| As contemporary scholarship in sociology, anthropology, psychology and the interdisciplinary field of cultural studies assert, identity formation is an on-going and iterative process of inventing and re-inventing oneself that requires both conflict and resolution. Within the field of Jewish identity research, however, scholars and educators have largely pathologized the role of conflict in Jewish identity formation, and focused, instead, on resolution. Driven primarily by the ultimate concerns of ensuring the qualitative and quantitative survival of Jews in America, wittingly or unwittingly, they regarded the dissonance created by being both American and Jewish, by being both part of the larger American society and apart from it, as threatening. This survivalist master narrative dominated the field of Jewish identity formation until recent decades.;In this study, I began with the premise that identity is not a static product that can be manufactured for future generations, but an ongoing and unstable activity, rife with contradictions and tensions in order to explore the complex relationship between education and identity formation. Specifically, I engaged in a year-long ethnography of a liberal Jewish day high school, an ideal site for the study of dissonance in Jewish American identity formation because of its curricular commitment to teach, as one senior at the school put it, "Martin Luther King with Martin Buber." In other words, liberal Jewish day schools serve as unique postmodern experiments in juxtaposing Jewish teachings against the compelling and often competing intellectual, social, economic, and political rewards that the modern, Western ethos offers American Jews.;The study revealed how the members of one liberal Jewish high school in the United States navigated among the dissonant pressures that come with the desire to inhabit divergent cultural worlds simultaneously, and focused on the conscious and unconscious strategies they developed in response to this dissonance. In particular, I discovered a sharp cultural divide between general studies and Jewish studies learning environments, whereby the former were marked by a durability that I called "Jungle Gyms" and the latter were marked by a fragility, that I called "China Shops."... |
