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Home work: The building and decay of Jewish social and cultural capital

Tue, December 18, 2:30 to 4:00pm, Seaport Hotel & World Trade Center, Waterfront 2 Ballroom

Abstract

My paper takes up the categories of social and cultural capital to schematically chart the relative intensity of the Jewish lives of sixteen families that participated in a 10-year ethnographic study. Indicating the dynamic quality of capital over time, repeated interviews with the same parents and children revealed that families with higher Jewish social capital and lower Jewish cultural capital at the start of the study were among those whose Jewish lives intensified most over the following decade. It seems that over time, as Lareau (2011) has demonstrated, social capital can be translated into increased cultural capital; extensive Jewish relationships are associated with ever deeper Jewish literacy and cultural engagement (as previously proposed by Cohen and Veinstein 2011). By contrast, other than in one outlier case, cultural capital was not readily translated into social capital. Being knowledgeable about Jewish matters did not stimulate or nourish extensive Jewish social relationships. Indeed, there is evidence that Jewish capital is not always something that an individual or family consistently accumulates or that remains inert over time. In some cases, both social and cultural capital had been higher in the distant past, but had declined by the time of the research team’s first contact with the family. Capital, it seems, does not resist decay without supporting social systems. It erodes even within the same generation in ways not previously noted in either Bourdieu’s or Putnam’s influential formulations of these constructs

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