Contemporary Jewish Identity Research Articles

Postmemory: Fragments / Crypt

This photo essay gathers evidence of the video works Postmemory: Fragments and Postmemory: Crypt, which ran from June 27 to August 4, 2022, at Holocaust Centre North at the University of Huddersfield in northern England. Included here are photographs from the video works and their installation, as well as the complete exhibition program. In an accompanying statement, Spatz positions this work within the broader Judaica project, an extended investigation of contemporary jewish identity developed over the past decade, and in relation to the four themes suggested by the editors of this special issue: ethics, knowledge, affect, and power.

How to Walk Away from the Trauma Corner: A Deconstructive Analysis of Besser’s Man in the Corner and Birman’s How To Walk Away

The present paper attempts to deconstruct two postmodern Australian Jewish novels to examine the chief social-psychological dimensions of the main characters: David, in Besser’s Man in the Corner (2016) and Otis, in Birman’s How to Walk Away (2015) and thus investigate their implications about contemporary Jewish identity within the ethnoreligious Australian Jewish context. The previous analyses of the texts have only been internet reviews focusing on the psychological dimension on its own. These reviews have not linked the texts to current Jewish identity, as attempted in this article. In addition, these attempts’ focus has been on several perspectives, not deconstructive. Therefore, this paper delves into the mystic depths of these novels inferring, through deconstruction, the Jewish Identity in the postmodern era. The analyses have been conducted in light of Breakwell’s Identity Process Theory (1986) and Derrida’s Différance through textual analysis that elicits the traces beyond binaries, rhetoric expressions, and semantic and morphosyntactic tell-tale textual moments. David and Otis pass different experiences and personal traumas that primarily influence their ability to decisions making and thus initially increasingly shrink inward. However, the later awakening by confessing the existing problems, renewal and pleading to God provides ways to walk away from these traumas. These solutions reflect the overall diverse attempts of the Australian Jews today to overcome their traumatic past by universalizing the experiences of suffering, by attempts to communicate with the self and the other and to -sometimes- return to God.

American Jews Face Israel in Philip Roth's Writing: Identity, Generation, Politics, and Language

The relationship with Israel is an increasingly complicated issue for diaspora Jews. Philip Roth's texts show a complex and critical positioning of American Jews towards Israel from as early as the 1960s. Analyzing Portnoy's Complaint (1969), The Counterlife (1986), and Operation Shylock (1994), I argue that Roth portrays a complex, critical, and often uncomfortable Jewish-American relationship with Zionism and Israel. His ongoing engagement is as urgent, even if less prominent, as is the constant re-debating of Jewish-American identities throughout Roth's oeuvre. This suggests that Israel is a constituent, if problematic, part of his negotiations of contemporary Jewish identities. Roth explores the role of Israel in the Jewish-American identity politics by way of generational positioning, the question of politics, power, and violence, expectations of diaspora loyalty, and, most prominently, the meaning of language as an identity marker as American English and Hebrew are set against each other.

Deconstructing the Tropes of Communication in Jonathan Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

This study is an attempt to examine Jonathan Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005) that is supposed to represent contemporary moments of Jewish identity in the American context. Scrutinizing identity features of the young generations of Anglophone Jewish fiction from a social and psychological perspectives is a recommended trend This social psychological scrutiny, conducted throughout Breakwell's Identity Process Theory (IPT) (1986), of eliciting contemporary Jewish identity attributes is to be realized through the application of a deconstructive theoretical framework based on a neoreading of Derrida's master conception: différance. It is noticeable that the novel reflects a tendency towards overcoming traumatic moments that hinder communication among the American Jews and between them and other nations.

Text, Context, and Knowledge Building: Creating, Crisscrossing, and Rising above Jewish Identity

ABSTRACT Jewish education in Israel’s non-religious state (Mamlakhti) schools is intended to support an open-ended, pluralistic dialogue surrounding the question of Jewish identity. The distinct features of Knowledge Building Communities (KBCs) set them apart as a pedagogical approach that is particularly suitable for achieving this educational goal. In this article, we report on a year-long study that redesigned a tenth-grade Jewish philosophy class in Israel as a KBC. Our findings indicate that students co-created a Jewish-identity idea landscape, which they crisscrossed and rose above, to develop a deeply nuanced understanding of contemporary Jewish identity in Israel.

