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: 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: Faith schools represent controversial aspects of England’s educational politics, yet they have been largely overlooked as sites for geographical analysis. Moreover, although other social science disciplines have attended to a range of questions regarding faith schools, some important issues remain underexamined. In particular, contestation within ethnic and religious groups regarding notions of identity have generally been ignored in an educational context, whilst the majority of research into Jewish schools more specifically has failed to attend to the personal qualities of Jewishness. The interrelationships between faith schools (of all kinds) and places of worship have also received minimal attention.
In response, this investigation draws upon a range of theoretical approaches to identity in order to illustrate how Jewish schools are implicated in the changing spatiality and performance of individuals’ Jewishness. Central to this research is a case study of the Jewish Community Secondary School (JCoSS), England’s only pluralist Jewish secondary school, with more extensive elements provided by interviews with other stakeholders in Anglo-Jewry. Parents often viewed Jewish schools as a means of attaining a highly-regarded ‘secular’ academic education in a Jewish school, whilst also enabling their children to socialise with other Jews. In the process, synagogues’ traditional functions of education and socialisation have been co-opted by Jewish schools, revealing a shift in the spatiality of young people’s Anglo-Jewish identity practices. Furthermore, JCoSS, as well as many synagogues, have come to represent spaces of contestation over ‘authentic’ Jewishness, given widely varying conceptualisations of ‘proper’ Jewish practice and identity amongst parents, pupils and rabbis. Yet, although JCoSS offers its pupils considerable autonomy to determine their practices, such choice is not limitless, revealing an inherent dilemma in inclusivity. The thesis thus explores how different manifestations of Jewishness are constructed, practised and problematised in a school space (which itself is dynamic and contested), and beyond.
Abstract: As early as the mid-1990s, individuals within the Jewish community in the UK were discussing the potential of setting up a pluralist Jewish secondary school in London. Until 1981, every Jewish school in the UK had operated under Orthodox auspices. By 1999, three pluralist primary schools were thriving, and the political and Jewish communal climate was ready to support the development of a new kind of Jewish secondary school. A feasibility study in 2001 led to the formation of a steering group and the project was born. Nine years later, JCoSS opened its doors in a brand new, state-of-the-art building in North London, and 150 eleven-year-olds began a new kind of Jewish secondary education. This article charts the journey of this project, from idea to reality, navigating political, economic and community challenges, and shows how one group of people changed the landscape of Jewish education in the UK.
Abstract: From 1990 until 2008, about 200,000 Jews from the former Soviet Union migrated to Germany. At the same time, Germany re-unified and took its place at the centre of the new Europe. In a global world, in which people maintain multiple homes, languages, identities and means of communication across thousands of miles, these migrants challenged German Jewish notions of identity, rootedness and community. Their particular Soviet and post-Soviet approaches to these issues also challenged the liberalising tendencies of an emerging European Jewish identity. This review essay examines how Soviet and post-Soviet Jewish migration to Germany interacted and intersected with new notions of European Jewish identity in Germany, with special focus on Berlin, the largest, most cosmopolitan Jewish community in Germany. Rather than continuing to bemoan the ‘failed integration’ of post-Soviet Jewry into some notion of fixed German Jewish identity or into liberal European notions of identity, a global approach would allow for the co-existence of many Jewish identities in a diverse German Jewish community.
Topics: Synagogues, Ethnography, Race, Racism, Ethnicity, Diversity, Pluralism, Conflict, Bukharian Jews, Mountain Jews, Main Topic: Identity and Community
Abstract: The prevalence of anti-Semitism in Russia is well known, but the issue of race within the Jewish community has rarely been discussed explicitly. Combining ethnography with archival research, Jewish Russians: Upheavals in a Moscow Synagogue documents the changing face of the historically dominant Russian Jewish community in the mid-1990s. Sascha Goluboff focuses on a Moscow synagogue, now comprising individuals from radically different cultures and backgrounds, as a nexus from which to explore issues of identity creation and negotiation. Following the rapid rise of this transnational congregation—headed by a Western rabbi and consisting of Jews from Georgia and the mountains of Azerbaijan and Dagestan, along with Bukharan Jews from Central Asia—she evaluates the process that created this diverse gathering and offers an intimate sense of individual interactions in the context of the synagogue's congregation.
