What does the Modern Love column tell us about contemporary Judaism?

Eryn Loeb writes:

It’s perhaps telling that a disproportionate share of contributions invoke Judaism, even if the stories being told aren’t explicitly Jewish. The sheer numbers suggest that though contemporary Jewish life may be fractured—a subject of constant and occasionally hysterical concern to Jewish organizations of all stripes—it certainly persists (though maybe not in ways that would please Rebbe Schneerson, or even Jack Wertheimer). No matter: Modern Love stories illustrate the distance between the advice Shmuley Boteach dispenses in his column for the Forward, and the ways people are actually negotiating their Jewish identities. In one essay, Cindy Chupack writes about getting an official Jewish divorce, and finds the old-school religiousness of the ritual less valuable than the basic closure it affords. Her story is a comment on the tensions between Judaism’s ancient insularity (where bearded men sit in judgment of her ex’s homosexuality), and its more contemporary shape, complete with a “hot rabbi” and a “bad-boy motorcycle-riding tattooed lawyer/poet/chef” fiancé whose Jewishness is a happy coincidence but not a requirement.

In the context of Modern Love, an author’s passing mention that she is Jewish—the writers are overwhelmingly women—serves as a bit of cultural shorthand, a way of calling attention to what readers know (or believe) about the kind of people Jews are: intellectual, liberal, hilariously wracked with guilt. This shorthand—scrawled all over contemporary culture, from Seinfeld to Superbad; The Daily Show to, yes, The New York Times—often works to comic effect, as in Amy Cohen’s piece about playing the field at the same time as her father, who is more successful at 76 than she is at 35. “We all need to be reincarnated as an older Jewish man with an apartment on the Upper East Side,” Cohen quips. Often, though, the humor has a bittersweet tinge, as in Anya Ulinich’s account of her marriage of convenience. “After I told him I was Jewish,” explains Ulinich, a Russian immigrant, “he promptly assured me that he personally didn’t think all Jews were stingy and nicknamed me ‘Anne Frank.’” It’s funny, but the laughs aren’t easy or comfortable. Being married to this guy couldn’t have been much fun, but his anti-Semitism is never explored—apart from that striking line—nor, for that matter, is her Judaism.

The message seems to be that Jewishness is a characteristic that explains as much or more about a person than any other identity category she may subscribe to. He lost his wife, and he’s a Jewish widower. She’s a lesbian, and thus a gay Jew. They had a baby, and now they are Jewish parents. It’s a kind of code, even if it’s not always clear how we’re meant to decipher it. Meanwhile, mention that someone is Christian and the assumption is that they’re really Christian—as in religious. Jewishness in the modern world, though, can be an integral characteristic without being definitive; a cultural identity even if not a religious affiliation. This makes it possible to discuss its many quirks without straying into uncomfortable religiosity and dogma. It lets people easily claim Jewishness as just one part of who they are.