Demographic and Religious Dimensions of Jewish Identification in the U.S. and Israel: Millennials in Generational Perspective

The mutual relationship between demography and religion is explored in this paper through a comparison of the two largest Jewish populations worldwide: the U.S. and Israel. Special attention is devoted to the younger adult population – the Millennials – operationalized here as ages 18 to 29 and divided into three sub age groups. Data come from the Pew Research Center’s surveys of Jewish Americans in 2013 and of Israelis in 2015. After a short review of the main demographic differences between the two Jewish populations, the paper focuses on the multiple possible meanings and contents of Jewishness. The paper explores age-related differences regarding indicators of contemporary Jewish identity: religiosity, peoplehood and nationalism. We discover that young Jewish adults – the Millennials – in Israel and in the U.S., especially those 18–21 years old, are more likely than their elders to view their Jewishness mainly as a matter of religion rather than as a culture or ethnicity. Emerging similarities and differentials between Jews in Israel and in the U.S. are interpreted in the light of general theories of demographic change and religious identification, and are related to specific events and developments that have affected Jews in the two countries and their mutual relationships.

A PROJECT OF CONSTRUCTING A CONTEMPORARY JEWISH IDENTITY IN RABINOVICI’S NOVEL SUCHE NACH M

Attitude to the Nazi past turns to its new phase in the 1980s, after the time of repressing, silent and mourning brings the new discourse in talking about the Holocaust. It was a tendency of "denying" the Holocaust and new anti-semitism movement. In the 90s, Jewish authors confirm their position as „self-determined agents' in the literary and political area. One of them is Doron Rabinovici, an Austrian Jewish author who wrote the novel Suche Nach M in engaging on the project of constructing a contemporary Jewish identity. In this article, the question of how Robinovici proposes the construction of contemporary Jewish identity will be answered through critical reading on Jewish myth and identity formation theory. The result shows two major strategies that he proposes in his novel: “deconstructs” the Jewish myth (by playing other possibilities to interpret them and unveil the truth) and suggests the self-referential concept (find oneself based on 'the self' instead of immersing self in 'the Other‟). These two strategies can be seen as an active engagement with one own traumatic past. It is a historical- and self-awareness approach to construct a problematic contemporary Jewish identity.

A New Approach to Understanding Contemporary Jewish Engagement

Although researchers have long recognized the multidimensional nature of Jewish life (e.g., Hartman in Studies in Contemporary Jewry, Oxford University Press, New York, 2014; Himmelfarb in Understanding American Jewry, Brandeis University, Waltham, 1982), most sociodemographic studies examine Jewish behaviors and attitudes in isolation rather than considering their complex interactions. Examining each of these behaviors and dimensions separately provides only limited understanding of the meaning and enactment of Jewish identity. The present study presents a statistical method to understand the patterns of Jewish engagement across multiple dimensions. Based on data from a survey of the Greater Boston Jewish community, latent class analysis was used to combine 14 behavioral measures into a typology of Jewish engagement. The results were a “partially ordered” set of 5 classes representing distinct behavior patterns. Three of the classes followed a low-to-high continuum. Two classes did not follow this order and represented distinct but parallel patterns of engagement. Most notably, the study identified a category of Cultural Jews who do not regularly practice Jewish rituals or affiliate with synagogues but do feel strong connections to the Jewish community. A simple continuum of Jewish identity disguises the multidimensional nature of engagement and provides too simplistic a tool for policymakers. This approach suggests not only a new method of measuring Jewish engagement, but, more importantly, a new way to understand contemporary Jewish identity.

