Abstract: As one of the most visited museums in Germany’s capital city, the Jewish Museum Berlin is a key site for understanding not only German-Jewish history, but also German identity in an era of unprecedented ethnic and religious diversity. Visitors to the House of Memory is an intimate exploration of how young Berliners experience the Museum. How do modern students relate to the museum’s evocative architecture, its cultural-political context, and its narrative of Jewish history? By accompanying a range of high school history students before, during, and after their visits to the museum, this book offers an illuminating exploration of political education, affect, remembrance, and belonging.
Abstract: Antisemitism from Muslims has become a serious issue in Western Europe, although not often acknowledged as such. Looking for insights into the views and rationales of young Muslims toward Jews, Günther Jikeli and his colleagues interviewed 117 ordinary Muslim men in London (chiefly of South Asian background), Paris (chiefly North African), and Berlin (chiefly Turkish). The researchers sought information about stereotypes of Jews, arguments used to support hostility toward Jews, the role played by the Middle East conflict and Islamist ideology in perceptions of Jews, the possible sources of antisemitic views, and, by contrast, what would motivate Muslims to actively oppose antisemitism. They also learned how the men perceive discrimination and exclusion as well as their own national identification. This study is rich in qualitative data that will mark a significant step along the path toward a better understanding of contemporary antisemitism in Europe.
Abstract: En cette fin de XXe, début de XXIe siècles, l'Europe a connu de multiples bouleversements sociaux, dont la chute du bloc soviétique. Une approche anthropologique des juifs d'ex-RDA aujourd'hui constituait dans ce cadre un sujet d'analyse fort intéressant. Considérées dans les pratiques effectives de ses acteurs, les Gemeinden juives de Saxe et de Berlin, communautés institutionnelles allemandes, nous ont permis d'appréhender le mécanisme spécifique de construction d'une identité. La judéité se meut actuellement au travers de la négociation de plusieurs variables différentes, telles que la religiosité, l'ethnicité ou la mémoire. Une analyse transversale, s'appuyant sur le mécanisme d'assignation interne et externe concomitants,permet de mettre en exergue, dans leurs formulations actuelles d'une part et dans leurs incohérences ou inadaptations d'autre part, les différents outils conceptuels à disposition dans ce mécanisme d'élaboraton. Ainsi, peut-on évoquer un retour à la religion pour les juifs immigrés de l'ex-Union soviétique aujourd'hui en ex-RDA ? La notion de communauté est-elle pertinente dans la désignation des juifs d'ex-RDA ? Comment comprendre la gestion du passé historique de l'Allemagne, après 50 ans de communisme, pour les juifs qui y résident actuellement ? Autant de questions trames de cette thèse, auxquelles nous tentons de répondre ici, par une analyse la plus fine possible de la réalité sociale juive existante aujourd'hui en ex-RDA.
Abstract: What is the nature of interactions between Jews and Muslims in contemporary Dubai, Berlin, and Warsaw? The purpose of the three presented case studies is to evaluate the state of affairs and identify newly emerging trends and patterns in the given trans-urban context. The methodology is based on qualitative anthropological research, emphasising an emic perspective that centralises respondents’ own lived experiences and worldviews. The main research’s findings made evident that interactions between Muslims and Jews in each examined location are, to various extents, acknowledged, and in some cases, also embody a formative part of public discourses. Perhaps the most visible manifestations of these relations are represented by the ambitious interfaith projects that were recently established in each geographical area in focus. The Abrahamic Family House (UEA), The House of One (GE), and The Community of Conscience (PL) reveal the aspirations of multi-faith religious leaders to overcome polarising dichotomies and search for common ground. One of the conclusive outcomes of the study is a somewhat diminishing impact of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict on the Jewish–Muslim relations; however, the extent differs in each destination in focus. Finally, an unpredicted observation can be made. A surfacing inclination towards embracing a joint Muslim–Jewish Middle Eastern identity was perceived
Abstract: In response to a call for interview partners for an ethnography on the Israeli-Jewish lesbian diaspora in Berlin, my prospective partners contacted me, offering their migration stories while apologetically stating that they were no longer, or not exactly, lesbians. Admittedly, such transformations should not come as a surprise. Scholarship on queer migration to urban spaces elaborates the sexual imaginary, which brands the city as the scene in which gay cultures are rooted and develop, and which allows, and perhaps actively embraces (specific kinds of) sexual diversity. This sexual imaginary assumes contingency among sexuality, transformation storyline and displacement, and suggests that identity is enabled, enacted, conscripted and occasionally, violently incited as a result of spatial positions and migration. While the migration stories celebrate and brand the city as a cosmopolitan and queer haven, they also reveal an ambivalent dimension, which draws on ambiguous historical baggage and current hostility to strangers. In what follows, I discuss the shift to ‘queerness’ and the emergence of racial identities that came to light during my Berlin ethnography, charting the ways those shifts coincide and exploring the processes by which identities are lost and found.
