Photo credit: id-iom
Benjamin Weiner has reviewed Benyamin Cohen’s new book My Jesus Year: A Rabbi’s Son Wanders the Bible Belt in Search of His Own Faith over at ReligionDispatches. He criticises the author, an Orthodox Jew of not challenging himself enough during the year of Sundays he spent attending Christian church services, ostensibly to question his faith but never intending in the least to abandon Judaism.
Weiner was intrigued, however, by Cohen’s description of his own dual identity as an Orthodox Jew in modern-day America.
His discussion of the young Orthodox bourgeoisie—Jews like himself who he terms “metrodox,” raised with the social expectations of their worldly peers while simultaneously beholden to an arcane and restrictive code of behavior—is actually rather compelling. “Being tugged in one direction by the secular world and in another by the religious world, they have styled their own compromise,” he says, “[and yet] they also feel an unbearable sense of loneliness and despair.”
Metrosexuality was a buzz-word coined a few years back used to describe heterosexual men who paid a lot of attention to their appearance in a way that mirrored that stereotypically attributed to homosexual men. In this case it is used to describe Orthodox Jews who still pay lip service to the everyday social pressures of modern life. I suppose in the religious worl heterodoxy is not considered the same norm that heterosexuality is, so the terms were reversed.
Benjamin Weiner ‘A Jew in Church? No Big Deal‘, ReligionDispatches (25/9/09)
