On the Origins and Persistence of the Jewish Identity Industry in Jewish Education

Journal of Jewish Education ISSN: 1524-4113 (Print) 1554-611X (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ujje20 On the Origins and Persistence of the Jewish Identity Industry in Jewish Education Jonathan Krasner To cite this article: Jonathan Krasner (2016) On the Origins and Persistence of the Jewish Identity Industry in Jewish Education, Journal of Jewish Education, 82:2, 132-158, DOI: 10.1080/15244113.2016.1168195 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/15244113.2016.1168195 Published online: 16 May 2016. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 360 View related articles View Crossmark data Citing articles: 5 View citing articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=ujje20 JOURNAL OF JEWISH EDUCATION 2016, VOL. 82, NO. 2, 132–158 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15244113.2016.1168195 On the Origins and Persistence of the Jewish Identity Industry in Jewish Education Jonathan Krasner ABSTRACT “Jewish identity,” which emerged as an analytical term in the 1950s, appealed to a set of needs that American Jews felt in the postwar period, which accounted for its popularity. Identity was the quintessential conundrum for a community on the threshold of acceptance. The work of Kurt Lewin, Erik Erikson, Will Herberg, Marshall Sklare, and others helped to shape the communal conversation. The reframing of that discourse from one that was essentially psychosocial and therapeutic to one that was sociological and survivalist reflected the community’s growing sense of physical and socioeconomic security in the 1950s and early 1960s. The American Jewish Committee and its Division of Scientific Research offers an enlightening case study of this phenomenon. Jewish educators seized on identity formation, making it the raison d’être of their endeavor. But the ascent of identity discourse also introduced a number of challenges for the Jewish educator—conceptual, methodological, political, and even existential. Modern historian Jacob L. Talmon observed that “the links holding Jews together are—to use the words of Edmund Burke—as invisible as the air and as strong as the heaviest chains, and the Jewish ingredient to be as imper- ceptible to the senses, yet as effective in result” (Talmon, 1965, p. 69). The difficulties inherent in Jewish identity discourse are encapsulated in this poetic description. Yet, by and large, communal professionals, social scientists, and educators have approached it with little prudence or humility. The New York Times Magazine recently dubbed 2015 as “the year we [Americans] obsessed over identity.” But in American Jewish establishment circles, identity has long ago become a fetish, a preoccupation for Jewish social scientists, and the “holy grail” of Jewish education. The discourse on Jewish identity and education is sufficiently ingrained and ubiquitous in American Jewish culture that it has an almost timeless quality to it. But like most other buzzwords and phrases it has a history that reveals much about its utility. Focusing on the years between 1940 and 1980, when the contemporary pattern was set, my purpose here is to historicize the Jonathan Krasner is the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Associate Professor of Jewish education research at Brandeis University, and a coauthor of a forthcoming book on Hebrew at American Jewish residential summer camps. E-mail: [email protected] © 2016 Network for Research in Jewish Education JOURNAL OF JEWISH EDUCATION 133 term Jewish identity, to point out that it has a particular genesis and that the discourse on identity serves a particular purpose. It appeals to a set of needs that American Jews have felt, at least since the 1950s, which accounts for its popularity. Jewish educators have seized on identity formation, making it the raison d’être of their endeavor. But the ascent of identity discourse has also introduced a number of challenges for the Jewish educator, conceptual, methodological, political and even existential. The origins of identity discourse The conventional wisdom in the academy is that the emergence of identity discourse was an outgrowth of the ethnic pride movements of the late 1960s and 1970s. Some have connected the emergence of Jewish identity concerns with the Six-Day War or the ethnic pride movements of the late- 1960s and 1970s. While these developments promoted increased public interest in heritage and a wave of cultural reclamation and refitting, the genesis of Jewish identity discourse is rightly located a generation earlier, in the anxiety-laden conversations about Jewish self esteem during the 1940s, which gave way to the creeping fears of assimilation in the mid-late 1950s and early-1960s. Arguably, no scholar