Abstract: In recent years, Berlin has witnessed an ever-growing internationalization, predominantly through migration flows from all over the world. Its Jewish population has equally diversified: Berlin is now populated by Jews from the Americas, Europe and also by young Israelis who permanently live in the city. The migrant group of ‘Israelis in Berlin’ has attracted significant media attention in Germany, Israel and beyond and has often been portrayed as detached from the existing local Jewish community. My thesis interrogates this assumption and presents an ethnography which shows diverse and complex affiliations and Jewishness(es) entangled with nationality, ethnicity, religion, gender and sexuality. Through the immersion in ‘Jewish’ and ‘Hebrew’ Berlin, I span an interrelated ethnographic field which I construe as a scene. Focusing on a choir, and its connections to a synagogue and a queer Shabbat event, I investigate ‘how the scene constitutes itself as Jewish’. Combining ethnography with biographical-narrative interviews, I present how this scene is enacted and performed, embedded in the respective historical and socio-political contexts, and constituting itself by migration and conversion. By way of mirroring the biographies of migrants and converts, I argue that Jewishness in the scene is constituted by complexity rather than unity, ambivalence rather than certainty and contestation rather than agreement. The influence of Israeli migration to Berlin and the presence of Hebrew engenders the emergence of new ways of ‘being Jewish’. Under the specific representations of Jewishness in Germany, ‘being Jewish’ is always co-constructed alongside the negotiation over ‘being German’. Thus, by way of mapping trajectories of conversion and migration and their embeddedness in their respective socio-political contexts, I analyse processes of ‘becoming Jewish’ and their impact on this urban scene. In the framework of urban scenes, diaspora and secularism, I describe transformations towards new forms of urban (religious) socialities and aesthetics (music) and show how biographical research and the study of urban scenes offer profound insights towards new understandings of contemporary societies in the light of global transformations.
Abstract: This thesis centres the lived experiences of eighteen queer Jews in postsecular Britain. In situating my work between postsecular geographies of lived religion and the anthropology of experience, I present rituals as the technologies by which things are brought into being. By foregrounding rituals, I critically outline the haptic, politically conscious, and symbolic acts queer Jews mobilise in the (trans)formation of selves, spaces, and others. My findings are grounded in fourteen months of virtual narrative ethnography. My focus is on the stories participants told, the memories they recalled, and the queered ethnoreligious worlds they (trans)formed through unstructured life story interviews, semi-structured interviews, and participant observation. Considering this, I conducted my research in collaboration with the Council of Christians and Jews – a nationwide forum for interfaith engagement – as part of their ongoing LGBT+ initiative. Throughout this thesis, I illustrate the ritual performances latent in participants’ selfactualisation. First, I explore the role of heritage and memory in participants’ selfconstrual. I find that rituals are pivotal in actualising ties to an imagined community or symbolic peoplehood – an affective, (im)material, and fundamentally social entity (trans)formed through the narration of history and recollection of memory. Second, I focus on participants’ extrasensory perception of the spatialised power relations they are subjected to, subject others to, and subject themselves to. Here, I find that rituals represent key place-making practices – the tools by which selves, spaces, and others are differentiated as such through the active, agential, and creative (re)aggregation of spatial configurations. Third, I emphasise the actualising power of ritual performance through the ethnographic vignette of Buttmitzvah. I demonstrate how ritual – alongside liminality and communitas – actualises the process of self (trans)formation in a queer Jewish rite of passage that is at once spatially bound and diffused, temporally fixed and transcendent. In doing so, I trace the complicated and often contradictory relationship between structure and anti-structure, communitas and commerciality, ritual and resistance. I conclude by arguing that rituals are more than indexical phenomena, they are the tools by which things are brought into being, worlds constructed, and subjectivities (trans)formed.
