Generation J

A Bunch of Searchers

by Lisa Schiffman

Reviewed by Suzanne Sadowsky

A week or so ago Dave Cort handed me a book that he had borrowed from the San Geronimo library. "Here," he said, "have you read this book?" He said that he hadn't read it himself but when he looked at it, he thought I might enjoy it. He was right, I did.

Lisa Schiffman's book, just published by Harper San Francisco, is a chronicle of the author's still ongoing encounter with Judaism, her struggle to define, come to terms with and ultimately begin to embrace her Jewish identity. But it is more than her personal story. It is a look at the post-Holocaust generation of American Jews written by a woman whose academic training provided her with the skills of a social anthropologist. As is often the dilemma of ethnographers, she finds herself both as an outsider looking in and an insider looking out.

The daughter of secular Jews, Schiffman's religious upbringing was sketchy, bordering on non-existent. She nevertheless is fascinated by her own sense of being Jewish --whatever that may mean-- to the point of having devoted most of the past several years on a personal quest to discover, explore and unearth the range of Jewish practice and affiliation in America at the turn of the millennium -- including the ambiguity and ambivalence. Her book is a chronicle of her journey.

After attending a conference on Judaism and psychology, she had what calls a big think-through: "What I realized is this: I am not alone. I'm part of a generation of fragmented Jews. We're in a kind of limbo. We're suspended between young adulthood and middle age, between Judaism and atheism, between a desire to believe in religion and a personal history of skepticism. Call us a bunch of searchers. Call us post-Holocaust Jews. Call us generation J."

She describes members of this generation as "wayfinders": "You'll see us everywhere: Jews in search of a perfect clarity. We're turning away from the religion into which we were born. We're turning to Wicca, to New-Ageism, to Buddhism, to nothing. We're burning sage sticks at home and pounding drums in the forest. We're meeting with psychics, shrugging our shoulders at rabbis, listening to the music of twelfth-century nuns. Our chakras are opening, our kundalini is bursting. Our mouths open in the shape of questions. If we believe anything, it's that Allen Ginsberg may return as someone else. We light jasmine-scented candles and we wait."

Schiffman's searching takes her from Crown Heights in Brooklyn where she spent some time learning about and with the Lubavitcher community, to northern California where she now lives. She spends time with Rabbi Margaret Holub of the Mendocino Coast Jewish Community and she has a spiritual immersion in the Navarro River in Elk with Ella Russell as her gentle mikvah guide. She meets with Roger Kamenetz and Rabbi Allen Lew, and she has long soul-searching conversations with Rabbi Jane Litman in San Francisco and Berkeley. She meditates at Chochmat HaLev and she goes to a San Francisco Gay Lesbian Bisexual Transgender Pride Day parade where she feels a sense of Jewish pride when a group of men ride by with signs on their handlebars, unashamedly proclaiming themselves: Kikes on Bikes.

When she decided to go with her non-Jewish husband, David, and her visiting East Coast parents to Rosh Hashanah services (her mother had never in her life been to a High Holiday service, and her father not since he was a boy), she found seats available at the Aquarian Minyan in Berkeley. She realizes a spiritual epiphany many months later when David buys her a mezuzah for their new home. It takes her some time --an additional period of questioning and struggle-- before she is ready to hang it on her doorpost and thus identify her dwelling as a Jewish home.

Generation J has real clarity, humor, wit and insight and, additionally, a feeling of great familiarity. Some of us, myself included, have had the same questions and taken many of the same turns in our paths. Lisa Schiffman is clearly a Jew of our time and of this place and of this season.

— from our March 2000 Newsletter

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