Abstract: Built from nothing on the Parisian periphery in the 1950s, the neighbourhood known as Les Flanades in Sarcelles is perhaps the single largest North African Jewish urban space in France. Though heavily policed since 2000, Les Flanades had been free from violence. However, on 20 July 2014, violence erupted close to the central synagogue (known as la grande syna’) during a banned pro-Palestinian march. The violence pitted protestors and residents against one another in a schematic Israel v. Palestine frame leading to confrontations between many descendants of North African Jews and Muslims. Using that moment as a strong indicator of a broken solidarity/affinity between people of North African descent, Everett’s article traces a process of de-racialization, amongst Jews in Les Flanades, through the use of place names. North African Jewish residents use the local names of first-, second- and third-generation residents for their neighbourhood, ranging from from Bab El-Oued (a suburb of Algiers), via un village méditerranéen (a Mediterranean village), to la petite Jérusalem (little Jerusalem). Using the lens of postcolonial and racialization theory—a lens seldomly applied to France, and even less so to Jews in France—and a hybrid methodology that combines ethnography with discursive and genealogical analyses, Everett traces the unevenness of solidarity/affinity between Muslim and Jewish French citizens of North African descent and the messy production of de-racialization. This approach involves looking at shifting landscapes and changing dynamics of demography, religiosity and security and describing some tendencies that resist these changes consciously or not. Examples include the re-appropriation of Arabic para-liturgy and an encounter with a lawyer from Sarcelles who has taken a stand in prominent racialized public legal contests.
Abstract: Studie se zabývá obrozením budapešťského židovské čtvrti. Část města, kterou dnes takto označujeme, leží v centru Budapešti, konkrétně ve čtvrtích Erzsébet a Teréz, na hranici šestého a sedmého městského obvodu. Ve studii jsou na příkladech několika restaurací, knihkupectví, prohlídkových okruhů a tzv. barů na staveništi popsány nové tendence, ke kterým v židovském městě dochází. Svou typickou architektonickou podobu získalo židovské město během 19. století a před první světovou válkou. V roce 1944 bylo na jeho území „velké ghetto“. Na zničení architektonicky cenné zástavby se nepodepsala ani tak válka, jako spíše období socializmu, které následovalo po ní. Budovy chátraly, různým vlnám modernizace a přestaveb však čtvrť nepodlehla. Po změně režimu dávalo město stále větší prostor investorům, kteří staré budovy demolovali. Proti těmto necitlivým zásahům se vzedmula vlna občanských iniciativ. Hospodářská krize, která vypukla v roce 2008, pomohla snahám aktivistů o záchranu čtvrti. Mnoho parcel zůstalo po stržení budov prázdných a další demolice byly odloženy. V zachovalých budovách a na volných prostranstvích začaly vznikat různé podniky se zvláštní atmosférou dočasnosti.
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
Abstract: Mokum is 'Amsterdam' in the local dialect of Yiddish. Deriving from the Hebrew word makom, meaning 'place', Mokum affectionately designates the Dutch capital as 'the place' for Jews. Judith Belinfante, director of Amsterdam's Jewish Historical Museum from 1976 to 1998, explained: 'Amsterdam was, for a long time, the only place where Jews could come without any restrictions'. Already in the early seventeenth century, Jews began arriving, from Portugal and from Central and Eastern Europe. And, in contrast to the rest of Europe, in Amsterdam, they were given unlimited freedom to settle, and were never confined to ghettos, or forced to wear a distinctive sign. The extent of Jewish institutional integration in Amsterdam, and today, throughout the Netherlands, is nowhere more evident than in the history and exhibitions of Amsterdam's Jewish Historical Museum. It's a classical Heimat or 'home town' museum. It celebrates the city, and displays Amsterdam and Dutch Jewry as a dynamic, loyal and well-integrated minority
Abstract: Une fresque conçue par Henry Dougier et dirigée par Pierre Milza et Emile Temime. Populations, lieux symboles, récits : les trajectoires de l'immigration en France dressent une véritable cartographie de leur mémoire par rues, quartiers et villes interposés. Des histoires inscrites dans l'espace et dans le temps. La première grande saga de ces Français venus d'ailleurs, dans une France monde. Avec les Juifs tunisiens, la scène bellevilloise, déjà riche d'expériences migratoires, acquiert un nouveau visage. Ainsi va ce quartier, qui ne les a pas attendus pour se faire un nom. Ils y ont néanmoins accompli un tel enracinement que leur présence a marqué cet espace de vie, ne serait-ce que par leur-attachement à ce " petit Jérusalem ". Traumatisme du départ, traumatisme des taudis, angoisse des rénovations. Mais, grâce à la cohésion communautaire, les nouveaux venus s'acclimatent d'abord aux règles de vie bellevilloises, pour mieux s'en affranchir et créer leur quartier " tune ", haut en couleur de nombreux témoins se souviennent... Les rites, autant séfarades que tunisiens, la convivialité, mais aussi la " guerre des Six-Heures ", la transmission rompue, la tradition réinventée. Ainsi, au fil de son intégration, la population reprend à son compte des fragments de la mémoire bellevilloise et les intègre à la matrice tunisienne. Curieux mythe qui ravive l'identité blessée à travers l'ancrage en terre d'exil...
