The "Jews in Space" trope is bad and should end

Space Judaism is neither a joke nor a fantasy.

Hi folks—I’m still recovering from Passover so no new big post today. Instead, I wanted to talk briefly about space Judaism and the way we talk it seriously or don’t.

And before you ask: I’m aware that there is an expectation that the Big Jewish Conversation right now should be about college campuses, academia, left-wing antisemitism, the limits of free speech, and acceptable forms of protest.

Those are important conversations, and I’m sure you will have no trouble finding people who are having them. But they’re not the only conversation—and I invite you to consider that this one is not simply a tasty distraction, but worthy of your time as a locus of creative Jewish thought.

Ready? Let’s go.

The second dreidel spun in space. The spinner, Jasmin Moghbeli, isn’t Jewish—but her husband is, and her kids made the menorah.

If there’s 60 seconds of film that I wish had never been aired, it’s the Jews in Space bit from Mel Brook’s History of the World Part 1 (1981). This clip, dripping with ashkenormativity, is supposedly funny because the idea of Orthodox Jews in space (or really anywhere outside of a shul or study hall) used to be the sort of things that Americans thought was funny.

The problem with the clip is that it’s now the go-to image for people imagining space Judaism. This is too bad because there are quite a few Jewish astronauts and the emergent space Judaism they (and their loved ones!) are building has little in common with the dancing tallis-wearing men in Brooks’ six-sided spaceships. Space Judaism isn’t going to be about us projecting our stereotypical selves onto the cosmos. It’s going to emerge from the Jews (and those married to them) who actually go to space.

The best place to see the divergence between these approaches is in how we talk about extraterrestrial prayer times. On one side, it’s pretty easy to come up with ideas about to pray in space or observe the holidays. On the other hand, there’s the way that the nineteen Jews who have been to space seem basically uninterested in this question, and if we insist on asking it anyway we lose track of the culture that may emerge. This is what I wrote about today in the Forward.

While “Jews in space” may seem outlandish, it’s actually not that different from thinking about Jews in Christian Europe before the year 1000 CE, or pre-Islamic Arabia, or any of the many other places that Jews have travelled in relatively small numbers. These Jewish communities are not always well documented (rabbis were unusually invested in text production, which is why we know more about them) and their cultures seem to have been extremely permeable; sometimes they adopted local customs that only later received rabbinic approval (this is documented in Ivan Marcus’ work, for example).

Like the first Jews to travel to Europe, or Arabia, or the New World, or the United State, the Jews who have been to space so far are not representative of the Jewish people as a whole—and that’s fine! Space Judaism will develop in its own unique ways, and we should watch for that. We on Earth can talk about prayer times if it makes us happy; in fact, speculation about Jewish space law could be considered a form of science fiction, since both are reflections of the present more than they are predictions about the future. We can critique the space program on Jewish grounds, and we can be inspired by science fiction portrayals of space Jews. But these conversations are separate from the what the Jews who go to space are actually doing, and we shouldn’t overwrite their ability to create something truly new by only talking about our fantasies.

That’s all for now. More next week.