American Observant Jews and Muslims: Creating a Third Space

Samuel Heilman and Mucahit Bilici

The intuition with which our recent book about contemporary observant Jews and Muslims in America, Following Similar Paths (University of California Press), Mucahit Bilici and I begin is that in America, religiously observant Jews and similarly observant Muslims share patterns by which they try to simultaneously remain attached to their faiths, traditions, and observances, while honoring as well their sense of what it means to be part of American society and culture. This necessitates a balancing act between often competing demands and worldviews, which is not easy and often calls for intuitive improvisation, the creation of a new cultural context and intellectual or emotional risks. It results in social change that reframes or adapts some religious behavior and beliefs that are remarkable in their resemblance for both religious groups.

Each of them needs to figure out when to answer to the demands of their

American cultural belonging and when to their religious sense of obligation and

commitments, and how? The choices they make show how much the two groups have to learn from one another. While the Jews historically have had a head start in the process, the Muslims are headed in the same direction: a hybrid culture that must adapt to a "Christian hegemonic" society.  They have each accomplished this by socially constructing a shared "third space" of informal gatherings, a common cultural reservoir, redefining the role of their religious leaders, institutions and identity as well adjusting similar legalistic, dietary traditions. This "braided" identity is forged through parallel experiences of marginalization, prompting interreligious solidarity that allows both communities to maintain authenticity within a pluralistic society. In short, they have followed similar paths to being at home in America without dropping their religious commitments and identities.

Observant American Jews and Muslims are comfortable in the enclave cultures they have established, where they live with others like them and feel at home sharing a lifestyle with a majority of their neighbors.  At the same time, many of them also want to be able to venture outside of their self-imposed ghettoes without altogether leaving them forever. What does this require?  To do this, these people have effectively fashioned a kind of portable “marginal culture,” a hybrid that allows them to stand simultaneously in several cultures, commonly on the margins of each, where they might even find others doing the same.

Combining a life that is both parochial and sectarian with one that is cosmopolitan and acculturative, they manage to be attached to religious particularism without abandoning the more general culture.  This requires a knowledge of various ways of living – a well-honed cultural competence – and skills of moving easily among them.  But is not just for individuals but also for groups of people who share the same desires to be part of these multiple realities.

What both groups seek to discover is not simply whether they can be religiously observant and different from  - while not necessarily alienated from - Christian America, but whether they can do the things that mark them as different: pray on a day other than Sunday and in a language foreign to America, eat a different diet, wear garments or groom themselves in ways that mark them as different, and so on. Can they do all this and still be considered a legitimate part of America?

For example, in the case of observant Jews, some hold on to an ideological attachment to the complete halacha (Jewish law), alongside a practical desire to belong to and be embraced by American society and share in its culture, even when this poses obstacles to their following the dictates of halacha to the letter. Some such Jews are commonly referred to as “modern Orthodox,” or more recently “open Orthodox.” They are “open” to being associated with a culture that is not always in harmony with the halacha and to their commitments. To continue the musical metaphor, their relationship to the various worlds they inhabit is more contrapuntal. Standing with a foot in more than one culture, they hope to create a hybrid third position on the margins between the other two, a situation well-represented by the image of a young man wearing a yarmulke while sipping a drink at a sports bar where he is watching a football game and engaging with people whose values and outlook are far from those symbolized by that skull cap of his and the kosher diet he observes (de rigeur among all Orthodox), a diet which some would argue is supposed to prevent exactly this sort boundary-crossing of social behavior.

As one such Jew explained: 

Our community is immersed in American culture, but our religious commitments can impede socialization in America’s diversity. Prioritizing Jewish education, restrictions attached to Shabbat-observance on Saturdays, and adherence to traditional dietary laws may limit interactions in schools and the workplace. Likewise, concerns about intermarriage and negative influence from secular culture can also restrain contact.

Yet, as this Jew, concludes, one can still feel at ease in the American social and cultural environment.

