Implicit Judaism: Culture and Boundary Keeping

Henry Bial, in Acting Jewish, describes “double coding” as “the specific means and mechanisms by which a performance can communicate one message to Jewish audiences while simultaneously communicating another, often contradictory message to gentile audiences.” Such double coding is in play with what these panelists term “Implicit Judaism,” referring to the subtle ways in which Jewish identity, culture, and practices are embedded within various aspects of everyday life, often without explicit religious markers. These aspects include food choices, popular culture references, and the presentation of American Jews in post-WWII popular literature.

By bringing these topics together in a single roundtable, we are able to highlight continuities and discontinuities across different times and forms of cultural production, showing the ways that the boundaries of Jewish identity are discursively constructed and traversed by means of putatively secular cultural forms. Of particular interest in this discussion is the way that implicit Judaism operates as a form of gatekeeping around Jewish identity. This gatekeeping not only creates its own particular cultural identity—it also alienates those on the margins of the Jewish community who might not know the codes.

The roundtable will consider the following topics:

There are foods that are explicitly Jewish, regardless of origin story: gefilte fish, bagels, challah. These read—at least in North America—as Ashkenazi Jewish foods. But then there are foods that are implicitly Jewish—those foodstuffs that while not obviously coded as Jewish to outsiders are subliminally understood by insiders as food for the tribe, such as The Silver Palate’s Chicken Marbella. This dish, made famous in the 1980s, became a mainstay at Shabbat and holiday tables for decades to come (despite no obvious Jewish connection). Roundtable Participant #1 will parse the subtlety with which certain dishes—or methods of preparation—are implicitly identified as Jewish and thus lend a taste of Jewish legitimacy to the cook or the eater. She will also interrogate the ways that incorrect etiquette surrounding these foods can do the opposite—render the cook or eater as not quite Jewish (regardless of origin story).

Roundtable Participant #2 examines the coding of American Jewish literature as “Jewish” or “American” by focusing on the genre of 1940s anti-antisemitism novels. The most famous and commercially successful example was Laura Z. Hobson’s 1947 novel, Gentleman’s Agreement. Jewish readers considered it a “Jewish novel,” which explains why the Jewish Book Council was eager to award Hobson the National Jewish Book Award. But Hobson declined the award, as she resisted all efforts to label herself or Agreement as a Jewish author/book.” Hobson’s strategy of keeping her Jewishness and that of her novel implicit, allowed for the successful promotion of Gentleman’s Agreement as an American midcentury novel. Nonetheless, this tactic of keeping explicit Judaism out of the novel became a point of criticism: several critics asked why Hobson had so studiously avoided any explicit mention of Judaism in Agreement. This examination sheds light on the post-WWII context in which implicit Judaism was often most desirable, in the wake of a war which proved the divisiveness of religion.

Picking up from the specific discussion of Hobson, Roundtable Participant #3 will examine more general patterns in Jewish consumption of mass culture in the later 20th and early 21st century century, as Jewish audiences eager to see themselves reflected in popular media developed interpretative practices which projected Jewishness onto particular characters who were not originally written as Jewish. Drawing on the immense archive of fanfiction, this paper will explore not just the ways that characters are re-presented as Jewish, but the hermeneutic techniques that fanfiction authors use to justify their interpretative choices within a particular fandom discourse. This exploration will shed light on the complex interplay between cultural consumption and Jewish identity, highlighting the ways in which Judaism is constructed and perpetuated through secular culture.

Finally, Roundtable Participant #4 will discuss the ways that implicit gatekeeping comes up in Jewish communities, largely around conversion, (formerly) interfaith families, and Jews of color. She will point to how the boundaries of the community are policed using aspects of identity such as fashion and aesthetics; taste in food; sense of humor; politics; skin color; and other markers of identity. She will suggest that, in many Jewish communal settings, these markers matter as much or more than conventional markers of religiosity such as knowledge of prayers, Hebrew skills, or even synagogue membership. She will then consider the ramifications of this gatekeeping in terms of Jewish communities, particularly in the fact of their attempts to adapt to a changing Jewish landscape.