Abstract
One version of the story of Jewish identity—or to be more precise, the story of the discourse of “Jewish identity” in North America—goes like this. Beginning around the 1950s, leaders of the Jewish community found themselves faced simultaneously with the collapse of a traditional, religious self-conception and with the demographic challenge of increasing exogamy. Jews were moving out of ethnic enclaves to the suburbs, and while suburban American norms certainly did demand membership in a house of worship (and suburban synagogues fit the bill quite nicely), they did not support intensive Jewish practice, and the social integration of