Abstract: According to the Jewish Chronicle, on December 1, 2021, a group of Jewish bus passengers on their way to celebrate Chanukkah in London were attacked by a mob, spit upon, verbally abused, and subjected to Nazi salutes.1 Similarly, the monitoring group Tell MAMA reported that in the week after the Daily Telegraph published a column written by the then prime minister Boris Johnson, in which he compared Muslim women to “letterboxes” and “bank robbers,” Islamophobic incidents in the United Kingdom rose by 375 percent. In December 2019, a fourteen- year- old Muslim girl was violently attacked on her way home from school. The same month, a rabbi waiting in the Stamford Hill overground station was beaten by two men who shouted, “fucking Jew, dirty Jew” and “kill the Jews”; a month earlier a Jewish father and his two young sons were the targets of antisemitic abuse on the London Underground. While these forms of generalized Islamophobia and antisemitism have unfortunately become commonplace in the United Kingdom , there exists a largely unexamined form of antisemitic/Islamophobic violence perpetuated against LGBT Muslims and Jews— double minorities. In this chapter, I examine discourses present in the British print media that may contribute to a framing of LGBT Muslims and Jews in ways that can lead to the demonization of members of both communities. Robert Phillips My focus here is in the collective representation of double minorities by the British press. In choosing this focus, I should point out that those minorities who are the targets of harassment are targeted largely due to the saliency of their difference. As noted above, women wearing head or body coverings of any degree and men and boys wearing what are perceived to be “Muslim” or “Jewish” clothing or hairstyle (head coverings/payot) are often targeted. This includes Sikh men and boys wearing turbans, in that some may incorrectly identify them as Muslims. Because of outward appearance, many of the victims of these crimes may also be perceived to be observant in their faith and perhaps even threatening to national security and identity. This chapter is concerned with members of these communities who also identify as LGBT, positioning them as double minorities. As with members of other diasporic communities around the globe, LGBT Muslims and Jews have assumed unique types of identity forged through a combination of factors brought about by, among other things, processes of transnational migration. As both Muslims and Jews form some of the smallest ethnic communities in Britain, they are far outnumbered by more dominant Anglo groups and share a type of liminal subjectivity. Gay Muslim and Jewish men are both an ethnic and a sexual minority, further complicating this relationship. This dual-minority status has had a distinctive effect on how nonminority British view these individuals. For instance, Yip focuses on kin relations when examining the narratives of non-heterosexual British Muslims and suggests that within these communities , there is a perception of homosexuality as a “Western” disease that did not exist in the family’s community of origin. They also point out the fraught negotiations between parents and children, complicated further by sociocultural and religious factors, when it comes time to marry and the subsequent strategies employed by the children. In terms of how the nation views Muslims in Britain, Jaspal and Cinnirella position such subjects as a hybridized threat— British Muslims are positioned solidly as “other” while simultaneously being framed as a threat to the survival of the “in- group.”
Abstract: For some, the early hours of the morning are a time when few are awake, the city quiet, and the streets empty. In London’s East End, however, the dimly lit alleyways are teaming with late- night revelers. Historically characterized as largely working- class neighborhoods, districts like Bethnal Green, Shoreditch, and Whitechapel have undergone a rapid process of gentrification in recent years and are now synonymous with trendy clubs, pubs, and wine bars.1 The Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club, located just off Pollard Square, has been a cultural, political, and social hub of the East End since 1887. In recent years, the venue has become popular among students at the nearby Queen Mary, University of London, and a new wave of young urban professionals who are spatially segregated from the club regulars: Downstairs, the octogenarians still have their cards and gambling machine. But upstairs, the space is used for concerts, burlesque shows, voga (a dynamic fusion of yoga and vogueing), a pop- up Chinese restaurant and . . . “wild, unhinged good times.”2 Now and again, the walkways crossing Weavers Fields and the A1209 from the Bethnal Green Underground Station become a threshold to the United 148 Matthew Richardson Kingdom’s first queer Jewish club night. Organized around special and transitory dates in the Hebraic calendar, Buttmitzvah is a camp, erotic, playful, and satirical celebration of queer Jewish identities in postsecular Britain. The evening is centered around the backstory of the Rimmer family, pun intended, hosting their daughter Becky’s Bat Mitzvah. Facilitated by a troupe of dedicated actors, dancers, and drag kings and queens, the night is more than just a raunchy get-together. In this chapter, I explore the Bethnal Green Buttmitzvah as an ethnographic case study to argue that the evening functions as an aspirational and motivational platform from which partygoers construct, demarcate, and celebrate an