Maxwell Institute Podcast #155: Nostalgia as Jewish Religious Practice, with Rachel B. Gross

Joseph Stuart: Welcome to the Maxwell Institute Podcast. I’m Joseph Stuart. In 2007, the Museum at Eldridge Street opened at the site of a restored nineteenth-century synagogue, originally built by some of the first Eastern European Jewish immigrants in New York City. Visitors to the museum are invited to stand along indentations on the floor where footprints of congregants past have worn down the soft pinewood. Here, many feel a palpable connection to the history and historical community surrounding them.

Beyond the Synagogue argues that nostalgic activities such as visiting the Museum at Eldridge Street, or eating traditional Jewish foods should be understood as American-Jewish religious practices. Even if they’re not set out in the Torah, they are things that help Jews to feel Jewish. Rachel B. Gross asserts that if scholars looked outside of traditional centers of religious practice, they would see that the embrace of nostalgia provides evidence of an alternative, under-appreciated way of being Jewish and of maintaining Jewish continuity.

Tracing American Jews’ involvement in a broad array of ostensibly nonreligious activities, including conducting Jewish genealogical research, visiting Jewish historic sites, purchasing books and toys that teach Jewish nostalgia to children, and seeking out traditional Jewish foods, Gross argues that these practices illuminate how many American Jews are finding and making meaning within American Judaism today.

We’ll be discussing Professor Gross’s book, Beyond the Synagogue: Nostalgia as Jewish Religious Practice. And without any further ado, let’s get to our discussion with Professor Gross. Rachel B. Gross. Welcome to the Maxwell Institute podcast.

Rachel Gross: Thank you so much for having me, Joey. I'm so glad to be here.

Stuart: It is a pleasure to host you here at the Maxwell Institute. And we're here to discuss your book, Beyond the Synagogue. And in the book, you present nostalgia as a form of religious practice. What do you mean by nostalgia?

Gross: So, a lot of people have a lot of different feelings about nostalgia. I think of nostalgia as a sentimental longing for a past that is irrevocably gone. And this always makes me laugh when I say it, because the fundamental idea of the past, you will know as a historian, is that it is gone! But nostalgia is about longing for the past, it is really leaning into your feels about how the past cannot be recovered, and having really mixed and sentimental feelings about the fact that it is gone. We see all kinds of cultural forms of nostalgia. And the nostalgia that I have been most interested in is the nostalgia of American Jews. I look at American Jews from the 1970s to the present day. And I look at their nostalgia for the turn of the century immigration of Jews from Central and Eastern Europe, to the United States. So the vast majority of American Jews by far, not all of them, but the vast majority of American Jews immigrated from Central and Eastern Europe to the United States between the 1880s and 1924. SIn my book, I look at American Jews nostalgia for this period of immigration. And I'll say one more thing about how I think about nostalgia. We often think about nostalgia as something that is individual, you might feel nostalgia for your childhood, sometimes we think that children can't feel nostalgia because they don't have enough of a history, a personal history to feel nostalgia for. But, I think that actually we are taught to feel nostalgia by our parents, by our teachers, by all kinds of institutions. So what I'm doing in my book is looking at how parents, teachers, communities, institutions, teach American Jews and other people, other Americans especially, to feel nostalgia for this period of Jewish immigration history to the United States.

Stuart: Yeah, that's really helpful. I really liked that you talk about seeing nostalgia as an individual thing. So I can have nostalgia for my time as an undergraduate at BYU, or for my swim team when I was in fourth grade. But also as a BYU football fan, I have nostalgia for the 1980s when the football team won a national championship. Or Latter-day Saints may feel a form of nostalgia that's rooted in an idealized version of what had happened, such as thinking about the sacrifice that Latter-day Saint settler pioneers did in the 19th century. So I love that, that expansive definition.

Gross: Exactly. And I'll add to that, that nostalgia is, is sentimental and idealized. And one of the things… maybe we can get into this. But a lot of times, especially lately, people think of nostalgia as a bad thing. And we can certainly talk about the harms that nostalgia might do. One of the major things I'm doing in my book is saying, Look, that's absolutely right, nostalgia can absolutely be harmful. But we also need to look at its more positive attributes as well. The way it can build community and the way that it builds community by having a shared feeling. If we are all feeling sentimental for that moment of the 1980s, then there's a community there, right. So in my book, I'm looking at how American Jews have built community around this shared feeling for this moment of immigration history.

