Topics: Jewish Identity, Jewish Renewal, Jewish Revival, Main Topic: Identity and Community, Jewish Continuity, Post-1989, Educational Tours, Birthright (Taglit), Interviews, Jewish Leadership, Young Adults / Emerging Adulthood
Abstract: Our narrative and expert interviews with Jewish and non-Jewish key figures in public and political life mainly focussed on the question of to what extent have Jewish-non Jewish relations changed, compared to the discord prior to 1933, and the general reservation and uncertainty after 1945? We also raised other key questions like: to what extent do Jews in Germany feel integrated into today’s non-Jewish majority society? What do they consider core elements of their Jewish identities? What is the meaning of Israel in their lives as Jews? How do they cope with new trends of antisemitism in Germany? As a complementary question, we wanted to know from our non-Jewish interviewees how different they consider Jewish/non-Jewish relations today? To what extent does Shoah memory (still) affect these relations? How do Jews and non-Jews cooperate in social activities, and are there new, joint strategies to combat antisemitism?
Our interviews revealed that Jews in present-day Germany do not romanticize their lives in the country of the former Nazi regime. However, they appreciate efforts by the state to promote future Jewish life, to carry out dignified politics of commemoration, and to ensure security. Antisemitism is perceived as a societal problem but not as an existential threat. None of the Jewish interview partners considered Germany as a place that is too dangerous for Jews. Memory of the Shoah is considered important, but building a Jewish future, especially for one’s
own children, is the more relevant issue.
A key finding of our interviews in Germany is that a new generation of young Jews has grown up neither justifying living in the “country of the offenders” nor considering themselves representatives of the State of Israel. Young Jews in Germany run their own multifaceted networks, understanding themselves as Jews but to a similar extent also as Germans. Some of them enjoy participation in public and political life, deliberately acting in both roles
Abstract: Le franco-judaïsme est fini, bel et bien mort ! affirment bien des observateurs de la scène juive française. Pourtant d’autres parlent encore de rêve français. Vision naïve ou ambition renouvelée ? L’israélitisme du XIXe siècle, tout entier contenu dans le slogan consistorial « Patrie et religion », ne fut en fait que la première forme du franco-judaïsme. Deux institutions créées au lendemain de la Deuxième Guerre mondiale, le CRIF et le FSJU, ont accompagné la pluralisation du judaïsme français et sa sécularisation. Dans les années 1980, un nouveau franco-judaïsme s’est affirmé en célébrant publiquement « la communauté » réunie autour d’une double fidélité à la France et à Israël, confirmant ce que le philosophe Levinas avait pressenti dès 1950 : la « fin du judaïsme confidentiel ». Cette synthèse harmonieuse serait-elle mise à mal aujourd’hui par le communautarisme des milieux ultraorthodoxes, présents au sein des écoles juives et même du Consistoire, et la politisation du CRIF ? Mais un pluralisme religieux inédit est apparu avec le succès croissant des courants libéraux et l’émergence d’une orthodoxie moderne au sein desquels des femmes jouent un rôle majeur. Et si l’adhésion enchantée à la France n’est certes plus de mise, le développement des relations interreligieuses et interculturelles apparaît comme une des réponses au nouvel antisémitisme. Aurait-on là aussi les ferments de recomposition d’un autre franco-judaïsme, celui des solidarités à construire ?
Abstract: After the 1968 emigration, very few Jews remained in Poland, and even more miniscule was the number of “Jewish Jews.” Since then the number has grown somewhat, and much of it is due to the process of de-assimilation; i.e., some people with Jewish ancestors raised in completely Polonized families began to recover, reclaim, and readapt their Jewish background. An analysis of this phenomenon is offered with a series of putative reasons for its occurrence. The individuals constituting the “products” of de-assimilation are the majority of Polish Jews today and form much of the current leadership. While individuals everywhere can strengthen their ties to the Jewish people and can experience teshuvah or another kind of “Judaization,” the process of de-assimilation does not seem to be reducible to those moves. It begins with no Jewish identity, and is highly dependent on the attitudes and cultural trends in the majority society. It does not remove the de-assimilationists from the majority culture. The phenomenon is general and deserves to be studied as a sociological mechanism working in other cases of assimilation to a majority culture. In the Jewish case, it is especially dramatic. Probably the first example can be found in the evolution of the Marrano communities settled in Holland. The presence of de-assimilation seems to differentiate some European, first of all East European, communities from the globally dominant American and Israeli ones. Probably this rather new concept is needed to describe a significant part of the world of the Jews of twenty-first century Europe.