Fixity and flux: A critique of competing approaches to researching contemporary Jewish identities

Jewish identities are becoming increasingly pluralised due to internal dynamics within Judaism and wider social processes such as secularisation, globalisation and individualisation. However, empirical research on contemporary Jewish identities often continues to adopt restrictive methodological and conceptual approaches that reify Jewish identity and portray it as a ‘product’ for educational providers and others to pass to younger generations. Moreover, these approaches typically impose identities upon individuals, often as a form of collective affiliation, without addressing their personal significance. In response, this article argues for increased recognition of the multiple and fluid nature of personal identities in order to investigate the diverse ways in which Jews live and perform their Jewishness. Paying greater attention to personal identities facilitates recognition of the intersections between different forms of identity, enabling more complex understandings of the ways in which individuals both define their own identities and contribute to redefining the boundaries of Jewishness.

Two Plays about Israel/Palestine: Masada/Facts

Two Plays about Israel/Palestine: Masada/Facts

Deflationary tactics with the archive of life: contemporary Jewish art and popular culture

ABSTRACTThis paper discusses art works by Suzanne Treister, Deborah Kass and Doug Fishbone. It considers the importance of their work for contemporary Jewish identity within the terms of wider conceptual questions that preoccupy contemporary art. These concerns are challenging the perceived structures of power, the “performance” of subjectivity and the questioning of authenticity. A deflationary aesthetic is central to the critique of these structures of thinking fuelled by an interest in the relationship between Jewish subjectivity and popular culture that underpins all of these art works. I argue that popular culture plays a key role as a constituting factor in the production of contemporary Anglophone subjectivity. I use the case studies to develop the argument in the three artists’ specificities and the way they all question the idea of authenticity as a stable source of self-understanding. Suzanne Treister questions history and our relationship with historical events, specifically the Holocaust. She also explores questions of the relationship between structures of power and narratives of history. Debora Kass considers the representation of Jewish women, power and iconicity. Doug Fishbone, a younger artist, takes on self-hate as a transformative tool and as a motif that destabilizes Jewishness as a category, especially in an age of the accelerated post-internet-derived subjectivity.

In Search of Transnational Jewish Art: Immigrant Women Artists from The Former Soviet Union in Contemporary Israel

The article explores the subject of contemporary Jewish identity through the case of young immigrant women artists from the former Soviet Union in Israel, with particular emphasis on an analysis of the gendered aspects of their religious identity. Drawing on an interdisciplinary method, the research is based on in-depth interviews with artists, artwork analysis, and various theories from the social sciences and humanities. The article's main argument is that an analysis of the artistic practices of this and similar understudied social groups, particularly those practices undertaken in moments of conflict or times of deep social change, produces a more subtle understanding of the shifting modes of Jewish identity in the age of globalization and transnationalism, whose phenomenon of mass migration has led to the construction of new multi-hyphenated, hybrid identities.

Too Much Bar and Not Enough Mitzvah? A Proposed Research Agenda on Bar/Bat Mitzvah

Jewish educators are understandably interested in research on how bar/bat mitzvah affect Jewish education or research on what Jewish schools have done to avoid the distortions of a focus on bar/bat mitzvah. Research might also focus on the somewhat different and more ambitious topic of the role that bar/bat mitzvah play in contemporary Jewish identity. Three examples—the meaning of bar/bat mitzvah in intermarried families, bar/bat mitzvah as a ritual entry into early adolescence, and how bar/bat mitzvah perform values—indicate how this larger research agenda might be useful to those rethinking the role of bar/bat mitzvah in Jewish supplementary school education.

The Circularity of Secularity: The Sacred and the Secular in Some Contemporary Post-Holocaust Identity Narratives

This article explores some of the methodological and theoretical critiques concerning the meaning and measure of secularity and religiosity in contemporary Jewish identity research and compares them to critiques of secularization theory. Data from an ongoing study of contemporary post-Holocaust identity narratives of seventy American and twenty Israeli young adults between the ages of twenty and thirty are used as descriptive examples of the fluid and creative ways in which secularity and religiosity are invented and reinvented. These data offer glimpses of the ways in which young people reposition themselves within the institutional and linguistic spaces of the secular and the sacred. For many, their concerns begin with their own particular Jewishness and then often circle back to a “secular” and/or more universal expression of that particularity.