Stuart: And that leads me into the next question, which is what do you mean by religious practice?

Gross: Absolutely. So I'm looking at this phenomenon of nostalgia, this particular iteration of American Jewish nostalgia as religious practice. So I have an incredibly expansive view of religion. I find it really helpful to think broadly about what religion is. So, first of all, the way that we tend to think about religion today is actually a really modern Protestant construction. Usually, when we think about religion, we think about individual personal relationships with the divine. And we think about recognizable forms of worship. But that's, that's a real construction. That's a really Protestant construction of what religion is. And I think it's really helpful to think about in order to get at many people's experiences: Jews, Protestants, all kinds of people, I find religion a really helpful word, to think about how people make meaning in their lives. So I think about religion, as relationships, as sacred relationships that help us understand who we are, and what we're doing in the world. So building on religious studies scholar, Robert Orci, I think about religion as a series of sacred relationships that might be the sacred relationships that you have with your family, living and dead, with your ancestors. Latter-day Saints know a whole lot about that, and have taught Jews a whole lot about that. And it might be your relationship with your community in the present and the kind of imagined sense of of your community in the in the past and into the future. It might be your relationship with the divine as well. And each of those relationships, I think, comes into focus at different moments. So I think that the nostalgia that I'm looking at of American Jews, for their communal ancestors, is so important, because of the ways that it highlights those emotional relationships with ancestors, with community, with community in the present, and it really provides a narrative that helps American Jews understand who they are and what they're doing in the world.

Stuart: Thanks so much for mentioning Robert Orci. There, you can listen to an interview with Dr. Orci on the Maxwell Institute Podcast that we will link to in the show notes. And while I understand your definition, as a scholar of religion I can also hear my students saying to me, but religion needs to take place in a synagogue, or a mosque, a temple, a church. So what does it mean to think about religious practice in/beyond the synagogue? And how does it connect to the idea of a lived religion as an academic category?

Gross: So, I love the category of lived religion. What I'm interested in as a religious studies scholar is the ways that again, that we make meaning in our everyday lives, the ways that we don't necessarily think about how we make meaning in our lives. So, I was telling some BYU family history students last night, that when I teach my, my own students at San Francisco State, I love to teach about tchotchkes, about the little kind of knick knacks that you pick up, and might have around your house. And they might tell a story about where you've been, where you want to go. Those kinds of stupid little objects that you have around your house that you know, you don't think about all the time. But they often tell a significant story about who you are, and what you value, where you've been, your connection, your emotional connection to the places you've been. And I'll say, look, I talk to a lot of different groups: academics, Jews, who are not academics, all kinds of folks. And I always some people like my definition of religion in the way I'm expanding it, and some people don't. And that's fine. It really is, you don't have to buy it. But I do, my goal here in thinking broadly about religion is to get people to think about the ways they make meaning in their lives. About what's really important, what's maybe even sacred to them. So I find religion a really helpful word for that. But not everybody has to and if you just pause and think a little bit about the ways that you make your life sacred, in your everyday moments, then I'll have done my goal, and I'll add to that I find that there are three reasons that motivate me in thinking really broadly about religion. One is that definitions of religion are legal implications of religion in the United States tend to privilege some groups over others, they especially tend to privilege white Protestants over others because they have the most recognizable forms of religion.

Stuart: And also because white Protestants have held more power in American history than any other group as well.

Gross: Exactly. So a really clear example of this is the ways that Native Americans have routinely fought to have their sacred spaces and sacred practices recognized as religious, legally religious, in order to afford them certain kinds of protections, and they've usually lost. So number one, legal definitions of religion have an effect on our lives. Number two, in my own communities, in American Jewish communities, actually a lot of money is distributed. I would argue, based on what gets defined as religious or not religious, there are a lot of large scale philanthropic organizations that are designed to bring especially young Jews into recognizable forms of American Jewish community. And I think that's very closely tied to what gets recognized as religious or nonreligious. And then my third reason is, again, that reason that I just think “religion” is a really useful word that helps us ask questions about what's meaningful in our own lives. And I think that matters, to get us to pause and think about how we make meaning in our lives.

