Does it Matter if Authenticity is Authentic?

Does it Matter if Authenticity is Authentic? Sh’ma: A Journal of Jewish Ideas, December 2011, p 9-10. “Authentic? Get Real” read a recent New York Times headline (in the Fashion & Style section). The article highlighted the obsession with authenticity in our popular culture (one example cited Katie Couric claiming, “I think I love to be my authentic self.”) The piece concluded with a snarky critique of the authenticity trend as a highly calculated form of self-presentation more... Read More

Post-Ethnic, But Not Post-Peoplehood

My article in this month’s Sh’ma (March 2011) explores possibilities for peoplehood in a post-ethnic age. Here is a brief blurb–you can read the entire article on the Sh’ma website. Recently, I have been interested in the resurgent popularity of the term “Jewish peoplehood” as a new buzzword for evaluating Jewish identity. To get a better sense of the trend, I have had Google send me a daily alert with a link to every new Web reference to the term. The alerts I’ve... Read More

New Hans Kohn Article in Leo Beack Journal

Did Kohn Believe in the “Kohn Dichotomy”? Reconsidering Kohn’s Journey from The Political Idea of Judaism to the Idea of Nationalism Leo Beack Institute Yearbook (2010) 55(1): 295-311 The recent reprinting of Hans Kohn’s classic 1944 study The Idea of Nationalism: A Study in Its Origins and Background (2005) reflects renewed interest among scholars of nationalism in the man regarded as one of the founders of the field. In his introduction to this re-publication, sociologist Craig... Read More

“Counting Can Be Counterproductive” Sh’ma Magazine

Sh'ma Magazine October 2010 The October 2010 issue of Sh’ma magazine focuses on counting. Editor, Susan Berrin, writes, “since the days of King David, our numbers have been a source of contention; today is no different.” My article in the issue argues that “numbers and data galavanize a sense of demographic emergency by pointing to dwindling participation or shrinking populations. But they do so while implicitly promoting outdated paradigms of Jewish membership.” Read... Read More

Sources and Functions of Mordecai Kaplan’s “Civilization”

Pianko, Noam. “Reconstructing Judaism, Reconstructing America: The Sources and Functions of Kaplan’s ‘Civilization.’” Jewish Social Studies 12, no. 2 (2006):39-55. Mordecai Kaplan’s notion of Judaism as a “civilization” remains one of the most influential contributions to modern Jewish thought. The term civilization transformed a religious conception of Judaism into one that includes the totality of social interactions, cultural attributes, and religious folkways that... Read More

Cosmopolitan Wanderer or Zionist Activist? A New Look at Sir Alfred Zimmern

Ab Imperio 2009 Volume 4 My article “Cosmopolitan Wanderer or Zionist Activist? Sir Alfred Zimmern’s Ambivalent Jewishness and the Legacy of British Internationalism” appears in the April 2009 issue of Ab Imperio. Share and Enjoy:  Read More

Kaplan and Jewish Peoplehood

Kaplan On A Visit to Palestine Mordecai Kaplan gave his readers plenty of reasons to accuse him of disloyalty. Over his long life, Kaplan denied central pillars of the Jewish narrative—including the existence of a supernatural God and the concept of chosenness. However, Kaplan’s association with the concept of “peoplehood” has escaped controversy. Indeed, it is more popular today than ever before. Foundations, denominations, and institutions from across the spectrum of Jewish life have adapted... Read More

Horace Kallen, Jewish Nationalism, and the Limits of American Pluralism

Kallen lecturing at AJC event, 1968. AJA Archive Horace Kallen, Jewish Nationalism, and the Limits of American Pluralism American Jewish History, Volume 94, Number 4 Article Abstract This article rehabilitates two sources largely erased from Kallen’s intellectual biography and the genealogy of cultural pluralism more generally.  Kallen’s concept of cultural pluralism developed in conversation with British internationalism and the cultural Zionism of Asher Ginzberg, a Russian Jewish thinker... Read More