2005. Beware of God: Stories. New York.

— 2.007. Foreskin’s Lament: A Memoir. New York.

COHEN, GERSON D. 1997[1966]. ‘The Blessing of Assimilation in Jewish History’. In id., Jewish History and Jewish Destiny, 145-56. New York.

COHEN, STEVEN M.1988. American Assimilation or Jewish Revival? Bloomington, Ind. EICHENWALD, DOv,ed. 2008. The People of the Book [Am hasefer], 24 vols. Tel Aviv. FISHMAN, SYLVIA BARAK. 2000. Jewish Life and American Culture. Albany, NY.

GREENBERG, STEVEN. 2004. Wrestling with God and Men: Homosexuality in the Jewish Tradition. Madison, Wis. GRISH, KRISTINA. 2005. Boy Vey! The Shiksa’s Guide to Dating Jewish Men. New York.

HOBSBAWM, ERIC. 1983. ‘Introduction: Inventing Tradition’. In Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition, 1-14. Cambridge. HORN, DARA. 2003. Inthe Image: A Novel. New York. —— 2006. The World to Come: A Novel. New York. HOWE, IRVING, ed. 1977. Jewish American Stories. New York.

THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE HOME JACOBSON, DAVID C. 2007. Creator, Are You Listening? Israeli Poets on God and Prayer. Bloomington, Ind. KAMENETZ, RODGER. 1998. The Jew and the Lotus: A Poet’s Rediscovery of Jewish Identity in Buddhist India. Northvale, NJ.

KERET, ETGAR. 2004. The Bus Driver Who Wanted to be God and Other Stories. New Milford, Conn. —— 2005. The Nimrod Flip-Out: Stories, trans. Miriam Shlesinger and Sondra Silverston. London.

— 2007. Missing Kissinger. New York. —— 2008. The Girl on the Fridge, trans. Miriam Shlesinger and Sondra Silverston. New York.

KONVITZ, MILTON R.1978. Judaism and the American Idea. Ithaca, NY.

MIRIAM, RIVKA. 2007. My Father Ordered Me Not To Die: Poems [Avi tsivani lo lamut: shirim]. Jerusalem. — 2009. These Mountains: Selected Poems of Rivka Miriam, ed. and trans. Linda Zisquit. New Milford, Conn. OCHS, VANESSA L. 2007. Inventing Jewish Ritual. Philadelphia.

‘The Pittsburgh Liberal Religious Platform’. 1996[1885]. In Jacob Rader Marcus, ed., The Jew in the American World: A Source Book, 241-3. Detroit. SABATO, HAIM. 2003. Aleppo Tales: A Tapestry of Tradition and Faith, trans, Philip Simpson. New Milford, Conn.

— 2006. The Dawning of the Day: The Story of Ezra Siman Tov, trans. Yaacob Dweck. New Milford, Conn.

SARNA, JONATHAN D. 1999. ‘The Cult of Synthesis in American Jewish Culture’, Jewish Social Studies, 5: 52-79.

SEIXAS, MOSES. 1790. ‘Congratulatory Address to George Washington, August 17, 1790’. , accessed 8 Dec. 2007. STRAUS, OSCAR S.1885. The Origin of Republican Form of Government in the United States of America. New York.

WALLACH, YONA. 2006. Let the Words: Selected Poems, trans. Linda Stern Zisquit. Riverdale-on-Hudson, NY.

WASHINGTON, GEORGE. I996[I790]. ‘ George Washington Writes the Hebrew Consregation in New Port, Rhode Island’. In Jacob Rader Marcus, ed., The Jew in the American World: A Source Book, 109-10. Detroit.

WEISS, ANTHONY. 2007. ‘Attachment to Israel Declining Among Young American Jews’. Jewish Daily Forward, 5 Sept., , accessed 8 Dec. 2007. WISE, ISAAC M.1860. The First of the Maccabees. Cincinnati. YOVEL, YIRMIYAHU, and YAIR TSABAN, eds. 2007. A New Jewish Time: Jewish Culture in a Secular Age | Zeman yehudi hadash: tarbut yehudit be’idan hiloni], 5 vols. Jerusalem.

