For
over 10 years, Dr. Charmé has been interviewing Jewish
children and adolescents about their religious ideas and
their feelings about various Jewish issues. In particular,
he has focused on questions of gender in children’s
understanding of Jewish history and practice. Previous surveys
have indicated that there is a dramatic decline after bar/bat
mitzvah in Jewish adolescents' participation in formal Jewish
education and in organized Jewish activities. This period
of relative disengagement from formal Jewish activities
generally corresponds with heightened social interaction
with both Jews and non-Jews and with some degree of separation
from the practices and attitudes that characterize parental
Jewish identity. Very little work has been done to explore
just where or how Jewishness fits into the overall identity
of Jewish adolescents at this age. Building on interviews
conducted with children and young adolescents, this phase
of the study will focus on adolescents ages 15-16.
The
interviews consist primarily of open-ended questions that
allow subjects to describe how they experience various
aspects of being Jewish. Research into adult Jewish identity
has begun to shift in the last few years from quantitative
survey research to more qualitative studies of the actual
lived texture of Jewish life. In a major just-released
study of Jewish adults in New York, subjects were asked
(among other things) to reflect on how they felt about
being Jewish when they were adolescents. Since such reminiscences
are inevitably tinged by subsequent experiences, it would
be useful to discuss adolescents' experiences and attitudes
at the time they are first forming, as this project will
do.
Dr.
Stuart
Charmé:
Unveiling of film, Kotel:
Jewish Teens on Tradition and Gender
On
March 14, 2002 at a Center Associates' seminar, Dr. Stuart
Charmé, Professor of Religion, hosted a premiere
viewing of his film "Kotel:
Jewish Teens on Tradition and Gender." The 30-minute
film presents a small segment of Professor Charmé's
research on Jewish-American teenagers. It focuses on the
attitudes of Jewish-American teenagers toward the Western
Wall (known in Hebrew as the Kotel) in Jerusalem, the
most sacred site in Judaism.
Since
the Kotel is administered by the Orthodox rabbinate in
Israel, religious worship there follows the Orthodox custom
of separating men and women. The majority of American
Jews, however, are not Orthodox. Their support for equal
rights for women in prayer, in the rabbinate, in liturgy,
and elsewhere makes the situation at the Kotel a somewhat
dissonant experience for many religiously liberal Jewish-American
teenagers.
Charmé's
film presents a wide spectrum of teenagers' reactions
to this site, and their views of the benefits and disadvantages
of the Kotel's gender rules. It shows not only the dramatic
differences between Orthodox and non-Orthodox teenagers,
but also the struggle of most Jewish-American teenagers
to balance their respect for Jewish traditions and their
commitment to liberal values of fairness and equality.
Charmé
provides historical background and historic images of
the Kotel that challenge the notion that the gender traditions
at the Kotel are longstanding policies. The teenagers
also make their own suggestions about how to balance the
conflicting demands of traditional Orthodox gender segregation
and the need to respect the values of non-Orthodox Jews.
The film provides a microcosm of the diversity of Jewish-American
teenagers' opinions and the tensions between Orthodox
and non-Orthodox views of Judaism.
