Contemporary Jewish Identity Research Articles

South Africa's Jewish Complex

South Africa's Jewish Complex Oren Baruch Stier (bio) South Africa's Jewish community is quite small (likely no more than 80,000 people, and less than 0.2 percent of the population),1 but its pioneering spirit, autonomy, and isolation make it a fascinating case for examining Jewish self-definition in the contemporary era. Because of a variety of factors—including the aging and the slow decline of its Jewish population—and in response to a need to define itself against the backdrop of an increasingly multicultural and democratic postapartheid South Africa, a complex of institutions has sprung up along Cape Town's museological axis2 which serves to define Jewish self-identity at the southern tip of Africa. Although this complex was neither designed nor constructed as a totality, it nonetheless stands as a museological package, presenting the public face of South African Jewish identity to visitors. In this article I analyze this complex and its components as the performative expression of contemporary Jewish identity and self- representation in the postapartheid era. This discussion reveals telling characteristics about how the Jewish community sees itself and its position in South African society. Playing off the classic (and problematic) dichotomy of Jewish power and powerlessness, South Africa's Jewish complex translates that dichotomy into a local idiom with unique and innovative characteristics. In addition, analyzing this highly localized performance of Jewish identity on the frontier may raise important issues of a more general nature. In particular, such an analysis reveals the interaction between Jews' political anxieties and their public personae as alternatively powerful and powerless. Sander Gilman even notes that this dichotomy can be associated with two models within Jewish self-understanding for the nature of "exile": [End Page 123] The voluntary dispersion of the Jews ("Galut" or "Golah") is articulated as inherently different from the involuntary exile of the Jews ("Diaspora"). These two models exist simultaneously in Jewish history in the image of the uprooted and powerless Jews on the one hand, and rooted and empowered Jews on the other....Indeed, the same person can find his or her existence bounded conceptually by these two models at different times and in different contexts.3 Although Gilman's characterization of voluntary and involuntary versions of exile is questionable, I want to highlight the dynamism of the power/powerlessness dichotomy on which he too relies. Near the southwestern tip of Africa, this dynamic is played out with interesting results. The architectural complex under discussion consists of an institutional campus constructed in the spaces around the Cape Town Hebrew Congregation, or Gardens Synagogue, South Africa's oldest Jewish congregation. On one side of this campus lies the Cape Town Holocaust Centre, Africa's only Holocaust educational institution, a small museum built on the roof of what is still a communal meeting hall and Jewish library. On the other side lies the South African Jewish Museum, a high-tech monument to the country's Jewish experience, mostly the commercial experience (and influence) of the country's Jewish community. Taken as a whole, one can say that these three institutions constitute a complex identifying South African Jews with, respectively, religion, suffering, and capital, thereby condensing the Jewish experience there (and, by analogy, elsewhere) into an almost holy trinity of significations. Linked to the "power/powerlessness" paradigm, these symbolic associations can also represent a psychological complex encompassing a number of the anxieties facing South African Jewry today. Anxieties Many of these anxieties are themselves caught up in the "power/powerlessness" paradigm. In her entry for the key textbook on religion in South Africa, Jocelyn Hellig, professor of religious studies and one of the best-known interpreters of South African Judaism, begins her discussion with a long defense of the particular characteristics of the [global] Jewish experience....Diaspora Jews...are always in a vulnerable situation. For almost two thousand years, from 70 ce until the re-establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, [End Page 124] Jews have lived as a relatively powerless minority in a variety of host countries. Their well-being, or lack of it, has been in direct proportion to the positive or negative attitudes of their host governments. Jews have been...

Varieties of Authenticity in Contemporary Jewish Identity

Varieties of Authenticity in Contemporary Jewish Identity

Varieties of Authenticity in Contemporary Jewish Identity

L'A. traite des racines historiques et culturelles et des modeles de l'authenticite invoquee par des discussions sur le pluralisme religieux, l'assimilation, la vie en Israel et dans la diaspora ainsi que sur d'autres problemes relies a l'identite juive, en analysant notamment les idees de Jean-Paul Sartre et d'Alain Finkelkraut.

The Imaginary Homosexual: Sartre's interpretive grid in Saint Genet

Alain Finkelkraut has interrogated contemporary Jewish identity in terms of how a Jew reckons with the heavy impact of the Holocaust and in fact with the entire history of the Jewish people. Finkelkraut takes issue with Sartre’s 1947 essay, Anti-Semite and Jew, not for its content but the effect that it has had on him. “Let there be no misunderstanding: I am not attacking the book that Sartre wrote on the Jewish problem,” asserts the author in a footnote (JI 17, my translation). Instead, he shows how the philosopher aids in the creation of what Finkelkraut terms “the imaginary Jew.”

