What is “Jewish peoplehood”? (a) A bold way of framing global Jewish interdependence in the face of existential threats? Or (b), to quote U.C. Davis Jewish studies professor Ari Kelman, “A solution looking for a problem”?
That was one of several conundrums considered at a Sept. 20 discussion at the Church Divinity School of the Pacific in Berkeley. The event was titled “Jewish Peoplehood: A Jerusalem-Berkeley Conversation.”
On the panel with Kelman were Deena Aranoff, assistant professor of medieval Jewish studies at Berkeley’s Graduate Theological Union, and Bernie Steinberg, vice president of the Shalom Hartman Institute in North America. GTU’s Center for Jewish Studies sponsored the event, with funding from the Koret Foundation and the Taube Foundation for Jewish Life and Culture.
Kelman, a social scientist who studies contemporary Jewish culture, noted that the term has gotten broad traction among Jewish leaders and organizations in the last 10 years.
“Peoplehood” was posited as a unifying buzzword for American Jewry as earlier concepts such as “Jewish continuity” were deemed less appealing, particularly to the younger generation.
Kelman said the push to sell the peoplehood notion came about because of a “loss of an imaginary collective, a nostalgic norm” with which Jews had aligned themselves until recent decades. Other factors came into play, including the global pushback against particularistic culture in favor of a more universal view of humanity.
In other words: tribes — bad; we are all one — good.
Peoplehood is the corrective, he noted, when religion proves too divisive, nationhood too political. It is “the bulwark against rampant individualism,” he said, quoting Jewish peoplehood champion Misha Galperin. “The American story is not the Jewish story.”
After sharing the results of a demographic survey that showed Jews in Israel and the United States already feel strong affinities for each other and all Jews, Kelman critiqued the peoplehood movement as a “gross misdiagnosis … [It] shows little involvement with the people it’s trying to help.”
Aranoff tackled the issue by going back in time to the era when the Jews of Spain and Portugal were forced either to convert to Christianity or suffer the torments of the Inquisition. She made the argument that Jewish peoplehood survived there, embedded in the daily habits of the Conversos (converted Jews who clung to aspects of their former religion).
“What explains the persistence of social ties and rituals without synagogues, libraries and institutions?” she asked. “It was the domestic sphere, the behaviors of home, what people ate, their leisure time.”
She cited the example of slaughtering a chicken in a kosher manner. While the Catholic neighbor would wring the bird’s neck, the Converso would still use a sharp knife, just as ritual kosher slaughterers would. “The home is the one institution not dismantled in Jewish life,” Aranoff added.
Steinberg went further back in time to Maimonides, the 12th century Egyptian Jewish philosopher, who addressed the notion of Jewish peoplehood through a re-examination of the Patriarch Abraham.
“If one looks at Abraham as the founder of the Jewish people, it’s biological,” he said, explaining that peoplehood can be seen as purely genealogical. But that by itself isn’t enough, Steinberg continued. Abraham, he said, founded a community based on learning and charity. Thus peoplehood is transmitted both biologically and morally.
One questioner in the audience cited the example of the Soviet Jews as a contemporary example of Conversos. Another wondered why peoplehood proponents seem to have forgotten the enormous numbers of interfaith marriages in the North American Jewish landscape.
On that latter point, Kelman noted, the peoplehood movement “goes off the rails. It betrays a fundamental misunderstanding” of modern Jewry because it neglects to consider whether all those non-Jewish spouses are part of the peoplehood equation.
Ultimately, quipped Kelman, the peoplehood movement is “Zionism without Israel.”