Riv-Ellen’s comments illustrate precisely why she deserves the 2011 Marshall Sklare Award. In line with almost everything else she has written, her remarks are cogent and clear, and they keenly map the range of scholarship in which she intervenes; she both frames and redefines the parameters of social scientific research on American Jews. It is a pleasure to have the opportunity to respond to her remarks in this forum and to build on her contributions to our field.

In her comments, Riv-Ellen insightfully organizes the field around two primary orientations: “Behavior, Belonging, and Building Bridges” and “Subjectivity and Meaning.” The former focuses on how Jews inscribe themselves in community, and the latter emphasizes individual productions of meaning. Yet, even as she makes this precise and valuable distinction, she highlights their shared focus on Jewish identity. For the past few decades, Jewish identity has occupied much of Jewish social scientific research across the disciplines. Whether constructed by erecting boundaries, through cultural practices, or via more subjective articulations of one’s own feelings toward Jewishness, the primary organizing framework has remained that of identity. While I appreciate Riv-Ellen’s keen insights into the symbiotic relationship between the subjective constructions of Jewishness and the scholarship on those phenomena, I can’t help but wonder about the limitations of identity as a meaningful or useful term. In fact, I’m wondering if identity, as a discourse that emerged out of specific historical, cultural, and political conditions during the second half of the 20th century, has not run its course, and whether it might be time to consider a new framework for exploring “how Jewishness is constructed.”

This question is particularly vital for our work as social scientists. As Riv-Ellen so brilliantly points out, research on Jewish life does not just reflect or report on that which it documents but shapes Jewish life as well. This is true across the scholarly disciplines, but it is particularly true in the social sciences, given their relatively close relationship with applied research and policy. Applying her insight to the concept of identity, I can’t help but wonder if social science is promoting or sustaining a concept that has outlived its utility in the lives of those people in whom researchers profess such interest.

By applying the concept of identity so broadly, perhaps we are inadvertently undermining the diversity of ways in which people construct Jewishness. If everything becomes an articulation of identity—paying membership dues at the local Jewish museum, lighting candles for the Sabbath, talking about Jewish subjects with friends, choosing whom to marry—then rather than documenting or illuminating the nuances of Jewish life, perhaps social scientists are inadvertently reducing them to something mono-dimensional or monochromatic. Instead of rendering richly informed portraits of Jewish life, behavior, belief, and practice, perhaps the concept of identity flattens those subtleties by cramming them into a single conceptual frame.

I am not offering this critique of Jewish identity in order to condemn it as too individualized, too personal, too self-centered, or narcissistic. Problematizing the concept of identity in such a manner often ends in claims that people simply need a greater sense of commitment to or connection with a collectivity. This prescription pits individuals against the communities they might create and does not meaningfully advance conversations or understandings about how Jews live their lives as individuals who participate in communities.

After all, Jewish identity, as a concept, is historically contingent; it emerged under particular historical conditions in response to specific cultural and political stimuli. Emerging scholarship from historian David Kaufman locates the genesis of the term “Jewish identity” in the early 1960s, in response to perceptions that assimilation and intermarriage threatened the future of the Jewish people. Kaufman’s history of the concept of Jewish identity illuminates its contingencies and suggests that it might not be so easily transferrable to other historical situations. Put differently, the conceptual apparatuses employed by intellectuals during the 1960s might not be the same as those required of social conditions in the 2010s.

I do not think, therefore, that it is a coincidence that the concept is so deeply embedded in Prell’s remarks. After all, she, like many of her peers (and my mentors and teachers), came of age in the slipstream of American Jewish identity discourse which reached its apotheosis with the publication of Steven M. Cohen and Arnold M. Eisen’s masterful work, The Jew Within. Cohen and Eisen, perhaps inadvertently, helped to reaffirm the centrality of identity as a concept by studying members of that same generation. I don’t mean this as a challenge, pitting one generation against the next, but rather to reinforce the historically contingent nature of Jewish identity as a concept. This is to suggest that, despite its naturalized and privileged place within American Jewish social scientific and communal discourse, Jewish identity may have run its course.

What’s next? I don’t know. I don’t have a good proposal for something to replace identity. I don’t have a neologism or a clever turn of phrase to suggest. In fact, I’m not sure that we need identity 2.0, 3.0, or some other term that might do the conceptual work that identity has done. Instead, I want to take this opportunity to encourage our field to continue the conversation in which Riv-Ellen has been both so productive and instructive, and to take seriously the questions she has raised. For me, that includes thinking more critically about the concept of identity, its uses, and its limitations. Instead of speaking of “identity construction” or “identity formation” or even “questions of identity,” I want to think alongside this field, and in conversation with my peers, colleagues and teachers, about what kind of conceptual or intellectual work we expect such a term to do.

The concept of Jewish identity, though crucial to much lively scholarly and communal discourse over the past few decades, may now be foreclosing more avenues than it is opening. Perhaps it has become a rhetorical tool that masks rather than reveals complexities in how Jews live. Perhaps removing the term from our vocabulary will create opportunities for further investigation and deeper examination of the many dimensions of Jewish life that have occupied Riv-Ellen throughout her career. I, for one, still have much to learn from Riv-Ellen and look forward to continuing our collaborations and conversations, whether or not we talk about identity.