FIFTEEN The Last Word: A Response JENNA WEISSMAN JOSELIT THERE’S NOTHING like contemporary Jewish affairs to stir things up, as the spirited and thoughtful, if occasionally overwrought, responses to my description of American Jewry circa 2009 make vibrantly clear. Although my intention was to take the measure of Jewish life, not to judge it, two of my interlocutors— Professors David Kraemer of the Jewish Theological Seminary and Michael P. Kramer of Bar-Ilan University, respectively—have placed me in the dock, not only

reading into my prose but, worse still, charging me with a bad case of historical amnesia, sneering, exasperation, alarm, and, of all things, a furrowed brow. Confusing a rhetorical gambit—‘Go figure!’—with a moral position, they suggest that had I only reckoned more forthrightly with the historical process, with the longue durée, perhaps my brow would unfurrow and I would come to see that today’s orange or vacuum cleaner is yesterday’s seder plate or hanukiyah. I do not doubt for a second that the history of Judaism or, for that matter, that of Yiddishkeit more generally, is one of constant change. All the same, is it not fair game to entertain the wee possibility that some changes represent a difference of degree while others represent a difference of kind? To wonder if, perhaps, just perhaps, there is something afoot in contemporary American Jewish life— the impact of the internet, say, or the stunningly large pool of the religiously unaffiliated and culturally uninterested, or the striking number of Jews who, for the very first time in Jewish history, as Leon Wieseltier has pointed out time and again, know no Jewish language, let alone feel a sense of connection to Israel, and have no qualms on that score (see Greenberg and Fingerhut 2007; Rifkin 2006; Wieseltier 2002). Is there not something here that might possibly represent a bona fide watershed moment? It seems to me that this is a question well worth asking, even if it runs the risk of irritating one’s colleagues. Oh, and this: the gentleman from Bar-Ilan seems to have gotten his Zionist knickers in a twist because I wrote that Israel lends itself more easily to description than the United States. It does. Iam not, heaven forfend, suggesting that the Holy Land is not a complex place, or that the sight of babes in Gottex bikinis alongside hasidim with peyot is not literally eye-opening. But no matter how messy or fraught or variegated or colourful or combustible—choose your adjective, please—Israel is a state, a polity, with a social structure all its own. American Jewry is none of those things. Meanwhile, Joachim Schlér’s moving account of Jewish life in contemporary

THE LAST WORD Berlin and Suzanne D. Rutland’s portrait of the Jewish experience in Australia remind us that, in the postmodern era in which we all find ourselves, American Jewry is not necessarily the only template. In Germany, where the weight of the

past hangs heavy, where ‘stumble-stones’ as well as Holocaust monuments pepper the landscape, where the popularity of klezmer music is as much an act of contrition as of affirmation, Jewish life assumes an altogether different valence than it does in the United States. The normalization of its rhythms—something Jews in Israel and America simply take for granted—remains elusive. Australian Jewry, in turn, marches to a more traditional beat. Fidelity to Israel and Zionism remains strong, as do day school attendance and other markers of heightened Jewish consciousness. With the passage of time and the passing of Holocaust survivors who constitute a significant proportion of Australian Jewry, will it, too, eventually go the way of its American kin? The jury is still out on that one. In the end, whether we prefer to wait and see, wring our hands or use them to

applaud, one thing is certain: the challenges and possibilities of postmodern Jewish life will continue to engage, inform, bemuse, and otherwise occupy our thoughts for many years to come. Lehayim!

References GREENBERG, RICHARD, and ERIC FINGERHUT. 2007. ‘Whither the Jews?’ Washington Jewish Week (10 May), I.

RIFKIN, IRA. 2006. ‘Future Talk’. Baltimore Jewish Times (2 June), 65. WIESELTIER, LEON. 2002. ‘Hitler is Dead’. New Republic (27 May), 19.

Contributors Gabrielle A. Berlinger is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University. She received the Raphael Patai Prize in Jewish Folklore and Ethnology for 2007 from the American Folklore Society. She has published in Cultural Survival Voices, Material World, and Museum Anthropology Review. With the support of a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship, she is currently research-

ing longstanding and emergent uses of ritual objects, art, and architecture in Jewish life.

Rosana Kohl Bines is Professor of Brazilian Literature and Literary Theory at the Pontificia Universidade Catdélica do Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio), where she has taught several courses on Jewish topics. She also works as a consultant for the UNESCO Chair in Reading at PUC-Rio. She is part of the International Research Group on ‘The Writings of Violence’, devoted to comparative work in the fields of

literature and the visual arts, examining the art produced in the context of the Holocaust and under Latin American dictatorships. She holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Chicago, and was awarded a Fuerstenberg Fellowship (1998-2001) to write her doctoral dissertation on ‘Post-Shoah Identity between Languages’. In 2001 she received the Best Dissertation Manu-

script award from the Latin American Jewish Studies Association. She is the author of a number of articles on Jewish Brazilian literature, with special emphasis on the work of Samuel Rawet. Her most recent publication is an anthology of Rawet’s writing, Samuel Rawet: ensatos inéditos, 1960-1980 (2008), edited with José Leonardo Tonus.

