I have always found it curious that our field is colloquially referred to as the “sociology” of Jews. So much of the public policy conversation about ASSJ members’ research focuses on questions of Jewish identity. But the concept of identity is not well grounded or well theorized in my discipline of sociology. Identity is well theorized in social psychology, however. When questions of Jewish identity are at stake, we would do better to speak of the “social psychology” of Jews, and to let social psychologists lead the conversation.

When Bethamie Horowitz made her leap from studying war and peace in the Middle East to studying American Jews, the limits of our standard sociodemographic approaches to studying identity were already apparent and being debated in sessions sponsored by the ASSJ. The debates were framed around dichotomies: assimilation versus transformation, macro versus micro, and quantitative versus qualitative.

Horowitz’s entry into these conversations added a clear and much-needed social psychological voice. She introduced the use of life-history interviews. By listening to how her interviewees spoke about Jewishness, she developed new types of survey questions that drew from what people said actually mattered to them, rather than just tallying participation in traditionally normative religious behaviors. [Pew’s headline-grabbing finding about a “sense of humor” being “essential” to the Jewishness of 42% of American Jews derived from the research center’s adaptation of the battery of identity questions that Bethamie Horowitz pioneered (Horowitz 2000, 64; Pew Research Center 2013, 14)].

Horowitz also refocused the conversation about Jewish identity to emphasize change over the life course, introducing the language of Jewish life “journeys” into the parlance of researchers and policymakers alike. Although she is best known for this “journey” metaphor, two other metaphors anchor her Sklare address: “Navigation”—and especially navigation at sea, which builds from the notion of “journeys” and which, I would like to think, is also an homage to our friend and mentor Charles Kadushin, an avid sailor—and “gameboard.” With both metaphors, she is trying to draw our attention to, and help us make sense of, the contexts in which individuals make their life choices.

Metaphors in social science research are tools to think with. The social world is too complex and too multifaceted to understand without resorting to metaphorical thinking (Lakoff and Johnson 1980). Is it any surprise that our sociological approaches are essentially just a working through of extended metaphors? Goffman’s dramaturgy analyzing the social world as theater. Durkheimian functionalism treating society as an organism. Conflict theorists approaching society as an ongoing war. Each metaphor reveals. Each hides. Each pushes inquiry down different paths as we work the metaphor deeper and deeper until we exhaust it. At the same time, each path forecloses alternative lines of inquiry, the many roads not taken.

It is a telling sign of the times that Horowitz presents us with not one but two possible guiding metaphors. We have indeed, as she said in her spoken address, “been living in uncertain, unsettled times.” So unsettled that we do not yet have a single clear metaphor to help us make sense of it. If life is a gameboard, it has been kicked over—not once, but several times in the past few years.

How different this context is from that of the mid-1990s when Horowitz first directed our focus onto Jewish journeys. We conducted research back then under the working assumption of “present trends continued.” It was a moment ripe for a social psychological turn in research on Jewish Americans. The USA had won the Cold War. The country seemed stable. A “new world order” was being shaped under American hegemony. New technologies promised a future of unleashed human potential and wired prosperity. For second, third, and fourth generation Ashkenazi Jews, the structural trends had been moving in the same direction for decades: acculturation, social acceptance, and socioeconomic attainment were going up. Antisemitism and social barriers were going down. And the Jewish communal sphere—philanthropy, political activism, religious innovation—continued to thrive and grow ever more diverse. The “gameboard” was set. Jewish Americans were free to choose. Did they want to identify as Jewish or not? Did they want to affiliate with the myriad Jewish organizations and communities or not? Did they want to make Jewishness an active part of their lives or not? All the options were open to them. America was not forcing them one way or the other. And it was not just Jews. Herbert Gans, Richard Alba, and Mary Waters were finding that these types of shifts were giving many of the so-called white ethnic groups the option to embrace and abandon whichever aspects of their cultural heritages they saw fit (Alba 1990; Gans 1979; Waters 1990).

Under these circumstances, the great unknown was what was going on inside the minds of millions of individual Jews. After all, these were the people in charge of making the decisions about whether and how to be Jewish. They were the full owners of their decisions because they were operating in a situation of structural stability and predictability.

Welcome to 2023. Would anyone care to venture a “present trends continued” prediction for American Jewry 10 years out? What about a “present trends continued” prediction for America? Maybe you want to wait until the war in Israel ends? Or until after the upcoming presidential election? Or maybe not even then.

Only over short historical time horizons does change seem to move in straight lines. Dialectical forces in social, economic, political, and cultural life, however, are always creating pressure for change in unpredictable directions. Course reversals. Veerings into great unknowns. “Tectonic shifts,” as Horowitz says. Look at where we are meeting. San Francisco has known its share of earthquakes.

Unsettled times draw our attention back to the macro-level structural forces shaping the contexts in which Jews live. That is more the purview of political sociology than social psychology. Let us hope that a new generation of political sociologists will rise to the occasion. If the social scientists of Jewry are to use “a navigational approach to have a better understanding of the person-in-context,” as Bethamie Horowitz is calling for, we need the political sociologists to bring more clarity about the context itself. To my mind, the important task is to theorize and analyze antisemitism not as a matter of hateful attitudes or as an enumeration of incidents. When Jews are being disregarded, othered, excluded, silenced, boycotted, marginalized, targeted, vilified, and worse, this is happening in patterned ways that reflect deeper systems and structures of power in which Jews are embedded. If Jews themselves do not understand these systems and structures of power, it is hard to see how they will effectively navigate them. It is even harder to see how they will effectively resist, challenge, and overturn them.

But an analysis of power dynamics alone is not enough.

Horowitz ended her remarks by arguing for the importance of research into “avenues for resilience” and the “strategies that key social actors are developing to respond to the new circumstances.” In other words—and in the language of social psychology—studies of agency, of self-efficacy and of collective efficacy.

Self and collective. In Bethamie Horowitz’s pioneering research, “Journeys” had a counterpart: “Connections.” As Jews today navigate these unsettled and unsettling times, they do not just navigate as individuals. They stand with other Jews in the same boats, facing the same storms. We need our social sciences, all of our disciplines, working at all levels of analysis—micro, meso, and macro—to help us understand how they navigate together.