The film, “Keeping Up With The Steins,” is one of those cultural events that remind you just how different contemporary Judaism is from your grandparents’ Judaism.
The story revolves around a family preparing for the bar mitzvah of their son. A bar mitzvah in a wealthy and Jewish Los Angeles suburb is something that involves booking rock stars, luxury boat cruises and million-dollar-a-night arenas.
The movie takes its inspiration from a recent spattering of some very high profile bar/bat mitzvah parties.
For the last couple of years, we have increasingly read about and perhaps even attended these so-called religious coming of age events where the only thing religious about them is the amount of food conspicuously consumed.
Judaism is not prudish in its embrace of materiality. There is no mitzvah in being an ascetic. While the rabbis tell us “he who is wealthy is he who is satisfied with what he has,” Protestant moderation is not seen as an ultimate value.
I don’t think that the Jewish tradition is opposed to nice Chanukah gifts, being hospitable, and, yes, even dressed-up parties with good food and entertainment.
But there is something about the image of the rapper 50 Cent and half-clad women on a yacht with 700 of your closest friends “dancing” around a 13-year-old that just … how do I say this? … doesn’t sound Jewish.
The Steins and the rest of the characters in this movie are easy targets for anyone who has a shred of moral and ethical decency.
Do we really think one should be blowing millions of dollars on lavish affairs while children starve in African deserts? Do we really want gun-slinging rappers dancing the hora with our children at the Playboy mansion? Of course, not.
Along those lines, there have been those such as the Haredi community that have attempted to curb its appetites by demanding that people restrain themselves by limiting their spending on weddings and bar-mitzvah celebrations. In itself, not a bad idea.
So what does this movie have to teach us? And what does it tell us about who and what we as Jews have become?
From Tevye to Madonna
What’s new here are not Jews outdoing other Jews. Rather, it’s that Americans want to be like Jews.
The movie is not for Jews but about the image of Jews and about Americans wanting to mimic Jews. Judaism has become an icon of a religious and ethnic minority moving into he mainstream and into wealth.
“Keeping Up With The Steins” is the economic and social equivalent to Madonna’s and every other pop star’s interest in “Kabbalah” and the black super model Naomi Campbell’s belief that “anti-Semitism is anti-me.” It is cool to identify with Judaism.
Yuri Slezkine, the academic historian from Berkeley, in his much-acclaimed work, “The Jewish Century,” suggests that “The modern age is the Jewish age, and the 20th century, in particular, is the Jewish century.”
According to Slezkine, in the 20th century the world adopted patterns of behavior and modes of thinking traditionally associated with Jews such as social mobility, capitalistic instincts, and intellectual achievement.
The Jewish century paved the way for what he terms “Tevye’s children” to grow up and become “Steins” — a successful “Jew-ish” family that America as a whole can identify with or at the very least wishes to identify with. Instead of being Jews, the Steins, like so many other Americans, want to be Jew-ish.
How come and why have Jews like the Steins merely become Jew-ish is a question whose answer is actually simpler than what any demographer or social scientist will admit.
Crudely put, being Jew-ish is more “fun” than being a Jew. As the bar mitzvah boy’s father Adam Fiedler (played by Jeremy Piven) says, “It’s not about what happens in temple it’s about what happens at the party.”
The movie resonates because people are all too aware of the real-life prototypes for its characters and situations. The paradigm for American wealth is no longer an old stuffy, reserved Protestant man.
It’s the latte-sipping, iPod-buying, Hummer-driving, sweat suit-wearing, hedge-fund-managing Jew-ish type. What is Jewish here are certain cultural and economic attributes that Selzkine and others have shown are traditionally associated with Jews.
However, the fact that Jews now compete with other Jews for wealth and social status is more chance than anything else. They do so not because of any inner ethnic ties but because this is who moved up the corporate, social and intellectual ladder with them.
American Jews have gotten to the point where it’s the most un-coincidental coincidence that many of their well-to-do neighbors are also Jews. While such characteristics may have held Jewry together in the 20th century, I doubt it will provide the glue to hold it together in the 21st.
The tragic part about this movie is not that America has become Jewish — as the saying goes “keyn yirbu” (let them increase) — but that Jews have forgotten their Judaism.
Being economically and socially mobile, putting a premium on education and even providing a loving home for children might make Jews the best Americans, but it will not help ensure a future for Judaism.
Jewish sentimentality and ethnicity will never take the place of Jewish content. No matter how much everyone loves a party, in the long term what matters most is what happens in the synagogue.
Rabbi Eliyahu Stern is scholar-in-residence at Manhattan’s Park East Synagogue and writes for beliefnet.com. This article was provided by Edah, the advocacy movement for a modern and relevant Orthodox Judaism.
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