Stuart: Well, thanks for thinking about that, because I think that it's crucial to remember that religious practice isn't- in the context of Judaism, it's not just a Bar Mitzvah or Bat Mitzvah. It's also the practices that help you to feel Jewish that helps you to connect to this community through the nostalgia that you're talking about. And in the second chapter of your book, Beyond the Synagogue, you explore how Jews do genealogy as a way of feeling Jewish. And you note that genealogy isn't something that the Hebrew Bible commands as a mitzvah, or a commandment, so how does it function as a religious practice, even as it's not formally spelled out by an authoritative source, like the Hebrew Bible?

Gross: I am so glad to get to talk to Latter-day Saints about Jewish genealogy! Jewish genealogists have learned so much from Latter-day Saints and also, you know, been in in kind of complicated conversations with them about it as well. I think that Jewish genealogists who began to develop what becomes recognized as a specific Jewish genealogy, they begin to organize themselves and figure out what they're doing in a kind of formalized genealogical practice, starting in the 1970s. And then they get more organized, they build societies, and they build databases, eventually they build journals, in the decades since the 1970s. And, you know, I think that genealogist, Jewish genealogists, think about their work as a way to connect to their ancestors, they certainly build community in the present. And I think they're making a statement also about what values they want to pass on to the future. So you know, those all sound like religious activities to me. It's also really interesting to me, the ways that they do and don't build on traditional Jewish practices. So occasionally, when I did… I read a ton of Jewish genealogy manuals because it's so interesting to read how people explain themselves. A lot of Jewish genealogy manuals will note that the Hebrew Bible has a whole lot of what we call genealogies, right, list of patriarchal kinship, that I think Jews would feel comfortable saying they are incredibly boring.

Stuart: Yeah, the “begat” section is maybe how I think about it.

Gross: Thank you exactly. So, those lists, Hebrew Bible scholars will tell us, those lists are doing something very different than what Jewish genealogists are doing. Jewish genealogists are thinking expansively about who counts as their ancestors, who they want to elevate in telling their stories. But it's interesting to me that Jewish genealogists will point to these moments in the Hebrew Bible and be like, look, this is a long standing Jewish tradition. They also build on Jewish Memorial practices in all kinds of different ways. One of my very favorite examples, is something that's come out since my book, largely. Jews, especially starting in the 20th century, I'm not I'm really not sure how old this practice is. But start, at least in the 20th century, Jews have had a practice of putting up memorial boards, especially in the lobbies of their synagogues. And if you're a congregant, a member of the… of that congregation, you can pay to have your ancestor put up on a little plaque on this board, maybe with their birth date, but certainly with their death date. And that serves as, one, a reminder, a memorial to that ancestor. But it's important, especially to remind their descendants to say the mourner's prayer for their ancestor on the anniversary of their death. And starting in the 20th century, we start to see these literally lit up. So sometimes, there are little red lights next to each of these plaques, and on the week that is the anniversary of an ancestors death, this little red light will light up. So you'll know to say the mourners' prayer, and it's an electric memorial practice. So I love that in itself. But more recently, Jewish genealogists have pointed out, had been looking around at synagogue lobbies and said, this is an amazing source of information that we have not been paying attention to. And they've begun transcribing and indexing this information and putting it online on Jewish Gen, which is the major Jewish genealogy database which is largely connected to ancestry.com at this point.

Stuart: Thanks so much for sharing this. I love the meaning that's in this, and thinking about the community going forwards and backwards, those who have come before us and those who are coming after us. But I'm also thinking about some items that have been in the news over the past 20 or 25 years or so, which is that Latter-day Saints in their temple work will often find the names of Holocaust victims. And they'll find these names and meaning well, will baptize these victims of the Nazi regime as a religious duty, but the First Presidency has actually asked Latter-day Saints not to do this because Jewish leaders see this as particularly offensive. Could you share with us why that might be offensive to Jews and their and their families?