Abstract: This article is a discussion on my research that examines the social and musical aspects of orthodox women’s Rosh Chodesh groups. These groups, both past and present, are not a widespread phenomenon and have remained very much on the periphery of Jewish practices which, apart from communities based in Israel, already operate on the periphery of non-Jewish societies. As such, my research has required a broad, international focus. My discussion is largely based on groups in North America and Europe (specific locations examined include New York, Montreal, Amsterdam, Berlin, and London, which is also the site for fieldwork on the relatively recent phenomenon called the ‘Partnership Minyan’). I also conducted preliminary fieldwork with the much-discussed group Women of the Wall (WoW) based in Jerusalem.
Abstract: Welche Erfahrungen machen Lehrer*innen mit Antisemitismus und Diskriminierung an Schulen? Welchen Umgang mit antisemitischen Phänomenen praktizieren sie? Welche Praktiken, Präventions- und Interventionsansätze sind bereits etabliert, welche könnten zusätzlich vorgeschlagen, entwickelt und implementiert werden?
Die qualitative Studie „Umgang mit Antisemitismus im Kontext Schule – Berlin“ ist eine Bedarfsanalyse, die vom Kompetenzzentrum für Prävention und Empowerment (ZWST) durchgeführt wird. Hierin wird nach den Sichtweisen, Strategien und Ansätzen von Lehrer*innen, Schulleitungen und Bildungsverwaltung in Bezug auf Antisemitismus und weiteren Diskriminierungsformen an unterschiedlichen Schulen gefragt. Ein wissenschaftlicher Beirat berät die Umsetzung des Forschungsprojekts. Die Umsetzung der Studie findet mit Genehmigung durch die Senatsverwaltung für Bildung, Jugend und Familie statt.
Der Ausgangspunkt praxisorientierter Forschung im Kompetenzzentrum sind langjährige Erfahrungen im Präventions- und Interventionsbereich unterschiedlicher Bildungseinrichtungen. Sowohl die pädagogische Beratung von Schulen als auch die zahlreichen Anfragen seitens betroffener Familien begründen den Bedarf an empirischer Fundierung pädagogischen Handelns im Umgang mit antisemitischer Diskriminierung. Dabei ist es dem Kompetenzzentrum wichtig, mit Lehrer*innen ins Gespräch zu kommen und ihre Anliegen zu erfassen, um gezielt unterstützen zu können.
Auf der methodischen Grundlage der qualitativen Sozialforschung finden vertiefende Einzelinterviews, Gruppendiskussionen sowie fallbezogene Praxisgespräche mit Lehrer*innen, Schulpsycholog*innen und weiteren schulbezogenen Akteur*innen statt.
Dabei werden folgende Forschungsfragen bearbeitet:
Welches Verständnis von Antisemitismus bringen Lehrer*innen in den schulischen Alltag ein?
Welche Umgangsweisen praktizieren Lehrer*innen?
Auf welche Unterstützungssysteme greifen Lehrer*innen dabei zurück?
Welche Ansätze und Methoden können Lehrer*innen darin unterstützen, Antisemitismus und Diskriminierungen vorzubeugen und mit Vorfällen umzugehen?
Welche institutionellen Rahmenbedingungen können hierfür geschaffen werden?
Das Ziel der Studie ist eine Bedarfsanalyse in Bezug auf den Umgang mit Antisemitismus unter Berücksichtigung von Handlungsräumen und Strukturen der Institution Schule. Auf dieser Grundlage werden Empfehlungen für die Prävention und Intervention formuliert. Die Perspektive von Lehrer*innen bietet dabei zentrale Einsichten für die Erstellung einer Gesamtstrategie gegen Antisemitismus auf schulischer, struktureller und bildungspolitischer Ebene.
