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Chrismukkah: Millennial Multiculturalism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 June 2018

Samira K. Mehta
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Abstract

Chrismukkah and its increased public presence marked a shift in the public discourse around Christian–Jewish interfaith families in the United States in the years surrounding the turn of the millennium. In children's literature, greeting cards, humor books, on television and in blogs, interfaith families who practiced elements of both Christianity and Judaism constructed a multicultural identity by the strategic reframing of practices from both backgrounds. Rather than understanding this identity as based in a failure to choose one religious practice over another, multicultural interfaith families argued that their blended practices both reflected an unavoidable reality and offered distinct advantages and moral formation to their families. “Religion,” as used by these multicultural families, becomes the domain of religious institutions, with membership lists and competing truth claims. “Culture,” their preferred term, denotes practices that are equivalent and can exist simultaneously in the lives of families and individuals. The article argues that interfaith families who practice both traditions use language of multiculturalism to create a space for such choices to be framed as morally cohesive. This multicultural framing then re-casts these practices, re-inscribing them with values of tolerance and minimization of difference rather than the theological and historical content ascribed by many of the religious institutions that these families avoid.

Keywords

Chrismukkahinterfaith familiesJewishmulticulturalpractices
Type
Research Article
Information
Religion and American Culture , Volume 25 , Issue 1 , Winter 2015 , pp. 82 - 109
Copyright
Copyright © Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture 2015

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References

Notes

Samira K. Mehta is an American Council of Learned Societies Public Fellow at the Museum of Jewish Heritage—A Living Memorial to the Holocaust. All views expressed in this article are those of the author and are not necessarily those of MJH. A number of people have helped to bring this article to fruition: first, the editors at Religion and American Culture and their anonymous reviewers, whose feedback has immeasurably improved the piece. In addition, at various points in this project’s development, Benjamin Brazil, Jodi Eichler-Levine, Eric Goldstein, Rachel Gross, David King, Gary Laderman, Katie Lofton, Anthony Petro, and Tisa Wenger have all offered helpful feedback on text and thought process.

1. “The Year in Buzzwords,” Time, December 20, 2004.

2. Michael McCarthy, “Have a Merry Little Chrismukkah,” USA Today, December 16, 2004.

3. Goldschmidt, Henry, Race and Religion among the Chosen People of Crown Heights (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2006).Google Scholar

4. Hecht, Richard, “Active versus Passive Pluralism: A Changing Style of Civil Religion?” in Religious Pluralism and Civil Society, vol. 612,Google Scholar The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (Los Angeles: Sage Publications, 2007), 133–51; Halter, Marilyn, Shopping for Identity: The Marketing of Ethnicity (New York: Schocken Books, 2000).Google Scholar

5. This article intersects with a number of bodies of literature in religious studies. The bulk of the work on interfaith marriage in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries considers the impact of marriage between Jews and non-Jews on the community, Jewish. Books such as Sylvia Barack Fishman's Double or Nothing: Jewish Families and Mixed Marriage (Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis University Press, 2004)Google Scholar explore dynamics of interfaith households and the role of Jewish education in the decision of children of interfaith marriage to affiliate with Judaism as adults. McGinity's, Keren Still Jewish: A History of Women and Intermarriage in America (New York: New York University Press, 2009)Google Scholar counters narratives that Jewish women who marry non-Jews lose their connection to Jewish identity with examples of the ways in which these women maintain a connection to their heritage in a variety of forms. Thompson's, Jennifer Jewish on The ir Own Terms (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2013)Google Scholar explores the role of non-Jewish women in creating Jewish homes after an interfaith marriage, examining the ways in which these women (and their husbands) are reshaping what it means to be Jewish in early-twenty-first-century America. This article shifts the focus of scholarship on interfaith families away from their impact on American Judaism, reading them instead in the broader context of American society at the turn of the millennium and exploring the material culture produced outside of the context of an affiliation with institutional Judaism.

