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And I Will Dwell in Their
Midst: Orthodox Jews in Suburbia Two social historians, Etan Diamond and Hasia Diner, have written very good books that highlight the role of sacred space in the Jewish identity of North American Jews. In focusing on the nostalgic role of New York's Lower East Side in the sacred memory of America's Jews, Hasia Diner seeks to understand the development of that memory. Etan Diamond, by contrast, analyzes a contemporary suburban Orthodox community; he is intrigued by the very phenomenon of what might have been assumed an oxymoron. By the middle of the 20th century, Diner points out, the Jewish population of the Lower East Side was on the decline. It was at this very moment, however, that the area came to be viewed as the cradle of Jewish life and history in America. As portrayed in literature and lore after World War II, it was "a place of beginnings, of engaged senses, of passionate ideologies, and of life lived to its fullest." At the turn of the 20th century, the area had the largest Jewish population of any neighborhood in the United States. As Diner shows through an impressive survey of literature, no other Jewish neighborhoods took on the aura and symbolic meaning of the Lower East Side. In the collective memory of American Jews, the Lower East Side has "become sacred in the sense that it is re-enacted through ritual, visited as pilgrimage, and invoked as a shorthand way of encapsulating an entire trajectory of Jewish history." The Lower East Side is not simply a neighborhood that was densely populated with Jews. It has achieved the status of "sacred," a term that, as like its Hebrew version, kadosh, means "set apart" - that is, special, not ordinary. The process of creating the sacred character of the Lower East Side began with the large-scale exodus of economically and socially mobile Jews into America's cities and suburbs. During the 1950s, social critics, who were disproportionately Jewish, viewed suburbia with disdain. In contrast to the meaningless, crass, vulgar, cultureless life of suburbia, the Lower East Side nostalgically became the model Jewish gemeinschaft. By the early 1960s, with the rise in ethnic consciousness and the attempt to return to "roots," American Jews could look for roots only in The Lower East Side; Eastern European Jewish life had been obliterated in the Holocaust. Etan Diamond assumed suburbia would not be conducive to the development of an Orthodox Jewish lifestyle - if for no other reason then suburbia represents modernity and Orthodoxy represents tradition. And yet, there did develop in the suburban community of Toronto that he studied, as well as in other suburban communities across North America, vibrant Orthodox Jewish centers. How this developed is trenchantly analyzed and portrayed in Diamond's model social history. The key to the success of these Orthodox communities is the combination of the socio-economic affluence of their constituents as well as their religious commitments, which require them to live within a single neighborhood. Orthodox Jews who were sufficiently modern as to have achieved relatively high educational and economic status and who internalized modern conceptions of aesthetics and social organization pioneered the suburbs and built small communities that, once there were communal foundations, attracted larger numbers of Orthodox Jews. There is an irony in the fact that, as Diamond indicates, the new Orthodox communities, which were developed by Modern Orthodox Jews and reflected Modern Orthodox norms and values, are now abandoning many of those norms and are becoming much more traditionally Orthodox. On at least one front, Diamond's work stands in sharp contrast to that of Diner's: suburban Orthodox sacred space is real and growing while Diner's Lower East Side is waning. Those who are aware of the interplay between identity and identification must question the viability of "symbolic identity" - to use another notion developed by Herbert Gans - of so many American Jews. My own study of Jewish baby boomers indicates declining Jewish identification even while the overwhelming majority acknowledges that being Jewish is important. The importance of the Jewish baby boomer's attaching to the Jewishness of their neighborhood is one aspect of this phenomenon. The data indicate that only a minority of about 13 percent of the baby boomers considers the Jewishness of the neighborhood as very important. More than three times as many Orthodox as Conservative and almost three times as many Conservative as Reform baby boomers consider the Jewishness of their neighborhood to be very important. My work reveals patterns similar to those cited by Arnold Eisen in the November 2000 issue of Sh'ma. America's Jews are very American in their cultural patterns and are increasingly "bowling alone" (if they are "bowling" at all). The declining Jewish identification, of which declining sacred space is but one manifestation, leaves me somewhat less sanguine than Eisen. Chaim I. Waxman is Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Rutgers University. His latest book, Jewish Baby Boomers: A Communal Approach, was just published by State University of New York Press. (c)2004 Sh'ma. All rights reserved. The information contained in this article may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of Sh'ma.
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