Jewish Tradition and the Challenge of Darwinism (review)

Jewish Tradition and Challenge of Darwinism, edited by Geoffrey Cantor and Marc Swetlitz. Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 2006. 260 pp. $24.00. This book is a collection of papers written by scholars in a variety of disciplines. It provides a survey of Jewish voices on a broad range of subjects related to Darwinism. One of book's main goals is to delineate scientific and theological dimensions of topic in context of engaging modern Jewish thought in dialogue between and religion. The book is eminently readable and accessible. While book initially claims that there is no Jewish problem with of evolution, further reading shows that not as much harmony exists under surface in terms of compatibility between Darwin's theory and Judaism as this claim would imply. Indeed, in final chapter, Darwinism is called the greatest challenge to divine (p. 230). Likewise, one of book's editors says that evolution is probably most prominent and controversial aspect of science (p. 32). Another theme is that of conflict and harmony. The theories of mutual aid and altruism are raised in contrast to competitive, war-based ideology, struggle for life, survival of fittest component of Darwinian theory, which was heavily influenced by Spencer's evolutionism and Malthus' population pessimism. Mutual aid, as it was originally envisaged, actually contradicts current evolutionary psychology, which has detached itself from metaphysics and ethics, to degree that it imagines animals and sometimes plants as similarly social beings equal to human beings. Should we not respect notion of a continuing creation, at work in both natural history and human history? Is reality of divine action something that can be considered in light of divine knowledge, if not in terms of secular human knowledge? Should we not leave space for highly improbable, or for what evidence has not yet verified, or for theories which do not currently stand as legitimate or valid? In this way anti-evolution, creation science, and Intelligent Design (ID) are said not to resonate with modern Orthodox Jews, but this need not mean that this applies to all such theories and paradigms. One suggestion is given in book, for example, of a reversal of typical views of evolution, suggesting that perhaps apes descended from humans, namely from sinful ones (p. 84). The larger context of book thus regards compatibility between and Judaism. Judaism holds a singularly important voice in controversy over evolution, which is nowadays current in some Christian circles, particularly in United States. Another aspect of book that makes this publication very timely has to do with contemporary Jewish identity, place of race concept and practice of eugenics in Zionism. …

Jewish Frontiers: Essays on Bodies, Histories, and Identities (review)