Gross: Absolutely. So, this is such a tricky interfaith issue. And it comes after decades of Jewish genealogists learning from and benefiting from and appreciating Latter-day Saint genealogists, and genealogy institutions. So I just think this is such a fascinating issue. And it really gets to the heart of what Jewish genealogists think they are doing. First of all, why should Jews care about this practice? And I want to be very clear, I hope without being offensive, that Jews do not believe that something happens to their ancestors when they are baptized by Latter-day Saints. So I think the fundamental question is, if they don't think that something happens, why should they care? Some Jews do not care. Right? Some Jews have said, look, it's not my practice, it's a little bit unusual to those Jews. But you know, they might appreciate that somebody is, is thinking about their ancestors that might be really comforting to some Jews. Those Jews are by far in the minority. Some Jewish genealogists have said that baptism has particular resonance for Jews, that there have been moments in Jewish history when Jews have had to forcibly convert, so that that kind of gets at some, I don't really love the term “ancestral trauma”, but it you know, it touches Jews in a place that they're a little bit tender, that they're particularly sensitive around issues of baptism, because of those moments of anti-semitism and forced conversion in Jewish history. That's part of it. I also think that through my research from talking to Jewish genealogists, reading the materials, studying their blogs, all kinds of things, I think that what Jewish genealogists are really doing at the heart of it, is claiming their ancestors, is building a relationship with their ancestors. And I think that's something Latter-day Saints can understand. That doing this research, does something, right, does something is an act of possession over your ancestors. And, and to hear I think that somebody else is taking a certain kind of possession over your ancestors, I think, is really upsetting to some Jews, and especially to some Jewish genealogists, I think that's what, I think that's where the heart of it is.

Stuart: Yeah, thank you for sharing that. And of course, recognizing that you don't speak for all Jews, or for all Jews interested in genealogy. We'll be sure to link to the First Presidency letter in the show notes for the podcast, which you can sign up for by Googling Maxwell Institute Podcast Newsletter, and you can read the letter for yourself. I think it's, again, a fascinating and important part of interfaith work is recognizing that working together means actually working together. 

Now, moving forward into the book, I was just intrigued by the idea of visiting historical synagogues, because as anyone in my family can tell you, I just love to visit houses of faith. On any vacation or anywhere we travel, I will find the oldest religious buildings, I can and want to go into them. But in reading your book, I thought that it was really interesting to think about what sort of synagogues are remembered and how they are framed to the public, as historic synagogues. I was also just fascinated by the idea of non-Jews visiting synagogues. And as a non-Jew who visits historic synagogues, I'd love to hear: what do you think about how those, those synagogues, those houses of worship, are appealing to Jews and non-Jews at the same time?

Gross: Absolutely. So this is really where my research on American Jewish nostalgia began! Like you, I just love visiting houses of worship. And as an undergrad, and then as a Master's student at the University of Virginia, I became just obsessed with the idea of historic synagogues used as a museum, like it's a synagogue, it's a museum, what does it mean to be both? Those things seem to have different kinds of goals. What is going on in these spaces? And I think that I found that after years of study, I think I've concluded that what's going on in these spaces is that visitors, Jews and non-Jews, are taught to feel a certain way about the past in these spaces. That they're being taught to feel nostalgia again, for this certain moment in Jewish history. And what's so interesting to me about inviting Jews and non-Jews to feel this longing for a particular moment in American Jewish history, is that it gets at the heart of what do we think religion is? Right? What do we think our religious communities are? And I think that these kinds of nostalgic activities that I'm looking at, historic synagogues and other ways, are our places and activities where it's a little bit safer to let other people into your religious community. So are non-Jews really feeling the same things that Jews are? Are they being taught to feel the same things that Jews are? I think they're being taught to feel similar things. So, it does complicate the boundaries of our religious communities. Which even if we don't have an answer to where those boundaries are, I think looking at the edges of our religious communities is, is a productive act in itself.

Stuart: Well, so one of those museum-synagogues that you spend a lot of time with is the Eldridge Street Synagogue on the Lower East Side in New York City. And I love how you describe the gender segregated spaces within the Eldridge Street Synagogue. And how different stakeholders in this museum synagogue explain why gender segregation took place and takes place. Can you tell us more about that?

