Judaism

With increasing anti-Semitism and violence against Jews in Europe and Russia, from the Russian pogroms of the 1880s through the Holocaust, the Jewish population center shifted from Europe to the United States and Israel. After World War II, the Jewish family in the United States prospered. U.S. Jews have been particularly successful in education and the professions and have claimed many of the advantages of middle class life. Even so, virtually every account of contemporary Jewish life registers uneasiness about its status and future, including the fate of the family. "Once perhaps the most predictably normative of American family types, contemporary Jewish-American families now seem to be the epitome of change" (Fishman 2000). For with prosperity, as is the case with other groups, has come a high degree of assimilation, and among many Jews, the feeling that they are at least as much "Americans" as they are Jews.

The increasing influence of the modern Jewish denominations has meant changing ideas about the individual and the family. Conservative and Reform Jews, although differing in attitudes toward Jewish tradition, are both less categorically tied to traditional family practices than the Orthodox. For example, the laws and ritual practices of kashrut still govern Orthodox and sometimes Conservative family life, whereas they are unevenly observed or ignored among Reform Jews. A fourth denomination, Reconstructionism, is widely understood to fall between Conservatism and Reform, and families who identify with it also blend traditional and modern features of Jewish living.

Jewish identity—for individuals and within the family—represents a combination of religion and ethnicity, the latter being the dominant factor for many Jews in the years since World War II. The family is the crucible of Jewish identity, the place where commitments to Jewish ideas, values, and ways of living are encountered and expressed. But the Jewish family, like other institutions in the United States has responded to pressures that both reduce difference, late artifacts of the famous melting pot, and strengthen it, like the ethnic revivals of the 1960s and 1970s when racial and then ethnic minorities found it satisfying to accentuate what made them different from others. Thus, as Charles Liebman (1990) has argued, the Jewish family should be seen against the historical choices posed by loyalty to universalism, or the values Jews share with others, in contrast to particularism, or those values Jews believe are unique to their history and faith. Even so, with the increasing individualism of Jewish life, either choice can mean a weaker connection to traditional religious observance.

In the latest study of the U.S. Jewish community (Cohen and Eisen 2000), the family is presented ideally as a chain of influence across generations. Thus, "Those who are nearest exert the greatest influence upon Jewish observance and supply its greatest meaning, serving as both stimulus and audience to the enactment of convictions, which might otherwise have remained within the self." Grandparents are identified as being crucial and beloved role models for many Jews who came to adulthood in the later decades of the twentieth century. However, as wealth and mobility have increased during this time, the extended Jewish family became less common, and nostalgia for the roles of family elders has replaced the experience A Jewish family celebrating Seder. For many Jews today the Passover Seder represents the meaning of the Jewish family. The ancient distribution of roles is represented in the meal-based service. ROGER RESSMEYER/CORBIS of family life with them. The success of Allegra Goodman's collection of short stories, The Family Markowitz (1996), illustrates the transition in intergenerational roles. Gathered for the family's Passover seder, the Markowitz's four children offer competing images of Jewish commitment. Their parents and grandmother accept them all as signs of the inevitable breakup of tradition and of the Jewish future in which the family will house (generally) tolerant varieties of contemporary Judaism reflecting generational, ideological, educational, and experiential difference. Whether Judaism can in fact hold a family together, and whether a family can maintain a unified view of religious belief and practice, is precisely what worries a middle class professional who understands the tensions of contemporary Jewish family life:

I hope [my children] become practicing and believing Jews. In other words that there is a consistency there, that they are not just practicing. It's because they actually believe the prayers and it's important. And somehow I would approach that question by saying that all these other qualities that I want for them are the things that instigate whatever their Jewish practice is. I don't particularly care if they want to join an Orthodox congregation; that doesn't bother me. If they become Jews in such a way that it excludes me or any other members of their family, that's a different story (Cohen and Eisen 2000).

Holding the Jewish family together has been seen—in history and in popular U.S. culture—the primary responsibility of the Jewish mother. There is an old Jewish proverb, "God could not be everywhere, so mothers were created." Even so, like other groups around the world, Jews maintained a patriarchal family structure throughout most of their history. However, feminism and the women's movement have had a major impact on what Jews think about family life, with new roles for women in ritual life at home and in the synagogue. Thus, the famous Jewish mother, a domineering if loving fixture of the suburban American-Jewish family, can give way to a mother who is no less loving but who contributes less by control of the household (especially the kitchen table) and more in terms of a her unique grasp of the spiritual and of the meaning of community (see Hendler 1999 for a personal account of this transformation).