Jewish Cultural Heritage, Minority Agency, and the State: Introduction
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Abstract
Using an interdisciplinary perspective at the intersections of anthropology, Jewish Studies, and critical academic scholarship of heritage, this special issue presents ethnographic examples to explore the relationship between minority groups and the state through the prism of representations of Jewish cultural heritage in the European public sphere. On an empirical level, the articles focus on personal, community-led, and wider public discussions of the way Jewish experience and histories of migration have been (or should be) represented in museums and historical sites, in musical productions and open-air displays, at sites of restitution and in virtual spaces. In this introductory article we summarise the main points of each contribution and some of their connected themes. We then briefly discuss the articles we brought together and outline the main matters of theoretical concern they raise. Key are the aspirations that members of Jewish communities have in negotiating representations of Jewish heritage in Europe and the agentive capacity that diverse Jewish publics, including individual artists and professionals, demonstrate in shaping these representations to achieve, disrupt, or suspend state-sponsored consensus about the preservation of minority heritage.
Topics
Jewish Heritage Main Topic: Culture and Heritage Jewish Culture Jewish Community Representation Jewish Space Ethnography Anthropology
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Geographic Coverage
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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Volume/Issue
27(1)
Page Number / Article Number
32-42
DOI
Bibliographic Information
Jewish Cultural Heritage, Minority Agency, and the State: Introduction. 2025: 32-42. https://archive.jpr.org.uk/10.15460/ethnoscripts.2025.27.1.2413
