Jewish Cultural Studies

Simon J. Bronner

• Publisher: Wayne State University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780814338766
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Studi sull'ebraismo

Jewish Cultural Studies charts the contours and boundaries of Jewish cultural studies and the issues of Jewish culture that make it so intriguing—and necessary—not only for Jews but also for students of identity, ethnicity, and diversity generally. In addition to framing the distinguishing features of Jewish culture and the ways it has been studied, and often misrepresented and maligned, Simon J. Bronner presents several case studies using ethnography, folkloristic interpretation, and rhetorical analysis. Bronner, building on many years of global cultural exploration, locates patterns, processes, frames, and themes of events and actions identified as Jewish to discern what makes them appear Jewish and why. Jewish Cultural Studies is divided into three parts. Part 1 deals with the conceptualization of how Jews in complex, heterogenous societies identify themselves as a cultural group to non-Jews and vice versa—such as how the Jewish home is socially and materially constructed. Part 2 delves into ritualization as a strategic Jewish practice for perpetuating peoplehood and the values that it suggests—for example, the rising popularity of naming ceremonies for newborn girls, simhat bat or zeved habat, in the twenty-first century. Part 3 explores narration, including the global transformation of Jewish joking in online settings and the role of Jews in American political culture. Bronner reflects that a reason to separate Jewish cultural studies from the fields of Jewish studies and cultural studies is the distinctiveness of Jewish culture among other ethnic experiences. As a diasporic group with religious ties and varying local customs, Jews present difficulties of categorization. He encourages a multiperspectival approach that considers the Jewish double consciousness as being aware of both insider and outsider perspectives, participation in ancient tradition and recent modernization, and the great variety and stigmatization of Jewish experience and cultural expression. Students and scholars in Jewish studies, cultural studies, ethnic-religious studies, folklore, sociology, psychology, and ethnology are the intended audience for this book.

I

Conceptualization

1

Framing Jewish Culture

Jews’ awareness of a history of non-Jewish differentiation, and indeed discrimination, has affected a tendency to view identity as a binary of being either Jewish or non-Jewish. This perspective also presumes a total identity rather than the kind of behavior that could be called Jewish in selected situations or settings in response to the audience and the desire by participants to present themselves in a certain way, one of which might be Jewish. Sociologist Erving Goffman (1974) is often given credit for the view of identities being selected for presentation according to the context of such situations or settings; he referred to it as frame analysis. The reference to frames borrows from the concept of play frames introduced by psychological anthropologist Gregory Bateson (1955) to describe the construction of situations that support expectations of or allowances for stylized behavior and communication that are different from those outside the often intangible social frames. The frames imply a psychological shift and often a place to air or resolve problems, because the use of play invokes a liminal boundary between conscious and unconscious, fantasy and reality, and past and present (Bronner 2010b). Goffman expanded the idea of social frames from those in which participants invoked the idea of play to give license to often contentious communication, to ritualistic and work contexts. Although Goffman meant this view to entail people generally, the question subsequently arose about how participants with ties to ethnic and religious groups negotiate the myriad situations of modern life differently.

Such groups often face another boundary between the conscious and unconscious that sociologist W. E. B. DuBois (1903) called double consciousness. DuBois noted that, as a consequence of racial difference, African Americans distinctively identify as a group not only as one affiliates socially with other individuals but also by taking into account how outsiders view the group. Although applied to Jewish identity by later scholars, the idea of double consciousness is complicated by the vagueness of Jews’ racialization, consideration of the differentiation of Jews to one another, and the ensuing problem of presenting or hiding a Jewish face to outsiders in light of the wide range of behaviors falling under the umbrella of “being Jewish” (see B. Kaplan 2012; Thomas 2020). The analysis of shifting strategies taken by Jews and non-Jews in relation to one another takes a different turn from a prevalent scholarly approach that presumes a continuous Jewish history in which Jews live out an inheritance from, and indeed are chained to, the past, usually defined in the biblical era. The view of shifting strategies involves recognition of Jewish agency and the negotiation of identities through processes of boundary maintenance, public presentation of self, and representation of cultural distinction through ritual enactments and customary practices.

