Nicknames and the Transformation of an American Jewish Community: Notes on the Anthropology of Emotion in the Urban Midwest

Fieldwork in Search of the Past: Identity and the American Jewish Experience

“…I am as ambivalent about the comforts of the American Jewish present as are my informants and susceptible to viewing the past, for all its distresses, in nostalgic terms rather than in the more dispassionate, critical frame my professional self demands (Glazier 1987). I would certainly not exchange it for their poverty or even for what now captivates my interest-the profuse ethnic symbols and meanings pervading their lives but echoing only faintly in my own.…”

“…These differences were so strongly felt that the immigrant Sephardim and, for a while, their children were an excluded, stigmatized minority (Glazier 1988). 4 Impoverished and partially segregated as much by choice as by circumstance, the Sephardim lived in a poor southside neighborhood already inhabited by Ashkenazic Jews, mostly from Poland and Russia.…”

“…1 My continuing reflections as a native on the nature of the American Jewish experience, particularly in its midwestern manifestations, also raise questions about Jewish self-identity that weave their way into the fabric of my recent professional concerns (Glazier 1985). 1 My continuing reflections as a native on the nature of the American Jewish experience, particularly in its midwestern manifestations, also raise questions about Jewish self-identity that weave their way into the fabric of my recent professional concerns (Glazier 1985).…”

Fieldwork in Search of the Past: Identity and the American Jewish Experience

“…Both groups shared a class and status antagonism toward the wealthier Americanized Reform Jews at the same time that they were alienated from each other through their very distinct little traditions, differences of language, custom, and history. These differences were so strongly felt that the immigrant Sephardim and, for a while, their children were an excluded, stigmatized minority (Glazier 1988). Although Orthodox in their practice, the Sephardim found the authenticity of their Judaism questioned, and they were regarded, in the words of a first generation Sephardic man, as "Jewish impostors.…”

“…This essay derives from my professional experience as an anthropologist in my home town, Indianapolis, where I have conducted fieldwork among Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jews, particularly regarding the history of Jewish settlement in that city. 1 My continuing reflections as a native on the nature of the American Jewish experience, particularly in its midwestern manifestations, also raise questions about Jewish self-identity that weave their way into the fabric of my recent professional concerns (Glazier 1985). I would thus like to explore several issues-Jewish religiosity and ethnicity, the historic division between Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jews, and class mobility-in relationship both to research at home and to my own professional and personal dispositions.…”