Marshall Sklare Award Lecture December 19, 2010, Association for the Social Scientific Study of Jewry Steven M. Cohen, [email protected], 646-284-1932 Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion and Berman Jewish Policy Archive @ NYU Wagner In memory of Charles S. Liebman, z”l As I’m sure anyone who receives a prestigious award in recognition of their life’s work will experience, such an occasion is a time for reflection, and a myriad of emotions. For me, the first emotion is a profound sense of gratitude to my parents, Max and Toby Cohen, of blessed memory, and also to my wife Marion Lev-Cohen, to my children, Adam Wall and Edeet Cohen, and to other beloved family members and dear friends. Over the years, they all have given me the passion, motivation, and industry to do my part for our people and our profession. My gratitude also extends to our academic community and, in particular, to dozens of co-authors over the years. I checked my CV, and found some 56 collaborators, including seven previous Sklare Awardees. I know they’ll forgive me, and I’m sure you’ll thank me, if I forego a public recitation of all their names. Yet, I’d feel remiss if I failed to at least mention several collaborators to whom I feel especially indebted -- Paul Ritterband, of blessed memory, Paula Hyman, Samuel Heilman, Jack Wertheimer, Ari Kelman, Jack Ukeles, and, of course, my good friend, Arnie Eisen, with whom I had the privilege of writing, The Jew Within. I also wish to lovingly acknowledge four mentors in my life, albeit with all-too-brief expressions of gratitude. All are men, and all were born between 1934 and 1941. The first is the dearest friend of my youth, Fred S. Sherrow. Fred was both an energetic and universally beloved Jewish activist, and a doctoral student in Columbia’s sociology department. During my junior year in 1969, Fred guided me in my first Jewish identity study -- a survey of Columbia and Barnard students that would yield my first 1 published article some five years later. Fred modeled for me the notion that the academic study of Jewish life both serves, and is enriched by, a dedicated commitment to the vitality of the Jewish People. An eclectic Jew, for whom nothing Jewish was foreign, he died in 1971, just after completing his dissertation on religious intermarriage, inspiring my own dissertation on interethnic marriage and friendship in 1974. Next, I thank Leibel Fein. In 1969, I became Leibel’s summer intern, working at MIT on a project on intermarriage, marking the beginning of a life-long mentorship and lasting friendship which I deeply cherish. Among Leibel’s many gifts to me was exemplifying how he combines incisive scholarship with a loving, yet critical, stance to the established Jewish order, one ever in need of repair, as is our world. For Leibel, as for Fred, few things Jewish are foreign; but, for Leibel, not all things Jewish are unequivocally benign. Probably no one has influenced my thinking about how to conceptualize and to measure Jewish continuity and change more than Calvin Goldscheider. In the early 1980s, not only did he befriend and empower me around the time of my first book, American Modernity and Jewish Identity. He also taught me a foundational principle: That Jewish continuity depends upon the extent of intra-group ties, both formal and informal, buttressed by numerous elements of social differentiation that provide what we may call, “the socio-ecology” for Jewish ethnic cohesion. As he and Alan Zuckerman wrote: The strength of the Jewish community reflects the number and intensity of ingroup interactions. … Of primary importance are the patterns of residential clustering, strong occupational and education concentrations, extensive institutional networks, and the absence of internal conflicts. Calvin’s truly imaginative and instructive approach sees Jewish cultural elements, in effect, as epi-phenomena that ride above the cohesive Jewish social ties that undergird them. Intra-group ties and social boundaries are at the core of Jewish vitality and continuity. Jews engage in continuing invention and reinvention of the meaning of Jew, 2 Jewish, Jewishness and Judaism, creating the possibility for ongoing transformation. Accordingly, we social scientists need to continually update and invent measures and modes of observation so that they are attuned to novelty, innovation, and diversity of Jewish expression, as we see beautifully exemplified in the series of Jewish population studies conducted by Jack Ukeles and Ron Miller. As a personal and small example, I’ve come to advocate the inclusion of questions on Jewish friends, Jewish talk, and Shabbat meals as critical to measuring Jewish engagement of younger adults. At the same time as we invent new measures, we need to continue to track what I may call the “legacy measures,” items such as Federation giving and organizational belonging, if only to document both decline and revival, both continuity and transformation. I see the invention