In Jewish Cultural Studies, prolific folklorist Simon Bronner makes a detailed argument for the eponymous field he discusses. Bronner, a leading scholar in the area for more than two decades, has organized numerous conference panels and lectures on the topic (two of which I have participated in), reinvigorated the Jewish Folklore and Ethnology section of the American Folklore Society, and founded and edited the Jewish Cultural Studies series with the Littman Library of Jewish Civilization (2008-, currently at six volumes). What appears at first an ambitious title, in other words, deservedly reflects Bronner’s considerable dedication to the continued vitality of scholarship on Jewish cultural expression.
Yet this book’s significance comes less in Bronner’s contribution to folklore and ethnology, which has been ongoing, than in the way he packages the field of Jewish cultural studies for readers from other fields, especially Jewish studies. Bronner seeks to bring order to the vast, heterogeneous landscape that scholars of Jewish culture have created in the last thirty-plus years; and he orients the field around the central defining question of “how and why one thinks Jewishly and feels and expresses Jewishness in culture” (xii). In a newly written preface, he describes Jewish culture as a product of contemporary experience, with a distinct topography of relationships to tradition (including religious texts) and modernity. He then illustrates his view by presenting updated versions of his own published work, oriented around classic themes of conceptualization, ritualization, and narration.
As with any effort to summarize and project a field’s directions, Bronner’s curatorial approach encompasses a wide range of examples, many inspired by the writing of scholars he originally shepherded into the Jewish Cultural Studies book series. The book’s introduction and first section largely reproduce the introductory essays from that series’ first four volumes, covering Jewish cultural creativity, domestic spaces, mediation/mediatization, and (in an essay from a different source) the twentieth-century development of Jewish folkloristics; the second section explores Jewish culture through rituals, with a focus on lifecycle ceremonies (coming-of-age and baby-naming) and Holocaust memorialization; and the final section offers a series of case studies in Jewish-motivated literature, humor, Holocaust narratives, and American politics. Most of these chapters are lightly modified from their original versions, with a few clarifying remarks, occasional added materials (such as a new section on Jewish rituals during COVID [118-24]), and opening/closing transition sentences to give the book-form greater coherence.
The most significant new additions come in the form of the aforementioned preface, an epilogue, and a section of the introduction where Bronner recounts his disciplinary struggles with the American Studies Association (which excluded Judaism as an ethnic group) and Jewish studies’ marginalization of culture studies (17-24). Especially this last addition offers an optimistic blueprint for the role of Jewish cultural studies: as a kind of bridge between disciplines that can identify and then ameliorate each field’s respective blind spots. Bronner approaches each field’s dug-in positions, in other words, with a patient “long game” strategy for breaking down barriers and contributing new perspectives.
But the book also appears at a reflective moment that makes me wonder if its project is still viable in its current form. Ethnographic scholarship places a high value on individual experience. Yet critical voices in Jewish studies today—as seen in recent issues of AJS Perspectives on patriarchy (Spring 2019) and protest (Spring 2021)—struggle with Jewish studies’ historical basis in communal self-preservation, identify these (often patriarchal) foundations as central to the field’s development, and criticize the field’s reticence to challenge its own gender, ethnic, and racial assumptions as a result. In this context, several of Bronner’s choices, including foregrounding Erving Goffman’s Jewish background when discussing his “framing” theories (38-41), his emphasis on gender-normative spaces (including the Bar Mitzvah as male space, baby naming as a female space, and politics and Yiddish literature as nearly exclusively male domains) felt uncomfortable to me. Similarly, Bronner’s attempts to parlay vernacular “Yinglish” terms such as chutzpah (introduction) and shlep (epilogue) into primary conceptual lenses for understanding Jewish cultural motivations reads regressively today. To be sure, Bronner offers this all with a generous spirit, and his conscious recognition of the field’s dynamic playfulness can give scholars unfamiliar with ethnography and folkloristics an opportunity to enter on their own terms. But Bronner’s central contention that personal experience complements if not begets scholarly analysis—as important as that is to ethnographic research—becomes messy and problematic when he identifies as an exemplar of that connection. His opening paragraphs, which directly acknowledge his own Jewish upbringing as an impetus for his scholarly interest, establish this discursive mode from the start (xi-xii)—and, in the process, highlight the same disciplinary legacy now undergoing scrutiny.
Presented differently, Jewish Cultural Studies could have been a powerful contributor to Jewish studies’ contemporary critical self-assessment: there is plenty of opportunity to connect ethnography to communal critique and push back on the patriarchal structures that have defined both folklore and Jewish studies; and Bronner always writes with an unparalleled knowledge of the literature and an ever-probing mind. But this book more often does the opposite: unintentionally reinforcing through familiarity the same classic scholarly structures that both fields are currently seeking to reckon with (and, ideally, uproot). Bronner admirably stays the course in his decades of work. Given the convulsive last couple of years, however, this book becomes the record of a long journey rather than a bold vision forward.
Folklorists might find this collection a bookshelf-worthy package, even if they’ve been following Bronner’s work all along. As the latest volume in Dan Ben-Amos’s celebrated Raphael Patai Series in Jewish Folklore and Anthropology, moreover, Jewish Cultural Studies will likely garner attention for its efforts to integrate culture-based studies more deeply into the philosophical, textual, and historical foci that often dominate the study of Jews and Judaism. It is the capstone of a passionate and sincere pursuit by a major scholar. Yet in the current academic environment, I hope it can also be a platform to inspire other scholars to reshape the field and lay a new set of pylons that can extend Bronner’s disciplinary bridge to new shores where we now lay anchor.
--------
[Review length: 1011 words • Review posted on December 2, 2021]