40 | JUNE 24 • 2021 

I

n one approach to Jewish 
customs, scholars investigate 
the back story of current 
Jewish practices. They trace the 
source of a behavior back to a 
verse in the Torah or to a com-
ment in the Talmud to the rec-
ommendations of the rabbinic 
leaders of a specific community.
Excellent scholarship in this 
approach appears in Minhagei 
Yisrael (Customs of Israel), an 
ongoing series published by 
Rabbi Daniel Sperber, head 
of the Talmud department at 
Bar-Ilan University in Israel. 
This approach leads scholars to 
emphasize practices that con-
nect directly with holy books 
and religious observances. 
Simon J. Bronner, in Jewish 
Cultural Studies (Wayne State 
University Press, 2021), takes 
a starkly different approach. 
Bronner takes as his subject any 
practice that Jews, or non-Jews, 
identify as characteristic of Jews, 
especially in contemporary 
America. 
Practices may originate in 
religious observance or in the 
host country where Jews lived a 
generation ago, or in a peculiar-
ity of the position of Jews in our 
current homes. Different prac-
tices register as Jewish in differ-
ent communities. Bronner does 
not need to distinguish between 
essential Jewish practices and 
practices that Jews accidentally 
happen to do. He identifies this 
field of inquiry as “Jewish cul-
tural studies.
” 
He focuses a chapter on the 
struggles of Jewish cultural stud-
ies to find a place in the politics 
of scholarship. Where does it 

belong? In the general field of 
cultural studies, some scholars 
consider Jews just a minor sub-
set of privileged whites and not 
an ethnic group worthy of study 
at all. Scholars in the field of 
Jewish studies prefer to honor 
inquiries into classical Jewish 
texts.
But Bronner argues that the 
actual lived culture of modern 
Jews deserves its place as a field 
of study. Furthermore, knowl-
edge of actual culture can help 
leaders of the Jewish communi-
ty make informed decisions to 
prepare for our shared future. 

BAR MITZVAH ROOTS
One fascinating example of this 
approach appears in “Fathers 
and Sons,
” Bronner’s chapter on 
the bar mitzvah in American 
and Western European Jewish 
culture. Far from being an 
adaptation of an ancient cere-
mony, the modern bar mitzvah 
developed from a much more 
modest observance in medieval 
Germany and Italy, from where 
it spread to Eastern Europe in 
the past few centuries, and only 
later to other Jewish commu-
nities. 
Anthropologists sometimes 
call the bar mitzvah a “rite-of-
passage,
” but, Bronner objects, 
passage from what to what? He 
has a point: A seventh-grader 
in America does not have a life 
situation significantly different 
from that of an eighth-grader. 
For many Jews, the ceremony 
does not mark the beginning of 
participation as an adult in syn-
agogue ritual. So why has the 
American bar mitzvah since the 

1950s become the occasion for a 
huge party, nearly equivalent to 
a wedding?
Bronner sees “the bar mitzvah 
as an invented milestone tradi-
tion that deals with father-son 
conflicts as the boy wrestles 
with the uncertain status of his 
masculinity in a wider modern 
context.
” 
Fasting on the Yom Kippur 
before one’s bar mitzvah, in 
Bronner’s psychological analysis, 
symbolically moves one from 
the maternal space of home to 
the paternal space of the syn-

agogue. The ordeal of reading 
from the Torah in public tests 
him before his father and his 
teachers. Even egalitarian liturgy 
and female rabbis do not, for 
Bronner, completely neutral-
ize the synagogue’s masculine 
identity.
As the synagogue became 
feminized, bar mitzvah parties 
became more muscularly mas-
culinized, with parties “in auto 
museums, on ski slopes or in 
sports stadiums.
” The ceremony, 
that once transferred a boy from 
the custody of his mother to 
his father, to his teachers, now 

transfers his allegiance “to his 
pals,
” in Bronner’s trenchant 
formulation. 
Oddly enough, Bronner pres-
ents the practice of fasting on 
Yom Kippur the year before bar 
mitzvah as entirely a folk prac-
tice, without a source in classical 
Judaism. In support of this 
analysis, he notes that contrib-
utors to an internet discussion 
of this practice do not mention 
any text. Bronner overlooks the 
Mishnah, at Yoma 8:4, which 
instruct parents not to let young 
children fast, but to train chil-
dren to begin to fast “a year or 
two earlier.
” Bronner sustains his 
larger point, however, that the 
classical sources do not mention 
any celebration related to reach-
ing the age of bar mitzvah.
Bronner expresses the hope 
that these studies will influence 
the standing of Jewish culture in 
academia and will help leaders 
understand Jewish culture in the 
home, synagogue and commu-
nity organizations. 
An unfortunate impediment 
to that hope, in my opinion, 
comes from his academic writ-
ing style. In a typical example, 
here Bronner explains that his 
fellow practitioners of Jewish 
cultural studies do retain an 
interest in the possible histor-
ical roots of current culture: 
“Despite the synchronographic 
or ethnographic orientation 
of Jewish cultural studies that 
draws on the legacy of Jewish 
folkloristics and anthropology, a 
historicism adapted from Jewish 
studies is apparent.
” 
That kind of writing is tough 
to get through. 

ARTS&LIFE
BOOK REVIEW

A review of Simon Bronner’s Jewish Cultural Studies.
Jewish Culture Matters

LOUIS FINKELMAN CONTRIBUTING WRITER

Simon J. 
Bronner

PENN STATE

