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NEXTBOOK FEATURE
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Jewish Identity at Work
Tobin Belzer, post-doctoral fellow, University of Southern California
Tobin Belzer might have called her talk “Jewish Communal Professionals,” but few of her 48 subjects choose to identify themselves that way, even though they work for synagogues, parochial schools, and Jewish communal agencies. Many of the young professionals Belzer interviewed told her that they chose their jobs to “marry their non-work life and their work life—to express their Jewish identities. But in many cases, because they spent all day around Jews, their Jewish practice suffered. By the time they got home they were like, 'I don't want to do Shabbat, I don't want to see another Jew.'” Moreover, their jobs offered few advancement opportunities, and salary and maternity-leave policies often lagged behind mainstream employers. “There's an assumption that it's so meaningful, you'd want to spend 24/7 at your office and it would be okay because you'd have an a priori commitment to Jewish communal work.”
While an earlier generation saw the keystone of its identity in formal membership in a synagogue or a group like Hadassah. Belzer's subjects, aged 24 to 38, “defined themselves in opposition to Jewish community culture—they described themselves as out of it, as something they didn't belong to. It was white, it was parochial. They're Gen X-ers, they see themselves as having multiple identities. Informal networks of Jewish geography really made up their feeling of belonging.” For many of these professionals, working for a Jewish organization carried a stigma. “It's becoming cool to be a young Jew, but it's still not cool to be a young Jewish professional.”
More from the AJS Conference:
American Jews and Marriage Counseling, 1920-1945
"Based on a True Story": Popular Imaginings among American Jews of Gender
in Ultra-Orthodox Society
Bi'ur Hametz and the Ancient Semitic Magic
Confronting the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict in the Jewish Studies Classroom"
Gefilte Fish and Beautiful Shoes: Soviet Jews Describe the Ideal Jewish Woman
Lekhu ve-nelekhah (Come Ye and Let Us Walk): The Jewish Students of
Kazimir Malevich
Money in Jewish Eyes: Object of Desire or Derision?
Mothers' Dreams, Daughters' Choices: Envisioning Mothers of Ba'alot Teshuvah
and their Daughters
The "Normal" Mysticism of Jewish Meal Rituals
Piracy, Politics, and Product Placement: Hasidic Book and Magazine
Publishing Today
The Rise of the Ladino Theater in the Ottoman Empire
About the Conference
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