Ethnic Options

What we must take not of is that the walls have come down not just for Jews, but for white Americans in general. In 1990, Mary Waters published a fascinating book about the changing patterns of ethnicity in America. It is a study of the patterns of transmission and expression of ethnic identity among white Americans today. To be blunt, if the Italians of Irish or Scotch were Jews, they would be wailing about Italian or Irish or Scottish continuity. The weakening of communal ties, in the form of group distinctiveness, is not just a Jewish phenomenon.

The title of Waters' book, Ethnic Options, should strike us as ironic. How can ethnicity be an option? Isn't it a given, like the year you were born? The short answer is, no. Using data from the 1980 US census question on ethnic ancestry and following up with extensive personal interviews, Waters found that today's Americans of white, European ancestry pick and choose their ethnic identities --- taking on, giving up, combining. The operative principle is personal preference, not inheritance.

Here is the flavor:

Q. 1What about your husband's ancestry?'

A. ``He would have answered Russian Jew and English and Scottish on the census form. He really likes his Russian Jew part. We have a mezuzah on the front door. He converted to Catholicism when he married me. He grew up with his mother, and she was Baptist, so he was kind of raised in that tradition. But he likes his Russian Jew part more, he feels closer to being catholic, and that part goes together more. They are kind of similar.

I won't go into the details here, but as this excerpt suggests, religion has also participated in this transformation, with individual choice now very much the norm.

Waters' respondents did not disavow their ethnicity. They wanted to have an ethnic identity. But it is identity without obligations. It functions in what I would call a decorative way. It gives a sense of belonging to something besides the great mass American culture, but in a way that does not violate the principle of individual choice. The cultural practices associated with this new kind of ethnicity are selective, intermittent, and largely, symbolic. They make little claim on the person's basic American life style.

We can hear in these words the echo of Marshal Sklare's work on the Jews of Lakeville in the 1950's, who chose to maintain the forms of Jewish expression that were capable of redefinition in modern terms, not demanding of social isolation, and intermittent (and also child-centered). Jews are now, and then, reflecting the larger trends of American culture. And any responses we make must reckon with this reality.