“Religion in the Rocky Mountains and Great Plains” Conference

The Department of Religious Studies at the University of Denver is delighted to host a one-day conference on “Religion in the Rocky Mountains and Great Plains”, to be held Saturday, June 22 at the University of Denver, with the support of an AAR Regional Development Grant. It begins with welcoming remarks at 8:45, panel I 9:00-10:30, panel II 11:00-12:30, lunch 12:30-1:45, panel 3 2:00-3:30, coffee break 4:00-5:30, and keynote speech at 7:00. 

This conference brings together scholars from nine universities and colleges around the United States to examine religious identity and practice (including secular and spiritual approaches) around the region, past and present. It is intended to help highlight and bring greater interest to issues of religious identity and practice in the states of the Rocky Mountains and Great Plains, and to provide an opportunity for faculty, researchers, and graduate students to connect with and learn from colleagues. The conference is envisioned as a catalyst for more sustained efforts at regional community building, including future conferences and workshops.

Conference structure

The conference consists of four panels of paper presentations, arranged thematically, highlighting recent research on 20th-century Protestantism in South Dakota, the development of the “Mormon Migration” website, the rise of non-denominationalism in Colorado and the United States, Judaism in early 20th-century Utah, indigenous studies and religious subjectivity, Muslim women in Colorado, Denver-area black churches as agents of change, and Colorado’s influence on Islamist thinker Sayyid Qutb, among other topics. Dr. Bonnie Clark, Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Denver, will deliver the keynote talk, “Follow the Request of the Stone: Spirituality and Gardening in Internment Camps”, about her work on the World War II Japanese-American internment camp of Amache.

Registration and Attendance

There is no cost to attend the conference and registration, while encouraged, is not required. To register, please email Professor Andrea L Stanton: andrea.stanton@du.edu. Lunch and coffee will be provided to presenters and attendees.

Conference Website and Contact Information

For more information about the conference, please visit our website: www.religionintherockiesconference.wordpress.com or email andrea.stanton@du.edu. For more information about Dr. Clark and her work, please visit: http://religionintherockiesconference.wordpress.com/keynote/.

Researching Judaism in the West

by Shari Rabin

Over the last few years the Bancroft Library at the University of California at Berkeley has acquired the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life from the Judah L. Magnes Museum in Berkeley. Included in this collection is the Western Jewish Americana Collection, which I spent a month with last summer as part of my dissertation research on the importance of geographic mobility in nineteenth century American Judaism. In addition to being a beautiful research facility in a moderate climate with easy access to great food and really strong single origin coffee, working at the Bancroft was an exciting opportunity to research in a major archive with broad holdings in western history.

Jewish materials tend to be held in separate archives, most notably the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati and the American Jewish Historical Society in New York. Such archival divisions beget historiographical ones, however, and I hope that the presence of Jewish materials in the Bancroft, where those with interests outside of Jewish history can easily access them, will help bring Judaism into more studies of religion in the American West.

While there are sources in German, French, Yiddish, and Hebrew, some come with translations and there are plenty of fascinating materials in English. A few highlights from the collection:

The most compelling and robust congregational collection is that of Congregation Sherith Israel, one of the two oldest Jewish congregations in San Francisco. In addition to the congregation’s constitution, minutes, and marriage records, particularly fascinating is its documentation of the contentious relationship between the congregation and its clergy. For instance the collection includes a paper war over animosities with Rabbi Aron J. Messing in 1872 – he was accused of financial misdeeds, misrepresenting his English abilities, and “using during his address from the pulpit profane and indecorous language…to attack the Board of Trustees personally” – followed by a stack of applications from the ensuing search for a new rabbi.

Clerical-congregational acrimony flowed both ways. In 1855 San Francisco’s cantankerous Rabbi Julius Eckman wrote a letter to Solomon Nunes Carvalho, who had been the daguerrotypist on John C. Fremont’s Fifth Expedition. Exasperated with the indifference and bad behavior of his congregants, he noted as an example the “strange mode gaining countenance here of celebrating Wedding banquets.” Receptions were being held – and announced in the synagogue – at the non-kosher Shepherds Brewery Saloon “without grace, without a blessing.” Furthermore, “the room was crowded, people got in spirit[, and] four ladies fell headlong to the ground in the room.”