of the sociology of Jewish sound, language, and educational tourism by Ari, Sarah and Shaul respectively as refreshing and imaginative responses to new and emerging modalities of Jewish life. Since encountering Calvin in 1982 at Brandeis when Marshall Sklare served as our profession’s dominating presence, Goldscheider has been an ever-present voice speaking in my left ear. That voice reminded me continually of the centrality of measures of ethnic cohesiveness – such matters as in-group marriage and friendship, residential concentration, institutional belonging, and Israel attachment. But, at the same time, starting in the mid-1980s, the ever-present voice speaking in my right ear has been that of Charles S. Liebman, of blessed memory. Charles and I wrote several works together, most notably Two Worlds of Judaism, of which he was, in all ways, the senior author. More than anyone else in my life, Charles has influenced the deepest core of my thinking and feeling about the Jewish enterprise – both how to study it and what to do about it. For these reasons and many more, I am moved to dedicate this talk to his memory, and to do so just about ten years to the day when Charles was honored by the ASSJ with the Marshall Sklare Award in the year 2000. 3 For his part, Charles strongly opposed Calvin’s thinking, arguing that Calvin denies “an essential Judaism … [or] what Jews ought to value and believe and practice … what they affirm as the beliefs and values and practices of the Jewish tradition.” As Charles wrote, Judaism (the sets of values, beliefs, rituals, ceremonies and behavior patterns to which Jews subscribe) will continue to evolve over time … But there is a point where Judaism or Jewishness might so transform itself that it can no longer be called Judaism. Although seen as a pure Judaic essentialist, I viewed Charles more as an “instrumental essentialist,” rather than an “essential essentialist.” He had good, pragmatic reasons for saying, as he often did, “Judaism is not anything you make of it.” He believed that the social construction of authenticity demanded a slow pace of change, and a restraint on Jewish cultural innovation and diversity. In his view, only if Jews believed in the mythic notions of Judaic constancy and continuity, over both time and space, would they feel a moral compulsion to act in distinctively Jewish ways, together with fellow Jews. Change and innovation, especially if they are so recognized as such, undermine the legitimacy and moral integrity of the Jewish values, beliefs and practices that Jews attribute to both their ancestors and their contemporary Jews around the world. In this, Charles and I differed. For me it’s an open question as to whether the image of a relatively continuous tradition and widely shared culture is conducive to Jews maintaining their engagement with Judaism and Jewish life. The appearance of continuity and uniformity can be helpful, but not essential, to maintaining Jewish engagement. In that spirit, over the years, I’ve celebrated the many refreshing and invigorating aspects of recent Jewish innovation, developments that I’m sure Charles would have celebrated as well. I’m thinking, for example, of independent minyanim, new cultural 4 endeavors, social justice initiatives, self-directed Jewish learning, and the vast Jewish life on the Internet. In fact, since 2005, largely with Ari Y. Kelman -- but also with Shaul, Sarah, Jack and Sylvia and others -- I’ve been deeply engaged in studying these innovative phenomena. I certainly sought to explore and explicate them using all the social scientific tools of observation and analysis. But, truth be told, my choice of research topics was motivated by an advocacy agenda, in that I sought to contribute to the recognition of these endeavors by philanthropists and policy makers. Calvin and Charles, each for his own reasons, arrived at very different fundamental perspectives and prognostications on the Jewish present and future. Calvin, for his part, might be labeled an “upbeat transformationist,” seeing the ability of Jews to redefine Judaism and Jewishness as the guarantor of a bright Jewish future. In contrast, we may label Charles an “anxious traditionalist,” fearing that the rapid abandonment and undermining of traditional Jewish values and practices abetted by the proliferation of diversity in Jewish life, would run counter to Jewish vitality and continuity in the long term. Drawing upon these two perspectives simultaneously, I now have come to see myself as an, “anxious transformationist.” Thus, with Calvin, I see ethnic cohesion and measures of in-group ties and social differentiation as critical and fundamental to maintaining and measuring Jewish vitality and continuity. And, with Calvin, I sociologically welcome – although I may sometimes ideologically reject – most forms of Jewish innovation we have seen as contributing to the vital transformation of Jewish life, reshaping Judaism in line with the larger society and culture.