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It is certainly true that people thinking of themselves as” Jewish” in contemporary North America assert radically differing interpretations of the term. Is “Jewish” a religious expression? But, if so, how can it be defined? Is “Jewish” descriptive of an ethnicity? But, if so, can we give it any hard and fast definition?
Decried by some, embraced by others, the current diversity and fluidity of definitions of the term “Jewish” has given rise to a multitude of hybridities that in previous generations would have been dismissed as inherently absurd and self-contradictory. Nonetheless, numerous such hybridities have engendered communities that proudly espouse the possibility of being, for example, a “gay frum Jew” in print, on the internet and through social media. As well, the assertion of previous American Jewish “truths,” such as the rightness of Jewish endogamy and the wrongness of intermarriage, which served as the watchword of organized American Jewry across its denominational spectrum for nearly the entire span of American Jewish history, is now under serious challenge.
Hybrid Judaism: Irving Greenberg, Encounter, and the Changing Nature of American Jewish Identity takes the reader on an...