Ken Koltun-Fromm's Material Culture and Jewish Thought in America begins with a cast of familiar characters in American Jewish culture: Mordecai Kaplan, Joseph Soloveitchik, and Abraham Joshua Heschel each have a chapter; Anzia Yezierska, Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud, and The Jazz Singer each play smaller roles in subsequent chapters. Koltun-Fromm's approach proposes to illuminate this standard canon of twentieth-century American Jewish figures with dual spotlights: thought and the realm of the material. His attempt at a material analysis produces a set of diverse, new questions and challenges for the study of these well-worn thinkers. Whether or not it is ultimately successful in a quest to produce a recognizably object-centered account of Jewish thought, Material Culture and Jewish Thought in America undoubtedly shifts the analytical starting point and produces fresh readings of familiar texts.

Using one “rubric” for each chapter, Koltun-Fromm demonstrates the variegated features of the construction of what he terms “material Jewish identity.” Accordingly, Kaplan performs a “material self” through extensive journal-writing; Edward Bernays, Joshua Loth Liebman, and Erich Fromm negotiate the “material past” through a transformation of psychology; Soloveitchik situates halakhah and American Orthodoxy in the material “place” of urban America, Heschel struggles with the “presence of things” in his concept of the Sabbath; Yezierska, Roth, Cynthia Ozick, and Malamud create “narrative” identities; and magazine covers, Barbie dolls, and other images create a “gaze” toward their own materiality. Koltun-Fromm's careful readings demonstrate that these rubrics are always intertwined in American Jewish life. Taken as a whole, his project uses these texts and objects to demonstrate that Jewish thought is a “cultural practice,” and that as such it “generates compelling accounts of an identity steeped in material culture” (2–3).

What ties these things together other than Koltun-Fromm's assertion that they are indeed things? Very little, and that is precisely the point. The realm of the material is inescapable and omnipresent; even when Jewish thinkers distance their philosophies from materiality, they are nevertheless in its orbit. If Kaplan, Soloveitchik, Heschel, Bernays, Liebman, and Fromm are all suspicious of too-close ties to materiality, and yet they all produce work that relies on materiality, Koltun-Fromm's analysis might be extended to suggest that any thorough study of thought must take materiality into account. Kaplan's journal, for example, is both textual and material. But the two are inextricable; its textuality is its materiality. It becomes a meaningful object for Kaplan and Koltun-Fromm precisely because of this simultaneity: A blank book wouldn't fulfill Kaplan's needs despite its materiality, and neither would a solitary verbal monologue despite its discursive production.

Many of Koltun-Fromm's figures actively attempt to travel on roads leading away from materiality, and this would seem to challenge his argument. Bernays, Liebman, and Fromm—the subjects of the “material past” chapter—all actively seek to distance individuals from the past in order to promote psychological health. Likewise, Heschel attempts to protect people “from a consuming, spatial culture” (173). For him, “thinginess is our blindness;” experience of and with the material world is always limited (147). Yet, as Koltun-Fromm demonstrates, despite their deep mistrust of the physical world of objects and consumerism these men nevertheless depend upon the notion of things as the unacknowledged foundation of their accounts of fulfilling human life and Jewish identity.

At times, however, the generally insightful analysis of text loses its connection to a material approach. The application of the appellation “material” cannot alone argue for the importance of weightiness in the physical universe. For example, what is material about the “material past”? Koltun-Fromm provides a capacious definition that does little to define its distinctiveness from other kinds of past (or history, a word he inexplicably avoids): “The past is a material one when it informs the various contemporary enactments of identity” (106). He also claims that a “material language” is so because it “ties us to place and past and inform[s] our ethical duties as witnesses to heritage” (212). Is all language material in this view, and if so, what differentiates a material culture approach from any other discursive method? In the later chapters, Koltun-Fromm firmly grounds literature and visual culture in material objects; but here the analysis is less diligent about making connections to “thought.” This disjuncture between the earlier thought-centered chapters and the last object-centered chapter also highlights the struggle to keep both materiality and philosophical texts simultaneously in the foreground. Concrete definitions of the categories of “material” and “thought” would clarify both the work's stakes and its claims, even while Koltun-Fromm's analyses suggest that any true separation of the two diminishes our ability to conceptualize either.

Thus even the difficulties and dissonances in Koltun-Fromm's readings are ultimately productive: They raise the larger issue of the relationship between discourse and material, between words and things, in American culture. Can Bernays' rejection of a past be read as a failure to escape the importance of materiality precisely because such an escape is impossible? How do Neil Diamond as the Jazz Singer in the 1980 remake and a tefillin-wearing Barbie doll recreate the world of Jewish thought in their own image? Does the scholarly disagreement about whether Kaplan lived in a “world of things” or a “world of words” result from the radical inseparability of the two? The task remains, then, to articulate a fuller account of this relationship between materiality and ideas.

Is Material Culture and American Jewish Thought a case of bringing a new methodology (“material culture”) to bear on a set of texts (“thought”)? Or might Koltun-Fromm's work be better conceptualized as a call for the restructuring of the field of American Jewish thought as a whole? Koltun-Fromm claims that he “seek[s] to wed cultural studies to Jewish thought” (3), but perhaps a better metaphor than the marriage of two people would be the self-transformation of one person. Through better knowledge of itself, Koltun-Fromm suggests, the field of Jewish thought can come to see how the objects, landscape, and ground beneath its feet construct the very possibility of Jewish identity. It is certainly a metaphor to which Kaplan, Heschel, Liebman, and Yezierska could relate.

In many ways, the book's greatest strength is also its liability: For many of the interpretations, the distinctiveness of a “material culture” approach remains elusive. On one hand, the relationship between material objects—or even the imagination of material objects—and the ideas at hand nearly disappears from view at times. But on the other hand, in its best moments, this ambiguity demonstrates the fundamentally interdependent relationship of linguistic discourse and physicality. Material Culture and Jewish Thought presents a series of new and insightful readings, but it is ultimately unclear what precisely is distinctive about this material cultural approach to Jewish thought. Or perhaps Koltun-Fromm has made his point too well, and there should be nothing distinctive about it.