Abstract: Are Jews today still the carriers of a single and identical collective identity and do they still constitute a single people? This two-fold question arises when one compares a Hassidi Habad from Brooklyn, a Jewish professor at a secular university in Brussels, a traditional Yemeni Jew still living in Sana’a, a Galilee kibbutznik, or a Russian Jew in Novossibirsk. Is there still today a significant relationship between these individuals who all subscribe to Judaism? The analysis shows that the Jewish identity is multiple and can be explained by considering all variants as “surface structures” of the three universal “deep structures” central to the notion of collective identity, namely, collective commitment, perceptions of the collective’s singularity, and positioning vis-à-vis “others.”
Contents:
Preface
Judaism and the culture of memory /Thomas Gergely
Introduction
European Jewry and Klal Yisrael /Eliezer Ben-Rafael, Thomas Gergely, and Yosef Gorny
Is the French model in decline? /Pierre Birnbaum
Case of Belgium /Jean-Philippe Schreiber
Identity of Dutch Jews /Ludo Abicht
Russian-Jewish immigration to Germany /Julius H. Schoeps, Willi Jasper, and Olaf Glöckner
Religiosity, praxis, and tradition in contemporary Hungarian Jewry /András Kovács
Being Jewish in Romania after the second world war /Carol Iangu
Jewish identity, memory, and anti-Semitism /Maurice Konopnicki
Siamese twins: religion and secularism in Jewish national thought /Yosef Gorny
Israeli identity and mission in Buber's thought /Shalom Ratzabi
Sovereignty, voluntarism, and Jewish identity: Nathan Rotenstreich /Avi Bareli
On religious-secular tensions /Avi Sagi
Religious-secular cleavage in contemprary Israel /Yochanan Peres
On European Jewish Orthodoxy, Sephardic tradition, and the Shas movement /Zvi Zohar
Ultra-Orthodox, Orthodox, and secular women in college /Lior Ben-Chaim Rafael
Challenge of secularism to Jewish survival in Abba Hillel Silver's thinking /Ofer Shiff
Identities of Jewish American women /Suzanne Vromen
Jews and secularization: a challenge or a prospect? /Guy Haarscher
Submission and subversion before the law /Rivon Krygier
Tradition of diaspora and political reality of the state of Israel /David Meyer
Diaspora museum and Israeli-Jewish identity /Dina Porat
Jewish transnational community and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem /Uri Cohen
Contemporary dilemmas of identity: Israel and the diaspora /Eliezer Ben-Rafael
Was the Shoah the "sanctification of God"? /Thomas Gergely.
Abstract: This is a book about Klal Yisrael, the worldwide commonwealth of the Jewish people. The main question asked, is whether one can still speak of 'one' Jewish people, encompassing all Jews in the world.
The Jewish collective identity stands at new crossroads of multicultural ideologies and transnational diasporism. Jewry is experiencing an existential problem in today's changing society, shifting between convergence and unity on the one hand and divergence and division on the other hand. Quo vadis, O Jewish people? Rather than fully answering this question, researchers from Israel, the United States, Brazil, Argentina, Ukraine, Russia, France and Belgium try to open up the discussion in this book.