The term framing refers to this agency, which is often responding to the situation or context in which Jews find themselves or where others do it for them. Instead of generalizing the perception of non-Jews and strata of Jews, frame analysts are careful to identify the outlooks of participants with different affiliations within various cultures (Bateson 1956; Bronner 2010b, 2011b; Erving Goffman 1974; Mechling 1983, 11–30). As with the selection of a frame around a painting representing a border that complements a symbolic image, in my fieldwork I found that Jews in various settings make decisions about where and how the picture of themselves will be displayed, and in so doing create a message about what is inside and outside the frame. The framing is material in the sense that images and their messages are contained in outward signs, such as dress, food, and customs, and set the group apart from others, like the edges of the picture. It is also social because the framing process of selecting appropriate behavior for a situation invites others to engage one another, whether informally or in organizations, to define their Jewishness as a form of communication.

To introduce the perspectives on framing Jewish culture, I offer examples that epitomize this turn toward Jewish agency in identity formation and then discuss the terms of framing, representation, and boundaries in more detail.

Frames

In cultural analysis frames more often refer to communicative strategies of organizing experience than to physical enclosures. Goffman underscored the often unspoken negotiation of socially constructed frames by participants in a cultural “situation” when he wrote, “I assume that definitions of a situation are built up in accordance with principles of organization which govern events—at least social ones—and our subjective involvement in them” (Erving Goffman 1974, 10–11). Although credited with promoting frame analysis, undoubtedly influenced by his experience in a family of Ukrainian Jews migrating to Canada in the late nineteenth century, he did not analyze many Jewish situations for his examples of frame analysis (Burns 1992, 8; Cuddihy 1974, 68; Fernandez 2003, 206–7; Erving Goffman 1963, 60, 114). Nonetheless, according to those who knew Goffman, he became interested in the problem of socially constructed frames through issues of Jewish identity and his negotiation of social interactions far from his Manitoba home. For instance, classmate Saul Mendlovitz, who shared a Jewish background with Goffman, remarked of their graduate school experience together at the University of Chicago, “Erving was a Jew, acting like a Canadian, acting like a Britisher. . . . He felt that he was Jewish yet didn’t want to be Jewish. He wanted to be something else. He really wanted to be an English gentleman [in line with] the picture of him that he had in his head” (Shalin 2009). A central problem in Goffman’s paradigm-changing approaches to social interaction was one of identity that could be appropriated and related through expressive acts of gesture and talk in selected settings.

Goffman never wrote about his childhood, but he was quoted as asserting that “being a Jew and a Russian Jew at that, explained a lot about me,” which biographer Ronald Fernandez took to mean that “he was a perennial outsider, caught between his ancestry and the prejudices of the larger society” (Fernandez 2003, 206–7). Taking the analytical role of an observer looking in on someone else’s culture, Goffman sought to be an insider looking out, and he developed theatrical metaphors for cultural behavior—stages and performances—to describe variable social roles, much as touring actors adapt to different physical settings and audiences. Mendlovitz indicates that Goffman “was very much into that observational stuff very early on,” based on his concern for his fit as a Jew and a Canadian with different social groups on campus. Mendlovitz, who also had a self-impression of himself as an outsider in Chicago, recalls that as Jews, “Erving and I used to go to [ethnically mixed] parties and agree that we would exchange [thoughts on] what we had seen. He especially was interested in what we had seen and then he would take copious notes on that. . . . And we would then go over very carefully what the girl said to him, who was going off into another room, what was the content, how come there were no paintings on the wall, but it was a full range of ethnography and that kind of stuff” (Shalin 2009). In these settings, often populated by strangers, Goffman noticed that a standard part of dialogue would be the extraction of information such as birthplace, occupation, and ethnicity between individuals to figure out another person’s identity and categorize what to expect socially from that person. Goffman was apparently concerned with what the label “Jew” meant to others and how that identity matched his own self-awareness. Even though Goffman was self-conscious about his Jewish background as a basis for frame analysis, as a professor he encouraged ethnographers, including his Jewish students, to avoid studying their own families or cultural groups so as to maintain an objective distance from the observed scenes.1

