Abstract: This chapter focuses on the construction and expression of Jewish identity through food in current-day Barcelona based on historical research and anthropological fieldwork. The Jewish population of Barcelona is at once small and vastly diverse, consisting of immigrants from Morocco, Turkey, Argentina, the United States, Poland, and many other countries. This chapter examines how the food habits and customs of these diverse populations interact with each other. It focuses on the culinary and cultural fusion―or lack thereof―between the Ashkenazi and Sephardic communities of Barcelona, the observance of kashrut on a collective and individual level, and the conceptualization of ‘Jewish food’ as a cultural term even when it is difficult to pinpoint exactly what the term ‘Jewish food’ means. For today’s Jewish population in Barcelona, is ‘Jewish food’ a reality, a fabrication based on nostalgia, or a re-creation of a lost identity?
Abstract: Around 2011 Israeli (Jewish) immigration to Germany became a recurring subject in public discourse. Reflecting ideological investments, the migration was reported with curiosity. Israeli migrants turned into Jews in German imagination, contradicting their self-definition of being primarily Israelis. As Jews they were welcome, but within limits. If the ‘guests’ expressed too much agency and challenged the status quo of German/Jewish and more so Jewish/Muslim and Israeli/Palestinian relations, things could become complicated. While Palestinian issues are met with increasing support across the social, media, and political spheres, Palestinians are not that welcome as (Muslim) migrants. They are suspected of importing a ‘new antisemitism.’ This paper seeks to unravel the conflicting attitudes towards the interlinked categories Israelis/Jews and Muslims/Palestinians, by focussing on the issue of the politics of hospitality. These reveal how agentic presences of those categorised as others destabilise the assumed ethnic, and ethno-religious boundaries of the German, nominally Christian, majority.
Abstract: Religious minorities have always been at the centre of the German nation-state’s self-understanding, as it came to define itself vis a vis, and often against, them. Historically, this can be seen specifically in the Jewish experience, and today reverberates in the experience of Muslims grappling with a position of alterity in German society. We will move beyond the scholarship on these two religious minority groups to that of these two religious minority groups—that is the intellectual milieu of German Jews and German Muslims. Both have confronted the insider-outsider status of religious minorities in Germany, while themselves occupying—and thinking from—this position of alterity. As Jewish intellectuals a century prior, Muslim intellectuals are confronting the (im)possibility of fully belonging to the society at hand. In so doing, they are, at times inadvertently, coming into conversation with Jewish intellectuals past on ideas surrounding the practice of religion, pluralism, minority-state relations, and social ethics.
Abstract: In this deeply personal essay, Leora Tec, the daughter of Holocaust survivor and Holocaust scholar Nechama Tec from Lublin, Poland, examines the causes of past and present divides among many in the Polish Jewish community, both Jews and non-Jews. She shows how factors such as: silence (both personal and institutional or governmental); ignorance; an overemphasis on Polish rescue; a competition of victimhood; and an overemphasis on the separation between Jews and non-Jews before the war, have all deepened this chasm. And she demonstrates—using her own experience encountering the memory work done by those at Brama Grodzka-NN Theatre Centre as an example—how these divides can be bridged by collective, artistic, and individual remembrance. This remembrance holds space for what is absent or incomplete, while valuing the “fragments” of history. Most of all, she shows how forging human connection in the present, continues the work of remembering the past with reverence, and has enabled her to find a connection to Poland. Ultimately, she concludes that the human beings building the bridges are themselves the bridge.
Abstract: This article has a twofold aim: historical and practical. First, it conducts a brief historical review of the Jewish community in Serbia, addressing the ways in which this community has contributed to country’s culture, history, sciences, politics, and social life. It focuses especially on Jewish life in Serbia after the Holocaust, and the various difficulties of assimilation and emigration. Second, the essay investigates the practical realities of interculturalism in Serbia, weighing these realities against concerns about preserving Jewish identity. The article stems from three interviews: Stefan Sablić, theater director, musician, and founder of Shira U’tfila; Sonja Viličić, activist and founder/director ofNGOHaver Serbia; Dragana Stojanović, anthropologist and scholar of cultural studies. Taken together, the responses of these speakers offer novel approaches to multiculturalism and intercultural dialogue in an area with a complex history and cultural makeup.
Abstract: Until the early 1990s, the close cohabitation in France of Jews and Muslims from formerly colonized North Africa was generally peaceful. During the first half of the twentieth century, most of the newcomers fulfilled the Republican vision of assimilation. However, events in the Middle East in the latter part of the twentieth century and early years of the twenty-first, and in particular the First and Second Intifada, together with the introduction of Arab satellite television, caused a sea-change in inter-ethnic relations. Angry Muslim youths, frustrated also by widespread discrimination in the broader French society and workplace, directed violence both toward the authorities and the establishment and particularly against Jews whom they accuse as being Zionists. For their part, the Jews of the banlieues (suburbs) and inner cities have felt increasingly insecure and have been progressively moving to “safer” bourgeois or gentile neighborhoods or to Israel. These new realities have been the subject of a considerable number of French movies by Jewish and Muslim directors (and in one instance the son of a pied noir family) and film writers. Some of these films merely attempt to record the situation, whereas others aim at fostering improved relationships. This article chronicles these cinematic efforts and analyzes their varying approaches to Jewish-Muslim relations in France.
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.