affirming identity politics. To do so, I use Turnerian anthropology of experience as a key analytical , methodological, and theoretical heuristic tool to explore the affective , anti- structural, collectivizing, and subversive qualities of the Bethnal Green Buttmitzvah. First, I situate Buttmitzvah in the socio- cultural- geographic context of postsecular Bethnal Green and identify it as liminal space providing the ideal settings for the generation of communitas, a special type of ritualized space- time whereby all those present enjoy an intense sense of belonging and identification with each other. Next, I explore the ritualization needed to generate this social state of communitas by drawing on what I call the ritual complex, an intricate system involving myths, symbols, and rituals functioning as media through which selves and others are formed, mobilized, and resisted. Finally, I unpack the anti- structural qualities of communitas by characterizing Buttmitzvah as a liminoid phenomenon in a liminal space, providing those in attendance with a platform for subverting antisemitic, heterosexist, and postsecular social structures. As such, I argue that religious life is life together because it is only when people come together and generate the collective electricity of communitas that the aspirational and motivational forces for constructing, demarcating, and celebrating religious selves and others becomes possible. It is through ritual performance, in other words, that an imagined community is actualized in an intense emotional state of social belonging. I conclude this chapter by highlighting the benefits of engaging with Turnerian anthropology of experience when researching alongside minoritized religious communities in postsecular contexts. The findings in this chapter are grounded in fifteen months of narrative ethnographic research (April 2020 to July 2021) with eighteen queer Religious Life Is Life Together 149 Jews who were living, or had previously lived, in postsecular Britain (their selected profiles are included in the appendix for context).
Abstract: This research considers an existential exploration of the experience of coming out in the Orthodox Jewish community. It is grounded in a qualitative, phenomenological and existential methodology. Eight participants were interviewed, all male between the ages of 20-30, who grew up in the Orthodox Jewish community and came out as gay, a minimum of three years ago. The interviews were semi-structured in nature; they were recorded and transcribed. The interview transcripts were analysed using SEA, a phenomenological and existential research tool. It used two specific features of SEA; the four worlds and its paradoxes, and the timeline tool. Accordingly, data was analysed against the four existential worlds, and the four periods of time identified in the timeline tool; with the moments of coming out being the present focus. Key themes, paradoxes and similarities were drawn out from across the analysis. They were then analysed alongside a consideration of relevant literature, also presented in this study. Overall, significant findings were identified, which both resonated with, supported and questioned existing literature. Findings were linked to four particular time periods: before, during and after coming out, and the ongoing state of participants. The findings relating to the time period before coming out mainly linked to matters around identity and findings linked to the actual moments of coming out mainly related to embodiment overall. The findings of the time period immediately after coming out linked to relationships and emotions, whereas the findings linking to the ongoing state of participants were to do with spirituality and meaning. This study concludes by outlining the valuable contribution these findings have made to Counselling Psychology, as well as areas that have been highlighted as ripe for further research.
Abstract: Les travaux sélectionnés pour cette thèse de sociologie (4 ouvrages et 14 articles ou chapitres de livre) explorent deux thématiques différentes : les familles homoparentales et le vécu de croyants homosexuels. En dépit de leur éloignement du modèle exclusif de la parenté, un père, une mère pas un de plus, les familles homoparentales inscrivent leurs enfants dans une chaîne de transmission parentale, tant culturelle que généalogique. De même, les croyants homosexuels adhèrent aux valeurs de leur appartenance religieuse même s'ils contestent la légitimité de l'autorité institutionnelle de l'Eglise ou des rabbins. Dans les deux cas, il y a à la fois ébranlement de la norme et adhésion à un modèle légèrement différent, plus inclusif. Les homosexuels deviennent parents en élargissant les représentations de la parenté. Les homosexuels croyants parviennent à intégrer leurs dimensions identitaires antagonistes en se tournant vers des églises ou des communautés plus accueillantes ou en réinterprétant les textes problématiques. Dans l'un et l'autre cas, ils contribuent à construire des modèles compatibles avec les formes nouvelles de la famille et de la socialité religieuse. Les travaux sélectionnés pour cette thèse montrent que la réunion de dimensions a priori inconciliables -homosexualité et famille, homosexualité et religion - conduit à des innovations sociales non seulement à l'échelle individuelle, mais aussi à l'échelle sociale. Les institutions, qu'il s'agisse du droit de la famille ou des autorités religieuses ne peuvent rester complètement imperméables aux évolutions sociologiques auxquelles les expériences individuelles les confrontent.