One can read a concern for the kinds of interaction between individuals who have a self-awareness of ethnic difference in Goffman’s reference to “stereotype” in his groundbreaking study, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life: “If unacquainted with the individual, observers can glean clues from his conduct and appearance which allow them to apply their previous experience with individuals roughly similar to the one before them or, more important, to apply untested stereotypes to him. They can also assume from past experience that only individuals of a particular kind are likely to be found in a given social setting” (Erving Goffman 1959, 1). Before Goffman applied the terminology of the frame, he used the looser terminology of “situation” to refer to a recognizable context—at least recognizable by participants—that drives the distinctive forms of expression and impression that people convey to one another. Goffman was interested in the attempts of individuals in modern everyday life to manage the many situations they encounter in heterogeneous society, often through symbolic communication in talk and action, to advance their own interests. A proposition Goffman advanced that drew consideration in scholarly circles was the idea that in these situations boundaries and connections were established through symbolic communication often embedded in artistic performances, including the use of proverbs, slang, and body language.

Goffman’s microsociological approach attracted wide notice because of the implication that participants have agency in the formation of their social life rather than blindly following precedents of traditions or repeating fixed texts of lore in their expressive talk (Scheff 2006). He outlined an ethnographic goal of analyzing through observation whether the expressive and often ethnically inflected communication that occurs in a situation is dictated by the setting, often outside the awareness of participants, or is strategically guided by one or more figures in the frame. Setting up a frame socially is an attempt by interacting participants to gain social order by emphasizing connections among themselves and by moving potential conflicts to the margins or edges of the frame. Goffman declared that this constant negotiation of different social settings is a function of modern everyday life in which identities are open to alteration in response to conditions of high mobility, social diversity, and extreme individualism. He conceptualized modern society as one in which people are strangers to one another and consequently create social frames constantly to establish familiarity and construct an identity appropriate to the situation (see Kim 2002; Packard 1972; Sennett 1977). Identities are not shaped by family line or locality alone, therefore, but are flexible and overlapping. Modernity offers individuals choices for who they want to be or how they appear to other strangers, but with those choices comes the often difficult cultural work of formulating and managing their identities in various social relations on a daily basis. Forced into this role of presenting themselves and taking on the risk of rejection, individuals become actors to one another and learn from culture the dimensions of acts they can ply variously to communicate and impress others. To this sociological premise, other scholars into the twenty-first century have added historical and psychological inquiries into the experiences and drives that shape socially framed behavior, particularly in Jewish contexts where issues of stereotype, migration, boundary, and difference abound (Boustan et al. 2011; J. Boyarin and Boyarin 1997; Bronner 2012, 272–96; Bush 2011, 57–67; Heilman 2006; Prell 1989; Sklare 1993).

Some scholars prefer the terms scenes or stages to frames so as to emphasize the performative, presentational, and emergent nature of socially contextualized expressions in modern everyday life, but I maintain that those theatrical terms do not fully connote the repetitive patterns of cultural impressions that arise from daily and ceremonial encounters. For many visual ethnographers, the frame draws on the documentary operations of framing, centering, and focusing in photography and the interpretation provided by sequentially arranging images in a gallery or exhibition (Bateson 1956, 175–76; Bateson 2000, 186; Bateson and Mead 1942; Mechling 2004, 2009). In this view, the observer looks through a lens and identifies boundaries that will not be apparent to the subjects. The observer as analyst is able to variously center or arrange different activities in the shot as symbolically related. The analytical act of framing scenes and arranging them in a sequence of communicative acts captures a narrative and action that have bearing on the perception of the event from the perspective of the participants and assorted viewers. Consequently, frames refer to the ways that insiders and outsiders comprehend activity as a deep cognitive structure in addition to viewing and strategizing what occurs behaviorally. The use of a frame does not imply a singleness of mind or society among participants, because, as a culturally derived construct based on precedent that has been adapted to new situations, the elastic social frame is open to negotiation and contention by participants (R. D. Abrahams 2005; Bronner 2010b; Fine 1983; Mechling 1980; Raspa 1991; Sherzer 1993).

