Stuart Charmé. <i>Authentically Jewish: Identity, Culture, and the Struggle for Recognition Reviewed by Jennifer Caplan</i>

What does it mean to be “authentically Jewish”? This is a question that is, on one hand, older than the concept of Jewishness itself and, on the other, a singularly contemporary concern. What we mean by “authentic” in the twenty-first century CE is not at all what they had in mind in the twenty-first century BCE when questions of matrilineality and kinship defined belonging. When Stuart Charmé talks about Jewish authenticity he is referencing a postmodern conception of interiority and truth that both includes and transcends biology or family. That is all contained within the subtitle of his book, “Identity, Culture, and the Struggle for Recognition,” and yet the concept of “authenticity” transcends those boundaries as well.Charmé’s book comes at a time when there is a growing body of scholarship concerned with how we define, categorize, and discuss contemporary Jewish (and in particular American Jewish) practice and praxis. These concerns are also not new, and yet in some ways they are. Since the 1970s there has been a great deal of effort (and money) aimed at identifying, enumerating, and classifying Jewish populations, primarily as a response to the data that gave rise to the so-called “continuity crisis.” When Jewish intermarriage rates jumped from single digits in the early twentieth century to 50 percent in the final quarter of the century, there was understandable panic and immediate existential concern on the part of Jewish organizations and institutions.Those data began to emerge, however, the better part of fifty years ago, and in that time, while many things have changed, the number of Jews in the United States has not dwindled to nothing. Subsequent studies have shown that the 50 percent intermarriage rate was based on questionable data, and while the rate likely was and has remained in the high 40 percent range, that hasn’t spelled the incipient end of Judaism as we know it. In fact, according to many surveys, Judaism is doing as well or better than the mainline Protestant churches in the United States in terms of demographic losses and gains, so it is increasingly clear to many scholars that the focus on intermarriage was misplaced, and the “crisis” has never really materialized.1The conversation in which Charmé’s book enters, then, is one in which many scholars are looking at other ways to interpret and frame this half century of data, and Charmé’s work is a very useful addition to this important reimagining of Jewishness. At the same time, because this is such a vibrant and growing subfield, and because books take a long time to be published, there are ways in which Charmé’s book feels dated even upon release. He does not engage with several of the important works in this area from the early 2020s, most notably Rachel Gross’s Beyond the Synagogue and Paul Mendes-Flohr’s Cultural Disjunctions, both of which take on elements of Charmé’s subject matter (Charmé does use an earlier essay by Mendes-Flohr that covers similar ground). This is the nature of the beast, so to speak, when publishing in a dynamic and growing subject area, but there is nevertheless a palpable sense of absence of the interlocutors this book naturally wants to engage.The book itself is divided into four sections, organized in a way that makes it eminently excerptable and extremely useful for both researchers and teachers. Part 1, “Theoretical Perspectives on Jewish Authenticity,” is, unfortunately, where the lack of connection to other recent scholarship is felt the most keenly. Charmé’s approach to the question of Jewish authenticity and what we “count” as Jewish practice and identity is different from that of many other scholars (again, see Gross’s work or other books that have come out since Charmé’s, including Sandra Fox’s The Jews of Summer or my own Funny, You Don’t Look Funny), so the introductory positioning and situating of his argument would be easier to work with if it were clearer how his work intersects with those other works and with a clearer sense of why he is approaching these questions in a different way. Other recent works are, broadly speaking, focused on highlighting all the ways in which Jews engage with culture as expressions of their Jewishness, and making cases for why we’re not thinking expansively enough about what constitutes contemporary Jewish practice. Charmé’s work is more interested in communities, which is an important addition to the conversation but leaves questions about some things that go on at the familial or individual level, which, ultimately, is what survey data and demography is collecting.The second section, “Authentically Jewish Religion,” will be especially useful in Jewish studies classrooms as his four chapters on (1) Orthodoxy, (2) Reform (broadly construed), (3) Meditation, Yoga, and Kabbalah, and (4) Messianism offer four very different views into Jewish institutional life and will help satisfy the inevitable student who doesn’t see enough of what they think of as “religion” in classes on Jewish topics. Part 3 (“Authentic Jewish Peoplehood”) is a bit of a mixed bag, containing the lone chapter on Israel followed by a chapter on “Shtetl Authenticity” that looks at Yiddish revivalism and the resurgence of Klezmer, all framed in a sort of “post-Fiddler” timeline. The third chapter in the section is on intermarriage and conversion and is followed by a chapter on “Jewish genes,” and while there is a logic to why these chapters come where they do in the book they also could have gone into the opening section as part of the theoretical positioning of Jewish authenticity. I appreciate that Charmé didn’t start with those chapters as they are, perhaps, “expected” as entry points, and switching the focus from natality/intermarriage/conversion/descent helps to push the reader to think about authenticity differently. And yet, their position late in the book also makes it feel a bit as though we’ve moved backwards in the conversation.The fourth section is perhaps the most exciting. “Struggles over Authentication and Recognition” looks at Ethiopian Jews, Black Jews in the United States, Crypto-Jews, and “Newly-Found Jews” and brings much needed, new insights into conversations that have felt a bit stagnant. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, when DNA testing became more commercially available and the Cohen Modal Haplotype was identified, there was a flurry of interest in testing various communities around the world that claimed Jewish ancestry to “prove” (or disprove) those claims. Both the Lemba of South Africa and various communities in the American Southwest and northwestern Mexico that were long thought to be enclaves of the descendants of those who fled the Spanish Inquisition showed high concentrations of the Cohen Modal Haplotype, at rates consistent with other Jewish communities. The problem was that DNA testing advanced rapidly and haplotype mapping was quickly abandoned as more sophisticated testing became available. Additionally, even if haplotype mapping had remained the gold standard, it didn’t overcome the racial concerns that undergirded some of these conversations, and “proof” that these non-white communities were Jewish didn’t change the ongoing questions about their practices and their authenticity. Charmé shows this clearly in the chapter about Black Jews in the United States. Charmé covers the various problems Black Jews face in being accepted and treated equally in Jewish spaces because the existence of Christian groups such as the Hebrew Pentecostals and Black Hebrew Israelites cause many white American Jews to see all Black Jews as pseudo-Christians at best, and as nefarious agents of Christian evangelism at worst.Overall, Authentically Jewish is an excellent addition to the robust conversation about why—and how—we continually seek to define and police the boundaries of Jewishness. The book arrives just as a new generation of scholars is taking up this question, and Charmé’s book offers excellent insights into the way these questions have developed and evolved. The places where one wishes the book could engage with some of those new voices are primarily a function of the rapidity with which new scholarship is appearing, and for classroom use sections of the book can easily be paired with other readings to offer students additional insights into this moment in Jewish studies. The researcher will find the book useful, and the organization is of particular use for scholars looking to advance the conversation around those peoples on what has long been considered the margins of Jewishness. With luck, Charmé’s book will be one more nail in the coffin of the legitimacy of that notion of marginality.