The marginal culture that this kind of Orthodoxy has developed is continuously recalibrating itself and reshaping the contours of its hybridity. The people who share it watch how their fellow members change and shift and, together, adapt in ways that they all find acceptable.  As Judaism slides both to the left and right, the hybrid on the margins of both is stretched, often beyond recognition. This might encourage people often to make Judeo-legal decisions on their own in their practices, deciding for themselves what is within the boundaries of the acceptable, at least within the hybrid world they have constructed.

“If we think of modernism as a struggle to make ourselves at home in a constantly changing world,” then those who claim to be “modern Orthodox,” can be defined as religiously observant but as still seeking to make themselves at home in this changing world. Or, as Open Orthodox Rabbi Avi Weiss puts it, arguing that the meaning of “modern” has changed and that we are now in a post-modern era, “the dividing line within Orthodoxy today revolves around inclusivity” and not simply modernity.

However, while modern Orthodox Jews seek to be steadfast in and committed to their Jewish observance but also attached to contemporary American values and culture, their abiding preoccupation is whether or not they can continue to maintain their observances without turning their back on the parts of American life they seek to embrace (or vice versa). Seeking to negotiate a path between that taken by their more insular Orthodox counterparts standing to their religious right and the less observant and more assimilated Jewry to their left, they reject the Orthodox critics who say that the modern Orthodox goal of being dually committed is an illusion and that they must choose between being fully Orthodox or fully American. They deny the arguments from those on the liberal left who claim the choice is either becoming fully assimilated or the traditionalist contra-acculturative right who urge remaining in a life apart. For proof, these traditionalists often point out how some who have tried this hybrid life have been lost and fallen down a slippery slope that has taken them off the path (“halacha” can be translated as “path”), while modernists see the unwillingness to drop the parochial attachments as too limiting.

But those who embrace hybridity reject both these criticisms and the implied notion that it’s all or nothing at all. They have argued that America is different from places where the choice was either/or but never both/and.  America and western democratic societies, where life is becoming increasingly open and culturally pluralistic (with many unmeltable ethnics), allow this sort of free movement.

To be sure, there is a spectrum of adaptations that creates these hybrid cultures, which are themselves not monolithic. There are those who draw the redlines of acculturation in different places, and different subcommunities and organizations often debate over the permissible and the impermissible.

Contemporary American Jewish observant society is not alone in all this. Their successes and challenges offer both a lesson and a warning for American Muslims, who are still in the process of evolving a hybrid culture even as they (like the visibly Orthodox Jews) continue to be defined as outsiders by the mainstream society.

Anxieties about assimilation and the loss of Muslim distinctiveness in liberal democratic societies are common concerns in Muslim communities. While enjoying the rights and liberties, some early Muslim immigrants continued to invoke an old juridical distinction (Dar al Harb versus Dar al Islam) to characterize the purity or legitimacy of a place. In discouraging assimilation, medieval jurists denied justification for Muslim residence in non-Muslim lands. However, contemporary Muslim practice and legal thinking have transcended this distinction. Observant Muslims who seek to fashion a pious life that is at the same time practical and, thereby, to feel “at home in America” typically have to engage in theological accommodation.  Muslims in liberal western societies have long grappled with the challenge of creating a minority culture. In recent decades, Sunnis have revived the dormant institution of ijtihad, independent legal reasoning, in response to novel situations (for Shi'a, both in Muslim-majority contexts and in diaspora, ijtihad has always been a normal part of religious life).

Such thinking initially gave some autonomy to Muslims in the West to adapt to

the culture of their non-Muslim majority settings. This pragmatic turn ultimately paves the way for an independent and confident American or European Islam that makes peace between Muslim identity and the majority culture. Indeed, the Muslim scholarly class that often determines what is normative in the United States is increasingly more confident in overcoming the cultural baggage of immigrant generations and engaging in America-oriented jurisprudence and derivation of new standards.