Simon J. Bronner is Distinguished University Professor of American Studies and Folklore at the Pennsylvania State University, Harrisburg, where he is lead scholar of the campus’s Holocaust and Jewish Studies Center. He is the author and editor of over twenty-five books, including Jewishness: Expression, Identity, and Represent-

ation (2008; volume 1 of the Jewish Cultural Studies series), the Encyclopedia of American Folklife (2006), and Manly Traditions: The Folk Roots of American Masculinities (2005). He edits the Material Worlds series for the University Press of Kentucky, and has published in Jewish cultural studies in the Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, Jewish History, Yiddish, Markers, and Chuliyot: Journal of Yiddish Literature. He leads the Jewish Folklore and Ethnology section of the American

Folklore Society and edits the Jewish Cultural Studies series for the Littman Library of Jewish Civilization. He has received the Mary Turpie Prize from the American Studies Association and the Wayland D. Hand Prize and Peter and Iona Opie Prize from the American Folklore Society for his scholarship and educational leadership.

CONTRIBUTORS Jennifer Cousineau is Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Architecture, Urban Planning and Landscape Architecture at the City College of New York. She has a Ph.D. in Architectural History from the University of California, Berkeley.

She has written on ‘Rabbinic Urbanism in London: Rituals and the Material Culture of the Sabbath’ (in Jewish Social Studies, 2005) and “The Urban Practice of Jewish Space’ (in Louis P. Nelson (ed.), American Sanctuary: Understanding Sacred Spaces, 2006). She was a contributor on domestic topics to the Encyclopedia of Twentieth Century Technology (2004). She was a Visiting Scholar at the

Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies in 2001, and was the recipient of the Newhouse Doctoral Fellowship, Social Sciences and Research Council of Canada Scholarship, and the Spiro Kostof Award at the University of California at Berkeley.

Giovanna P. Del Negro is Associate Professor of English at Texas A&M University. Her books include Looking through My Mother’s Eyes (2003) and The Passeggiata and Popular Culture in an Italian Town (2005), which was awarded the Elli K6ngasMaranda prize by the Women’s Section of the American Folklore Society. She is co-author of Identity and Everyday Life (2005) and edits the Journal of American

Folklore with Harris M. Berger. Her research explores questions of gender, ethnicity, and performance. She is currently doing research on the bawdy humour of Jewish women comics in the 1950s.

Jenna Weissman Joselit holds the Charles E. Smith Chair of Judaic Studies at George Washington University, where she specializes in the history of daily life in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America and its relationship to religion, ethnicity, and material culture. A founding member of NYU’s Working Group on Jews, Media and Religion as well as a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Library of Congress’s John W. Kluge Center in 2007, she is the author, among other works, of The Wonders of America: Reinventing Jewish Culture, 1550-1950 (1994), which re-ceived the National Jewish Book Award in History, and A Perfect Fit: Clothes, Character, and the Promise of America (2002). Currently at work on a book about the Ten Commandments in modern American culture, Joselit is also a long-time columnist for The Forward, where her monthly column is now in its tenth consecutive year, as well as a frequent contributor to The New Republic, TNR Online, and Gastronomica, and a member of the editorial boards of the Littman Library’s Jewish Cultural Studies series and Images: A Journal of Jewish Art and Visual Culture.

David Kraemer is Joseph J. and Dora Abbell Librarian at the Jewish Theological Seminary, where he has also served as Professor of Talmud and Rabbinics for many years. As director of the library, he is at the helm of the most extensive collection

of Judaica—rare and contemporary—in the western hemisphere. His books include The Mind of the Talmud (1990), Responses to Suffering in Classical Rabbinic

CONTRIBUTOR S Literature (1995), and The Meanings of Death in Rabbinic Judaism (2000), among others. His most recent book is Jewish Eating and Identity through the Ages (2007). He has been associated for many years with the National Jewish Center of Learning and Leadership (CLAL), under whose auspices he has lectured extensively. He has also been a teacher at the New York Kollel (Hebrew Union College), the Skirball Institute for Adult Jewish Study (Temple Emanuel), and Meah (Hebrew College of Boston). Michael P. Kramer is Director of the Lechter Institute for Literary Research and the Anne

