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Rhinestone Aesthetics and Religious Essence: Looking Jewish in Paris
Author(s): Arkin, Kimberly A.
Date: 2009
Topics: Main Topic: Identity and Community, Jewish Identity, Race, Racism, Sephardi Jews, North African Jewry, Youth, Jewish - Muslim Relations, Clothing
Abstract: I explore the paradoxical construction of race through fashion among the Parisian children and grandchildren of upwardly mobile immigrant North African Jews. Faced with the conflation of North Africanity and inassimilable difference, Sephardi youth escaped some forms of French racism by enacting others. By essentializing and individualizing Jewishness through conspicuous consumption, they made Frenchness possible for "Arab Jews" in ways foreclosed to Arab Muslims. But these same practices also helped fashion and biologize their exclusion from the French nation. Rather than encourage the deconstruction of "modern" identity narratives, Sephardi youth liminality thus encouraged the reessentialization of class, ethnicity, religion, and nation.
Between anti‐Semitism and Islamophobia: Some thoughts on the new Europe
Author(s): Bunzl, Matti
Date: 2008
Topics: Main Topic: Identity and Community, Antisemitism, Islamophobia, Comparisons with other communities
Abstract: The apparent resurgence of hostility against Jews has been a prominent theme in recent discussions of Europe. At the same time, the adversities of the Muslim populations on the continent have received increasing attention as well. In this article, I attempt a historical and cultural clarification of the key terms in this debate. I argue against the common impulse to analogize anti‐Semitism and Islamophobia. Instead, I offer an analytic framework that locates the two phenomena in different projects of exclusion. Anti‐Semitism was invented in the late 19th century to police the ethnically pure nation‐state; Islamophobia, by contrast, is a formation of the present, marshaled to safeguard a supranational Europe. Whereas traditional anti‐Semitism has run its historical course with the supersession of the nation‐state, Islamophobia threatens to become the defining condition of the new Europe.
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.
Patriarchy through lamentation in Azerbaijan
Author(s): Goluboff, Sascha L.
Date: 2008
Topics: Mountain Jews, Jewish Music, Virtual Community, Internet, Death and Mourning, Main Topic: Culture and Heritage
Abstract: In this article, I analyze patriarchy through the lens of emotional discourse in and beyond death rituals among Mountain Jews in northeastern Azerbaijan. I argue that the time-bound nature of female lamentation and the recent development of a popular narrative conceptualizing this genre as the custom defining Mountain Jewish identity in the Caucasus ultimately work to disempower women, reaffirming gender roles through narratives of suffering. Even though they use lamentations to address grievances within a context of increased outward migration, Mountain Jewish women cannot easily escape the conservative force that sorrow plays in their daily and ritual lives