American JewBu
Jews, Buddhists, and Religious Change
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
A revealing look at the Jewish American encounter with Buddhism
Today, many Jewish Americans are embracing a dual religious identity, practicing Buddhism while also staying connected to their Jewish roots. This book tells the story of Judaism's encounter with Buddhism in the United States, showing how it has given rise to new contemplative forms within American Judaism—and shaped the way Americans understand and practice Buddhism.
Taking readers from the nineteenth century to today, Emily Sigalow traces the history of these two traditions in America and explains how they came together. She argues that the distinctive social position of American Jews led them to their unique engagement with Buddhism, and describes how they incorporate aspects of both Judaism and Buddhism into their everyday lives. Drawing on a wealth of original in-depth interviews conducted across the nation, Sigalow explores how Jewish American Buddhists experience their dual religious identities. She reveals how Jewish Buddhists confound prevailing expectations of minority religions in America. Rather than simply adapting to the majority religion, Jews and Buddhists have borrowed and integrated elements from each other, and in doing so they have left an enduring mark on the American consciousness.
American JewBu highlights the leading role that American Jews have played in the popularization of meditation and mindfulness in the United States, and the profound impact that these two venerable traditions have had on one another.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Sigalow, sociologist and executive director at the UJA-Federation of New York, uses fresh sociological concepts to shed light on the relationship of contemporary American Buddhism and Judaism in America in this probing debut. She begins by reclaiming the idea of religious syncretism, describing religious mixing without judgment about authenticity of religious contents. Sigalow's work openly contests this "pejorative" understanding of syncretism and "challenges the dominant paradigm within sociology that suggests that religions adapt and change in this country by assimilating into the majority, and taking on the characteristics and organizational forms of liberal Protestantism." She argues that "Jewish social location" as a "distinctively left-liberal, urban, secular, and upper-middle-class religious minority" was similar to that of American Buddhism, allowing for distinctive and fruitful interactions throughout the 19th century. Her extremely close focus at times misses larger forces at work specifically the overall decline of institutional religion over the past century, which has allowed beliefs and practices to mix. Nonetheless, Sigalow detailed investigation offers new insights about the mechanisms by which religions evolve in multireligious America.