Gross: Absolutely. So historically, synagogues have been segregated by gender. Historically, many people's houses of worship, including Christians have been segregated by gender. Today, the vast majority of synagogues have mixed seating, people sitting wherever they like, regardless of gender. But Orthodox synagogues particularly still retain a gender segregation between men and women. The Eldridge Street Synagogue, which is on the Lower East Side of New York, (and is so beautiful, it has had a beautiful restoration) is a synagogue that still has a functioning Orthodox congregation, a very small one, that meets there on the Jewish Sabbath-on Friday nights and Saturdays. But during most of the week, it is understood to be a museum space. And it is this gorgeous building that has a women's balcony. So the main floor of the sanctuary where all the ritual action happens is the men's space, and the women go upstairs. Now, most visitors to this space are not Orthodox Jews, many are other types of Jews, I would say liberal Jews, only about 10% of American Jews are Orthodox. So the vast majority of Jews who visit this space are people who don't have gender segregation in their own synagogues if they do go to a synagogue, and in fact, they might be very resistant to the idea of a gender segregated synagogue. So the staff members at the Eldridge Street Synagogue have a very tricky job to convince these liberal Jews to have a relationship, a meaningful relationship with this historically and contemporary gender segregated space. And they do it in a number of ways that I find very, very smart. There are very smart historians at this public history site. They tell stories about the women who have historically been members of this congregation. They tell stories of them being labor activists, there's an amazing moment when the women, when some women of the lower East Side decided that kosher meat meat that adhered to traditional Jewish dietary laws was too expensive, and they stopped buying, they had they had a consumer effort to stop buying kosher meat for their families. In, it happened a couple times, I think that one of the most prominent might have been around 1912. And in this moment, I forget if it's 1912 or 1915, some Jewish historian listening to this will fact check me. But at one moment, they build on a traditional Jewish practice from Eastern from Central and Eastern Europe, of bringing the most important community issues into the heart of the synagogue service, the torah service, and in the middle of the torah service, which, again, is a men's ritual activity, in the middle of this activity, the women of the Lower East Side in the early 1910s, rush into this sacred space, interrupt this sacred activity, and start shouting about the price of meat, and they're eventually pushed out. But there's this moment of women being activists, right, of being consumer activists, and the ways that it intersects with this religious space. You know, this is a great story. I'm also a food historian. So, I love this story for all kinds of reasons, but in terms of studying how this space is used today, it's a really useful story for the staff members of the museum at Eldridge Street, because it gets liberal Jews to buy in, right, it's a story about the way they want to see their ancestors, and gets them to buy into believing that the women who were congregants of this synagogue were active members of their community. Even if they were not the primary ritual agents of the synagogue service. The other thing that they say is, they'll say, look at this beautiful space, this is a gorgeous space is the moment to take your photos of this space. And if women were in a separate space, they were in the best space. So that's a kind of complicated statement, but it is one they use. So, I totally admire the way that they think about using this space and think about getting Jews and non-Jews who might find a gender segregated space surprising, how they get them to buy into this history.

Stuart: Yeah, it's fascinating that nostalgia needs to be usable in this way. It's not just something that you can put out on the table, so to speak, but it has to be something that folks can relate to. And I think that that connects to another chapter in your book, Beyond the Synagogue: Jewish Nostalgia as Religious Practice, when you explore how children's books and play things can also constitute a form of religious practice or religious objects. So how do children's stories or American Girl dolls relate to practicing nostalgia as a religious concept or feeling Jewish?

