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Playing with Jews in the Fields of Nations: Symbolic Contests in the Former Yugoslavia
Author(s): Gordiejew, P. B.
Date: 2006
Topics: Antisemitism, Main Topic: Other, Post-1989, National Identity, Nationalism, Philosemitism
Abstract: The collapse of socialist Yugoslavia and the rise of independent states in its place brought out interesting and disturbing phenomena involving Jews and Jewish symbols. This paper examines the following processes: 1) the loss of Jewish submergence in the political and symbolic orders of that socialist state; 2) a short-lived philosemitism; 3) an appropriation or ‘functionalization’ of Jews and Jewish symbols in contests over the moral superiority of one's nation; and 4) the return of classic anti-Semitism aimed at local Jewish places and individuals and at spreading ideas of Jewish political and cultural domination. Also described is how Jews engaged in welcoming or contesting encroachment on their own symbolic space.
Impostors of Themselves: Performing Jewishness and Revitalizing Jewish Life among Russian-Jewish Immigrants in Contemporary Germany
Author(s): Roberman, Sveta
Date: 2014
Topics: Main Topic: Identity and Community, Anthropology, Russian Emigration, Russian-Speaking Jews, Immigration, Jewish Revival
Abstract: In the early 1990s, Germany officially opened its gates to the immigration of Russian Jews as part of the politics of repentance and restitution for the Holocaust. The immigration of Russian Jews seemed to offer an opportunity to strengthen and revitalize Jewish life in the country, even to restore it to its pre-war scale and condition. For the Russian-Jewish immigrants, that task has proven a difficult challenge. Tracking the stumbling blocks and difficulties of the project of revitalization and recreation of Jewish life, this article moves through different arenas of the immigrants' performance of Jewishness – artistic, ritual, and mundane, individual as well as communal. It examines the situation in which role-playing or ‘passing’ as Jews fails to be perceived as credible and is interpreted as ‘imposture.’