Foregrounding the Family: An Ethnography of How Families Make Decisions About Hebrew School
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Families play a critical role in shaping children’s orientation to Judaism, and decisions about Jewish education are made within the family unit. However, in most studies of Jewish education, individual students or parents serve as the unit of analysis, with families being omitted or relegated to the background. In this paper, I foreground the family through an ethnographic study to illustrate the complex negotiations that occur between family members about involvement in Hebrew school post b’nai mitzvah. By illustrating the dynamic interplay between family members, I show the internal and external struggles that family members experience as they negotiate their Jewish commitments, and the potential unintended consequences that might arise from such negotiations. I describe how negotiations about Jewish education can have potentially deleterious effects on family members’ relationships, and how parenting philosophy and parenting style may shape negotiations about Hebrew school. My central goal in this paper is to advance a methodological argument about the value of taking a family systems perspective and using an ethnographic approach to understand families’ decisions about Hebrew school and Jewish commitments more broadly.
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Traditional Judaism: The Conceptualization of Jewishness in the Lives of American Jewish Post-Boomers
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Post-boomer American Jews pose many challenges to established frameworks for understanding the organization of the American Jewish community. In an analysis of 58 in-depth interviews with post-boomer American Jews, we found a preference for people who described themselves as not religious, and we found a near-total absence of the language of ethnicity. Instead, interviewees volunteered tradition as a replacement for both and as part of a rationale for the elements of Jewish life that compelled them to participate. Rejecting the voluntarism of much baby-boomer religion and the established frameworks of religion and ethnicity, post-boomers’ characterizations of their own Judaisms point to the ways in which the social science of American Jews needs to develop a finer, more diverse set of tools for understanding American Jews and the Judaisms they practice.
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The Social Self: Toward the Study of Jewish Lives in the Twenty-first Century
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This article reviews the conceptual frameworks that have underscored the social scientific study of Jewish identity and experiments with a methodological and analytical approach that aims to respond to contemporary social trends. Beginning with a historical account of the concept’s emergence in the study of American Jews, we consider the ways in which scholars and their research subjects have co-constructed the concept of Jewish identity. Based on our analysis of qualitative interviews with fifty-eight post-boomer American Jews, we propose that Jewish identity be understood primarily as a relational phenomenon that is constructed through social ties, rather than as a product of individual meaning-making or assessments of social impact. We set our exploratory findings in conversation with some of the most influential and widely cited qualitative studies of Jewish identity in the past to examine the implications of that conceptual shift for scholars and scholarship on Jewish identity in the 21st century.
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