A Movie Case Study of Anemic Jewish Education

Abstract

Keeping Up with the Steins (2006) is the first Hollywood film to focus on the Bar Mitzvah ceremony in its family, congregational, and Jewish community context. The film demonstrates how popular culture reflects community values, but may also shape them. The hero is alienated both from the synagogue service and his mega–Bar Mitzvah party. In line with current sociological thought, the film shows his search for meaning in personal space, not institutional frameworks. What is being passed on from generation to generation are the infrequent rituals of secular folk religion, as spirituality (let alone God) is not mentioned at all.

Acknowledgments

Dr. David Resnick is Senior Lecturer in the School of Education at Bar Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel. E-mail: [email protected]

Notes

The only exception to this statement is the mezuzah on the front door of the Fiedler home, though only those who view the film in slow-motion will notice it. There is one long scene at the front door, but it is shot from an angle that obscures the mezuzah. Had the director wanted to highlight the mezuzah—and with it some Jewish content in the Fiedler home—he would have shot that scene from a different angle.

Sociologists of American Jewry give the food connection its ethnic due, although it may lack religious implications: “Social scientists have often belittled the meaning of food, seeing it as part of merely symbolic and largely superficial ethnicity. Apparently, our respondents take a brighter view of the linkage between Jewish food and Jewish grandmothers [“Grandma Rose's Brisket” is on the buffet], lending it deeper meaning than many social scientists have recognized and making it a major causal factor in their adult Jewish development. … The survival of distinctive ethnic cuisines long after the disappearance of other markers of difference has made food a near-universal link to ethnic identity” (Cohen and Eisen 2000, 50).

Translation is from the The Prophets (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society 1978, 838, 840).

¹This article is based, in part, on a presentation at the Fifth International Conference of the Israel Association of Research in Jewish Education, Jerusalem, January 2009.