Abstract: This landmark study provides a detailed and updated profile of how British Jews understand and live their Jewish lives. It is based on JPR’s National Jewish Identity Survey, conducted in November-December 2022 among nearly 5,000 members of the JPR research panel. It is the largest survey of its kind and the most comprehensive study of Jewish identity to date.
The report, written by Dr David Graham and Dr Jonathan Boyd, covers a variety of key themes in contemporary Jewish life, including religious belief and affiliation, Jewish education and cultural consumption, Jewish ethnicity, Zionism and attachment to Israel, antisemitism, charitable giving and volunteering, and the relationship between community engagement and happiness.
Some of the key findings in this report:
Just 34% of British Jews believe in God ‘as described in the Bible’. However, over half of British Jewish adults belong to a synagogue and many more practice aspects of Jewish religious culture.
94% of Jews in the UK say that moral and ethical behaviour is an important part of their Jewish identities. Nearly 9 out of 10 British Jews reported making at least one charitable donation yearly.
88% of British Jews have been to Israel at least once, and 73% say that they feel very or somewhat attached to the country. However, the proportion identifying as ‘Zionists’ has fallen from 72% to 63% over the past decade.
Close to a third of all British Jewish adults personally experienced some kind of antisemitic incident in the year before the survey, a much higher number than that recorded in police or community incident counts.
Abstract: The subjects of Jewish identity and Jewish communal vitality, and how they may be conceptualized and measured, are the topics of lively debate among scholars of contemporary Jewry (DellaPergola 2015, 2020; Kosmin 2022; Pew Research Center 2021; Phillips 2022). Complicating matters, there appears to be a disconnect between the broadly accepted claim that comparative analysis yields richer understanding of Jewish communities (Cooperman 2016; Weinfeld 2020) and the reality that the preponderance of that research focuses on discrete communities.
This paper examines the five largest English-speaking Jewish communities in the diaspora: the United States of America (US) (population 6,000,000), Canada (population 393,500), the United Kingdom (UK) (population 292,000), Australia (population 118,000), and South Africa (population 52,000) (DellaPergola 2022). A comparison of the five communities’ levels of Jewish engagement, and the identification of factors shaping these differences, are the main objectives of this paper. The paper first outlines conceptual and methodological issues involved in the study of contemporary Jewry; hierarchical linear modeling is proposed as the suitable statistical approach for this analysis, and ethnocultural and religious capital are promoted as suitable measures for studying Jewish engagement. Secondly, a contextualizing historical and sociodemographic overview of the five communities is presented, highlighting attributes which the communities have in common, and those which differentiate them. Statistical methods are then utilized to develop measures of Jewish capital, and to identify explanatory factors shaping the differences between these five communities in these measures of Jewish capital. To further the research agenda of communal and transnational research, this paper concludes by identifying questions that are unique to the individual communities studied, with a brief exploration of subjects that Jewish communities often neglect to examine and are encouraged to consider. This paper demonstrates the merits of comparative analysis and highlights practical and conceptual implications for future Jewish communal research.
Abstract: This chapter examines the connection between Jewish identity and place in a Jewish community. The focus is on the Jewish cemetery in Trondheim, in the central part of Norway, and the aim is to explore how Jewish identity affects preferences for cemetery space. Against the backdrop of a larger ethnographic study and national research project, this study tracks narratives about burial decisions, illuminating the confluence of Jewish identity and Jewish burial space. The way the Jewish cemetery may mobilize or immobilize Jewish identity and belonging to the Jewish community is a multifaceted subject that relates to such wider experiences as mobility, relations to places of origin and Jewish networks. As discussed in the chapter, several aspects, religion, the Holocaust, and their Jewish kin relations, are in play for the participants and contribute to negotiating their burial decision.
