Traditional Judaism: The Conceptualization of Jewishness in the Lives of American Jewish Post-Boomers

Post-boomer American Jews pose many challenges to established frameworks for understanding the organization of the American Jewish community. In an analysis of 58 in-depth interviews with post-boomer American Jews, we found a preference for people who described themselves as not religious, and we found a near-total absence of the language of ethnicity. Instead, interviewees volunteered tradition as a replacement for both and as part of a rationale for the elements of Jewish life that compelled them to participate. Rejecting the voluntarism of much baby-boomer religion and the established frameworks of religion and ethnicity, post-boomers’ characterizations of their own Judaisms point to the ways in which the social science of American Jews needs to develop a finer, more diverse set of tools for understanding American Jews and the Judaisms they practice.