Abstract: Религиозная идентичность, даже в рамках одного течения прогрессивного иудаизма, является неоднородной и во многом зависит от культурного, политического и социального контекстов, в котором находится та или иная община. Прогрессивное течение призвано гармонизировать современный мир и традицию иудаизма в соответствии с запросами индивида. Основная проблема предлагаемого исследования связана с тем, что на уровне идеологии — учения прогрессивного иудаизма — существует определенный набор маркеров идентичности, но на практике — в отдельных общинах — этот набор может трансформироваться. Для выявления устойчивой модели идентичности в прогрессивном иудаизме необходимо рассматривать отдельные кейсы — российский случай является одним из них и заслуживает тщательного научного анализа
(автор рассматривает общину «Ле-Дор Ва-Дор»). Реконструируемая на основе идей Клода Монтефиоре и Лили Монтегю философия прогрессивного иудаизма сравнивается в настоящей статье с российским вариантом прогрессивного иудаизма. В результате исследования автор приходит к выводу о том, что идентичность в общине «Ле-Дор Ва-Дор» конструируется за счет философской идеи универсализма, которая позволяет людям нееврейского происхождения становиться членами общины. Философское обоснование модификации ритуалов основано на концепции Informed choice. Сравнение общей философской мысли в прогрессивном иудаизме с учением в общине «Ле-Дор Ва-Дор» показывает, что сообщество
вырабатывает определенные стратегии идентичности исходя из культурного контекста. Влияние культурного контекста отразилось в отношении к однополым бракам, а также в некоторых ритуальных сторонах жизни указанной общины в России
Abstract: In response to a call for interview partners for an ethnography on the Israeli-Jewish lesbian diaspora in Berlin, my prospective partners contacted me, offering their migration stories while apologetically stating that they were no longer, or not exactly, lesbians. Admittedly, such transformations should not come as a surprise. Scholarship on queer migration to urban spaces elaborates the sexual imaginary, which brands the city as the scene in which gay cultures are rooted and develop, and which allows, and perhaps actively embraces (specific kinds of) sexual diversity. This sexual imaginary assumes contingency among sexuality, transformation storyline and displacement, and suggests that identity is enabled, enacted, conscripted and occasionally, violently incited as a result of spatial positions and migration. While the migration stories celebrate and brand the city as a cosmopolitan and queer haven, they also reveal an ambivalent dimension, which draws on ambiguous historical baggage and current hostility to strangers. In what follows, I discuss the shift to ‘queerness’ and the emergence of racial identities that came to light during my Berlin ethnography, charting the ways those shifts coincide and exploring the processes by which identities are lost and found.
Abstract: Dans la société française contemporaine, laïque et souvent considérée hostile aux regroupements sur une base « communautaire », le Beit Haverim (« Maison des Ami-e-s » en hébreu) représente une association originale. Créée à la fin des années 1970, ce groupe juif homosexuel parisien s’inscrit d’abord dans les transformations du mouvement homosexuel, dont il fait partie intégrante. Le Beit Haverim participe du mouvement actuel des associations « gay plus un » que décrit Elisabeth Armstrong1 dans son analyse de la construction identitaire gay depuis les années 1950 à San Francisco. Son développement renvoie aussi aux transformations du monde juif français, marqué par le questionnement sur la place du religieux dans l’identité juive. Alors que les lieux de socialisation juive, synagogues, centres culturels, n’autorisent pas une affirmation gay ou lesbienne, le Beit Haverim permet à ses membres non seulement de vivre leur homosexualité dans une dimension identitaire collective mais également d’y trouver un support pour une autre dimension identitaire, leur judéité. Les différents rituels proposés par l’association offrent à ses sympathisants de quoi forger un sentiment d’intégration et d’affirmation de leurs deux dimensions. Des « tea dance » calées sur le calendrier des fêtes juives jusqu’aux cérémonies d’union modelées sur le rituel du mariage juif traditionnel, l’entretien entre Franck Jaoui, son actuel porte-parole, et Martine Gross, chercheure qui fut aussi l’une des membres fondatrices de l’association, permet de retracer la place du rituel dans la construction de sociabilités et d’identités juives homosexuelles en France.