Abstract: How attached do European Jews feel to the countries in which they live? Or to the European Union? And are their loyalties ‘divided’ in some way – between their home country and Israel? Answering these types of questions helps us to see how integrated European Jews feel today, and brings some empiricism to the antisemitic claim that Jews don’t fully ‘belong.’
This mini-report, based on JPR's groundbreaking report ‘The Jewish identities of European Jews’, explores European Jews’ levels of attachment to the countries in which they live, to Israel, and to the European Union, and compares them with those of wider society and other minority groups across Europe. Some of the key findings in this study written by Professor Sergio DellaPergola and Dr Daniel Staetsky of JPR’s European Jewish Demography Unit include:
European Jews tend to feel somewhat less strongly attached to the countries in which they live than the general population of those countries, but more strongly attached than other minority groups and people of no religion.
That said, levels of strong attachment to country vary significantly from one country to another, both among Jews and others.
European Jews tend to feel somewhat more strongly attached to the European Union than the general populations of their countries, although in many cases, the distinctions are small.
Some European Jewish populations feel more strongly attached to Israel than to the countries in which they live, and some do not. The Jewish populations that tend to feel more attached to Israel than the countries in which they live often have high proportions of recent Jewish immigrants.
Having a strong attachment to Israel has no bearing on Jewish people's attachments to the EU or the countries in which they live, and vice versa: one attachment does not come at the expense of another. They are neither competitive nor complementary; they are rather completely unrelated.
Jews of different denominations show very similar levels of attachment to the countries in which they live, but rather different levels of attachment to Israel and the EU.
Abstract: Against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, which lasted more than two years and included several waves, the present study focused on Jewish communities around the world, in order to understand the role of community during the pandemic. This study focused on the community mechanisms that helped community members to cope with the pandemic. To that end, between October 2021 and July 2022, in-person interviews were conducted with leaders and members of the following communities: Budapest, Hungary; Subotica, Serbia; Vienna, Austria; Bratislava, Slovakia; Vilna, Lithuania; Buenos Aires, Rosario, Salta, and Ushuaia in Argentina; and Mexico City and Cancun in Mexico. Each interview lasted between 45 min and 1.5 h. All of the interviews were audio-recorded and transcripts of those recordings were prepared. Three major themes emerged from the interviews: challenges, coping, and opportunities. Most of these themes were common to the different communities around the world. The findings of this work are discussed in terms of the concept of sense of community and resiliency theories.
Abstract: The purpose of this study is to compare native-born and immigrant Jewish people from North African roots who reside in greater Paris regarding their multiple identities: ethnic-religious, as Jewish people; national, as French citizens; and transnational, as migrants and ‘citizens of the world’. This study employed the correlative quantitative method using survey questionnaires (N = 145) combined with qualitative semi-structured interviews. The main results indicate that both groups have strong Jewish and religious identities. However, while immigrants had fewer opportunities for upward mobility and were more committed to national integration, the younger second-generation have higher socio-economic status and more choices regarding their identities in contemporary France. In conclusion, even among people of the same North African origin, there are inter-generational differences in several dimensions of identity and identification which stem from being native-born or from their experience as immigrants. Different social and political circumstances offer different integration opportunities and thus, over the years, dynamically construct identities among North African Jewish people as minorities. Nonetheless, the Jewish community in Paris is not passive; it has its own strength, cohesiveness, vitality and resilience which are expressed not only in economic but also in social and religious prosperity of Jewish organizations shared by both the native-born and immigrants, who can be considered a ‘privileged’ minority.
Abstract: Данная публикация проекта Ход истории / Ход историй посвящена еврейской жизни в современной России и является частичным переводом комплексного исследования о России как о стране происхождения. В ней представлен обзор нарративов о евреях, иудаизме, Шоа и Израиле в России, выделены доминирующие темы и различные направления дискурса, а также процессы их изменения. Авторы Алиса Гадас и Далик Сойреф работают хронологически и в то же время аналитически, таким образом, изменения и преемственность становятся столь же очевидными, как противоречия и амбивалентности.