Of the Collection’s various personal memoirs, of particular interest to American religious historians is Florence Prag Kahn’s 1904 account of living in Utah as a young bride in the late 1860s. In “My Life Among the Mormons” she describes life in Salt Lake City and socializing with Brigham Young, recounting: “Did they ever try to convert us? No. One day Brigham asked us, 'Are you Jews by birth and race, or converts to Judaism?' By birth, race, faith, conviction, was the reply. 'Then you can never become Mormons; no true Jew can be converted to Mormonism.'"

Cantankerous congregants, badly behaved clergy, non-normative religious practice, interreligious encounter: these are not just Jewish stories, but are classic themes of western religious history. If you are conducting research at the Bancroft, consider taking a look, and including some Jewish stories as you document the excitement, challenges, and eclectic forms of Western religious life.

AAR Recap

by James Bennett

The fifth and final session of the Religion in the American West seminar of the American Academy of Religion met during the AAR annual meeting last month in Chicago. It was a fitting end in many ways. Meeting in Chicago provided a nice book end to the seminar, which first meet four years ago when the AAR was last in Chicago. That first meeting was in a cramped conference room without enough seats. This year we were in a large meeting room which, at first felt much to vast but, before long, every seat was filled. Nearly fifty people found their way to this year’s seminar meeting! It was great to see several members who have been with us since the start as well as to welcome so many new participants. The presence of both bodes well for the future.

The session featured four pre-circulated essays. One of the advantages of the seminar format, compared with other AAR sessions, is this pre-circulated format. It not only allows for longer papers since they are read in advance, but it also allows most of the seminar meeting to focus on discussion.

Tammy Heise wrote about religion in the Ghost Dance revival at Wounded Knee in 1973, arguing for the important but generally overlooked role of religion in the occupation and AIM, challenging the tendency to sever religion from a event whose interpretation has been interpreted primarily through the lens of the political. Tom Bremer wrote about the role of religion in the founding of Yellowstone National Park, specifically a millennialist evangelical ethic that resolves the seeming contradiction between the nearly simultaneous acts of Congress that established the National Park System and passed the Mining Act. Sarah Koenig focused on the Northwest with a study of trade and material “goods” and they ways that market exchanges among natives and missionaries were also religious exchanges, thereby offering a commercial history of religion in the American West. Finally, Shari Rabin looked at the experience of Judaism in the American West, exploring the differing ways that Jews experienced the West, from the sense of promise and possibility contained in the ease of mobility to a sense of threat or insecurity that resulted from dispersion. The papers provided rich and often innovative analyses that not only moved forward our particular understandings of religion in the American West, but also intersected each other in interesting ways and collectively advanced and opened new thematic and theoretical issues that helped measure the distance the seminar has traveled.

Quincy Newell, my co-chair in the seminar, and I offered some brief comments about the papers. One of the themes of the seminar has been the ways that we draw attention to the presence of religion in the American West. All of the papers advanced this project of uncovering hidden religion, especially as they challenged prevailing understandings of religion by highlighting mobility over stasis, moving beyond Protestantism, and looking beyond institutions to the everyday lives of people as they lived and moved in the West. In this way, the papers advanced the other major theme of the seminar, to consider how attention to the West deepens our understanding of American religion and religion more generally. We then wondered what might remain hidden that we might want to explore more deeply. The categories of gender and race came to mind as ideas that might further complicate our understanding of the West in these and other studies, and as ideas that might be complicated by our study of the West. Alongside the uncovering of hidden religion what most caught our attention was the power of mobility in these papers: of location and dislocation, of claiming and moving into space as a religious act—an act with political, racial and material implications along with religious ones.

What followed was a robust discussion among the nearly fifty attendees in the room, and the space that at first seemed to large impersonal gave way to a conversation and give and take that illumined and challenged all present. Rudy Busto, who had been present at the first session, pointed out the dramatic shift from those first conversations:  no longer were we expressing insecurity about our project  or justifying the need to undertake such discussion. Five years in, the necessity of the conversation was a given and we were starting to complicate our own analysis and categories in ways that spoke to the significance of studying Religion in the American West across a wide range of disciplines and perspectives.