Shachter-Smith Memorial Project in Literature at Bar-Ilan University, Israel, where he has also served as the director of the Shaindy Rudoff Graduate Program in Creative Writing and as Chair of the Department of English. He is the author

and editor of numerous works on American and Jewish literature, including Modern Jewish Literatures: Boundaries and Intersections (2010), with Sheila Jelen and Scott Lerner; The Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature (2003), with Hana Wirth-Nesher; New Essays on Bellow’s Seize the Day (1998), and Imagining Language in America, From the Revolution to the Civil War (1992). He is also the founder and editor of MAGGID: A Journal of Jewish Literature and co-organizer of Kisufim: The Jerusalem Conference of Jewish Writers. He has received fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania,

the Fulbright Foundation, and the Humanities Institute at the University of Callifornia, Davis, and has been the recipient of an Israel Science Foundation Grant for his current work on assimilation in Jewish American literature and culture.

Marjorie Lehman is Assistant Professor of Talmud and Rabbinics at the Jewish Theological Seminary. Her scholarly interests are focused on the Ein ya’akov, an early sixteenth-century collection of talmudic aggadot. She has also studied Jewish education and women’s roles in festival observance in the Babylonian and Pales-

tinian Talmuds. Her research has appeared in prominent journals in Jewish studies, including Prooftexts, the Jewish Quarterly Review, the Journal of Jewish Education, and Studies in Jewish Civilization. Dr Lehman serves as the co-chair of the board of the Association of Jewish Studies Women’s Caucus and as a member of the editorial board of Teaching Theology and Religion. Prior to her position at JTS, she was Assistant Professor of Talmud and the Director of Rabbinic Civilization at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in Philadelphia. Andrea Lieber holds the Sophia Ava Asbell Chair in Judaic Studies at Dickinson College, Pennsylvania. She is the editor of Heavenly Tablets: Interpretation, Identity and

Tradition in Ancient Judaism (2007) and the author of numerous essays in the field of early Jewish and Christian mysticism in books including Of Scribes and Sages: Early Jewish Interpretation and Transmission of Scripture, edited by Craig A. Evans (2004) and Paradise Now: Essays on Early Jewish and Christian Mysticism,

CONTRIBUTORS edited by April D. DeConick (2006), and in the journals Jewish Quarterly Review,

Religious Studies, Studies in Spirituality, and Journal for the Study of Pseudepigrapha. She is co-chair of the board of the Association for Jewish Studies Women’s Caucus and sits on the Academic Advisory Committee for the Posen Foundation.

Suzanne D. Rutland is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Hebrew, Biblical and Jewish Studies at the University of Sydney, and the main lecturer in its programme on Jewish Civilisation, Thought and Culture. Previously, she founded the Hebrew and Jewish Studies teacher education programme in the Faculty of Education at the University of Sydney, in which she is still involved. She has published widely on Australian Jewish history, edits the Sydney edition of the AJHS Journal, and writes on issues relating to the Holocaust and Israel. Her latest books are The Jews in Australia (2005) and Triumph of the Jewish Spirit: Forty Years of the Jewish Communal Appeal (2007). She received a major government grant, with Professor Sol Encel, to study the political sociology of Australian Jewry. In January 2008 she received the Medal of the Order of Australia

from the Australian government for services to higher Jewish education and interfaith dialogue.

Shalom Sabar is Professor of Jewish Art and Folklore and Academic Director of Revivim—Honors Program for Jewish Studies Teachers at the Hebrew University

of Jerusalem. His fields of teaching and research encompass the visual arts, material culture, and the daily life and rituals of Jewish communities in

Christian Europe and the Islamic East. He is the author of, among other works, Ketubbah: Jewish Marriage Contracts of the Hebrew Union College (1990), which won the National Jewish Book Award; Jerusalem Stone and Spirit (with Dan

Bahat, 1997), which was translated into Chinese; and, recently, The Life Cycle (Hebrew; 2006), which is part of a twenty-volume series, Kehilot yisra’el bamizrah bame’ot ha-19 veha-20, of which he is a co-editor specializing in the Jewish com-

munities in the lands of Islam. He has served as the editor of Rimonim (the only Hebrew periodical of Jewish art), and co-edits Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Folklore.

Joachim Schl6r is Professor of Jewish—Non-Jewish Relations and Director of Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/non-Jewish Relations at the University of Southampton. He is the author of Das Ich der Stadt. Debatten iiber Judentum und Urbanitdt (2005), Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (2005), Tel-Aviv: From Dream to City (1999), and Nights in the Big City: Paris, Berlin, London, 1840-1930 (1998). He is also an editor of Boris Carmi: Photographs from Israel and Deutscher, Jude, Europder im 20. Jahrhundert: Arnold Zweig und das Judentum (2003). He

has received fellowships for Jewish cultural studies from the Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften, Collegium Budapest, and the Institute for German History at Tel Aviv University.