В этой работе рассматриваются перспективы и проблемы современной еврейской жизни в России. Авторы проливают свет на то, как изменилась жизнь еврейской общины после распада Советского Союза и массовой эмиграции многих ее членов. Также описано развитие еврейских организации за последние 30 лет, их отношения друг с другом и с государством, особенно при усилении авторитаризма.
Дальнейшими темами являются самовосприятие евреев, проблемы современного антисемитизма и реакция на него общин и еврейских организации и общественности. Особое внимание уделяется исторической политике Кремля в отношении Второй Мировой Войны и Холокоста. Актуальная политическая риторика Путина и его легитимация агрессивной войны против Украины также анализируются в послесловии этой работы.
Abstract: Für das Working Paper führte ich 18 qualitative Interviews mit nach Deutschland eingewanderten russischsprachigen Jüdinnen*Juden, Russlanddeutschen und Russinnen*Russen. Thematisiert wurden dabei ihre Haltungen zu Migration und eigenen Migrationserfahrungen, zu ihrer Religiosität, zum Zusammenleben mit Jüdinnen*Juden im Herkunftsland und in Deutschland, zu (eigenen) Diskriminierungserfahrungen und zu Israel. Die Erinnerungskultur und das Sprechen über den Zweiten Weltkrieg waren in der Sowjetunion von anderen Narrativen geprägt als in Westeuropa und den USA, der Holocaust spielte eine untergeordnete Rolle. Die jüdischen und die russlanddeutschen Interviewten berichten auch von ihren Bemühungen, ihre Zugehörigkeit zur jeweiligen Minderheit in der früheren Sowjetunion möglichst zu verbergen. Die jüdischen Interviewten gingen mit ihrem Jüdischsein in Deutschland deutlich offener um, machten dafür aber Erfahrungen mit Antisemitismus. Von Diskriminierungserfahrungen berichten die Interviewten gruppenübergreifend, teilweise aufgrund antislawischer Ressentiments, teilweise einfach durch Behörden, die beispielsweise berufliche Qualifikationen nicht anerkannten. Die eigenen Migrationserfahrungen, auch das machen die Interviews deutlich, führen nicht unbedingt zu Solidarität mit anderen Zugewanderten. Ein Teil der Befragten fühlt sich gerade Geflüchteten gegenüber benachteiligt und/oder sieht sie als Bedrohung.
Abstract: Two years after the Tunisian people overthrew an entrenched dictatorship, the country seems to be definitively turning a new page in its history. Its diminutive Jewish community continues to fade away, a vestige from another time now remembered only through writing. This article analyses how four francophone Jewish writers of Tunisian origins, Catherine Dana, Colette Fellous, Corine Scemama-Ammar, and Brigitte Smadja ‘write/return’ to Tunisia in the 1990s and 2000s. Given their own interrupted experience in Tunisia, they end up remembering through and on behalf of others, including elders, grandmothers and mothers, and siblings. Along with (re)visiting the houses and graves of their elders during the last decades of Ben Ali's rule, they negotiate a role for themselves in the complex diasporic identity that emerged after Tunisian Jewry's post-independence migrations. Nevertheless, I argue that the writing of return provides no simple resolution for the rupture experienced by the last generation of Jewish women born in Tunisia before the great exile in the 1960s. Rather physical return to contemporary Tunisia and its inscription in French transforms these women into inadvertent mediators between the past and present, homeland and diaspora, oral history and writing.
Abstract: This chapter focuses on the construction and expression of Jewish identity through food in current-day Barcelona based on historical research and anthropological fieldwork. The Jewish population of Barcelona is at once small and vastly diverse, consisting of immigrants from Morocco, Turkey, Argentina, the United States, Poland, and many other countries. This chapter examines how the food habits and customs of these diverse populations interact with each other. It focuses on the culinary and cultural fusion―or lack thereof―between the Ashkenazi and Sephardic communities of Barcelona, the observance of kashrut on a collective and individual level, and the conceptualization of ‘Jewish food’ as a cultural term even when it is difficult to pinpoint exactly what the term ‘Jewish food’ means. For today’s Jewish population in Barcelona, is ‘Jewish food’ a reality, a fabrication based on nostalgia, or a re-creation of a lost identity?
