To have a better understanding of what it means to celebrate Jewish culture in Warsaw, Poland, as luck would have it, the I.B. Singer Jewish Culture Festival begins this week.
How is Jewish culture represented? Music, Food, Storytelling... delightful really, but is Jewish culture something more? Is this simply a gimmick with the aftertaste similar to that of a Jewish themed restaurant where one finds themselves saying, "that chulent did NOT taste like my grandmother's" or "are those REALLY matzoh balls?"
Perhaps the festival's representation of Jewishness is admirable and the purpose is that of enrichment and education. Most likely, however, I will find myself the critic, and will not take the events to be simply celebratory but rather layered with meaning.
For event details:
http://www.festiwalsingera.pl/
http://shalom.org.pl/eng/index.php?mid=141
Disclaimer :
Jewish identity is the topic of my dissertation in graduate school, which I am attending in Warsaw, Poland. The blog itself is a way of discovering myself in new territory, that of my writing.
Sunday, August 30, 2009
Saturday, August 29, 2009
Jewish Identity in Crisis? Maybe Not.
In the essay, Jewish Identity: A Matter of Fate, a Matter of Choice, historian and author of works on modern Jewish history, Lucy S. Dawidowicz wrote that the reward of being Jewish “lies in defining oneself, not in being defined.”1 However, for centuries Jewish identity was an all-encompassing reality Jews were born into; there was no choice in the matter. In this context, the term modernity refers to the period to follow the demise or severe weakening of the traditional, autonomous Jewish community, known as the kehila.2 In pre World War II Europe, the kehila system was responsible for maintaining essential components of a Jewish way of life for the Jewish community. Among its authority, the various institutions and offices of the kehila oversaw the hiring of religious leadership, care of Jewish religious institutions, philanthropy and the registration of Jewish births, deaths, marriages and divorces. Each person registered as a Jew in public documents was thereby considered a Jew.3
Modernization was beginning to have pronounced effects on Jewish identity when the Jewish counterpart of Western Enlightenment, known as the Haskalah movement, surfaced in the second half of the eighteenth century in Germany. Moses Mendelssohn was a pioneer amongst the Maskilim, or Enlightened Jews to try to facilitate the integration of Jews into society at large. Mendelssohn translated the Pentateuch into German and shared his conviction that the Jewish religion could be applied through reason4. The Haskalah movement opened the door for traditional Jewish society to have contact with the outside world. This facilitated change in the way Jews perceived themselves as a group and as individuals.
In a Jewish heritage portal, shtetl.org.pl, a multi-lingual site that I am part of, users can post photographs, video and text about the history of Jewish communities in Poland. The Virtual Shtetl Portal is a cyber community for those interested in Jewish heritage sites and culture in Poland. On all websites mentioned, visitors (Jews and non-Jews alike) have the opportunity to learn for themselves what it means to be a Jew in the contemporary world. I would like to take a closer look at this phenomenon during my studies at the Graduate School of Social Research and work with the question: How do the media and advancements in technology influence the way contemporary Jewish identities are formed?
Works Cited
1. Dawidowicz, Lucy S. Jewish Identity: A Matter of Fate, a Matter of Choice in The Jewish Presence: Essays on Identity and History.
2. The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. Yale University Press: 2005. The system of the kehila came to Eastern Europe in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries when Jews from Central and Western Europe were granted protection by Polish rulers in the form of privileges or charters, the earliest of which was the Charter of Bolesław the Pious, granted in 1264.
3. Gitelman, Zvi Y. The Emergence of Modern Jewish Politics, 48.
4. The Center for Cultural Judaism, http://www.culturaljudaism.org/ccj/scd/58.
5. Shore, Marci. Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation’s Life and Death in Marxism, 1918-1968. 335. Yale University Press: 2009.
6. Lahiri, Jhumpa, My Two Lives. March 2006. Newsweek.
7. Davidson, Neil R. and Anthony Julius. James Joyce, Ulysses, and the Construction of Jewish Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Davidson, et al.
8. The Jewish Museum in New York City under the Auspices of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. New York, 10 March 1996- 14 July 1996.
9. Erikson, Erik H., Identity: Youth and Crisis. W. Norton & Co: 1994.
Modernization was beginning to have pronounced effects on Jewish identity when the Jewish counterpart of Western Enlightenment, known as the Haskalah movement, surfaced in the second half of the eighteenth century in Germany. Moses Mendelssohn was a pioneer amongst the Maskilim, or Enlightened Jews to try to facilitate the integration of Jews into society at large. Mendelssohn translated the Pentateuch into German and shared his conviction that the Jewish religion could be applied through reason4. The Haskalah movement opened the door for traditional Jewish society to have contact with the outside world. This facilitated change in the way Jews perceived themselves as a group and as individuals.
