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.
Abstract: This dissertation illustrates how a moral burden of history manifests itself in social relationships, cultural processes, and material products. Specifically, it argues that what appears to many as a superficial, commercially motivated revival of Jewishness in Poland is also a significant joint venture between non-Jewish Poles and Jewish visitors to Poland in exploring inter-ethnic memory-building and reconciliation. The findings are based on 18 months of ethnographic research in the historical Jewish quarter (Kazimierz) in Krakow, Poland, with further research in Israel and the United States among diaspora Jews. My research reveals that the notion of uniform Holocaust tourism disguises a movement to contest lachrymose conceptions of Jewishness as victimhood. I document a sense of Jewish connection to Poland---overlooked in mainstream discourses---that animates new generations of Jews and Poles to seek each other out. Similarly, much of the Jewish revival in Kazimierz is orchestrated by non-Jewish Poles. I show how they use identification with Jewishness to reconfigure their own Polishness and their visions for a pluralistic Polish nation state. I conclude that (1) popular cultural products, practices, and spaces can be important manifestations of---and tools for---moral reckoning; (2) identification with someone else's ethnicity/religion (often called appropriation) can be understood as an enlargement of, rather than an escape from, the self, and (3) Kazimierz in Krakow represents the cutting edge of Polish-Jewish relations via local grassroots culture brokers who use Jewishness to expand the Polish universe of obligation.
Abstract: Since 1989 Project Kesher has worked bringing women together, creating a network of Jewish women, helping women who knew nothing or very little about what it means to be Jewish, not only to become Jewish, but to create and strengthen Jewish community life in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia and Moldova. We shared success and analyzed the changes. We felt that we were one people.
Due to the present political crises we lost our vision as one Jewish people, we became divided. It was clear Project Kesher needed to take action. We started with International Skype calls. Every evening one woman from Russia, one from Ukraine, one from Belarus, one from Israel called a woman in another country: talking, sharing our love and support, wishing peace. When women started calling each other again and restoring broken relationships we saw that “KESHER” – connection – is working.
One day when there was a serious military clash in the area where she lived one of our leaders proposed to read Tehilim (Psalms), as prayers for peace. Soon more than one hundred women were reading Psalms, creating a chain of peace. Such a spirit of peace prevailed even at a time when the air was filled with war.
In Russia there are refugee families from different regions of the Ukraine. Sometimes they lost everything. Project Kesher women’s groups in cooperation with other Jewish organizations collected clothes, foot-wear as well as school-bags, school record books, sketchbooks, colored paper, paperboard, plasticine, pencil boxes, paints and markers for refugee children. Project Kesher activists also actively participated in organizing camps for refugees in Kharkiv and the Dnipropretrovsk region (Ukraine).
In times of conflict the wish to live in peace is not enough. Women needed instruments for conflict resolution. Project Kesher developed a unique leadership training program with the aim to enable the participants to conduct trainings in conflict resolution themselves in Jewish communities and partner organizations and to engage in mediation. These trainings are often based on Jewish tradition and text study.
A special event is Project Kesher’s Global Women’s Seder that was celebrated in 2015 for the 21st time. No less than 2500 members of 140 Project Kesher women’s and youth groups in 110 cities and five countries – Belarus, Georgia, Israel, Russia and the Ukraine – participated this year. The participants spoke about peace and declared that they intended to do everything possible to maintain peace in their families and in society. With the energy it sets free Project Kesher continues to initiate positive changes.