Challenging earlier research claims that Russian and Jewish identities are mutually exclusive, Goluboff illustrates how post-Soviet Jews use Russian and Jewish ethnic labels and racial categories to describe themselves. Jews at the synagogue were constantly engaged in often contradictory but always culturally meaningful processes of identity formation. Ambivalent about emerging class distinctions, Georgian, Russian, Mountain, and Bukharan Jews evaluated one another based on each group's supposed success or failure in the new market economy. Goluboff argues that post-Soviet Jewry is based on perceived racial, class, and ethnic differences as they emerge within discourses of belonging to the Jewish people and the new Russian nation.
Abstract: In the JFS case, the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom held that the admissions policy of a Jewish faith school constituted unlawful racial discrimination because it used the Orthodox Jewish interpretation of who is Jewish as a criterion for determining admission to the school. A detailed discussion of the case is located in the context of two broader debates in Britain, which are characterized as constitutional in character or, at least, as possessing constitutional properties. The first is the debate concerning the treatment of minority groups, multiculturalism, and the changing perceptions in public policy of the role of race and religion in national life. It is suggested that this debate has become imbued with strong elements of what has been termed “post-multiculturalism”. The second debate is broader still, and pertains to shifting approaches to “constitutionalism” in Britain. It is suggested that, with the arrival of the European Convention on Human Rights and EU law, the U.K. has seen a shift from a pragmatic approach to constitutional thinking, in which legislative compromise played a key part, to the recognition of certain quasi-constitutional principles, allowing the judiciary greatly to expand its role in protecting individual rights while requiring the judges, at the same time, to articulate a principled basis for doing so. In both these debates, the principle of equality plays an important role. The JFS case is an important illustration of some of the implications of these developments.
Abstract: British Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks - now Baron Sacks of Aldgate in the City of London - launched his tenure of office in 1991 with the aim of an inclusivist Decade of Jewish Renewal. Within a few years, fulfilling his installation prediction that 'I will have failures, but I will try again, another way, another time,' he was attracting calls, from opponents and supporters, for his resignation and the abolition of his office. Reviewing Sacks' early writings and pronouncements on the theme of inclusivism, Another Way, Another Time demonstrates how, repeatedly, the Chief Rabbi said 'irreconcilable things to different audiences' and how, in the process, he induced his kingmaker and foremost patron, Lord (Stanley) Kalms, to declare of Anglo-Jewry: 'We are in a time warp, and fast becoming an irrelevance in terms of world Jewry.' Citing support from a variety of sources, this study contends that the Chief Rabbinate has indeed reached the end of the road and explores other paths to the leadership of a pluralistic - and, ideally, inclusivist - community.
Abstract: From Publisher’s description: In A Time to Speak Out, a collection of strong Jewish voices come together to explore some of the most challenging issues facing diaspora Jews. With articles on such topics as international law, the Holocaust, varieties of Zionism, self-hatred, the multiplicity of Jewish identities, and human rights, these essays provide powerful evidence of the vitality of independent Jewish opinion as well as demonstrating that criticism of Israel has a crucial role to play in the continuing history of a Jewish concern for social justice. At once sober and radical, A Time To Speak Out reclaims an often intemperate debate for those both inside and outside Israel who prefer to confront uncomfortable truths. Nearly all contributors were associated with the Independent Jewish Voices declaration which, when launched in Britain in 2007, opened a floodgate of responses. Independent Jewish Voices is a group of Jews in Britain from diverse backgrounds, occupations and affiliations who have in common a strong commitment to social justice and universal human rights.With contributions by Julia Bard, Geoffrey Bindman, Emma Clyne, Stan Cohen, Howard Cooper, D. D. Guttenplan, Abe Hayeem, Anthony Isaacs, Gabriel Josipovici, Tony Klug, Francesca Klug, Richard Kuper, Michael Kustow, Antony Lerman, Antony Loewenstein, Mike Marqusee, Jeremy Montagu, Anthony Rudolf, Donald Sassoon, Lynne Segal, Richard Silverstein, Gillian Slovo, Eyal Weizman, and Sami Zubaida
