Abstract: The paper sets out how a small religion-based sub-population based in a UK city, Liverpool Jewry, underpinned its planning for the future in the light of its reducing size and the consequent strain on the community’s infrastructure and resources. This was achieved by carrying out a voluntary census to provide information on the community’s current size (about 1800 individuals living in 900 households) and its age profile, household types and other characteristics. The census questions were designed to provide data that allowed future population projections to be developed. The low number of births in the community necessitated the devising of a novel approach to the fertility assessment, though mortality rates were derived in a traditional way. In particular, the various elements of migration were investigated via historical information and stated preference responses. The analysis facilitated the estimation of levels of future demand for educational, youth, cultural, religious, welfare and burial services, and the community’s ability to continue to provide those services. Whilst the subject of this paper is the Jewish community in the city of Liverpool, the approach set out here could be adopted by other minority groups, whether shrinking, growing or stable, in other localities and in other countries.
Abstract: Muslims across Europe have been labeled as uncivil since the migration waves of postcolonial and guestworker migrants in the mid-20th century. In this paper, I bring the Muslim experience in the German capital into conversation with Civil Sphere Theory (CST), which analyzes how senses of cultural boundedness are supported, shaped, and contested through the interrelations between the institutions of civil society and social movements aimed at expanding civic inclusion. Drawing on two years of ethnographic research in a Berlin mosque, I move from Muslim associations with incivility to the actions these associations provoke in relation to the civil sphere: exploring how those deemed uncivil exert agency in response to, and also in spite of a civil/uncivil divide. Through the voices and experiences of my interlocutors, I show that Muslims are not simply a victimized out-group excluded from the German civil sphere, but are also agents of change who actively seek to gain full inclusion within it. Specifically, I trace how my German Muslim interlocutors contend with their negative social status by drawing on narratives, and enlivening connections that link them to the German Jewish experience: seeking incorporation in the civil sphere through identifications with another “Other,” and through this other, also mainstream society.
Abstract: Syrian refugees have become a significant minority in Germany over the past decade, with approximately one million now residing in the country. Most of them plan to stay and are eager to integrate into German society. Alongside practical challenges such as uncertain legal status, securing housing, finding employment, facing racism, and learning the German language, they must also navigate an ideological environment where common views on the Middle East, Islam, Israel, Jews, and the Holocaust differ significantly from those in their home country. This necessitates a certain degree of adaptation. Based on qualitative interviews with more than 200 Arab and Kurdish Syrian refugees, we examine self-perceptions, views on developments in the Middle East, and attitudes toward Jews. Significant differences emerged between Arab and Kurdish respondents. Especially among Syrian Kurds, there’s a noticeable openness to challenge antisemitic attitudes, often motivated by a rejection of Arab nationalist ideology and anti-Zionist propaganda. Syrian Kurds often perceive Jews and Israel more favorably than Arab Syrians. Their history of discrimination and oppression in Syria contributes to their rejection of hatred of Jews and Israel.
Abstract: Faith schools remain a topic of debate in contemporary Britain. In 2017, faith schools accounted for 33.7% of state-funded mainstream schools. Faith schools differ from other state-funded mainstream schools in many ways. For example, they have the ability to control the content taught in their Religious Education and Sex and Relationships Education (SRE) syllabuses and have control over their admissions arrangements. This project explores the impact Jewish schools can have on one’s adult beliefs, through a small-scale study. This study analyses online questionnaire responses from 25 participants aged 19-27. All participants in this sample attended the same Jewish secondary school in London, referred to as ‘School A’. The responses show that faith schools can have a significant effect on one’s adult beliefs, due to the ways in which they teach pupils about different religions, political ideologies, and sexuality. This was found to be mainly due to the perceived exclusion of other religious beliefs and opinions. Despite this, most of the participants still felt able to express themselves and their beliefs. Moreover, this study’s participants felt that their adult beliefs were more significantly impacted by their family and community, rather than by their school. The study’s findings highlight a need to improve the inclusivity of SRE teaching in Jewish schools. This project recommends that further research is conducted on the impact of attending a Jewish secondary school on an individual’s beliefs later in life, and whether this is also representative of all UK faith schools.
Abstract: The article deals with two legitimate cultures that were created in Poland after 1989. "Legitimate culture" means the axiological frame of reference that defines the criteria of prestige and dishonor, that is, the criteria of supreme values and anti-values. No authority (in Poland or any other country) can exist without controlling legitimate culture. However, legitimate culture in Poland is threatened by a history of domestic violence against Jews (massive pre-war Polish anti-Semitism, the murder of Jews during the Holocaust, the murder and persecution of Jews in the post-war period). respect, any Polish authority must control Holocaust-related content. The first concept of Holocaust management, created within the framework of the first legitimate culture (corresponding to the legal and institutional arrangements of 1989–2005 and 2007–2015) treated the Holocaust and Polish attitudes toward Jews as: an affirmation of the need to weaken the “nation,” the religious community and other collective entities; a problem that each Pole individually solves on his/her own. The second legitimacy culture (2005–2007; 2015–2023) works to: recognize the Holocaust as a problem that only the Polish nation can resolve; criminalize claims that Poles murdered Jews; present (and justify) violence against Jews as a struggle against communism; and portray Poles helping Jews as the norm, which the majority met during the occupation. The first culture of legitimacy used the Holocaust to weaken the social bond; the second uses the Holocaust to reactivate nationalism. Both cultures are responsible for the current crisis of social communication, and therefore another legitimate culture is needed to emerge from this crisis.
