Rabbi Irwin Kula writes:
This month the most ambitious documentary on the American Jewish experience, a six-hour series called “The Jewish Americans,” aired on PBS stations around the country. The program, whose third and final segment was on Wednesday, is the most nuanced and sophisticated telling of the Jewish American story to date. The documentary invites us to reflect about what Jewish identity has meant in the past, what it will mean in the future, and how a minority group retains its identity.
Historically, there was never a single Jewish identity, there were many Jewish identities. As with any religious culture, there were different expressions of Jewishness that were products of interactions between people, their times, their inherited traditions, the larger cultures in which they were embedded, and their personal biographies.
Jewish identity in the first century in Palestine was very different than Jewish identity in Poland in the 17th century, which was very different than Jewish identity in Spain in the 12th century, which was different than Jewish identity in New Mexico at the end of the nineteenth century, which is different from the many kinds of Jewish identities in Jerusalem and Manhattan in the 21st century. In fact, when one studies the Jewish past, one discovers that identity is really a verb and not a noun — it is something that is continuously being constructed and not something that is static that one possesses.