CONTRIBUTOR S Monica Szurmuk is Professor of Literature and Cultural Studies at the Instituto Mora, Mexico. She is the author of Mujeres en viaje: escritos y testimonios (2000); Women

in Argentina: Early Travel Narratives (2001), published in Spanish as Miradas cruzadas: narrativas de viaje de mujeres en la Argentina 1850-1930 (2007); and Memoria y ciudadania (with Ileana Rodriguez, 2008). With Robert McKee Irwin, she co-ordinated the Diccionario de estudios culturales latinoamericanos (2009), which has been published in English by the University Press of Florida. She has received fellowships from the American Association of University Women,

Hadassah Brandeis Institute, and the United States Memorial Holocaust Museum, and she is a member of the National System of Researchers in Mexico.

Joellyn Wallen Zollman is a frequent lecturer in the History Department at San Diego State University, where she teaches modern Jewish history and American Jewish history. She holds a Ph.D. in Jewish history from Brandeis University. Her dissertation, completed in 2002, is a history of American synagogue gift shops, which incorporates two of her areas of specialization, Jewish art and Jewish history. Dr Zollman has worked with the Jewish material culture collections at the Smith-

sonian Institution, the Skirball Museum, and the American Jewish Historical society.

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A see also literature, Argentine bywomen 263-4 Abbot, Patsy 188-9, 197-201 artefacts, Jewish 1, 6-7, 9, 11, Bloom, Emily Haft 16

Abraham (name) and number 7, 287 body, as unit of measurement

five 146-8 see also hamsa; Judaica; III~12

Abuhatzeira, R. Yisra’el (the mezuzahs Borges, Jorge Luis 251, 254

Baba Sali) 153-4 Ashi, Rav 123-5 Brandes, Stanley 199

Adorno, Theodor 217 assimilation 253, 291-2, Brazil 33

Ahad Ha’am 321-2 298-9, 307, 316-23 Jewish immigrants in AidelMaidel (female blogger) andculturalloss 4 218-40

267-8, 271 Australia, Jewish lifein 34, see also literature, Brazilian

Alfie, R. Isaac 146-7 307-15 Brevis, Anna 77

Alliance Israelite Universelle Azerbaijan 20, 21 Bronner, Simon 180-1,

248 Azulai, R. Hayim Joseph David 199-200, 204-5

Amichai, Yehuda 305 (the Hida) 146-7 Bronski, Michael 189,191, 205

Amish, comparison with Brook, Vincent 289

ene a B Bruce, Lenny 205-6 ee a aoe ome Baba Sali, see Abuhatzeira, R. Buber, Martin 236 Scrat pnekeMariode Yisra’el bungalows 17-19 Andrade, 225 a . Bahloul, Joélle 169 Burnett, Dave 313 Annie Hall 32 . , Baker, Cynthia 110,119 Antin, Mary 319

in Argentina 243

entisemitsr 03-06 Bammer, Angelika 219 C Bar Kappara 321 Candido, Antonio 226 in Brazil 233-4 Barth, Belle 188-94 Catskill Mountains 17-20

Barton, Matthew 262 Caucasian Mountains 20, 21

and Jewish home life 26-7 havi set eaiohh cheld in South Africa 309 ayit, contrasted with sukKa oa Michelde 227 in western Europe 302 1OO tnt, A22 Chabad: | .

Antler, Joyce 28, 93 Becher, Max 174 houses, replicas of 770 archiiechire: Belcove-Shalin, Janet 169-70 Eastern Parkway 163, Jewish, see bayit; bungalows; Ben-Amos, Dan 200 171-80 exteriors, Jewish; houses, Ben-Moshe, Danny 314 movement 170-1, 308

Jewish; sukkahs: Berg, Gertrude 28 Chagall, Marc 27

synagogues Berlin, Jewish life in 303-6 Chayyei Sarah (female blogger) replicas of 770 Eastern Berlinger, Gabrielle 14, 31, 33 204-5 Parkway (Lubavitcher Beth Hatefutsot (Museum ofthe Clifford, James 220

Rebbe’shome) 14, 31, 33, Jewish Diaspora) 149 Coates, Tom 260

163, 171-80 Bhabha, Homi 128 Cochin Jewish community Roman 128 Biale, David 302 22-3

