PHILADELPHIA — Grappling with Jewish identity in America is not a late-20th-century invention. Long before there were continuity commissions and Israel Experience programs, Jews were wrestling with what it means to be an American and a Jew.
In fact, ever since Jews first set foot in the New World more than three centuries ago, they have sought to piece together the different strands of their identity. Those efforts resulted in many paths — from full assimilation, even conversion, to maintaining and later reclaiming Jewish traditions and rituals.
A new exhibit at the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia seeks to shed new light on the Jewish experience in America, illuminating the varied approaches to identity.
Jewish identity in America has never been “one thing,” says museum director Margo Bloom. “It depends on where you came from, who your grandparents were, whether you were Sephardi or Ashkenazi.”
Many people think that all Jews came to this country in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, landed at Ellis Island, lived on the Lower East Side of New York and spoke Yiddish, says Bloom. Not many remember that Jews “lived in the South, fought in the Civil War, went West.”
Through the stories of individuals, and artifacts from their lives, the multitude of experiences are laid out in “Creating American Jews,” which will serve as the museum’s new permanent exhibit.
The museum, located in the historic section of Philadelphia just blocks from Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell, is the country’s only museum dedicated primarily to American Jewish history.
While all immigrants to America forged new identities, Jews for the first time had the freedom to choose how or even whether to remain Jewish.
As the introduction to the exhibit says: “In America, it was different. Everyone was a nomad, a traveler from somewhere else. The new land presented Jews with a dilemma: how to forge identities as `Americans’ and still remain Jews? Over time, the children and grandchildren of the early pioneers would discover that the openness of America posed endless possibilities challenging them to reinvent Jewish identity again and again.”
The exhibit divides 350 years of Jewish life into categories, including “The New World,” “Pioneers,” “Immigrant Neighborhoods,” “Modern Communities” and “New Identities.”
The stories include that of Joseph Simon, who lived in Lancaster, Pa., in the mid-1700s. He carried a miniature Torah scroll and ark when his business took him places where no Jewish community existed.
The Civil War found Jews on both sides of the North-South divide. The exhibit shows a stark photograph of a Union soldier wearing his yarmulke. Another soldier, Myer Levy, wrote a letter to his parents from the battlefront near Deep Bottom, Va.
The exhibit, though beautifully mounted, seems over-ambitious and confusing in its effort to be all-inclusive. It jumps, for example, from the mid-19th century to the 1960s too quickly without adequately preparing the visitor for the transition.
Still, the message rings clear that there were and still are many ways to be Jewish. For some, Jewish life centered around the synagogue, while for others Jewish identity was expressed through battling anti-Semitism, retaining memories of the Holocaust, identification with Israel or political activism on behalf of Israel, Soviet Jewry or the civil rights and feminist movements.
In 1975, Karen Mittelman, then a teenager, wrote a letter to the authors of “The Jewish Catalogue,” thanking them for sparking a new light in her Jewish quest.
Mittelman, the curator of the Philadelphia exhibit, was surprised when one of the editors unearthed her letter.
Just as she was “swept up in that re-envisioning of American Judaism” articulated in “The Jewish Catalogue,” Mittelman says, “the sense of invention and remaking Judaism is what’s at the heart of this show. In every generation, Jews had to reinvent their place in America.”