Gross: Nostalgia absolutely always has to be usable. And I looked at children's books and dolls because American Jews deliberately teach nostalgia for a moment of their history, to their children, and they do so through books through dolls. The books that I looked at are primarily distributed by an organization called PJ Library, which I find totally fascinating. It is an organization that distributes books, and sometimes music for free, once a month, to Jewish and interfaith families across North America, and now they've gone international as well. But they are explicitly designed to get Jews who are not involved with Jewish communal institutions, to get them where they're at their weakest, which, as a parent of young children, you may know better than I do that bedtime is tough for parents of young children. And, you know, if you just hand parents like, look, we've got you, here's a story that we think might align with your values. That might be a story that you can help your children connect to their ancestors, connect to their community. Here you go. So it's PJ Library for pajama library. It's explicitly about that bedtime moment. And it's explicitly about getting, these are not they say explicitly, this is not about books that your children are supposed to read on their own, even when they can read on your own on their own. This is about reading together and building that family moment that connects you to, in the cases of the books I'm looking at, connects you to a broader community history. So I look at a number of not all a PJ Libraries books are about nostalgia for the immigration moment, but I do look at some books from their selection. I also look at the American Girl doll who fits this moment of American history. Some of your listeners might know that the American Girl is a company that's now owned by Mattel, it's a very big business. But since the 1980s, they have had a line of historical books and dolls. It's a complete character. Books, dolls and accessories that you can buy that tell the story of American history through the stories of fictional girlhoods. So, they're very important for many people's sense of what American history is, many girls and women's sense of what American history is, in particular. And in 2009, this line of historical dolls came out with their first Jewish doll! When I actually got permission from American Girl to include some pictures of this material in my book, and in order to get permission from them, they had to take a look at my writing. And the only thing they did was really remind me that they had put out a Jewish doll several years earlier, but it was not in their historic line, it was in their contemporary line. So there was not the first Jewish doll but in 2009, it was the first Jewish historical doll with a complete set of books and accessories. And this Jewish doll, her name is Rebecca Ruben, and she had to be placed in the Lower East Side in the early 20th century. She, her stories largely take place in 1914. So one of the things I did for this research was interview the author of these books, Jacqueline Dembar, who's who's a really smart author of Jewish and non-Jewish children's books. And she said to me, she thought about, she actually she was one of something like five authors selected by American Girl, and they had to pitch their concept to American Girl. So she said she thought about doing other stories. She thought about Jews who emigrated from Central and Eastern Europe through Boston, which some Jews did, or other ports. She lives in Boston, so she thought about that. She thought about telling the story of Sephardi Jews, Jews from the Spanish and Portuguese Jewish diasporas. Her family are Sephardi Jews. So, she thought about doing that history. But ultimately, she said, if this story is going to be included, if this is the Jewish story, it had to be the 1914 Lower East Side story. So I think that highlights how essential this story is to American Jews, and even to the exclusion of other stories. So that's all kinds of complicated. And I love this doll because it's, I love this character, because it gets at an example as we were saying earlier, of something of an item of Jewish nostalgia. You're supposed to have an emotional reaction to this doll, that's the whole thing. You know, these tiny little accessories, they're so cute. But it's, it's marketed because this is Mattel, it's big business. It's marketed to Jews and to non-Jews. And Jews and non-Jews are taught to have, explicitly taught to have, an emotional connection to this history. So again, those boundaries of religious communities are so fascinating.

Stuart: Thank you so much for sharing that with us. In your last chapter, you explore how restaurants and particularly delis shaped Jewish religious practice. And one part that I found interesting to me was explicitly non-kosher restaurants or delis. So could you please tell us what kosher is, and then explain how an explicitly anti-kosher menu might tell us about how food contributes to Jewish practice and nostalgia?

Gross: Yes, so that's a big ask, but I love it. So, keeping kosher is the practice of observing traditional Jewish dietary laws. These have changed a great deal over time. They are rooted, they have their origins in the Hebrew Bible, in the Torah. And there are a number of rules about food in the Hebrew Bible, lists of which birds of prey cannot be eaten. There's a whole bunch of rules about what can and cannot be eaten. And the rabbis who created what becomes Judaism, in the first couple centuries CE before that, what we're talking about is not what I would call Judaism, but is a ancient temple practice. So when the, this is a discussion that has to go back to ancient times, in 70 CE, the Romans destroyed what we call the Second Temple, and there isn't another one rebuilt. So Judaism has to, what becomes Judaism, has to change. So before that, it's a temple sacrifice based practice. And we know some of what happened then. But historians, you know, have some idea of what happened. And there's still some some unknowns as there are about… about ancient history. So in the first couple centuries CE, the rabbis start to create what we know as Judaism, and they develop those food rules in new ways. One of the big ones is that the Hebrew Bible says don't boil a calf in its mother's milk. And we know from ancient writings that ancient Jews took that extremely literally, don't boil this calf in the milk of its mother. So eating a calf boiled in milk is a Middle Eastern delicacy. Even today, I’ve been told it's delicious. So, ancient Jews took that super literally, the rabbis and also Jews who developed and practiced their religion, took that and ran with it and created what Jews call a fence around the Torah, so as not to violate that principle. They build all kinds of rules around it, so you're not going to get anywhere close to it. And that becomes the separation of meat products from dairy products, which for at least 1500 years has been a, an important part of keeping kosher, of keeping Jewish dietary practice.

