FRANK LY E SPEAKING - College Of LSA U-M LSA

FRANK E LYSPEAKINGNovember 2013Jean & Samuel Frankel Center forJudaic StudiesFrom the Director2Curating AmericanFoodways3Anita Norich4Mazel Tov!5Spotlight onPoles and Jews6Book Notes7Save the Date8202 S. Thayer St. Suite 2111Ann Arbor, MI 48104-1608JudaicStudies@umich.edu(734) 763-9047

From the Director:Jews Who CountDeborah Dash Moore is the Director of the Frankel Center for Judaic Studiesand the Frederick G.L. Huetwell Professor of HistoryJews who don’t count, although they arecounted in the survey, are Jews with “noreligion.” These Jews distance themselvesfrom Israel, don’t join synagogues, andbelieve that working for justice andequality and living an ethical life are keyelements of Jewish identity. They have fewclose Jewish friends, and, not surprisingly,most of them intermarry. Hardly any ofthese Jews with “no religion” choose toraise their children as Jews.What are we to make of these categoriesand their implicit valuation of Jews whocount vs. Jews who don’t count?Reading the survey as a historian withno mandate to predict the future, I findthese distinctions disturbing. HistoriansWhat are we to make of thesecategories and their implicitvaluation of Jews who countvs. Jews who don’t count?of American Jews usually consider allof them worthy of study. Although onemay decide to focus on urban instead ofsuburban Jews, or immigrants instead ofthe second or third generation, the keyfocus should not be which Jews count.Rather one seeks to understand AmericanJews in their time and place.For example, the notion of AmericanJews possessing a religious identitygained widespread appeal in the yearsfollowing World War II. Jewish GIsdiscovered in the armed forces that theUnited States military classified themaccording to religion with an “H” ontheir dog tags. Ironically, the “H” stoodfor “Hebrew”—hardly a religious label.With over half a million American Jewsin military service, the imprint of agovernment-sponsored identity provedenduring. When Jews returned to civilianlife, they were ready to accept the ideathat the category “Jewish” referred totheir “religion.” Some of them, especiallythose who moved to the new suburbs ofthe 1950s, even decided that they wantedto join Jewish organizations. It seemedto be both a Jewish and an Americanthing to do, appropriate for the “greatestgeneration.”The United States eliminated the militarydraft in 1973. Many baby boomersmanaged to avoid military service throughdeferments for education. (Jews, thePew report tells us, are highly educated,and over half possess a college degree.)Without a government-issued dog tag(changed to “J” for “Jew” in the 1950s),religious identity gradually lost some ofits salience. The 1970s saw the rise ofwhite ethnics, along with black power,feminism, Holocaust consciousness, andidentity politics. “Jew” now might referto an ethnic identity, even a politicizedidentity, rather than a religious one.Another advantage of reading the surveyas a historian is that one can chooseone’s point of comparison unlimitedby previous surveys. As J. J. Goldbergnoted in the Forward, comparisons ofthe Pew data with that produced byPhoto: Jean-Pierre JansThe recent release of a Pew survey ofJewish Americans has unleashed a floodof commentary from social scientistsand journalists, rabbis and communalleaders. Most of them have taken astand on the “Jews who count”: that is,the ones who matter. Those AmericanJews, unsurprisingly, identify as Jewsby religion. They express abidingcommitment to Israel, they affiliatewith Jewish organizations as well assynagogues, they consider rememberingthe Holocaust critical to their Jewishconsciousness. In addition, they fast onYom Kippur and attend Passover seders.Most importantly, they marry other Jewsand raise Jewish children.a National Jewish Population Survey[NJPS] conducted in 2001 inevitablyskews one’s interpretation. He proposesa comparison with the less contested andmore reliable 1990 NJPS. That effortproduces some remarkable continuity.I would like to suggest far more distantpoints of comparison, to add somehistorical depth to these debates.I would like to suggest far moredistant points of comparison,to add some historical depthto these debates.Let’s start roughly 100 years ago with thesituation in New York City, when overa million Jews, most of them Yiddishspeaking immigrants from EasternEurope, lived largely on Manhattan’sLower East Side and in Brooklyn. In 1909the New York Kehillah, a communalorganization seeking to unite Jews acrossclass, religious, geographic, ethnic, andideological boundaries, sponsored asurvey of Jewish education in the city.The results scandalized some New YorkJewish leaders: a mere 25 percent ofJewish children received any sort ofJewish religious education, most of themonly for a year or two, and many of themin a dismal heder taught by poorly trainedand compensated teachers. How doesthis compare with American Jews today?Well, over 67 percent of Jews overallreport receiving a Jewish education androughly 60 percent of Jewish children arecurrently getting one.continued on page 52

