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March 2011/Adar 2 5771
A JOURNAL OF JEWISH RESPONSIBILITY
Jewish Identity
Susan A. Glenn
& Naomi B. Sokoloff
Who Is a Jew and
What Is Jewish? . . . . . . 1
Shaul Magid
Be the Jew You Make: Jews,
Judaism, & Jewishness in
Post-Ethnic America . . . 3
Discussion Guide. . . . . . 4
Steven M. Cohen
& Jack Wertheimer
What Is So Great about
“Post-Ethnic Judaism”? . 5
Lila Corwin Berman
Identity Making:
Its Historical Roots . . . . 6
Noam Pianko
Post-Ethnic, But Not
Post-Peoplehood . . . . . . 7
Zohar Weiman-Kelman
An “In-Between”
Identity. . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Picture a Jew:
A Photo Essay. . . . . . . 10
Daniel Gordis
What, Not Who,
Is a Jew?. . . . . . . . . . . 12
Yehiel E. Poupko
Making Jews: Conversion
and Mitzvot. . . . . . . . . 13
Mark Washofsky
Conversion and
Conversation . . . . . . . . 14
Ruth Abusch-Magder
Assuming Identity . . . . 15
Marla Brettschneider
African and African
Heritage Jews: Western
Perspectives. . . . . . . . . 16
Swifty Lang
Infinite Schlemiel:
The Erudite Bungler in
A Serious Man . . . . . . . 17
Patrick Aleph, Michael
Sabani, Caryn Aviv, Jason
Miller, Juan Mejía
NiSh’ma . . . . . . . . . . . 18
Richard Litvak
Sh’maEthics . . . . . . . 20
ewish identity has long been a source of questions and concerns — how to transmit and
teach it, and how to instill a passion to embrace it. However, over the past decade or so,
identity issues have taken a new turn, with talk of hyphenated identity (for example,
American-Jewish) seen increasingly in some circles as too clear cut and insufficiently expansive.
Some now speak of “fusion,” by which they mean amalgamating the many pieces of who we are
as individuals, commingling our many different identities and acknowledging that we belong to
various communities, either simultaneously or consecutively. For some, this means blurring
boundaries that have defined us for so long. This issue of Sh’ma seeks to examine these questions — in particular, to explore the musings of some GenXers about inheritance and legacy in
what some consider a post-ethnic America. Other essays look at global Judaism and what
weaves us together as a people, often in ways different from before. Three pieces look at the
question of conversion and how one becomes a Jew. This is an issue devoted to a deep conversation, and to examining how identities are negotiated in new and often surprising ways. —S.B.
J
Who Is a Jew and What Is Jewish?
SUSAN A. GLENN & NAOMI B. SOKOLOFF
In 2009, controversy erupted when a publi- cally funded Orthodox Jewish school in London denied admission to a child with a
Jewish father and a mother who had converted
to Judaism. The Orthodox standard of Jewish-
ness employed by the school favored children
born to Jewish mothers, regardless of how reli-
giously observant, over children born to non-
Jewish mothers, regardless of how stringently
those children and their families observed
mitzvot. The school insisted that because the
mother’s conversion did not meet
those standards, neither she nor
her son had a right to call them-
selves Jews. But that was not the
end of the story. As it turns out,
while British law permits publicly
funded faith schools to use reli-
gion as a criterion of admission, it
strictly forbids discrimination on the basis of
race. And when the British Supreme Court heard
the case in December of 2009, the majority opin-
ion declared that “by definition, discrimination
that is based upon [the matrilineal] test is dis-
crimination on racial grounds” and therefore il-
legal. State-funded Jewish schools are now
required to adjust their policies so that evidence
of faith-based activity, rather than Orthodox ha-
lakhic tests, are the criteria for admission. The
ruling continues to be contested.
Regardless of the historical, institutional, or
national definitions of “who is a Jew,” the
experience of identity is layered, shifting, syncretic,
and constructed, and it is clear that Jewish identity
can be reforged under new circumstances.
states and societies in the Diaspora. In Israel,
too, perplexities abound: Immigrants without
formal ties to religion, Arab citizens, guest
workers and their children, and homosexuals
who assert their voices, press their cases for full
civil rights, and struggle to define their relationship to the predominant culture of a Jewish
majority — a culture shaped in significant ways
by Jewish religious norms and constituencies.
Furthermore, in recent years, awareness has