Abstract: The filigree ground mosaic is placed at the heart of the Grindel neighbourhood in Hamburg, Germany. Tracing the footprint of the former synagogue that once stood there, proudly, it demarcates an absence. It is a reminder of what the Nazis destroyed and sought to extinguish. The fact that the synagogue will finally be rebuilt, in the same place, with the support of the Federal government and the city, is anything but a matter of course. This will be the first reconstruction project of a synagogue of this size in Germany since the Second World War. Yet the project has been controversial in some respects. The two main concerns expressed in the public debate about the form of reconstruction and whether and how to integrate the Synagogue Monument at first sight appeared to be in irreconcilable competition: the importance of maintaining a culture of remembrance, and the legitimate claim of the Jewish Community to recover and rebuild its former place of worship. This would not merely be, as is often said, a sign of Jewish belonging, of identity and representation, in the urban society. Rather, it is about modes of existence that the architecture itself, in the materiality of its form and its presence, embodies and makes possible. To the people, architecture is what makes the difference. It thus shapes the political landscape.
Abstract: Despite the increasingly diverse societal landscape in Greece for more than three decades within a context of migration, understandings of its fragile histories are still limited in shaping a sense of belonging that is open to ‘otherness’. While Greek communities have utilised history as a pathway to maintain identity, other parallel histories and understandings do not resonate with ‘Greekness’ for most, such as the case of Greek Jewry. Critical historical perspectives can benefit from tracing ‘re-membering’ as a feminist practice in the reassessment of societal values of inclusivity. Histories of violence and injustice can also include elements of ‘difficult histories’ and must be embraced to seek acknowledgement of these in promoting social change and cultural analysis for public humanities informing curation and curricula. Between eduscapes, art heritage spaces, an entry into contested and conflictual histories can expand a sense of belonging and the way we imagine our own connected histories with communities, place and nation. Greek Jews do not constitute a strong part of historical memory for Greeks in their past and present; in contrast to what is perceived as ‘official’ history, theirs is quite marginal. As a result, contemporary Greeks, from everyday life to academia, do not have a holistic understanding in relation to the identities of Jews in Greece, their culture or the Holocaust. Given the emergence of a new wave of artistic activism in recent years in response to the ever-increasing dominance of authoritarian neoliberalism, along with activist practices in the art field as undercurrents of resistance, in this intervention I bring together bodies of works to create a dialogic reflection with historical, artistic and feminist sources. In turn, the discussion then explores the spatiotemporal contestations of the historical geographies of Holocaust monuments in Greece. While interrogating historical amnesia, I endeavour to provide a space to engage with ‘difficult histories’ in their aesthetic context as a heritage of healing and social justice.
Abstract: This article focuses on a multireligious building project named House of One in contemporary Berlin. Initiated in 2012 by a Protestant community at the center of Berlin, House of One consists of a synagogue, a church, a mosque, and a communal room. My central suggestion is that House of One is invested in a pluralist re-branding of (liberal) Protestantism, a rebranding that underlies the post-unification emergence of a new national German imaginary: out of “soil” marked as historically Christian spreads an “Abrahamic” future that transcends its particularity via its assumed ability to incorporate Islam and Judaism. Liberal, Christian-secularized norms and affects are thus being rearticulated in a language of religious pluralism, so that a normative, Christian-secularized category of religion can be extended to Christianity’s “monotheistic brothers.” Elaborations of this building project’s intended purpose, I argue, are thus animated by a broader question about the appropriate relation between religion and the state, and conjointly, between the self and culture at a moment in time in which hitherto normative, Christian-secularized assumptions concerning this relation are challenged. As such, the discursive representation that sustains the yet-to-be-built House of One is conducive to the making of a new national imaginary: it is driven both by the desire to renounce past evil through a recognition and inclusion of alterity into the body politic, as much as by the simultaneous de-politization and scrutinization of such alterity.
