Finding
It is revealing that Koltun-Fromm examines American Jewish thinkers for the first two-thirds of the book.
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Book Reviews
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Full textAbstract
In Material Culture and Jewish Thought in America, Ken Koltun-Fromm, a professor of religion at Haverford College, sets out to investigate and better understand the material dimensions of Jewish identity in the United States. He is interested in “how American Jews work with things, and how they think about them in ways that produce distinctive identities” (p. 2). His stated aim is to “expose the cultural patterns that inform Jewish thinking about things, and the visual and literary paradigms that ground Jewish identity in objects” (p. 3). Koltun-Fromm contends that American Jews are “mesmerized by things” and “drawn to the vivifying effect of the material landscape” and, in doing so, “constructed their selves in and through material practice” (p. 3). He seeks to uncover the material features of Jewish thought and practice and he aims to do this by “linking the material dimensions in culture to Jewish identity” in order to create what he calls “material Jewish identity” (p. 3). He therefore examines the modes by which Jews confront objects; how devotion to the past limits material abundance and success; the ways in which place inspires Jewish thought and practice; the presence of physical objects in Jewish ritual life; how character is formed in its attachment to things; the visual paradigms in and by which Jews see things; and the manner in which those objects, in turn, speak to Jews. Koltun-Fromm has the admirable aim of wishing to emancipate Jewish thought from its intellectual, social and political ghettos (using a material metaphor he calls them “straightjackets”; p. 3), with their attendant epistemological, social critique, aesthetics, philosophical, and social ethical criticism. At the same time, he wishes to address those engaged in Jewish cultural studies (here he cites Jonathan Freedman’s Klezmer America: Jewishness, Ethnicity, Modernity as a model example), whose tendency is to neglect Jewish religious thought (namely Judaism) in favour of gender, race, and ethnicity. This last point is a fair one, for, using Film Studies as but one example, Jews have tended to be represented in the medium and hence analysed as an ethnic group rather than as a faith-based religious one as well. Overall, then, Koltun-Frumm proposes an intermarriage, as he wishes to “wed” (again his metaphor) the disciplines of cultural studies to Jewish thought (p. 3). The question then, which I shall return to later, is how successful is Koltun-Fromm in this shidduch? In terms of structure, the book is divided into six chapters. It is revealing that Koltun-Fromm examines American Jewish thinkers for the first two-thirds of the book. Chapter One, “The Material Self: Mordechai Kaplan and the Art of Writing”, takes Kaplan’s diaries covering the years from 1913–1934 as its subject. Chapter Two, “The Material Past: Edward Bernays, Joshua Liebman, and Eric Fromm”, explores the thought of those three thinkers. KoltunFromm then turns to Joseph Soloveitchik’s Halakhic Man and The Lonely Man of Faith in Chapter Three (“Material Place: Joseph Soloveitchik and the Urban Holy”). The fourth chapter, “Material Presence: Abraham Joshua Heschel and The Sabbath”, is the final dealing with American Jewish thought in the book. The remaining third of the manuscript investigates the material in the literary output of Anzia Yezierska, Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud, and Cynthia Ozick (“The Material Narrative: Yerzierska, Roth, Ozik, Malamud”), as well as heritage production as manifested in the covers of Lillith Magazine, Arnold Eagle photographs, the original story Day of Atonement by
Authors
L. Peters
Journal
Journal of Marketing Management