Islam in America differs from Judaism in one notable way. While the Modern

Orthodox are forced into a calculation whereby, in order to participate in modern American life, they must transform some practices that are central to Jewish identity, American Muslims by and large face no such quandary. With the exceptions (and they are serious ones) of practices around gender segregation and participation in an interest-based credit economy, or the problems that arise from not living in a place where halal foods are easy to obtain, there are no concessions to modernity that Muslims might make that would seriously impair their Muslim identity. Other areas that are experienced as problematic by today’s observant Muslims—areas relating to the education of children (who need to devote considerable time to learning Arabic and memorizing Qur’an in addition to their secular studies) and praying on time in a

workplace not geared to such concerns—are often perceived as matters of time

management, rather than existential or identity problems.

Among immigrant Muslims, “marginality” often expressed itself as a sense of

avoidance, of trying to remain somewhat apart from American life, with a firm footing in an enclave culture. To be sure, because of the ethnic diversity of American Muslims – everything from Malays, Pakistanis, Guyanese, Indians, Iranians, Arabs, Indonesians, Africans of all sorts, those from the Balkans, and Central Asia, to name but a few – the nature of the hybrid culture they fashioned is mingled with ethnic elements in ways that Jews do not quite share (in spite of their own ethnic diversity, given the array of national origins of many Jewish immigrants).

Whenever faced with an instance of embarrassing Muslim behavior (which can

run the gamut from an act of terror to a misogynistic preacher to a simple cultural oddity), young American Muslims distance themselves from such practices by designating them as part of the culture (of foreign Muslims) rather than part of the religion (of American Muslims). To do that they have to distinguish between “cultural Islam” and “pure religion.” The cultural, in this juxtaposition, is that which is temporal and dispensable, while the purely religious is that which is acultural and universal. What makes this distinction so interesting is that it is deployed not only against criticism and blame coming from American society, but also against both immigrant Muslims and Muslims overseas.

Even if American society were entirely welcoming, Muslims would still face the intersubjective question of culture versus religion, only this time set against

their own past and with respect to other Muslims. Such a distinction allows for the demolition of the parents’ foreignness. Their culture is understood as a custom or relic, as an interference from the past and from afar that holds back the Muslim subject. The negative discourse of culture is a negotiation with and dissociation from the past, from a distant tradition that, although Muslim, is no longer “in place.”

Americans may continue to see religion itself as culture (at least when it comes to Muslims). But this is precisely where separating a presumably core religion from its cultural “baggage” allows Muslims to engage in a two-step strategy: first, de-linking religion from Muslim-majority culture (whether this is possible or even real is entirely another discussion), then attempting a clean entry into “universality.” In fact, this is how Islam gets a seat at multiple universalist tables: humanistic universalism (which is secular) and the Abrahamic family table (which is less so). In both instances, American interlocutors are forced to engage their Muslim counterparts in civil discourse.

Young American Muslims engage in developing an American culture for their own Islam. This is, in a sense, a “marginal culture”, a culture that responds to and suits the needs and aspirations of Muslims as Americans. Dissociating oneself from the past (“back-home culture”) without losing the continuity of religious legitimacy is an important part of American Muslim culture.

What we try to argue and demonstrate in our book is that both observant American Jews and Muslims are testing the American tolerance for cultural pluralism over the melting pot ideal in which assimilation into Christian America was the goal. The willingness of Americans to find a place for them and their hybrid culture is proof that cultural pluralism or at least a symbolic aspect of it, has displaced homogenization of the melting pot. Our book tries to show that in that process they have much to learn from one another. It is of course up to those who will read our full and detailed portrait of these similar paths to decide if this argument is persuasive and if in post-Trump American and after October 7, 2023, these paths can still converge or whether divergence is ahead?

*The above is adapted from Samuel Heilman and Mucahit Bilici: Following Similar Paths (University of California Press, September 2024)

*By permission of the publisher, for further information or to order see website samuelheilman.com

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