Stuart: Thank you. I realize now that was an extremely large and historical question. But that historical information actually makes the second part of the question, I think, even more urgent or interesting, which is, how does having a Jewish deli that has an anti-kosher menu, so not just not kosher, but anti-kosher? What does that tell us about how food is folded into Jewish identity and practice?

Gross: Right, so most Jews today, do not keep kosher or have a complicated and variable relationship to keeping kosher. The Jewish deli tradition is something that developed in the United States. And it builds on the food practices of Germans and Jewish and non-Jewish and Central and Eastern European Jews who brought their food traditions to the United States around the turn of the century. And over the course of the 20th century becomes what we know of as the Jewish deli today. Some Jewish delis are kosher. Most of them do not keep kosher, they do what we call kosher style, which means that they adhere to the Jewish culinary traditions. But they separate those culinary traditions from the religious requirements. So we get a reuben sandwich, for instance, has sauerkraut, cheese and meat. And it is decidedly not kosher because of that mixing of meat and cheese, but it is part of the American Jewish deli experience. So that's, I would say, an authentically Jewish food, but it is one that is not kosher. That has a complicated relationship to kashrut. So I think that this tells us that food is an important part of Jewish identity. But they, it can be complicated. It's not just about adhering to religious strictures, but it is about food. I think that when a lot of Jews go to Jewish delis, they think about all the times that they've been to Jewish delis with their families, right? It's an important place of meaning making for them. They think about their family in their communities. They think about… this is this is the food of my people, right? And you might not be doing that explicitly, but you might have, you know, a lot of Jews are gonna have some warm fuzzies in some way, when they when they come to Jewish delis.

Stuart: As much as I love warm fuzzies, I can also see some more negative pushback. So for instance, you talk about a restaurant that has bacon wrapped matzo balls, which seems not only anti-Kosher or not kosher, but like, purposefully offensive to folks who keep kosher. So have you received any pushback about writing about these foods as “Jewish” even as they are directly contradicting what kashrut or kosher cuisine would be?

Gross: Yeah, so I want to back up and say that most of the delis that I'm looking at in my book are not kosher delis, but I'm looking at a wave of kind of nouveau delis that think about new practices in American food practices, so an emphasis on sustainability and environmentalism and local foods. And they're gonna say, those, the folks that I'm looking at the restaurateurs and chefs that I interviewed, most of them said, you know, we're updating the deli by making it sustainable and environmentally conscious by using local foods. And they're saying they're doing that not just, you know, as people who care about the Earth, but as Jews, that those are their Jewish values. So that's, that's really fascinating. So they're gonna say the consumer market for kosher meat is very complicated, but it's very, very expensive. It's actually prohibitively expensive to have a sustainable and kosher restaurant. So they're going to say, look, if I'm going to think about what are my Jewish values, it's going to be on the side of sustainability as a Jew who cares about the Earth. Now, in terms of pushback, I have gotten a lot of pushback on this book. Both from Jews who keep kosher, but also Jews and academics, Jewish Studies, and otherwise, who think misunderstand what I'm doing in this book. I will also say, this isn't about my Judaism, I do actually keep kosher. A lot of people have misunderstood this book about my Judaism, but it's because they think that I am being prescriptive, that I am telling Jews what to do. And I'm really not! What I'm doing in this book is being descriptive, is saying, what are Jews doing? And how should we analyze it? So some Jews who have pushed back against my book have really just been worried about change in Jewish communities, they see the activities that I'm looking at, as things that are new and things that are different than the Judaism that they grew up with. I will say that I studied people of all ages in this book, it's really not just a book about young Jews. But it is about Jewish practices that I see as largely new since the 1970s. So that's true. It is about change over time. Studying history, as you will know, is the study of change over time. And I think my bottom line is, that the way I think about Judaism is what Jews do. So if we're studying what Jews do, it's going to change over time, like all human practices. And whether you like those changes or not, it's important to be aware of them, and to think about what they mean for other Jews. And then you can go forward and have an informed sense of what's going on, and how you want to react to it. But my book is absolutely not telling people what to do or what the right way to practice Judaism is. But trying to take a clear and thoughtful look at how many Jews are making meaning in their lives as individuals in their families and as, as communities.