Ardener, Shirley 118 Bines, Rosana Kohl 4, 27, 33 Cohen, Debra Nussbaum 258

Argentina 33 blogging 259-60 Cohen, Gerson D. 320-1 immigration to 242-3 by Orthodox Jewish women Cohen, Richard I. 27

asaJewish homeland 241, 29, 34, 257-82 Cohen, ShayeJ.D. 297

246 viewed as threat to marriage comics, Jewish womenas 29,

as the Promised Land 251-3 and fidelity 273 32-3, 188-213

INDE X

computer as religious object F Halevi, Judah 248

7-8 Ferris, Marcie 289 hamsa 2, 06,16, 22, 33

see also blogging: by Orthodox Feuchtwanger, Heinrich 149 before the 1970s 140-9

Jewish women Fiddler on the Roof 25,28 early origins of 141-3 Conservative Women’s League films, see movies inthehome 154-8

75-104 passim Fink, Esther go in Israelisociety 148-60

Cooper, Davina 44. Fink, Mrs Max 81, 83, 92 among Jews in Islamic lands

Cousineau, Jennifer 32 Fishkoff, Sue 167-8, 170-1 143-50

culture: five, number 140,146,147 in synagogues 154-5 Israeli 317-18 Fonrobert, Charlotte 60 hand: Jewish 31 food, traditional Jewish 12-14, of God 141-2

Jewish American 287-92, 78 and magic 142,145—6 316 Forward photographs 291 symbol of, see hamsa

Foucault, Michel 116 Hanina ben Dosa, R. 141 D Freed, Marcus 259 Hanukah 22-4 dancing 22 Freyre, Gilberto 236 elephants as symbols of 100

Del Negro, Giovanna 2,14—-10, and the State of Israel 95

20533 G workshops 85-7

Dencik, Lars 23 Galinski, Heinz 304 hanukiyah 289, 297-8 Diamant, Anita II Gaon, Yehoram 158 see also menorahs diasporaand homeland 3-53 sauchos, Argentinian 249-51 Harrisburg, Pennsylvania 17 dining-rooms, Jewish 17 gematriyah 165 survey of 22 domestic, the 29-34 see also number symbolism hasidim, comparison with

see also home, Jewish; houses, — gendering: Amish 31 Jewish; parks as domestic andthe internet 270 hasidism:

spaces ofrabbinichome 108-9 andthe internet 270-1

Dorson, Richard 199 ofsukkahs 33, 112 see also Chabad; Lubavitch Dundes, Alan 28 Gerchunoff, Alberto 33, 241-56 community sift shops, synagogue 76-104 Hausman, Kressel 270-3 E gift-giving 12 Hayim, R. Joseph 146 Ehrentreu, Dayan 46,54, 69 Gilman, Sander 233 Hayman, Joe 196

Eichler, Yisrael 7-8 Goldberg, Molly 28 hehonamulets 146 Eliade, Mircea 169 Goldbergs, The 32 Heilman, Samuel 7-8

Eneida 224 Goldschmidt, Henry 165,168, heimishe, meaning of 21 eruv: I7I Helene, Queen 119-26 benefit of 46-7; for women Goldstein, R. Andrew 6 Herberg, Will 78-9

59-64, 69 Goodman, Gwen 287 Heschel, Abraham Joshua

buildinganeruv 44 Gordon, R. Albert 90,96, 99 40-7

as domestic space 51 Gordon, Maggi Salgado 245 Hezser, Catherine 115

English context of 45 Green, Mrs Alan 86 Hida, the, see Azulai, R. Hayim

jokes about 47,49 Green, Arthur 168 Joseph David

north-west London 43-74; Greenberg, MarkI. 289 Hirsch, Baron Maurice de

attendance at synagogues Grinspan, Izzy 259 242-3, 251

in 55;objectionsto 44-6, Gruber, Ruth Ellen 302 Holocaust survivors 308-9, 312

65-70 H 108-9

50, 58, 64-8 Guiraldes, Ricardo 246 home, Jewish:

synagogue attendance within rabbinic 113; gendering of Europe, as a Jewish home Habermas, Jiirgen 262 rabbinical study in 115

301-6 halakhah and role of women in talmudic literature 107-8

exteriors, Jewish 17-21 261-2 see also blogging; eruv;

