Beyond the Synagogue. Rachel B. Gross

provided a shared affection and longing for a distant past while creating distinctive Jewish communities in the United States, just as materials evoking nostalgia for Eastern European Jewish immigration histories would.49

      To some extent, American Jews’ nostalgia reframed Ashkenazi Jews’ diaspora as an exile from Eastern Europe and urban American neighborhoods rather than from the Land of Israel. Echoing their Zionist consumer habits, American Jews purchased tchotchkes like synagogue tzedakah boxes and Fiddler on the Roof snow globes. But nostalgia for European origins also existed comfortably alongside Zionism. American Jewish nostalgia for immigrant homelands does not necessarily replace a connection to Israel, and the Jews in this study have a range of opinions about Zionism, representative of the current range of American Jewish opinions about the State of Israel.50 Nonetheless, as debates about Israel’s policies have increasingly divided American Jews, a turn toward nostalgic consumption of immigration history has provided a seemingly more unifying practice for members of this diverse community.

      Popular Culture and Public History

      As American Jews have grown increasingly distant from the objects of communal longing—urban immigrant neighborhoods and imagined Eastern European shtetl origins—popular culture and public history have played an increasingly essential role in American Jews’ lives. Despite American Jews’ general fears about a lack of Jewish differentiation, Jews have rarely feared engagement with the materials of American popular culture. Popular culture on its own did not threaten Jewish continuity; failing to complement it with a firm grounding in Jewish religion, culture, and traditions did. Ostensibly non-religious institutions of public history and popular cultural materials now instruct Jews and other Americans on how to feel Jewish, including how to long for particular Jewish pasts. Institutions such as museums and restaurants make nostalgia a consumable product as well as an emotion and a religious practice, while popular culture and public history function as religious objects and sites.

      This is not altogether new. Jews have long identified forms of engagement with material culture as religious and spiritual practices. As religious studies scholar Vanessa Ochs explains, “in Judaism, the spiritual is material.”51 When they recall mythic ancestors who were freed from slavery in Egypt at the Passover seder or display family photographs of grandparents, American Jews engage in the mitzvah of remembering forebears, creating a transhistorical sense of community as Jews pass on to their children the sensibilities they believe were held by past generations. American Jews’ practices reveal them engaging with popular culture and public history in ways that are not merely entertaining but point to the sacred values by which they organize their lives.52

      In the nineteenth- and the twentieth-century United States, the popular heritage narratives of American Jews, like those of other American ethnic and religious groups, focused on Jewish patriotic participation in the American Revolution and the Civil War. Through these stories, they claimed essential roles in the major events of American history to underscore the nation’s acceptance of Judaism.53 While this Jewish heritage work focusing on the formation of the United States persists—it is notably present in the Smithsonian-affiliated National Museum of American Jewish History, which reopened on Philadelphia’s Independence Mall in 2005—it has been largely overshadowed by the emphasis on European heritage in the white ethnic revival that began in the 1960s and 1970s.

      American public history changed in both form and content in the 1970s. Public histories of the American Revolution and the Civil War had used material culture such as relics, replicas, and monuments to represent the past as both distant and different from the present. But starting in the 1970s, Americans increasingly and explicitly wanted to feel something about the past as well as remember it. They were eager for personal, emotional connections to the past in a variety of popular cultural forms—not just in museums, but also in film, television, novels, fashion, music, games, and toys. Public history increasingly became an emotional enterprise, and it could be found everywhere.54 The creators, staff, and participants at the institutions examined in this book encourage patrons to use their materials to form emotional connections to Jewish pasts that are inaccessible by other means. As the Jewish Museum of Florida told its prospective members, “This Museum is about you—and for you.”55

      As this new nostalgia for white ethnic pasts got underway, American Jewish nostalgia found its cultural lodestone in Fiddler on the Roof, the 1964 Broadway musical and 1971 film based on short stories written in Yiddish by Sholem Aleichem between 1894 and 1914. While Sholem Aleichem’s original tales of Tevye the Dairyman were funny and bitingly sarcastic critiques of European Jews trying—and often failing—to respond to social changes at the turn of the twentieth century, late-twentieth-century American Jews approached the stories with a serious sentimentality. Jewish and non-Jewish audiences used Fiddler’s story of Eastern European shtetl life to respond to the turbulent social changes of the 1960s, including women’s liberation, the Civil Rights Movement, and representations of the United States as a nation of immigrants. Fiddler itself became part of American Jewish heritage. Attending the musical, listening to the cast album, and watching the film became important means of expressing American Jewishness.56 American Jews brought Fiddler and its safely nostalgic longing into their lives through countless references, and recognized its sanctity by singing its songs—or even enacting its “bottle dance”—at weddings and bar and bat mitzvahs.57 The Fiddler song “Sunrise, Sunset,” explains religious studies scholar Ronald L. Grimes, “is Jewishly nondenominational in the way that commencement prayers are Christianly nondenominational.”58 Here, nondenominational in no way means “non-religious,” but rather Jewishly religious and broadly accessible to those both within and beyond religious boundaries.

      As I researched American Jewish nostalgia, Fiddler was ever-present in conversations and materials. In the Avotaynu Guide to Jewish Genealogy, Harold Rhode advises Jewish genealogists to think critically about the recorded and unrecorded pasts of Eastern European Jews. “Registration with the authorities in Eastern Europe invariably meant trouble,” he explains. He continues,

      One way to understand this is to remember what Tevye, the main character in “Fiddler on the Roof,” asked the shtetl rabbi: “Is there a blessing for the czar?” The rabbi answers: “A blessing for the czar? Of course. May G-d keep the czar far, far away from us!” This short exchange sums up how our ancestors viewed government.59

      More than most American Jews, Rhode knows how to do archival and scholarly research to trace his genealogy and place his ancestors in their historical contexts. Nonetheless, Rhode, like many others, employs Fiddler on the Roof as a nostalgic referent, a shorthand way to gesture toward a bygone world that contemporary Jews know primarily through popular culture.60

      New forms of American Jewish public history and popular culture followed suit. In the mid-1970s, inspired by the “roots movement” that was born of the popularity of Alex Haley’s 1976 book Roots: The Saga of an American Family and the ABC mini-series the following year, American Jewish genealogists began to organize and educate themselves, writing manuals and creating Jewish genealogical societies. A decade later, historians and preservationists started paying attention in earnest to the role historic synagogues might play in Jewish public life. In the 1990s, mainstream publishing houses started publishing increasing numbers of children’s books depicting stories of Jewish immigration as part of the American story of multiculturalism. And in the early twenty-first century, the Eastern European Jewish culinary revival began in earnest.

      These new forms of American Jewish public history encourage a more active longing for Eastern European Jewish immigration history. American Jews could connect to this past, and other Jewish histories, through a variety of older types of Jewish institutions and media, such as passively watching a movie or performance. The materials of the new Jewish public history lead American Jews to practice a more active longing for this Jewish past, beyond expressing a desire to connect to it. Longing activates their agency in this religious practice beyond a passive connection. Jewish genealogists actively research their family histories; visitors at historic synagogues step into the footprints of past congregants; parents read illustrated books aloud and children are encouraged to play with dolls; and restaurant patrons literally consume their longing for Eastern European Jewish