Methodologically, I engage primarily with two bodies of literature in the study of American religion. Specifically, considering the role of material culture and American holidays, I draw from Leigh Eric Schmidt's Consumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997) and Heinz’s, Andrew Adapting to Abundance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992),Google Scholar both of which explore the role of material and consumer culture in shaping American holidays and rituals. Marilyn Halter's work bridges ethnicity studies and consumerism studies, demonstrating that, in the late twentieth century, patterns of consumption were central in enacting ethnic identity and particularly in fusing disparate identities. Jacobson's, Matthew Frye Roots, Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008)Google Scholar explores the creation of white ethnic identity in the late twentieth century, providing safe space for assimilation. Both Halter and Jacobson flesh out an understanding of ethnic identity that illuminates the conditions and privileges of white engagement with multiculturalism.

6. Forum, Pew on Religion and Public Life, “Many Americans Mix Multiple Faiths: Easter, New Age Beliefs Widespread” (Washington, D.C.: Pew Research Center, December 2009);Google Scholar Forum, Pew on Religion and Public Life, “U.S. Religious Landscape Survey: Religious Affiliation Diverse and Dynamic” (Washington, D.C.: Pew Research Center, February 2008);Google Scholar Putnam, Robert D. and Campbell, David E., American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2012);Google Scholar Seamon, Erica B., A Leap of Faith: Interreligious Marriage in the United States (An Undergraduate Report) (Washington, D.C.: Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs at Georgetown University, 2008).Google Scholar The Pew Foundation puts this number closer to 37 percent, though the Pew Foundation is asking what percentage of marriages are currently interfaith and Putnam and Campbell are asking about the number of marriages that are interfaith at the moment that they were contracted.

7. Putnam and Campbell, American Grace, 156.

8. Goldschmidt, , Race and Religion among the Chosen People of Crown Heights, 117.Google Scholar

9. Susan Katz-Miller, “Ask Interfaith Mom: Is It OK for Interfaith Parents to Adopt Interfaith Identity?” On Being Both: Interfaith Parent, Interfaith Child: Life with Two Religions, June 27, 2013, http://onbeingboth.wordpress.com/tag/interfaith-identity/.

10. Susan Katz-Miller, “An Interfaith Child in the World: Rise Up Joyful,” On Being Both: Interfaith Parent, Interfaith Child: Life with Two Religions, August 24, 2012, http://onbeingboth.wordpress.com/tag/interfaith-identity/.

11. Joshi, Khyati, New Roots in America's Sacred Ground (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2006);Google Scholar Jacobson, Roots, Too; Halter, Shopping for Identity; Hecht, “Active Versus Passive Pluralism,” 133–51.

12. For examples of how multiculturalism has been applied in educational settings, see Banks, James A., An Introduction to Multicultural Education, 5th ed. (Boston: Pearson, 2013);Google Scholar and Nieto, Sonia, Finding Joy in Teaching Students of Diverse Backgrounds: Culturally Responsive and Socially Just Practices in U.S. Classrooms (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 2013).Google Scholar

13. Halter, , Shopping for Identity, 11.Google Scholar

14. Goldschmidt, , Race and Religion among the Chosen People of Crown Heights, 131.Google Scholar

15. Ibid.

16. Halter, Shopping for Identity.

17. Ibid., 189.

18. Roof, Wade Clark, Greer, Bruce, and Johnson, Mary, A Generation of Seekers: The Spiritual Journeys of the Baby Boom Generation (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1994), 250.Google Scholar

19. Bellah, Robert N. et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life, 3d ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).Google Scholar

20. Roof, , Greer, , and Johnson, , A Generation of Seekers, 250.Google Scholar

21. Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart, 219–49.