Stuart: Thank you so much for speaking about your book Beyond the Synagogue: Jewish Nostalgia as Religious Practice. And one final question: what are three of Rachel B. Gross's best books?

Gross: I love this question and I hope you know how hard of a question it is. So I will tell you three of my favorite books. The first is my teacher Vanessa Ochs's book, Inventing Jewish Ritual which unlike my book is a how to book. But I think it's just one of the best books I know, that bridges the gap between the work of religious studies scholars, it really builds on religious studies theory of what ritual is, and brings it to the people and helps American Jews understand what Jewish ritual is, and also how they can expand on it, and be creative with it, and play with it. And I would just recommend it as, for anybody interested in thinking about what ritual is and what it means to be a person interested in ritual, I just think it's, for me, it's the model I always go back to about how to write clearly and for different kinds of audiences. The second book that I would recommend, is also in that category of being able to speak to multiple audiences. And I think I've already gushed to you a little bit about Laura Leibman's Art of the Jewish Family. It's so brilliant, and also total…by a Jewish Studies scholar by a historian. But totally, I think it's totally accessible to a broad audience. And that book looks at early American Jews, so from the colonial period to about the mid 19th century, and it looks at American Jewish women who have been completely under-studied in these early periods. It looks at American Jewish women and the ways that they made families. So not just thinking, thinking both about the nuclear family, but also thinking about different types of kinship, about siblings, about what we might today call found families, networks, thinking about single women as well as married women. And she looks at what scholars call material culture, which as you know, is a fancy word for stuff. So she looks at paintings, she looks at goblets, she looks at letters, she looks at these objects that help us fill in the gaps of what we know about early American Jewish women. And it's also, it's a stunningly beautiful book! Laura Liebman got an amazing grant. So both the physical and the digital copies have hundreds, hundreds of color images, which as you know, is just like unheard of in academic books. So she can really dive in and walk the reader through how to study objects and what we can learn from them. It's just an incredible book for academics, and for lay people who might be interested in history. The third book I'm going to recommend is also by a historian, but it's not about Jewish Studies. I'm currently obsessed with Sarah Knott's book, Mother is a Verb. It's a completely stunning and creative history of motherhood, primarily in the UK, and also primarily in North America. So it's a sweeping history, thinking about motherhood. But it's not, it's chronological, in the sense of tracing mothers' experiences from pregnancy through early childhood, so it's chronological in that way. And along the way, she weaves different types of histories from different historical moments from Native Americans from centuries ago, from 19th century records of people in England, to her own experiences as a contemporary American woman. And it's just…it's one of the most creative books I've ever read by an academic, and it's so beautiful. I am not a mother. I'm not a parent. But this history of women's experiences is so powerful to me. So I recommend that as another accessible history book.

Stuart: Rachel B. Gross. Thanks for coming by the Maxwell Institute Podcast.

Gross: Thank you so much for having me.

Stuart: Thank you for listening to the Maxwell Institute podcast. Could you please rate, review, and subscribe to the podcast wherever you're listening to this podcast? And recommend it to others so that we can fulfill the Maxwell Institute's mission to inspire and fortify Latter-day Saints in their testimonies of the restored gospel of Jesus Christ and engage the world of religious ideas? Thank you and have a great week.