Abstract: Wladimir Kaminer has become something of a poster-boy for the 'Kontingentflüchtlinge [Quota Refugees]', the term applied to Jews from the former Soviet Union who immigrated to Germany between 1990 and 2006, as a result of a decision made first by the GDR and then adopted by the reunified Federal Republic. Kaminer writes little about his Jewishness in his work, but, in his first book, Russendisko (2000), he discusses the Jewish identity of Russian-speaking Jews living in Germany, viewed through the lens of Multikulti [multicultural] Berlin. Kaminer depicts them as just another of Germany's ethnic minority groups and, as such, nothing special. Given both Germany's past and the reasons offered by the German government for allowing these Jews to emigrate in the first place, Kaminer's opinion is undoubtedly controversial. This article investigates how and why Kaminer adopts this position. It examines the pre-migration experiences of Jews from the former Soviet Union, which include: antisemitism, attitudes towards religion and discourse about the Holocaust in the Soviet Union, as well as the experiences (more unique to Kaminer) of Berlin in the 1990s, the heyday of multicultural optimism. Although Kaminer is an unusual case study who deliberately subverts the reader's expectations of his identity politics, this article aims to show that his writings on Russian-speaking Jews, while highly subjective, have a wider application than might first appear.
Abstract: Berlin is home to Europe’s largest Palestinian diaspora community and one of the world’s largest Israeli diaspora communities. Germany’s guilt about the Nazi Holocaust has led to a public disavowal of anti-Semitism and strong support for the Israeli state. Meanwhile, Palestinians in Berlin report experiencing increasing levels of racism and Islamophobia. In The Moral Triangle Sa’ed Atshan and Katharina Galor draw on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with Israelis, Palestinians, and Germans in Berlin to explore these asymmetric relationships in the context of official German policies, public discourse, and the private sphere. They show how these relationships stem from narratives surrounding moral responsibility, the Holocaust, the Israel/Palestine conflict, and Germany’s recent welcoming of Middle Eastern refugees. They also point to spaces for activism and solidarity among Germans, Israelis, and Palestinians in Berlin that can help foster restorative justice and account for multiple forms of trauma. Highlighting their interlocutors’ experiences, memories, and hopes, Atshan and Galor demonstrate the myriad ways in which migration, trauma, and contemporary state politics are inextricably linked.
Abstract: Silence appears frequently in discourses of the Holocaust – as a metaphorical absence, a warning against forgetting, or simply the only appropriate response. But powerful though these meanings are, they often underplay the ambiguity of silence’s signifying power. This article addresses the liminality of silence through an analysis of its richly textured role in the memorial soundscapes of Berlin. Beyond an aural version of erasure, unspeakability, or the space for reflection upon it, I argue that these silent spaces must always be heard as part of their surrounding urban environment, refracting wider spatial practices and dis/order. When conventions are reversed – when the present is silent – the past can resound in surprising and provocative ways, collapsing spatial and temporal borders and escaping the ritualized boundaries of formal commemoration. This is explored through four different memorial situations: the disturbing resonances within the Holocaust Memorial; the transgressive processes of a collective silent walk; Gleis 17 railway memorial’s opening up of heterotopic ‘gaps’ in time; and sounded/silent history in the work of singer Tania Alon. Each of these examples, in different ways, frames a slippage between urban sound and memorial silence, creating a parallel symbolic space that the past and the present can inhabit simultaneously. In its unpredictable fluidity, silence becomes a mobile and subversive force, producing an imaginative space that is ambiguous, affective and deeply meaningful. A closer attention to these different practices of listening disrupts a top-down, strategic discourse of silence as conventionally emblematic of reflection and distance. The contemporary urban soundscape that slips through the silent cracks problematizes the narrative hegemony of memorial itself.
Abstract: This research offers an original contribution to the study of contemporary klezmer
music by analysing it in relation to a particular urban environment. With its origins in a
largely destroyed Eastern European Jewish culture, contemporary klezmer is both
historically-grounded and paradoxically rootless, cut loose from geographical
specificity by the internationalism of its recent revival. Seeking to counteract the
music’s modern placeless-ness, this dissertation analyses the musical and spatial means
by which klezmer has been re-rooted in the distinctive material and symbolic conditions
of today’s Berlin. The theoretical framework takes in questions of cultural identity,
music and place, authenticities of tradition and instrumental practice, to show how this
transnational and syncretic music – with few historical ties to Berlin – can be
understood in relation to the city’s particular post-reunification bricolage aesthetic and
subversively creative everyday tactics. Beginning by mapping the criss-crossing
networks of musicians and their multiple artistic perspectives, the dissertation proceeds
through an exploration of the official and unofficial spaces within which these fluid
musical practices operate, leading onto ways that the city of Berlin is made manifest in
the music itself – how the city is interpellated sonically and textually. Processes of
musical transmission and education are analysed through the filters of tradition and
pedagogical ideologies, from which my own instrument, the piano accordion, is used as
a lens through which to uncover the balance between personal expression and
historically-informed performance. The final chapter looks at the relationship between
history, Jewish identity and music in the city. It explores the resonances between the
contested discourse of memorial and present-day cultural and musical production,
discovering how at times sound and music can act as a living sonic embodiment that
speaks against the silence of historical memory
