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Between Symbolic Distancing and Following Desires: Conversion to Judaism among Women in Germany
Author(s): Rau, Vanessa
Date: 2023
Topics: Conversion, Gender, Interviews, Oral History and Biography, Main Topic: Other, Narrative, Religious Observance and Practice
Abstract: Over the past decades, Judaism and Jewishness have been subject to transformation and more fluid boundaries. This article looks at women’s conversions to Judaism in Germany. Analyzing differing biographical trajectories, the article shows how individuals negotiate their desire to become Jewish, which is often closely related to an experience in Israel and a Jewish partner. Arguing that the context makes the conversion, I show how desires and negotiations are deeply entangled with the socio-historical context of German society as well as with the erotic and sexuality. I demonstrate how becoming Jewish presents a way of symbolically distancing oneself from biographical experiences of difference, which are negotiated in and through the conversion. As these conversions are not uncontested, I also show how becoming part of Jewish socialities evokes a negotiation of one’s positionality at the intersection of gender and religion.
‘I Want Them to Learn about Israel and the Holidays’: Jewish Israeli Mothers in Early-Twenty- First-Century Britain
Author(s): Davis, Angela
Date: 2016
Topics: Israeli Expatriates, Motherhood, Parenthood, Jewish Women, Main Topic: Identity and Community
Abstract: Research has shown that the presence of children in the Jewish Israeli emigrant family intensifies their ambivalence about living abroad, but encourages greater involvement with fellow Israelis as they seek to transmit a Jewish Israeli identity and maintain their children’s attachment to the Jewish state. This article explores this assumption by focusing on the experiences of mothering of a group of Israeli emigrants in Britain. Based on twelve oral history interviews, it considers the issues of child socialisation and the mothers’ own social life. It traces how the women created a social network within which to mother and how they tried to ensure their children preserved a Jewish Israeli identity. The article also seeks to question how parenting abroad led the interviewees to embrace cultural and religious traditions in new ways.