Addressing the theme of framing Jewish culture, folklorist Steve Siporin (2014) offers a perspective on the mediation of ethnic identities in a cultural frame in his study of Pitigliano, Italy, known in the region as Little Jerusalem. Siporin finds this moniker significant because Pitigliano not only had a large Jewish population historically but also supposedly possessed an interreligious harmony. He describes a contemporary situation in which town leaders celebrate local Jewish experience toward the development of tourism around Jewish sites, although the town is almost completely devoid of Jews. Among the settings for social interaction of tourists with townspeople is the Ghetto Wine Bar and Caffè. Siporin notes that American tourists consider the use of ghetto in bad taste because of its allusion to a history of forced exclusion, but for many locals the shop’s name and setting represent an occasion to recount narratives about the rescue of Jews during World War II and to promote good relations between Jews and non-Jews. Siporin uses the idea that tourists feel compelled to experience Pitigliano firsthand, even if the historical representations are inaccurate, as a sign of deeper messages at work: consuming Jewish foods to gain a sense of authenticity, listening to stories about the town’s Jews to confirm the townspeople’s affinity for Jews, photographing themselves against staged Jewish backdrops as theater, and participating in festivities that relate in this setting a subtext about post-Holocaust Italian identity. Siporin asserts that “from an early time the Jews of Italy brought the host (Italian) culture into their own Jewish frame to a degree probably unsurpassed elsewhere in western Europe” (Siporin 2014, 254–55). This observation leads Siporin to ask, “To what extent might non-Jewish Italians today be incorporating Jewish culture into their understanding of Italian-ness?” (255). His answer is that Italians have promoted a Jewish cultural revival as frames in which narratives and the nostalgic behavior they enact can salvage Italian identity.

Ethnographer Amy K. Milligan (2014) studies a frame occupied by Jews in an American small-town setting. All the participants identified as Jews, ranging from Conservative to ultra-Orthodox, but they came together in the single synagogue. They negotiated the kinds of practices that can bind them together not just spatially, in a physical building, but also socially into a single cultural frame. The congregants were forced to reconcile different levels of observance among them, and in so doing danced around the very definition of Orthodoxy and its connection to historic Jewish tradition. Part of that negotiation in this particular context was the creative adoption of some practices, such as using head coverings, which connected the women in the congregation as the bedrock of the synagogue and also aligned them with the head coverings worn as a sign of pietism by the “plain groups” of Amish and Mennonites in the area. Hair covering more so than other familiar markers of Jewish pietism materialized their joined identity but also allowed for variability, from using a snood at the liberal end to a sheitel (Yiddish: a wig or half-wig worn by some Orthodox married women to comply with the halachic requirement of modesty to cover their hair; see Goldberger and Steinmetz 2014). on the more conservative side. Hair covering by the women in the congregation situated their Orthodoxy and empowered the women as taking responsibility in the synagogue for the continuity of the group and its maintenance of traditions.

In these and other pathbreaking studies, scholars frequently refer to the cognition of the frame in terms of action (or act) and interaction. Using the frame as a key to the consciousness of what is reality and fantasy, everyday and ceremonial, and play and work, ethnographic observers and historical chroniclers focus their analytic lenses on the way that ordinary activities—such as handing, lighting, sitting, and standing—become culturally framed as significant symbols (the kind of symbols that elicit responses in the form of gestures and ideas from others) with props, names, or narratives brought into the situation to support different meanings held by organizers and participants (see Blumer 2004; Duncan 2002, 92–106; Mead 1967, 61–81; Musolf 2003, 72–93). A historical example that uses ethnographic principles of frame analysis is Marcin Wodziński’s “The Question of Hasidic Sectarianism” (2014). Besides noting the widespread classificatory act by non-Hasidim of referring to the Hasidim as a “sect,” which differentiated the Hasidim from Judaism in an attempt to curtail their influence in Polish civic affairs, Wodziński analyzed the significant symbolism in a ceremonial frame of the mourning shiva enacted by many Jewish parents when their children left home to join Hasidic courts. The metamessage of these staged funerary events was that taking up Hasidism amounted to a conversion to a non-Jewish religion and therefore Hasidism was not part of Judaism. Of significance in Wodziński’s historical study is his innovative use of court records, diaries, and narratives to provide insights into not only the sequence of events but also the frames of social interaction that changed over time.

Wodziński places the loaded terms of sect and cult in the historical context of the relation of Jews to non-Jews in Polish public policy and even the attempt to criminalize Hasidic religious practice. In analytical terminology, the frame and context may appear similar. In his original formulation of the play frame, Bateson (1955) characterizes the frame as a perception of a setting in which interaction occurs from a context, or surrounding condition of an event. Bateson muses:

We assume that the psychological frame has some degree of real existe...