American Post-Judaism

Shaul Magid

Description

A vision of Jews, Judaism, and Jewishness for the 21st century

How do American Jews identify as both Jewish and American? American Post-Judaism argues that Zionism and the Holocaust, two anchors of contemporary American Jewish identity, will no longer be centers of identity formation for future generations of American Jews. Shaul Magid articulates a new, post-ethnic American Jewishness. He discusses pragmatism and spirituality, monotheism and post-monotheism, Jesus, Jewish law, sainthood and self-realization, and the meaning of the Holocaust for those who have never known survivors. Magid presents Jewish Renewal as a movement that takes this radical cultural transition seriously in its strivings for a new era in Jewish thought and practice.

Foreword
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Be the Jew You Make: Jews, Jewishness, and Judaism in
Postethnic America
2. Ethnicity, America, and the Future of the Jews: Felix Adler,
Mordecai Kaplan, and Zalman Schachter-Shalomi
3. Pragmatism and Piety: The American
Spiritual and Philosophical Roots of Jewish Renewal
4. Postmonotheism, Renewal, and a New American
Judaism
5. Hasidism, Mithnagdism, and Contemporary American
Judaism: Talmudism, (Neo) Kabbala, and (Post) Halakha
6. From the Historical Jesus to a New Jewish Christology:
Rethinking Jesus in Contemporary American Judaism
7. Sainthood, Selfhood, and the Ba'al Teshuva: ArtScroll's American
Hero and Jewish Renewal's Functional Saint
8. Rethinking the Holocaust after Post-Holocaust
Theology: Uniqueness, Exceptionalism, and the Renewal of American
Judaism
Epilogue. Shlomo Carlebach: An Itinerant Preacher for a
Post-Judaism Age
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Ethnic Studies
• Philosophie et théologie
• Religión
• General officer
• Judaism
• Religion
• General

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 09 avril 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253008091
• Langue: English