Topics: Memory, Jewish Neighbourhoods, Jewish Space, Jewish Heritage, Oral History and Biography, Holocaust, Holocaust Commemoration, Holocaust Memorials, Holocaust Survivors, Holocaust Survivors: Children of, Main Topic: Holocaust and Memorial
Abstract: In 1905, Yiddish poet and Glasgow union activist Avrom Radutsky described the Jewish population of Scotland as ‘a mere drop in the ocean’. Nevertheless, by 1920 this drop had swelled to 20,000 people, centred primarily (though by no means exclusively) around the Gorbals in Glasgow. The area was characterised by vibrant community life, but also cramped low-quality housing, poor sanitation and harsh economic inequality. Many of Glasgow’s Jews began to climb a social ladder that would lead them out of the Gorbals and towards more spacious residences in the south-west of the city, but maintained regular contact with its streets, shops and places of worship. Large-scale demolition of the neighbourhood in the 1960s mean that the Gorbals looks very different today, and the Jews are gone. The Jewishness of this space, however, still remains: a remembered or imagined presence in the minds of second and third generations, celebrated through community outreach, or romantically evoked in popular narratives. Equally, an absence of Jewish life in today’s Gorbals has been paralleled by the emergence of wide-ranging and socially minded virtual networks of shared memory. Through analysis of contemporary accounts and archival sources, oral histories, fieldwork interviews, and lively online discussion groups, this article examines how this former densely populated Jewish neighbourhood now functions as an important lieu de memoire, but in a significantly different way to Eastern Europe’s pre-war Jewish spaces. At the geographical edges of more traumatic histories, the Gorbals instead provides an affective link for contemporary, assimilated Scottish Jews, while at the same time the area’s Jewish history becomes part of a wider virtual online community – signifying an emotional connection to immigrant narratives and grounding personal and social histories.
Abstract: During the past 15 years, there has been a rapid increase in interfaith initiatives in the United Kingdom. Even though the “interfaith industry,” as some have cynically called it, has rapidly increased, the involvement of women in these groups has been relatively low. Based on ethnographic data, including 20 interviews and 3 years of fieldwork with female interfaith activists in the United Kingdom (2017–2020), this ethnography focuses on the emergence of Jewish and Muslim female interfaith initiatives, analyzing the creative ways religious women negotiate their challenges and struggles as women of faith, together. I examine the ways Jewish and Muslim women form nuanced representations of female piety that disrupt “strictly observant” gendered representations, thus diversifying the binary categories of what being Jewish, or Muslim, entails. Further, whereas former studies have focused on interfaith settings as crucial for the construction of religious identities, I show that interfaith activism also serves as a site for religious minorities to learn how to become British citizens. In a highly politicized Britain, where allegations of racism, antisemitism, and Islamophobia prevail, I argue that Jewish-Muslim encounters are sites for the construction and performances of British civic citizenship well beyond the prescriptions of the state. Drawing on these findings, I situate interfaith activism at the anthropological intersection of gender, religion, and citizenship, and as a site that reproduces and disrupts minority-state relationality.
Abstract: The purpose of this study is to compare two groups of Jewish women, native-born and migrants, who reside in Brussels regarding their social integration into native-born Jewish and non-Jewish communities and the acculturation strategies they employ. It seems that Brussels is not as socially and culturally open, as perceived by the interviewees. Hence, the social networks of women in our study, as well as their acculturation patterns, differ in degree of separation between native-born Jewish women, non-Israeli immigrants and Israeli immigrants. The former maintain social networks characterized by fluid boundaries between them and the majority society, whereas non-Israeli immigrants are characterized by shared, not very dense networks with the native-born Jewish community and diasporic networks. Finally, Israeli women are characterized by almost completely closed social networks, which can be defined as a distinct “Israeli bubble.” As for their acculturation strategies, native-born women are those who are more integrated among non-Jews and native-born Jews, as expected from their familiarity with the culture and their long-term interactions, despite being partially marginalized as minority. Migrant women are less integrated and more separated from both native-born Jews and – to a larger extent – from non-Jews; so are Israelis. Social networks which gradually become communities are mainly created by women and maintained by them over the years. Therefore, the study of social networks, their structure and construction through daily interactions, and their contribution to the ethnic-diasporic community building have become the source of women’s strength in the host country – as immigrants and as a native-born minority group.
Abstract: Teaching about the Holocaust is a deeply sensitive and controversial topic in the Republic of Latvia. Due to a Soviet-imposed silence on the topic and the developing nature of democratic education in Latvia, many schools cover this history superficially, if it is covered at all. This study examines a cross-cultural curriculum development project that sought to break the historical silence surrounding the Holocaust in Latvia and provide Latvian teachers with an inviting, defensible, and efficacious curriculum that is both sensitive to societal reluctance to discuss the Holocaust and responsive to the needs of students living in a pluralistic democracy. This ethnographic and descriptive case study draws on multiple interviews with curriculum writers and project personnel, as well as field notes from the 18 month project, and examines how writers arrived at the curricular purposes, aims, goals, and content that would open this closed area. Significant findings include new understandings of the challenges and promises of cross-cultural curriculum deliberation, as well as an analysis of the choices involved in creating a new Holocaust curriculum. These findings suggest numerous implications and considerations for other former Soviet republics and more established democracies grappling with how to develop curricula through just processes while producing materials that foster democratic citizenship.