INDE X Europe, as a Jewish home; Jewish Children’s Museum Kolatch, R. Alfred J. 16

sukkahs (Brooklyn) 167 kosher, keeping 14, 22 presentationof 8-9 242 Kraemer, David 31, 34, 303

home life, Jewish, museum Jewish Colonization Association see also kashrut

78-9 107 L

home observance 75-104 Jewish Museum (Berlin) 303 Kramer, Michael P. 34 in post-war religious revival Jewish Museum (New York)

in Reform households 78 Jewish Museum of Belgium language, diasporic 217-40

see also rituals, Jewish 38-9 Leary, James 199

hospitality 11, 21 Jewish space, Europeas 301-6 Lefebvre, Henri 301, 303 houses, Jewish: Jews, redefined as white 201-2, Lehman, Marjorie 31, 33

emotional 3-4 207 Lesser, Jeffrey 233 physical 2-3 jokes: Levi, R.S.Gershon 96 see also bungalows; exteriors, Jewish American princess Levitt, Laura 32

Jewish; home, Jewish; 28-9 Lieber, Andrea _ 16, 29, 34 sukkahs sexual 192-3, 195-200 Lindstrom, Naomi 252

humour: Jones, Lindsay 180 Lispector, Clarice 227-8 Jewish 188-213 Joselit, Jenna Weissman 4, literature:

sexual 191; see also jokes, Q—-I0, 16, 31, 34, 95, 190, Argentine 241-56

sexual 205,316,310, 320 Brazilian 218-40

Joseph and the number five 147 gauchesca 246 Iicons: Judah, Rabbi 109, 122 Israeli 317 onthe sukkah 119-25 Jewish, on search for home

religious meaning of 178-80 Judaica 1-2, 8 24-6

as socially cohesive force 180 demand for 80-1 Jewish American 316-17 see also under architecture: see also artefacts, Jewish Latin American 247

replicas of 770 Eastern Judaism: Yiddish 244-5

Parkway feminization of 93-4 London 5,17, 32, 43-74

identity, Jewish 24,207 kitchen 12-14 London Beth Din 46,72

American Jewish 289-90; in living-room 14-17 Lower East Side Tenement

1950S 188 Jusid, Juan José 246 Museum 8 and domestic space 77 Lubavitch community: immigrants, see under K population worldwide 164-5 Argentina; Australia; Brazil Kadourie, Yitshak 153 settlementin USA 164

India, see Cochin Jewish kashrut 7 as a worldwide movement

community see also kosher, keeping 163, 166

internet, see blogging Kefar Chabad 171-4, 181 see also architecture: replicas

Irish Jewish Museum 9 Keren, Michael 269 of 770 Eastern Parkway;

Israel: Kerman, Danny 158 Chabad

and Australian Jews 312-14 ketubah, ketubot 22,142,144, Lugones, Leopoldo 243

Israeli goods 96-8 158 Luncz, Abraham Moses 140 literature Khazns zyndyl, Dem 206 M

see also under culture; hamsa; Khaimovich, Boris 19, 21

Israel Museum (Jerusalem) 9 Kimche, R. Alan 54, 63, 69 Mabley, Moms 203

Kimmel, Hans 312 MaccabiGames 313

J Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara) =McDanell, Colleen 179-80

Jacobson, Israel 164 9,172,189 Mack, Linda 97

Jazz Singer, The 25 Kishinev pogrom 24 manuals for Jewish living 9-12,

Jewish American princess klezmer festivals 302 16 28-9 Kohler, R. Kaufmann 292,319 Matta, Robertoda 226

INDE X Maven, Fancy Schmancy observance, religious, see home see also eruv Anxiety (female blogger) observance; rituals, Jewish — Sacks, Karen Brodkin 201

257-8 Ochs, Vanessa 6-7, 290, Said, Edward 232

Meikle, Jeffrey 95 295-7, 319 Schatz, Boris 96

290, 296 Schl6r, Joachim 34

menopause, sacralizing the Onkeneira, R. Isaac 146 Schiffman, Lawrence 170-1

menorahs 94-5 P Schneerson, R. Menachem see also hanukiyah Paris 5 Mendel, home as icon

Merquior, José Guilerme 225 parks as domestic spaces 63-4 163-87

Meshulash (artists’ group) 304 party records and Jewish Schneerson, R. Yosef Yitzchak

mezuzahs 1,6, 11, 22, 95-0, 155 comediennes 188-213 164

inacar 296-7 Peck, Jeffrey 303 schools, Jewish, in Australia

onasukkah to9 Peha, R. Yitshak 146 309-II

Mikdash-Shamailov, Liya 21 Pennell, Joseph 26 Schreiber, David 55

Mimouna festival 150 Peretz, Isaac Leib 245 Schwartz, Seth 298 Mintz, Jerome 165 Perlow, R. Yaakov 2:73 Schwarz, Roberto 224

mizrah 11 Pinto, Diana 301-2 Scott, James 128 mobility, upward 201 Poll, Solomon 7 seder 12, 22-4