Reviewed by: Jewish Frontiers: Essays on Bodies, Histories, and Identities Warren Rosenberg Jewish Frontiers: Essays on Bodies, Histories, and Identities, by Sander L. Gilman. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003; paper 2004. 243 pp. $24.95. In this collection of loosely related essays, Gilman, the important cultural critic who gave us Jewish Self-Hatred (1986) and The Jew’s Body (1991), as well as works on the Jewishness of Freud and Kafka, seeks to establish the term “frontier” as the defining metaphor for contemporary Jewish identity. In this he partially succeeds. In his provocative introductory chapter, “The Frontier as Model for Jewish History,” Gilman distinguishes his definition from Frederick Jackson Turner’s iconic “closing of the American frontier” thesis as well as, more problematically, from Gloria Andalzua’s space she calls La Frontera. For Gilman, the frontier is neither Turner’s shifting and now completed site of manifest destiny, nor Andalzua’s celebration of a feminist/multicultural space. He defines the frontier as “the conceptual and physical space where groups in motion meet, confront, alter, destroy, and build” (p. 15), and this meeting space is permanently operating. Gilman’s post-modern definition sees the frontier as symbolic space linked to a variety of concrete locations and histories. Israel is [End Page 106] of course a prime example of such a space, but there are many others, and thus Gilman can decentralize Israel as the touchstone of Jewish identity. Jews, like other globalized peoples today, share a Diaspora identity everywhere with everyone. Gilman wishes to escape the center-periphery duality, with Jerusalem as its center, that would locate the “authentic” in either the center or the margin. The authentic, as we might expect from a literary critic and linguist, can be found, most reliably, in the struggle over language. Those who can negotiate among different languages on the frontier are the “true hybrids.” In the history of various language adaptations—Yiddish and Hebrew for example—Jewish identity can be established, for specific times and places. This, for Gilman, avoids the error of seeing Jews as nomads made synonymous with the shifting ideas of identity represented by an atemporal modernism. “Who are the Jews?” Gilman asks. “Those who understood themselves as Jews at specific moments in time. Does this definition change? It is constantly shifting and constantly challenged, which is why absolute boundaries must be constructed for the Jews within and without Jewish culture and ritual” (p. 25). Gilman explores this shifting Jewish frontier identity in three not easily connected areas—in the representation of the Shoah in film, in the cultural construction of disease and the Jewish body, and, finally, in contemporary multicultural literature. Gilman’s concept of the frontier sheds new light on topics he has written about before. Yet at times, he loses sight of the master metaphor, which detracts from the “heuristic power” he claims for it. For example, the chapter, “Is Life Beautiful? Can the Shoah Be Funny?” raises important questions about the limits of representation, but the precise relation to Gilman’s concept of the frontier is unclear and his answer to the chapter’s title question inconclusive. While discussing Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful (1998), Gilman makes the point that at the beginning of the film “Benigni’s character, Guido, is not seen . . . as a Jew. . . . Rather, he fulfills the stereotypes and self-image of the Italian Jew . . . that they were well integrated into Italian prewar society and no different than other Italians” (p. 85). But if we are not shown the confrontation of cultures that Gilman sees as characterizing the frontier, how is it operating in the film’s depiction of pre-War Italy? If, in the second half of the film, it is the Germans that make the protagonist’s Jewishness visible, then his death at the end should not, as Gilman concludes, make the audience “feel good about our laughter” (p. 86). The Jewish father is dead, has been sacrificed, so that the half-Jewish son and his non-Jewish mother can return to a “normal” life in a new post-war Italy. Why is this an “acceptable” comic representation of the Shoah? The Jew is once more made invisible, but this...

The Golem in the Attic: Rodinsky's Room and Jewish Memory

This article focuses on Rachel Lichtenstein and Iain Sinclair's co-authored text Radinsky's Room (1999). The discussion reads the text's figuring of David Rodinsky as an absent presence in particular relation to the Jewish golem legend. In developing the connection between collective myth and Lichtenstein's pursuit of Rodinsky's story the article draws from Jonathan Boyarin and David Roskies' theorisation of cultural memory and Jewish identity in order to ask questions about the interplay between remembering and forgetting in the construction of contemporary Jewish identity.

Oppositional Culture and the "New Jew" Brand: From Plotz to Heeb to Lost Tribe

This essay considers how an amateur literary production, Plotz: The Zine for the Vaclempt, helped to construct both an oppositional and an eminently marketable form of contemporary Jewish identity. Barbara Rushkoff, née Kligman, the wit behind Plotz, yoked zine writing practices and attitudes with Jewish humor and thereby repositioned Jewishness in her zine as a kind of "alt-Jewishness," another type of oppositional culture within zine subcultures of the 1990s. Plotz's cultural significance is evident in the direct and indirect emulations of Rushkoff's formula in Heeb: The New Jew Review and in the visual and editorial packaging of Lost Tribe, an anthology of "Jewish Fiction From the Edge." Both developed that formula into a market brand, thus enabling fans of American Jewishness to buy, and to buy into, the values and practices that currently lend cultural legitimacy and social prestige to Jewish identity.

Review: Jacqueline Rose.THE QUESTION OF ZION. Princeton University Press, 2005.