The utility of long interviews in the study of American Jews

In the study of contemporary Jewish identity, long interviews offer several advantages over sample surveys that focus heavily on behavior, and that have played a valuable role in helping us understand American Jewry over the last half century. Especially when used judiciously, in conjunction with surveys that plumb behaviors and attitudes alike, long interviews: Recent developments in American Jews, Judaism, and Jewishness make the tum to long interviews even more necessary and useful than in the past. Of special relevance is the growth in diversity and idiosyncrasy, in the self as ultimately authoritative, and in the search for personal meaning as the driving force behind Jewish engagement. These are conditions and themes that clearly lend themselves more readily to investigation by tools of observation that are more personal, immediate, and nuanced. The long interview is clearly one such tool.

Discovering and Making Memory. Jewish Cultural Expression in Contemporary Europe

Sander Gilman argues in Jews in Today's German Culture that the Holocaust is the touchstone of contemporary Jewish identity.1 In the 1930s, National Socialists' eliminationist forced not only recent immigrants, but also emancipated and assimilated Jews, and persons unaware of their Jewish family background, to confront the issue of their Jewishness and their future in German-speaking countries.2 Like the Austrian-born Auschwitz survivor Jean Amery, many German-speaking Jews had considered themselves Austrians or Germans first and foremost, viewing their Jewishness as secondary at best. For them the experience of being Jewish was linked with the experience of persecution. Existentialist-positivist and stubborn atheist that I am, it doesn't occur to me to convert the Jewish fate into a metaphysical phenomenon. In my eyes the Jews are as little a chosen people as an accursed one. They are nothing but the chance result of historical constellations that were unfavorable to them for two thousand years... no, the Jews and their historical existence are not a metaphysical phenomenon. They are, as I just said, more the victims of chance than of necessity, and also of that indolence of the heart which in the Middle Ages plunged the peasant, and in the heyday of capitalism the proletarian, into unspeakable misery. Indolence of the heart: I choose to employ this old-fashioned formula. For it summarizes the factual situation better than the most sophisticated sociopsychological studies. The older ones among you may still have witnessed how, in the Third Reich, due to indolence of heart, people quickly grew accustomed to their Jewish neighbor being fetched at night and deported.3 Jean Amery knew that his family was considered Jewish. However, he knew next to nothing about Jewish culture or the Yiddish language, and he was not a religious man. He derived the most tangible proof of his Jewishness from anti-Semitism and his deportation to the concentration camp. The issue of identity was particularly problematic for persons of Jewish background who grew up almost assimilated into German or Austrian society. Identifying with their country and language of origin had become nearly impossible, but they also lacked the connection to Jewish culture that would have enabled them to position themselves into a Jewish context and participate in Jewish life. Amery's observations on learning new conceptual patterns reveal some of the difficulties older persons forced into a new reality faced particularly. Amery describes the life of the aging person as the memory of time spent elsewhere; hence the difference between later-life periods and youthful existence, to which the world seems open and the possibilities for expansion almost limitless.4 Amery is primarily concerned with cultural aging as juxtaposed to biological aging processes. Thus he focuses on the intellectual barriers between persons of different age groups, interpreting these barriers as the result of fast-changing cultural and theoretical codes that need to be, and are impossible to be, learned by the aging individual, in order to keep abreast with his or her times (Amery 90). The problem of becoming culturally obsolete was a particular threat to Holocaust survivors trying to convey their experiences to the following generations, and to find modes of expression that, in Adorno's words, are not coopted by the neutralisierte and zugerichtete traditional culture which causes noch das aulBerste BewulBtsein vom Verhangnis [...] zum Geschwatz zu entarten.5 The lives of survivors and exiles, and those of their children, continue to be affected by the Nazi legacy, and there is a vast body of literature reflecting the impact of the Shoah on the memory of those whom the Nazis victimized. Often the attitude and rhetoric ofthe children of survivors are less ambivalent, more rigorous, than those of survivors who remember the prewar era. In her 1987 book Unzugehorig (Not Belonging), Ruth Beckermann, the Viennese-born daughter of a Holocaust survivor, writes about her and her peers' relationship to the Shoah: For the children of the survivors, too, the meaning of their own life is challenged by the memory of the extent and the far-reaching implications of the loss, for the survival of their parents was ultimately accidental. …