Moldova, Jewishidentityin 24 Prell, Riv-Ellen 93 seder plates 290, 297-8, 319

Morgan, David 179 Purim 24 Senkman, Leonardo 247

Morocco 6 Sered, Susan 91 Jews from, in Gerchunoff’s Q Shalom Aleichem 241, 245 writings 247-8 quarters, Jewish 19-21 Shammai 116-18

mother, Jewish 25,28 Shandler, Jeffrey 97 see also under women, Jewish R Shaviv, Miriam 258

movies and television shows Rawet, Samuel 27, 33, 218-40 shemirah tablets 145,147

25-6, 28, 32, 245-6 Reform National Federation of Shimon ibn Lavi, R. 142

museums, Jewish 289 Temple Sisterhoods Shuman, Carl 17 Jewish home life in 8-9 75-104 passim sisterhoods and Jewish

see also individual museums Richman, Irwin 17-18 homemaking 75-104

Rickles, Don 206 Sklare, Marshall 75,78 N rituals, Jewish: Sommer, Doris 247 Nachman, Gerald 191 inthehome 22 space:

National Museum of American new 290, 295-7, 318 Islamization of 45 Jewish History 287, 316 see also home observance Jewish, Europeas 301-6

Nesbit, Louis 245 Robbins, Andrea 174 urban Jewish 43-74

New York City 5,8,12,17,18,22 Rosenbaum, Joan 107 see also domestic, the: homes,

Newhouse, Alana 291 Rubin, R. Simcha 66 Jewish; houses, Jewish;

number symbolism: rugs 21 sukkahs

Abraham (name) and the Rutland, Suzanne 16,34 Spector, Shelley 1

number five 146-8 storytelling 12

Joseph and the number five S sukkahs 31

147 Sabar, Shalom 2, 5-6, 9,16, as all-male space 124-7

number 770, mystical 22, 33 architecture of 109,119,

significance of: 165-6 sabbath: 121-3

see also gematriyah observance of 12, 22, 24, 43 distinguished from bayit prohibition on carrying IOQ—I0, 116, 122

O during 43, 48-9, 53-9, exclusion ofwomen 114-16, objects, transformation into 64-8 124,129; and children

Jewish 7 visiting on 61-3 116-20

IN DE X

gendered meaning of 33,112 V negative stereotype of Jewish

made ofrugs 19 Vartashen 21 mother 93-4

table outside 112-14 Verbitsky, Bernardo 246 Orthodox Jewish bloggers in talmudic literature 107-39 Vieira, Luis Gonzaga 223 257-82

within house 117-18 Vieira, Nelson H. 223 portrayed by Gerchunoff

Sussman, Lance 79 Viglucci, Andres S. 194 252-3

Sweden, Jewish community in Vifias, David 246-7 scapegoating of 203

23 violence, anti-Jewish 245 wearing talit 57

symbols, see hamsa; number see also blogging; comics,

symbolism W Jewish women as; homes, Synagogues 3 Waldman, Berta 221 Jewish; houses, Jewish; architecture 80, 82 wandering Jew motif 27, 33, Jewish American princess;

attendance at 16 2210203 ketubah; mother, Jewish;

in Australia 308 Weaver-Zercher, David 30 sisterhoods

post-war building boom Webber, Jonathan 4—5 writers, immigrant, see

79-80 Weingrod, Alex 168, 172-5 Gerchunoff, Alberto; separate seatingin 274 Wenger, Beth 97 Rawet, Samuel sisterhood sift shops in 33, Williams, Pearl 188-9, IOI, y

ee es Yohanan ben Hahorani, R. 108,

suburban 82 Wise, R. Isaac Mayer, 290, 319 Ha

see also under Monica eruv Wise, Miriam Yosef R. Ovadiah Szurmuk, ici263to85rad eee ner De 4, 33 Wise, Patricia

women, Jewish: Z. T benefit of eruv for 46-7, Zaino, Nick 191

talit, women wearing 57 59-64, 69 Zeitlin, Steve 12

telephone, sacralizing of 290, comics 188-213 Zenner, Walter 4

297 excluded from sukkah Zionism:

Tevye 25 114-20, 124, 129 in Australia 312, 314

Torga, Miguel 221 and Jewish home observance as historic home idea 5-6

Tucker, Sophie 208 75-104. Zollman, Joellyn Wallen 29, 33

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