In Eastern Europe, effects of modernization did not emerge so suddenly from within but were rather imposed by policies of the national government. However, for centuries to follow, Eastern European writers and thinkers of Jewish descent were openly considering the question of Jewish identity. One example is Alexander Wat who considered himself neither a Polish Jew nor a Jewish Pole, but rather a Pole and a Jew. For many Polish Jews, the two identities are both a source of pride and despair.5 Hyphenated identities, a term coined to imply dual-identities, is universal and stretches beyond the parameters of Jewish identity. 6 In what ways did the Jews in Poland meet the challenges of assimilation and acculturation differently from immigrants in America?
Jewish identity is a popular topic in literature and the visual arts. For instance, in James Joyce’s Ulysses the ‘true’ Jewish identity of Leopold Bloom, the protagonist of the novel, is an enigma as literary critics point to the boy’s mixed heritage. One critic asks, “Is Bloom, the uncircumcised, agnostic son of a gentile mother, Jewish?”7 In this regard Gerschom Scholem, philosopher and historian, commented that though the rabbinic authorities might not suggest Bloom was a Jew, he believed that Bloom was.8 At the Jewish Museum in New York, an exhibition was on display, in which artists confronted ethnic stereotypes and representations in American popular culture. The exhibition was aptly titled Too Jewish? Challenging Traditional Identities and paradoxically, the curator decided not to include any works of artists who did not identify as Jewish. 9
In Caryn Aviv and David Shneer’s provocative study, New Jews: The End of the Jewish Diaspora, the authors contend that Israel’s central role in constructing personal and communal Jewish identity has been shifted aside for a new generation of Jews or so-called “New Jews” who feel at home in America, Europe and locations all over the world. The study recognizes the diversity of Jewish experience and identity in contemporary Jewish society. I am part of this new generation of Jews and wonder what this means for Israel as a nation and how Jewish identity in Israel and the rest of the world will be effected.
A few conclusions:
Today, the advancements of Internet, mobile, and other technologies can provide a new space for modern Jewish identity. With the help of emerging technologies, such as web phones that can send virtual visual communication to locations across the globe instantaneously, people are finding new ways to create communities. In this respect, the popular use of emerging technologies challenges the traditional ways in which we understand the physical and spatial borders of communities. According to Erik H. Erikson, identity is at the center of the individual and at the same time also at the center of the individual’s communal culture.10 In this regard, an analysis of the technological innovations constructing communal cultures in the 21st century is required in order to address modern Jewish identity from a contemporary perspective.
With the convenience of the Internet, visitors to such websites as askmoses.com, half-jewish.com and shtetl.org.pl can learn for themselves about Jewish culture, history, identity and spiritual practice. AskMoses.com, which advertises that it „provides one-on-one spiritual guidance to people of all backgrounds in a confidential, real-time forum,“ also offers a cyber torah experience and live counseling services by Jewish rabbis and scholars fluent in English, Hebrew, Russian, Spanish and French. Another resource, half-jewish.org is specifically designed for descendants of Jewish intermarriage. The site propones, „ if the Jewish Torah is a legacy to the whole world (for it speaks to Gentiles too), then how much more so is it also the inheritance of those who descend from Jacob!“ Users can participate in forums, share stories, blogs, and media with other descendants of Jewish intermarriage.In a Jewish heritage portal, shtetl.org.pl, a multi-lingual site that I am part of, users can post photographs, video and text about the history of Jewish communities in Poland. The Virtual Shtetl Portal is a cyber community for those interested in Jewish heritage sites and culture in Poland. On all websites mentioned, visitors (Jews and non-Jews alike) have the opportunity to learn for themselves what it means to be a Jew in the contemporary world. I would like to take a closer look at this phenomenon during my studies at the Graduate School of Social Research and work with the question: How do the media and advancements in technology influence the way contemporary Jewish identities are formed?
Works Cited
1. Dawidowicz, Lucy S. Jewish Identity: A Matter of Fate, a Matter of Choice in The Jewish Presence: Essays on Identity and History.
2. The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. Yale University Press: 2005. The system of the kehila came to Eastern Europe in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries when Jews from Central and Western Europe were granted protection by Polish rulers in the form of privileges or charters, the earliest of which was the Charter of Bolesław the Pious, granted in 1264.
3. Gitelman, Zvi Y. The Emergence of Modern Jewish Politics, 48.
4. The Center for Cultural Judaism, http://www.culturaljudaism.org/ccj/scd/58.
5. Shore, Marci. Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation’s Life and Death in Marxism, 1918-1968. 335. Yale University Press: 2009.
6. Lahiri, Jhumpa, My Two Lives. March 2006. Newsweek.
7. Davidson, Neil R. and Anthony Julius. James Joyce, Ulysses, and the Construction of Jewish Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Davidson, et al.
8. The Jewish Museum in New York City under the Auspices of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. New York, 10 March 1996- 14 July 1996.
9. Erikson, Erik H., Identity: Youth and Crisis. W. Norton & Co: 1994.
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