Abstract: In the 1990s, Vienna's Jews and queers abandoned their clandestine existence and emerged into the city's public sphere in unprecedented numbers. "Symptoms of Modernity" traces this development in the context of Central European history. Jews and homosexuals are signposts of an exclusionary process of nation-building. Cast in their modern roles in the late nineteenth century, they functioned as Others, allowing a national community to imagine itself as a site of ethnic and sexual purity.In Matti Bunzl's incisive historical and cultural analysis, the Holocaust appears as the catastrophic culmination of this violent project, an attempt to eradicate modernity's abject by-products from the body politic. As "Symptoms of Modernity" shows, though World War II brought an end to the genocidal persecution, the nation's exclusionary logic persisted, accounting for the ongoing marginalization of Jews and homosexuals. Not until the 1970s did individual Jews and queers begin to challenge the hegemonic subordination--a resistance that, by the 1990s, was joined by the state's attempts to ensure and affirm the continued presence of Jews and queers. "Symptoms of Modernity" gives an account of this radical cultural reversal, linking it to geopolitical transformations and to the supersession of the European nation-state by a postmodern polity.
Topics: Citizenship, Jewish Renewal, Jewish Revival, Jewish Community, Jewish - Non - Jewish Relations, Jewish - Muslim Relations, Diaspora, Immigration, LGBT, Post-1989, Russian-Speaking Jews, Main Topic: Identity and Community
Abstract: The politics of Israeli governments in recent years and a drift to neo-conservatism among segments of Diaspora Jewry have substantially polarised the Jewish community abroad. Among many other Jews however, we observe a new insistence on the centrality of Diaspora life and we see re-inventions of Diaspora. These re-inventions are coming from the Jewish periphery: new visibility of women in Jewish affairs with new creative energy regarding religious services and community work at large; a rise of egalitarian religious services, Gay-Lesbian Jewish life, acceptance of intermarried couples, non-halachic (patrilineal) Jews and converts to Judaism who are seeking full acceptance via Reform Judaism or other, local, frameworks. These developments are especially pronounced in Germany, and this book addresses some of its characteristics: the transnational character of German Jewry, its relationship to the state and to other minorities, particularly Moslems, the astonishing revival of Jewish studies and Jewish culture especially also among non-Jews, and most of all, the massive influx of Russian speaking Jews after 1989 who are often at the forefront of redefining Jewish life in Germany. In these respects, Germany has become a laboratory of the ways in which Jewish life in Europe might develop in the future.
Contents:
Introduction: The Return of the European Jewish Diaspora; Y.M.Bodemann
PART I: A EUROPEAN JEWISH SPACE?
Can One Reconcile the Jewish World and Europe?; D.Pinto
Residues of Empire: The Paradigmatic Meaning of Jewish Trans-Territorial Experience for an Integrated European History; D.Diner
PART II: THE NEW DIASPORIC FIELD
Can the Experience of Diaspora Judaism Serve as a Model for Islam in Today's Multicultural Europe?; S.Gilman
Learning Diaspora: German Turks and the Jewish Narrative; Y.M.Bodemann & G.Yurdakul
PART III: GERMAN-JEWISH LIMINALITIES
Jewish Studies or Gentile Studies? A Discipline in Search of its Subject; L.Weissberg
How Jewish is it? W.G. Sebald and the Question of "Jewish" Writing in Germany Today: L.Morris
PART IV: RUSSIAN SPEAKING JEWS AND TRANSNATIONALISM
Homo Sovieticus in Disneyland: The Jewish Communities in Germany Today; J.Kessler
Fifteen Years of Russian-Jewish Immigration to Germany: Successes and Setbacks; J.H.Schoeps & O.Glöckner
In the Ethnic Twilight: The Paths of Russian Jews in Germany; Y.M.Bodemann & O.Bagno
Afterword; J.M.Peck