Extrait

RELIGION IN NORTH AMERICA
Catherine L. Albanese and Stephen J. Stein, editors
SHAUL MAGID
AMERICAN POST-JUDAISM
IDENTITY AND RENEWAL IN A POSTETHNIC SOCIETY
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
Bloomington and Indianapolis
This book is a publication of Indiana University Press 601 North Morton Street Bloomington, Indiana 474043797 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
Telephone orders     800–842–6796 Fax orders     812–855–7931
© 2013 by Shaul Magid
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses' Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Magid, Shaul, [date]    American post-Judaism : identity and renewal in a postethnic society / Shaul Magid.       pages cm. — (Religion in North America)    Includes bibliographical references and index.       ISBN 978-0-253-00802-2 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-253-00809-1 (ebook) 1. Judaism—United States—History—21st century. 2. Jews—United States—Identity—History—21st century. I. Title.    BM205.M25 2013    296.0973’09051—dc23                                                                                                                      2012049481
1 2 3 4 5 18 17 16 15 14 13
PUBLICATION OF THIS BOOK
IS SUPPORTED BY A GRANT FROM
Jewish Federation of Greater Hartford
For Yehuda, Chisda, Miriam, and Kinneret It is your world now. Please try to leave it better than you found it.
If Judaism is terminable, Jewishness is interminable. It can survive Judaism.
—Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever , 72
For Judaism's future to be rescued something will have to die.
—Rachel Adler, Engendering Judaism , 170
Contents
Foreword
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Be the Jew You Make: Jews, Jewishness, and Judaism in Postethnic America
2. Ethnicity, America, and the Future of the Jews: Felix Adler, Mordecai Kaplan, and Zalman Schachter-Shalomi
3. Pragmatism and Piety: The American Spiritual and Philosophical Roots of Jewish Renewal
4. Postmonotheism, Renewal, and a New American Judaism
5. Hasidism, Mithnagdism, and Contemporary American Judaism: Talmudism, (Neo) Kabbala, and (Post) Halakha
6. From the Historical Jesus to a New Jewish Christology: Rethinking Jesus in Contemporary American Judaism
7. Sainthood, Selfhood, and the Ba'al Teshuva: ArtScroll's American Hero and Jewish Renewal's Functional Saint
8. Rethinking the Holocaust after Post-Holocaust Theology: Uniqueness, Exceptionalism, and the Renewal of American Judaism
Epilogue. Shlomo Carlebach: An Itinerant Preacher for a Post-Judaism Age
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Foreword
Shaul Magid's new book is groundbreaking. Building on David Hollinger's concept of a “postethnic” America, Magid turns the postethnic lens on American Judaism to reveal an emergent form of the received tradition that represents a new interpretive turn. In Magid's reading, Judaism is becoming postethnic, and that is a very good thing. Whereas traditional academic tropes regarding Judaism merge into Jewishness and ask searching questions about whether both are better seen as ethnicity or religion, Magid stands this concern on its head. Jews—the people and their faith—have been changing. In so doing they risk dissolving the boundaries of their thick identity as a people in favor of spreading abroad their spirituality and culture in a quasi-universalist gesture.
This will surely be a provocative thesis for many. As Magid presents it, however, it is hardly a completely new development. With readings that encompass a wide-ranging cast of characters and phenomena, Magid looks to earlier American Jewish figures like Felix Adler and Mordecai Kaplan even as, with his complex knowledge of the European Jewish mystical tradition, he lifts out themes regarding Kabbalism and Hasidism and other cultural manifestations. All of this comes into focus for Magid in the American Jewish Renewal movement and its founder and charismatic leader Zalman Schachter-Shalomi. Magid's sympathies for Schachter-Shalomi are no secret here, and they form the basis for a hermeneutic that re-centers American Judaism even as it de-centers it from convention scholarship and received understandings.
In the midst of this, Magid's book combines historical materials, cultural analysis, and theological exegesis in a blended methodology. The result is a tour de force to argue for the Jewish Renewal movement of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century as a major cultural force. Here Jewish Renewal, with its “new paradigm” Judaism, represents an engine generating a radical change in Jewish thought and practice as well as identity in the present-day United States. According to Magid, Schachter-Shalomi combines the Hasidic tradition with a strong infusion of New Age spirituality to deliver a combinative form of religiosity unlike any Judaisms of the past. At the core of this new creation is a move from the particularism of the traditional Jewish ideology of chosenness to a new universalism—a global consciousness on the part of American Jewry that prompts Jews to offer their spiritual insights to the world.
As the Hollinger allusion already suggests, the backdrop for all of this is a discussion that Magid situates within general cultural studies scholarship. Here the emergence of a postethnic America signals a social world in which multiculturalism has become a kind of new norm. With the later phases of multiculturalism and with the Jewish record of intermarriage, runs the argument, Jews in a mood of post-assimilation or even dis-assimilation have opened themselves to an ethos at once universalized and globalized. In the case of the Holocaust, for example, Jews choose such universal outlooks not because they are without power but because they are truly free and have not experienced the systemic anti-Semitism of Europe. As Magid tells the story, Jews establish their universalism on their own tradition, which they use to support a rebirth of social justice concerns throughout the world.
Chapters, as they develop, pursue many different angles as so many vectors leading, from various directions, to this central thesis about postethnic Judaism and the role of Jewish Renewal in promoting it. As the larger perspective emerges, Magid's introductory discussion of ethnicity and postethnicity explores the terrain. Then, in a new chapter, these concerns yield to the close reading of Adler and Kaplan as well as an integrated account of Schachter-Shalomi in the context of Adler's and Kaplan's work. Several chapters take on American philosophical pragmatism in relation to the spirituality of Jewish Renewal, probe the theology of Jewish “postmonotheism,” and scrutinize Hasidism and related movements as they shape Renewal. In another chapter, a rethinking of the Jewish view of Jesus past and present demonstrates that from the nineteenth century Jewish leaders were attempting to negotiate their view of Jesus in the context of American society. Looking to themes of sainthood and “selfhood,” yet another chapter examines a series of popular biographies of Jewish “saints” published by an American Orthodox Jewish publishing house, ArtScroll. Finally, Magid looks to the issue of how Jews have dealt with the Holocaust and are dealing with it now in an age of post-Holocaust theology. As a revealing epilogue, Magid introduces us to Schlomo Carlebach, the itinerant and charismatic storyteller/preacher who wrote almost nothing but, in his life and work, epitomizes the themes and issues raised throughout the book in the context of the Jewish Renewal movement.
Throughout this work, Magid displays astonishing facility in his ability to comprehend so many thinkers and in the readings he offers, readings that weave them into his central thesis with apparent ease. His comparative proficiency is in display seemingly at every turn and suggests the wealth of erudition he brings to this book. Magid has read widely, argued convincingly, and quoted succinctly. His work will surely stimulate conversation and lead to earnest debate in the Jewish scholarly community and elsewhere. We are pleased to be publishing it.
Catherine L. Albanese Stephen J. Stein Series Editors
Acknowledgments
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