22. In Goldschimdt's own work, he points out that if one sees Jewish food as a set of cultural markers, such that one is Jewish because one eats kugel just as one is Jamaican because one eats jerk chicken, simply exchanging food and recipes is a mode of creating cultural diversity and getting along. If, instead, one sees food not as Jewish but as kosher, which is to say adhering to a strict set of laws that must be followed because they were given by no less an authority than God, the entire playing field shifts. The food ways may or may not become more important, but they certainly cease to be simply ethnic markers. In his work, these different viewpoints on the function of food, cultural versus religious, is the point of miscommunication between the black community and the Lubavitch community. It is important to note that, while interfaith families in my work understand and, in fact, use the distinction that Goldschmidt depicts as existing within Crown Heights, both Jewish and Christian members of multicultural interfaith families adhere closely to the cultural model.

23. Laderman, Gary, Sacred Matters: Celebrity Worship, Sexual Ecstasies, the Living Dead and Other Signs of Religious Life in the United States (New York: New Press, 2009), xlv.Google Scholar

24. Orsi, Robert A., Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study The m (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006), 3.Google Scholar

25. Moorman, Margaret, Light the Lights! A Story about Celebrating Hanukkah and Christmas (New York: Cartwheel, 1999).Google Scholar

26. This is particularly true of Effin Older's My Two Grandmothers (New York: Harcourt Children's Books, 2000).

27. Wolff, Virginia Euwer, The Mozart Season (New York: Square Fish, 2007).Google Scholar

28. Ibid., 247.

29. In this case, sources addressing Christian-Jewish heritage and interfaith family life diverge sharply from much of the literature on biracial identity. Scholarship on biracial identity argues that language of “halfness” essentializes race, negatively impacting biracial people by excluding them from full participation in racial groups. Rather than seeing halfness as negative, many sources on interfaith families explicitly use the term to counter the idea of a belief-focused, in-or-out institutionally based definition of religion. While arguing that a child of interfaith marriage is in an inherently liminal position, these sources often also claim that, through that very status, the “half-Jew” gains a valuable skill set. Among my interview subjects, some embraced the term “half-Jewish,” as presented in the stories here. Others rejected the term, either on the grounds of Jewish law (which states that, if your mother is Jewish, you are Jewish, and, if your mother is not Jewish, neither are you, and which does not allow for partial Jewish identities) or on the grounds that naming someone “half-Jewish” erases the non-Jewish half of the identity, be it framed in religious terms (Catholic, Episcopalian, Mormon, Hindu, Jain) or ethnic terms (Irish, Italian, Lebanese, WASP). The particular sources above, however, claim “half-Jewish” as a term, and I, in respecting the categories deployed by my sources, have chosen to replicate the term in my own work.

30. Margaret gives God male pronouns.

31. Wolff, The Mozart Season, 29.

32. Klein, Daniel and Vuijst, Freke, The Half-Jewish Book: A Celebration (New York: Villard, 2000), x.Google Scholar

33. Ibid., xv.

34. Ibid., xvii.

35. Ibid., xix.

36. Ibid., 97.

37. Gompertz, Ron, Chrismukkah: Everything You Need to Know to Celebrate the Hybrid Holiday (New York: Stewart, Tabori and Chang, 2006).Google Scholar

38. Ibid., 10.

39. Lofton, Kathryn, Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar While Lofton points out that not all consumption offers the promise of shaping who you are, some does. The implication is that consumer choice is presented as holding potential for spiritual growth and formation.

40. “Mixed Families Set to Celebrate ‘Chrismukkah’?” NPR.org, December 15, 2006, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId¼6630803.

41. William Donohue and Joseph Potasnik, “Joint Statement on Chrismukkah: Catholic League and New York Board of Rabbis,” December 6, 2004, http://www.catholicleague.org/joint-statement-onchrismukkah-catholic-league-and-new-york-board-of-rabbis/.

42. Gompertz, Chrismukkah, 16.

43. Schmidt, Consumer Rites, 188.

44. Heinze, Adapting to Abundance, 79.

45. There are not many of these families (though there have been moments when the fear that interfaith families would become Unitarian Universalists prompted the Reform movement of American Judaism to increase its outreach attempts.)

46. Eichler-Levine, Jodi, Suffer the Little Children: Uses of the Past in Jewish and African American Children's Literature (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 5–16.Google Scholar