The most encouraging testimony to the success of the seminar at its conclusion was a clear sense that it wasn’t ending, but only getting going. This took the pressure off of us to develop any sense of summing up or closure in our conversation and comments. But more importantly, enthusiasm for the concrete efforts to organize a permanent AAR program unit, as well of the success of this blog over the last year, confirm that these conversations will continue, and that is the best outcome we could have hoped for.

Casual Friday: Temple Emanuel

Photo by Tisa Wenger

This is Temple Emanuel in Denver, where the Western History Association meeting was held last weekend. According to the Temple Events Center website:

The Temple Emanuel Building, a Moorish style synagogue, was built in 1899 by architect John Humphreys. It is a local and national historic landmark. The Events Center features 100-foot towers with copper domes, stained glass windows, intricate woodwork, vaulted ceilings, gold leaf stenciling, and velvet-covered seats. A 1911 Estey pipe organ, the oldest in the country, is located in the choir loft.

These days, a "multidenominational community" called Pathways Church meets there. It is certainly a beautiful building, and thanks to Tisa Wenger for the photo. Watch this space for a recap of the WHA meeting, coming on Monday!

Homesteaders and High Holidays

By Sarah Imhoff

On the Jewish holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur traditional prayers are in the plural: “May it be your will, Lord our God and the God of our ancestors that you renew us for a good and a sweet year,” a Rosh Hashanah prayer pleads. As Jonathan Sarna points out, even the prayers asking for forgiveness during Yom Kippur use communal language.[1] “We” have sinned, and therefore “we” ask for communal forgiveness. These are, at their essence, communal religious holidays.

Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, marks one of the two high points of synagogue attendance. The other, Yom Kippur, follows ten days after Rosh Hashanah. Jews observe these high holy days as a community, often with hundreds of their fellow Jews. Even many of those who do not set foot in a synagogue during the rest of the year or have decisively left behind other aspects of Jewish life appear.

What would these holidays be apart from the company of others? For Jews in the American west in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, finding or creating a community was no easy feat. Even learning the dates that corresponded to the Jewish calendar would require a letter, a visit, or some kind of contact with other Jews. For Rachel Calof, who became a North Dakota homesteader just months after her 1894 arrival in New York, the early years of frontier life were lonely despite her in-laws crowding into her tiny home. Apart from her husband’s family, she had no nearby Jewish neighbors, let alone a synagogue. Her first decade as a homesteader was hard, and it was hard on her Judaism.

The American west represented a radical departure from most of the rest of Jewish history. These Jews left behind the shtetlach of Eastern Europe, the cities and towns of Western Europe, and neighborhoods in American cities where they found Jewish communal life available, or even the default mode of everyday life. But when they struck out as pioneers into the sparsely populated landscape, the vast majority of their nearest neighbors were non-Jews. The opportunity to convene a minyan (quorum of ten adult male Jews) seldom arose, and ritual functionaries might visit only a few times a year. On the frontier, a Jewish community represented a major achievement, and a rare one at that.

By 1910, the Calof farm had grown significantly, and Rachel and her husband Abraham had become prominent members of their region. In her memoir, originally written in Yiddish, she begins her recollection of this social transformation with an account of the holidays: “Our home became the center for all the Jewish holiday celebrations. Jewish farmers came from far and near to gather at our home for these occasions, some traveling for days by horse and buggy or on horseback. These were wonderful and festive events. Everyone stayed for as long as the holiday lasted. We put up for the visiting children’s sleeping quarters, and in the house sleepers occupied all the chairs and covered the floors.”[2] Calof associated her economic success with her ability to bring together a community for the holidays. Her first recollections about her upward mobility weren’t about material or prestige; they were about convening a Jewish community. Calof’s memoirs and her palpable joy at the opportunity to host a Jewish community—however ad hoc the sleeping arrangements—suggest not that the community gathers together in order to be blessed and forgiven, but rather that the gathering together itself constitutes the blessing.

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[1] Jonathan Sarna, A Time to Every Purpose: Letters to a Young Jew, (New York: Basic Books, 2008), 112.

[2] Rachel Calof’s Story (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1995), 85-86.