Search results
Your search found 2 items
Sort: Relevance | Topics | Title | Author | Publication Year
Home  / Search Results
Playing with Jews in the Fields of Nations: Symbolic Contests in the Former Yugoslavia
Author(s): Gordiejew, P. B.
Date: 2006
Topics: Antisemitism, Main Topic: Other, Post-1989, National Identity, Nationalism, Philosemitism
Abstract: The collapse of socialist Yugoslavia and the rise of independent states in its place brought out interesting and disturbing phenomena involving Jews and Jewish symbols. This paper examines the following processes: 1) the loss of Jewish submergence in the political and symbolic orders of that socialist state; 2) a short-lived philosemitism; 3) an appropriation or ‘functionalization’ of Jews and Jewish symbols in contests over the moral superiority of one's nation; and 4) the return of classic anti-Semitism aimed at local Jewish places and individuals and at spreading ideas of Jewish political and cultural domination. Also described is how Jews engaged in welcoming or contesting encroachment on their own symbolic space.
Voices of Yugoslav Jewry
Author(s): Gordiejew, Paul Benjamin
Date: 1998
Topics: Main Topic: Identity and Community, Jewish Identity, Secularity, Nationalism, Oral History and Biography, Post-1989, Post-War Jewish History
Abstract: Voices of Yugoslav Jewry emphasizes the role of history in shaping Yugoslav Jewish identity. World War II imposed irreversible effects on this population of Jews, leaving them with an acute sense of disjuncture and fragmentation. This once-unified Jewish community lost its secure place in the politico-symbolic order of a single multiethnic state, and the surviving local Jewish communities, which are now a part of new states, face the task of refashioning their identities once again. The process of creating the new Yugoslavia has allowed for the emergence of a new Jewish collective voice, one that blended harmoniously with the emerging voice of Tito. This collective voice manifested itself by using language, material culture, and dramaturgical performances in ways that exhibited high public integration with the symbolic order of the new state. In searching for the voices of individuals and listening to them closely, a wide range of diverse individual experiences and ways of constructing meaningful Jewish selves can be heard. It is these voices that constitute the core of the book.