
“Borscht Belt” in the Catskill Mountains north of New York City.
Jewish religious life has also become more visible to the general population even as
fewer Jews belong to synagogues or practice their faith at home. The building boom o
large, visible, suburban synagogues, which began in the 1950s and crested over the
following decade, made Jewish houses of worship a much more noticeable physical
resence in many communities. Moreover, beginning in the 1950s, the notion became
widespread that the US had three major religious groups—
Protestants,
Catholics and
Jews—equally deserving of respect, as did the idea that the nation was based on “Judeo-
Christian” (as opposed to simply “Christian”) values. Judaism was increasingly being
referenced and in a way that made it seem part of the American mainstream.
At the same time, more Jews were moving away from orthodox approaches to Judaism
into less traditional and fundamentalist branches, particularly Conservative Judaism,
which sought to bridge the gap between orthodoxy and the more liberal Reform
movement. After the 1950s, Jews on the whole were moving away from a focus on the
practices and scholarship that emphasized the more unique aspects of the
religion
.
This has perhaps become most apparent in the transformation of Hanukkah—a quite
minor
holiday
on the traditional Jewish calendar—into a major event, widely noted
outside the Jewish
community
and very publicly celebrated as a kind of Jewish
equivalent of Christmas, which occurs at about the same time. Ironically, Hanukkah
commemorates a victory in ancient Israel over both enforced and voluntary assimilation.
Beginning in the late 1960s and continuing through the early twenty-first century there
have been small, but significant contrary trends towards increasing observance. A Jewish
renewal movement began to reinvigorate Jewish traditions and to encourage a spirituality
that some felt had been smothered by mainline synagogues. The number of Jewish
parochial schools,
known as day schools, began to rise and more of them were linked to
the more liberal branches of Judaism. In 1999 Reform rabbis issued a statement
encouraging Reform congregations to return to more traditional practices.
At the same time, Jewish congregations have had to grapple with new issues posed by
changes in larger American society While many leading feminists, such as Betty
Friedan,
were Jewish, traditional Judaism delineated clear and highly circumscribed
roles for women. In the 1970s, some of the barriers to full female participation began to
crumble, first in the Reform and later in the Conservative movements. The Reform
movement ordained its first female rabbi in 1972, and the Conservative movement
followed in 1985. In addition, a vibrant feminist Jewish scholarship developed to
reinterpret traditional texts, uncover lost history and create new liturgy.
Still, by the late 1990s, Jews were more likely to define their “Jewishness” in ethnic or
cultural terms than in religious ones, and to focus more on an emotional link to Israel or
the Holocaust as touchstones of their Jewishness than on synagogue or other
organizational activities. As the immigrant generations pass away debate in the Jewish
community has increased about what it will mean to be Jewish in the US in the future. Al
Gore’s selection of Orthodox Jewish Senator Joseph Lieberman as his Democratic
vice-
presidential
running mate in 2000 has stimulated discussion about Jewish identity and
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