Roberta Rosenberg Kwall, Remix Judaism: Preserving Tradition in a Diverse World
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Roberta Rosenberg Kwall, Remix Judaism: Preserving Tradition in a Diverse World Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2020, 266 pp, Price: $30.00 Matthew Boxer1 Accepted: 5 November 2020 / Published online: 22 November 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
In 2001, a debate played out in the pages of Moment Magazine between Rabbi Avi Shafran, the Director of Public Affairs for Agudath Israel of America, and Rabbi Jerome Epstein, the then Executive Vice President and Chief Executive Officer of the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, over the authenticity of Conservative Judaism. Shafran’s essay (2001), “The Conservative Lie,” declared the Conservative movement a failure despite its best efforts. The movement claimed fealty to halacha (Jewish religious law) but had relaxed halachic standards for its adherents to accommodate sociological changes in society, and yet the vast majority of its members did not observe halacha even according to the movement’s more lenient interpretations. For those Conservative Jews who remained dedicated to halacha, Shafran argued that they would be better off joining the Orthodox community instead. Epstein’s rebuttal, “Authentic Judaism,” countered that halacha is not meant to be doctrinal but should be understood as a path that allows for multiple approaches to living authentic Jewish lives in a changing world. In turn, although the movement’s operationalization of halacha differed from that of Orthodoxy, it also required that Conservative Jews open their arms to “welcome the individual Jew at whatever level of observance we find him or her and take seriously our responsibility to urge, support, and guide that individual to a richer Jewish life” (Epstein 2001, p 67). Which side a Moment reader took in the debate was something of a projective test: Orthodox readers were likely to side with Shafran, while non-Orthodox readers were likely to side with Epstein. I was reminded of this debate when reading Roberta Rosenberg Kwall’s recent book, Remix Judaism: Preserving Tradition in a Diverse World, because I believe it may strike many readers in the same way. Some readers may applaud Kwall’s description of the ways contemporary Jews construct and reconstruct Jewish identities and practices by picking and choosing the aspects of Jewish life that are * Matthew Boxer [email protected] 1
Brandeis University, Waltham, USA
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most meaningful to them, adapting them to modern times and circumstances, and discarding the pieces that feel inauthentic or archaic. Others may lament such a description as abandoning Jewish history, tradition, and law in favor of convenience. But as Kwall takes great pains to demonstrate, neither reading is correct. Remix Judaism, as she describes it, is not the abandonment of Jewish history, tradition, and law, but rather, as Sylvia Barack Fishman (2000) might have described it, a coalescence of Judaism and the cultural context in which non-Orthodox Jews in general and American secular Jews in particular live their lives. Indeed, as a la
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