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Group Identities and the Construction of the 1943 Rescue of the Danish Jews
Author(s): Buckser, Andrew
Date: 1998
Topics: Attitudes to Jews, Main Topic: Identity and Community, Jewish Identity, National Identity, Memory
Abstract: The rescue of the Danish Jews from the Nazi roundups of 1943 has become the defining image of Judaism in Denmark, both within the country and to the world outside. This article examines the way in which this story about the past has been constructed, focusing particularly on its portrayals of the types of groups involved and on the motivations of the rescuers. It argues that the dominance and durability of this story in defining Jewish identity in Denmark stems from the type of relationships it posits between Danish Christians, Danish Jews, and worldwide Jewry. Anthropological studies of tradition could be enriched by a greater focus on such collaborative constructions of the past.
Social conversion and group definition in Jewish Copenhagen
Author(s): Buckser, Andrew
Editor(s): Buckser, Andrew; Glazier, Stephen D.
Date: 2003
Topics: Main Topic: Identity and Community, Jewish Community, Conversion, Jewish Identity
Religious Practice and Cultural Politics in Jewish Copenhagen
Author(s): Buckser, Andrew
Date: 2003
Topics: Orthodox Judaism, Jewish Community, Pluralism, Main Topic: Other
Abstract: The small Jewish community of Copenhagen is one of the most liberal and assimilated in Europe. In its liturgy, its leadership, and its ritual practice, however, it maintains strictly orthodox forms. In this article, I examine how this orthodox dominance has persisted, despite the often vigorously expressed dissatisfaction of the liberal majority. I argue that the confluence of Jewish religious forms with the cultural setting of contemporary Denmark tends to confer control over ritual practice on the orthodox. The interaction of Jewish institutional structures with Danish social patterns leads to orthodox social control, whereas the interaction of Jewish religious ideas with the Danish cultural setting promotes cultural control. These outcomes have implications for social scientific approaches to contemporary conservative religious movements, which have often been characterized primarily as forms of opposition to modern social change. The political dynamics of such movements are not simple reflections of a broad opposition between tradition and modernity; they emerge out of the intricate and often unpredictable interplay of religious structures with the social and cultural worlds within which those structures are embedded.
Keeping Kosher: Eating and Social Identity among the Jews of Denmark
Author(s): Buckser, Andrew
Date: 1999
Topics: Food, Anthropology, Jewish Identity, Ethnicity, Main Topic: Identity and Community
Abstract: Anthropologists have frequently noted the importance of foodways in demarcating ethnic and other group identities. The destabilization of such identities in late modernity implies deep changes in the meaning of ethnic cuisines. This essay explores the impact of such changes on the meaning of kosher practice among Jews in Copenhagen. A close engagement with Danish culture has made Jewishness increasingly difficult to define since the Second World War; Jewish ethnicity has become a contingent aspect of self-identity rather than a feature of a cohesive social group. Dietary practice provides a common symbolic system through which the increasingly heterogeneous notions of Jewish identity in Denmark can be expressed and interrelated.
Jewish identity and the meaning of community in contemporary Denmark
Author(s): Buckser, Andrew
Date: 2000
Topics: Jewish Identity, Jewish Community, Jewish Space, Main Topic: Identity and Community
Abstract: This article examines social, ritual and political structures in the Jewish Community of Copenhagen, Denmark. This community maintains great vitality despite profound fragmentation in its membership, as well as intensive interaction by its members with non-Jewish culture. It does so by providing flexible contexts for participation by its members, so that Jews with profoundly diverse understandings of group and self can engage with Jewish identity. The community does not foster a single model of ethnic identity, but rather provides a symbolic space within which individual members can construct their own understandings of self and group. Such symbolic spaces may become increasingly essential for ethnic groups in late modern societies, where it has become difficult to maintain the sorts of cultural consensus and separation that have historically grounded ethnic communities.
Modern Identities and the Creation of History: Stories of Rescue among the Jews of Denmark
Author(s): Buckser, Andrew
Date: 1999
Topics: Oral History and Biography, Holocaust Survivors, Memory, Main Topic: Holocaust and Memorial
Abstract: Anthropological analysis of the construction of history and tradition has focused on the role of the past in expressing group identities and interests. It has done so primarily in contexts where group identities are relatively clearly marked, as in nationalist movements or colonial situations. In many places, however, including many modern urban settings, group identities are ambiguous and poorly defined. In such contexts, standard approaches to the construction of the past are difficult to apply. This article contains a consideration of one such case, the Jewish community of Copenhagen, Denmark. A variety of Jewish accounts of the rescue of the Danish Jews from the Nazis in 1943 are analyzed. Emerging from a complex and deeply fragmented community, these narratives defy abstraction into a group version of the event. Thematically, however, all address problems of sameness and difference endemic to Danish Jewish life. A focus on such thematic issues allows a cultural analysis of the construction of the past, even where group identities are fragmented and incoherent.
Chabad in Copenhagen: Fundamentalism and Modernity in Jewish Denmark
Author(s): Buckser, Andrew
Date: 2005
Topics: Hassidim, Haredi / Strictly Orthodox Jews, Chabad-Lubavitch, Main Topic: Other
After the Rescue: Jewish Identity and Community in Contemporary Denmark
Author(s): Buckser, Andrew
Date: 2003
Topics: Jewish History, Jewish Community, Jewish Identity, Ethnicity, Main Topic: Identity and Community
Abstract: In October of 1943, the Danish resistance rescued almost all of the Jews in Copenhagen from roundups by the occupying Nazis. In the years since, Jews have become deeply engaged in a Danish culture that presents very few barriers of antisemitism or prejudice. This book explores the questions that such inclusion raises for the Danish Jews, and what their answers can tell us about the meaning of religion, ethnicity and community in modern society.
Social scientists have long argued that modernity poses challenges for traditional ethnic communities, by breaking down the networks of locality, kinship, religion and occupation that have held such communities together. For the Danish Jews, inclusion into the larger society has led to increasing fragmentation, as the community has split into a bewildering array of religious, social, and political factions. Yet it remains one of Scandinavia's most vital religious organizations, and Jewishness remains central to self-understanding for thousands of its members. How this has happened - how the Jewish world has maintained its significance while losing any sense of coherence or unity - suggests a new understanding of the meaning of ethnic community in contemporary society.