Introduction A Princeton University Press (PUP) Release announcing Jacqueline Rose's book, The Question of Zion, instructively informs its potential readers and reviewers that Rose, while exposing Zionism's "apocalyptic jargon" and the "messianic zeal" that drove Jewish nationalism, is also to be credited for pointing out "the dissident Zionist writers of the early twentieth century, including Hannah Arendt, Theodor Herzl, and Gershon Sholem, who, even before the founding of Israel, called into question the establishment of a Jewish state at the expense of the legitimate rights of the native Palestinians." Defining Herzl as a "dissident writer" or Arendt as a "Zionist writer" is a bit like calling Sigmund Freud a "dissident psychoanalyst," Alexander Hamilton a "dissident founding father," or Karl Marx a dissident Marxist. Also Sprach PUP? Or a sign that the Ivy League is not what it used to be? No matter. While the reader may be left to wonder who should lose their jobs at the prestigious publishing house for this little oversight, one should not judge this book by the blissful ignorance of PUP's public relations personnel, which perhaps is just a welcome indication of how this book made it into print. In fact, their little stretch of imagination is reality television compared to Rose's reach for the stars. Rose's argument has little to do with the reality of Zionism or indeed of the current state of the Arab-Israeli conflict. It is more a reflection of the state of mind of Jews who—like Rose and other radical Jewish intellectuals opposed to Israel's existence—do not want to be Jews, are ashamed to be Jewish, and take pride in saying it out loud—in short, her own state of mind. More than an indictment of Zionism then, as she no doubt conceived her book, The Question of Zion is Rose's pained and ultimately unsuccessful effort to grapple with Jewish identity in an age where Israel stands at its core. Unfortunately for Rose, her book is neither a confession nor a moment [End Page 194] of truth face-to-face with her demons. It is more like a transfer—in the psychoanalytic sense, not in the sense attributed to the sinister designs of Zionists by post-Zionist historians. It is a projection of the unresolved fears of an assimilated Jew quite incapable of letting go in theory of an identity she has already relinquished in practice. Rather than accepting that her unease with Israel and Zionism is a symptom of the fact that she does not feel she "belongs," Rose builds a highly inaccurate, historically flawed depiction of what Zionism is—with not a few factual mistakes—in order to show that it is actually those Jews who either embraced Zionism or at least support Israel from the Diaspora who do not "belong." Rose's book is a direct challenge to Zionism, the core of contemporary Jewish identity: "People who thunder," Rose writes "are generally those who are least sure of themselves" (101). By demonizing Zionism, she can become reconciled with her own unease as a member of a collective whose core identity she rejects. And, true to her words, Rose's thunderous book reflects more her wavering Jewish identity, less the reality of Zionism. Hegel and Freud, or Zionism as Madness The Question of Zion is divided in three sections: Zionism as Messianism, Zionism as Psychoanalysis, and Zionism as Politics. These three sections correspond to what Rose sees as the three phases of which the evolution of Zionism consists: Vision, Critique, and Violence, something which Rose herself suggests is an adaptation of the typical Hegelian process of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. Relying on psychoanalysis, Rose sees Zionism as a psychotic response to a permanent state of fear. For Rose, Messianism is an apocalyptic view of the world that is the historic response to disaster, and which thrives on disaster: "Redemption," she writes, "arises from the ruins of history. Disaster must be meaningful to be borne" (19...

Toward an Understanding of Jewish Identity: A Phenomenological Study.

To begin mapping the landscape of contemporary Jewish identity from a phenomenological perspective, the authors conducted a qualitative analysis of semistructured interviews of 10 Jewish adults in the northeastern United States. Coding resulted in 6 universal themes (dynamic nature of self-identification, early formative experiences, desire to increase religious practice, generativity, feeling marginalized, and awareness of discrimination). Most of the other 18 typical and variant themes reflected a congruence between cultural identification and religious observance. Whereas only the religiously unaffiliated participants expressed shame or embarrassment about being Jewish, the observant Jews described a sense of pride, the importance of Jewish marriage, and a connection to Israel. The Conservative and Orthodox Jews were most clear about their identity as Jews; they discussed the importance of Jewish texts, heritage, values, search for meaning, and relation to God. All but the most Orthodox participants valued interpersonal relations with Gentiles; for them, Jewish identity predominates regardless of the social context.