Israel and the Holocaust Trauma

culture both of Israel and of Diaspora Jewry. In the case of Israel, the proximity of the country's foundation to the massacre of Europe's Jews makes this centrality scarcely surprising.1 To begin with, there were many survivors and their relatives in Israel's population whose presence made the initial efforts to repress the memory of the Holocaust unlikely to succeed. Moreover, continuing Arab hostility and Israel's sense of isolation in the last twenty years reinforced what would in the best of circumstances have remained a massive trauma.2 The linkage is omnipresent and has grown ever more pervasive since 1967, strengthening the emotional bonds between Israel and the Diaspora and reinforcing the Jewish feeling of being a unique people among the nations.3 The institutionalization of the Holocaust in Israel and its status as a kind of civil religion are not however without problems. It stands in opposition to classical Zionism which aimed at normalizing the status of the Jews, not at the concept of "a people that dwells alone."4 Political Zionism sought to positively transform Gentile attitudes to Jews, not to dwell on the eternal antagonism between Jews and Gentiles; it aimed at economic and political independence, not at playing on the guilt of the nations as a justification for favorable treatment or for demanding immunity from criticism. The Holocaust contributed to this distortion of Zionism because of the ways in which it has been instrumentalized and politicized on all sides. Israel has used it frequently as a propaganda weapon against the Arabs and as a reproach against its critics. Arabs have manipulated it as a tool against the Jewish State, as have anti-Zionist Jews seeking to deligitimate Israel's moral and historical foundations.5 To understand this deformation one must consider why the Holocaust emerged in the first place as a central reference point for contemporary Jewish identity. One reason is that its memorialization has served to unite Jews pursuing very different ideological agendas, whether they are of the Right or Left, religious or

Prayer and Community: The Havurah in American Judaism (review)

104 SHOFAR Nonetheless, if these two groups provided the main impetus for Britain's decision to withdraw, the contribution of the Haganah should not be underrated. While the author cuts off his discussion in the fall of 1947, from then on, as the fighting against the British fell off and operations shifted more and more against Arab forces, soon operating in company, battalion, and even regimental formations, the Haganah came into its own, and without it the War of Liberation could not have been won. In conclusion, then, this book delivers what the title promises. It is strong in its evaluation of the British counter-insurgency effort, though somewhat weaker on the Jewish side where the author relies entirely on works translated into English and also seems to overestimate the influence of Jewish opinion on American policymakers. Happily, this study is free of the special pleadings and advocacy which so often mar works on the subject, and if, on occasion, the opinions cited are uncomfortable for the Jewish reader, it must be remembered that within the context of the time even a great Englishman such as Winston Churchill referred to the Jewish underground fighters as "brigands and bandits." Moreover, the reader should remember the statement already cited above, that the Jewish insurgents represented the "highest quality" of opponents the British army faced in the post-war period. Gunther Rothenberg Department of History Purdue University Prayer and Community: The Havurah in American Judaism, by Riv-Ellen Prell. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989. 335 pp. $37.50. Strange as it may1seem, given the plethora of books about American Jews and Judaism, we know next to nothing about the faith American Jews hold or what enables them to hold it. The number of times they go to shul, the percentage that observes dietary laws, their attitudes concerning Israel and antisemitism: on these subjects the data are plentiful. But as Riv-Ellen Prell notes correctly, researchers to date have "paid little attention to how religious experience is constituted." Her attempt to fill part of that gap with this anthropological account ora havurah-style minyan meeting in Los Angeles in the early 'seventies is most welcome, therefore. Prell's work takes its place among a small but growing literature devoted to the inner life of American Jews-in this case to the construction and authentication of contemporary Jewish identity through the "performance" ofJewish prayer. Prell's contribution is two-fold. First, she has culled from her participant -observation and interview schedules a rich set of quotations which VoLume 9. No.1 FaLL 1990 105 confirm the portrait of havurah Judaism offered by previous scholarship and personal contact with the movement. The language of the 'sixties is pronounced , the tension between tradition and "expressive individualism" acute, the ambivalence towards hierarchy and organization at the heart of the movement's travails. Members of the "Kelton Minyan" came together weekly to pray despite their difficulties with the act of prayer and their lack of clarity on just who or what they hoped would hear their prayer. They stayed together despite such difficulties because their gatherings offered a depth of experience, a sense of community and authenticity, a precious piece of continuity with past and future. Prell shows nicely how their tinkering with the aesthetics of the synagogue enabled them to reject the models of their parents without abandoning Jewish commitment itself. The core of the book is devoted to the origins of the prayer group, the structure of its prayer service, and two "crises" which threatened to break the group apart: one over discomfort with the act of prayer, the other over the relative "invisibility" of the group's female members. The account is convincing, at times even suspenseful . Prell transmits to the reader the affection which she developed for her subjects. We want the group to make it. The book's second contribution is a careful reading of the immense theoretical literature (particularly anthropological) on religious ritual, and its use to supplement primarily sociological accounts of the context in which modern Jewish religious activity occurs. Prell moves back and forth gracefully from her data to theory-Douglas and Turner are here, along with Tambiah, Geertz, and...