did more to bring identity into the consciousness of the American public than Erik Erikson. His book Childhood and Society, which was published in 1950, bequeathed to us the identity crisis. Erikson defined identity as “a subjective sense of continuous existence and coherent sameness” (Oppenheim, 1984,p.219).InErikson’sview,the individual negotiated a series of psychological struggles throughout the life course. Each of these developmental stages involved coming to terms with an existential question that contributed in a fundamental way to personality development. Erikson recognized that identity had a psychosocial component that involved an appreciation of one’srelationshiptoalargergrouporgroups and the internalization of the group’s culture, values, and philosophical outlook. But his work focused on the individual rather than social dynamics.Thus,itwaslefttootherstodevelophisinsightsinthe realm of social psychology. The adoption was rapid. Historian Philip Gleason observed that among the earliest writers to embrace the discourse of identity was Will Herberg, in his 1955 study of Americanization and religious group retention, Protestant-Catholic-Jew.Herberg’s classic inves- tigation of America’s “triple melting pot” appropriated and repurposed identity as a sociological term of art. “Identity and identification are, in a sense, what the book is all about” (Gleason, 1983,p.912).InHerberg’s view, the process of white ethnic assimilation involved the dissipation of ethnic identity. In its stead the second and third generations came to 134 J. KRASNER identify with one of America’s Judeo-Christian creeds. Religion, Herberg argued, was an acceptable way of retaining group distinctiveness. Herberg’s attraction to Erikson’s conception of identity is notable given the role that Herberg’s volume played in “affirm[ing] the arrival of Tri-Faith America” (Schultz, 2011, p. 85). Indeed, he implied that religious identification was an answer to postwar anomie. David Dalin asserted that Protestant- Catholic-Jew “served as a kind of ‘scientific legitimation of the arrival of American Jews as partners on the national religious scene, bolstering Jewish self-respect and altering for better the perceptions of American Jews held by their non-Jewish neighbors” (Shapiro, 2003, p. 271; Dalin, 1988). Dalin’s characterization of the Herberg volume intimates why Erikson’s psychosocial approach to identity development was appealing to a postwar Jewish community nursing the scars of anti-Semitism and preoccupied with its integra- tion into American society. Herberg was acutely concerned with what he characterized as “the perennial problem of belonging and self-identification.” In particular, drawing upon sociologist Ruby Jo Kennedy’sstudiesofethnicand religious group endogamy and historian Marcus Hansen’s “principle of third generation interest,” he posited a metamorphosis in self-concept and sense of group belongingness among the descendants of European immigrants, the melting away of national characteristics and the persistence in the third and fourth generations of religious group cohesion. “They were Americans,” Herberg wrote of the third generation, “but what kind of Americans?” Borrowing a line from immigration historian Oscar Handlin’s1954volume,The American People in the Twentieth Century, Herberg asserted that the grandchildren of the immigrants clung to group distinctiveness, “a sense of identity that would explain why they were different from ‘One Man’sfamily’” (Herberg, 1955, pp. 30–31). But whereas Handlin used the term identity in passing, Herberg fashioned it into a central descriptive and analytical frame (Gleason, 1983,p.912).“Not to be a Catholic, a Protestant or a Jew is today, for increasing numbers of people, not to be anything, not to have a name,” he wrote, with a bow to David Riesman. “To have a name and an identity, one must belong somewhere; and more and more, one ‘belongs’ in America by belonging to a religious community, which tells one what he is” (Herberg, 1955,p.40). At first glance, American Jews should have found Erikson’s autobiography compelling. Erikson grew up feeling like a misfit and drew on his outsider- looking-in sensibility when formulating his conception of ego identity. A Jewish-born émigré to the United States whose concern about an ascendant German Reich compelled him to flee Vienna, in 1934, Erikson, (né Homberger) changed his surname in a declaration of autonomy and a break with his European past. Yet, as Stephen Whitfield explained, Erikson JOURNAL OF JEWISH EDUCATION 135 was more intent on transcending the boundaries of Jewishness than reifying and celebrating them. “No one seemed less interested (or more ambivalent about [his Jewishness]) than the subject himself” (Whitfield, 2002, p.

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