Abstract: Cette thèse étudie comment le renouveau religieux participe aux changements urbains, faisant émerger de nouveaux lieux du religieux, de nouveaux usages de l'espace, parfois de nouveaux quartiers. A Paris, depuis les années 1990, le 19e arrondissement de Paris concentre le plus grand nombre de lieux juifs. Il n'est un lieu d'immigration juive que de façon marginale, et permet d'interroger le rôle du religieux dans la construction de nouvelles centralités et dans l'expérience urbaine. Cette recherche s'est appuyée sur des méthodes qualitatives, associant entretiens, observations des usages de l'espace liés à la religion et analyse des formes multiples de la visibilité du judaïsme. La description des processus de regroupement associant les aspects religieux, résidentiels et commerciaux a permis de montrer que loin d'être la traduction spatiale d'une unité communautaire, ces quartiers recomposés procèdent au contraire de la diversité du groupe, et constituent eux-mêmes des territoires discontinus et fluides.
Abstract: This article discusses the historical and geographical contexts of diasporic religious buildings in East London, revealing – contrary both to conventional narratives of immigrant integration, mobility, and succession and to identitarian understandings of belonging – that in such spaces and in the concrete devotional practices enacted in them, markers and boundaries of identity (ritual, spatial, and political) are contested, renegotiated, erased, and rewritten. It draws on a series of case-studies: Fieldgate Street Synagogue in its interrelationship with the East London Mosque; St Antony's Catholic Church in Forest Gate where Hindus and Christians worship together; and the intertwined histories of Methodism and Anglicanism in Bow Road. Exploration of the intersections between ethnicity, religiosity, and class illuminates the ambiguity and instability of identity-formation and expression within East London's diasporic faith spaces.
Abstract: Against the background of mass emigration, religious revival and social and political transformations in the former Soviet Union, specifically Ukraine, this thesis describes and analyses change and continuity in the Jewish way of life in contemporary Odessa. Odessan Jews - continuous residents and return migrants - engage in many different processes of identity formation and community building, negotiating Jewish traditions, values, practices and orientations. Through ethnographic analysis of individual and communal affairs, this thesis examines the everyday life of a post-Soviet ethnoreligious minority group open to competing cultural models, lifestyles and social norms that derive from different contexts: individual, family, community, city, state and transnational connections. Part I "Jewish life in Odessa: Memory and Contested History" focuses on the city's history and its legacy and myth as an open, cosmopolitan and Jewish city perceived as a "distinct place" within Russia, the Soviet Union and present-day Ukraine. These historical chapters not only provide the necessary background for understanding Odessa today but also challenge the highly negative and monolithic picture of Soviet Jewish experiences that often ignores the influences of specific urban cultures on the development of varying Jewish orientations. Part II "Jewish Revival: The View from Within and from Outside" concentrates on contemporary Odessa and focuses on the phenomena of local Jewish revival, mainly driven by international Jewish organizations and shaped by their differing agendas in the region. These chapters explore the various ways in which Odessan Jews selectively appropriate, explore and contest these new visions and practices of Jewish life that in effect offer an arena of novel orientations. At the same time, vital questions are posed about the overall goals and achievements of Jewish philanthropy projects in the former Soviet Union. Part III "Home in the Diaspora" deals with the processes of Jewish migration and analyses the various ways that continuous residents, visiting and returning Jews orient themselves to Odessa as a locale in relation to other destinations, including Israel, that partially define their sense of themselves as Odessan Jews. Chapter 7, in particular, poses the 3 question whether it is still meaningful to refer to Odessa as a Jewish city in the light of the changing demographics of its Jewish population and the altered status and orientation of the city's remaining Jews. In response, the thesis argues that Jewishness is envisioned as a metonym of cosmopolitan Odessa and that the fight for its recognition as a Jewish place is, by extension, a battle for the city's historically constituted - albeit diminished - cosmopolitanism