Curating American Foodways: the Jewish Contributionby Avery RobinsonIn 1660, the first Jewish institution established in NewAmsterdam was a kosher butcher shop, forever cementing theJewish experience in America as one intimately connectedwith Jewish culinary practice. Even though Asser Levy’s meatmarket no longer exists, he is memorialized throughout lowerManhattan (and Brooklyn) in parks, streets, and schools thatbear his name. Mr. Levy was a pioneer; and it is due in part tohis acumen and initiative that Jews, and their food, have hadsuch an impact on American culture.Before I began my research at the Janice Bluestein LongoneCulinary Archive (JBLCA) at Michigan’s Clements Library,I had never heard of Mr. Levy. I had learned about the 23Brazilian Jews who were the first refugees to arrive in NewAmsterdam in 1654, but I had no idea that there was a kosherbutcher amongst them, not to mention that he was the first Jewto own property in America.When I began my MA program in the Fall of 2012, Jewishculinary history interested me, but I didn’t know how toaddress such a rich and storied past. I decided to limit myfocus to Jewish food in America.What Jewish foods have influenced American cuisine? Howhave American culture, cuisine, and society affected Jewishfoods? And why were these changes taking place, or not?These are some of the questions I was working with as Iundertook this research. And in so doing, I helped push theJBLCA to schedule the Archive’s inaugural exhibit as part ofthe Special Collections Library on American Jewish foodways.Being able to curate such a large exhibition is something Ihad not anticipated when considering the Frankel Center forgraduate studies. I didn’t think I would be part of creating sucha comprehensive exhibit, with Jewish charity cookbooks fromall 50 states (and Washington DC), a feat that has never beenaccomplished by any other library or archive, not even theNew York Public Library or the Library of Congress. I did notrealize that I would be interacting with Jewish communitiesand congregations throughout the United States and learningabout Jewish food festivals in places as far afield as Cheyenne,Wyoming; Asheville, North Carolina; and Boise, Idaho. Nordid I think that my proposed summer research in New YorkCity would allow me to collect items for the JBLCA, such asmenus from delis and appetizing shops. And, most surprising,I had no idea that I would be teaching myself how to puttogether a website and create a digital exhibit.In addition, as part of the Frankel Institute for AdvancedJudaic Studies’ theme year of “Gender,” I was invited to createa complementary exhibit on the “Gendered Perspective” ofAmerican Jewish Foodways for exhibit in Thayer 2000. Thishas allowed me to explore some of the subtler influences thatJewish food has had in American culture. The exhibit includesitems that range from books about daughters, mothers,and grandmothers to a charity cookbook from an LGBTQcommunity in San Francisco. Jewish cookbooks, it turns out,reflect Jewish gendered and sexual identities.To be able to do all this, to be the co-curator of an exhibitthat has received national attention, has been an incredibleopportunity. This experience has proved to me not just howinterested people are in Jewish foodways, but also how muchmore there is to study. I am excited to see where this researchtakes me.The exhibit will be on display in the Hatcher Graduate Libraryuntil Dec 8, 2013 and in 2000 Thayer until the beginning ofthe 2014 Winter semester. You can also explore the exhibitonline at bit.ly/19QS1tl.q3

Photo: D.C. GoingsAnita NorichTikva Frymer-Kremsky Collegiate Professor,talks with Logan WallCould you talk a little aboutTikveh Frymer-Kremsky andyour decision to name yourCollegiate Professorship afterher?Tikveh was a friend of mine who diedmuch too young. When I first came toMichigan, she and her husband, then therabbi of the Conservative synagogue,were incredibly welcoming. I wanted toname my Collegiate Professorship after awoman who had a strong commitment toJewish scholarship, which she certainlydid. She was also the kind of scholar Iwanted to put forward to my students.Most graduate students think that there’sa path to academic success which ispretty straightforward: you write thedissertation, you get a job, maybe youknock around for a little bit—but there’san academic path to follow to tenure andsuccess.Tikveh’s path was more circuitous. Shewas a Yale PhD, learned in the ways youwant a scholar to be learned: she had all thelanguages; she saw the broader picture.But she didn’t follow the traditionalacademic path. She was married andhad children and couldn’t leave Ann4Arbor. But that didn’t hamper eitherher scholarship or her mind. She was amodel of someone whose academic workand whose scholarly life and whose mindflourished wherever she was. She was acommitted feminist who wrote about theancient Near East and about contemporaryissues from a committed feminist andJewish scholarly perspective. She was animpassioned and an inspired teacher, bothinformally as well as in the classroom.I wanted to honor her memory.novel, Fun Lublin biz Nyu York (FromLublin to New York), published in 1942. Ididn’t use it in that book, but it stuck withme. It’s written in the form of a diary ofa young woman who comes to New YorkCity. And it describes the difficultiesof being an immigrant: finding a job,learning a language, dealing with thehorror of what’s left behind and what’shappening to her family. At the sametime, she’s falling in and out of love.She’s a 20-something young woman.How do you think of your work After writing about translation,in relationship to her work?what has the actual process ofWe’re both committed to Jewish studies translation (of Molodovsky’sand feminism, but from different novel) been like for you?directions. Like hers, my work is alsoinformed by the contexts and languagesabout which I write.Your current project, aboutthe Yiddish writer KadyaMolodovsky, seems to go alongwith this.When I was researching my secondbook, Discovering Exile, about Yiddishwriting in America during the Holocaust,I “found”—in quotation marks—thisMy last book was about translation, butactually doing it is a different kind of work,one that I’ve admired, and one that I’menjoying tremendously. The truth is, onlyabout two percent of Yiddish literaturehas ever been translated. So there’s aworld out there, waiting. Molodovskyis known and we have translations ofher poetry and short stories, but I reallythought this novel needed to be done anddoing it feels constructive and creative.q