“New Jews is a thoughtful, persuasive case for why the Diaspora matters.” - Secular Culture. “New Jews makes the provocative argument that the Israel- Diaspora.
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Mainstream Jewish organizations have used and expanded historical, religious and cultural tropes in Judaism to cultivate among Jews a sense of connection and belonging to Israel and, through Israel, to one another.
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In the new book Cultures of the Jews, David Biale and the many participating authors show that the dynamic tension between unity and diversity has always defined Jews and their cultures from the days of the Bible. We question the very notion of a unified Jewish people who live within these two categories of Israel and diaspora. The idea of unity is often mobilized to create a semblance of collective solidarity in response to historical persecution or in order to make Jews feel responsible for people with whom they may have very little in common Kol Dor Voice of a Generation , an international network of twenty- and thirty-something Jewish leaders from twelve countries, including Israel, met for its first conference in May If Jews have trouble drawing a line between global Jewry and the State of Israel, it is no wonder that others do, too.
Not surprisingly, some French Jewish organizations took offense at the notion that they were somehow not at home in France. There is also the start of Reform Judaism.
New Jews: The End of the Jewish Diaspora
Although Reform Judaism is global, Reform Jews themselves adapt their worship and identities to the local cultures that they call home. Nelly Shulman, the first female rabbi of Russia and a product of the Machon program, is a perfect example of how Russian Reform Judaism is enmeshed in diasporic relations with other Jewish centers and is also developing its own forms of Jewish rootedness in Russia.
In , she moved to Minsk, Belarus, and has served as the chief Reform rabbi of this capital city Shulman thinks that being a woman benefits her in her attempt to get young Belorussian Jews excited about Judaism. A lot of women in provincial places talk to me about issues like abortion, sexual harassment in the workplace, their families.
All signs show that Jewish life in the city is growing. Moscow Jews are settled. Jews are so settled in Moscow, and in all of Russia, that, for the first time in history, more Russian Jews now migrate to Russia from Israel than the other way around. According to a report released by the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia, about 50, Jewish former emigrants to Israel have returned to Russia since Over the same period, only about 30, Russian Jews have left for Israel.
There are now hundreds of programs that send Jews of all ages to Israel to dig for archeological treasures, pray in synagogues, fire guns, excavate bones, learn a little Hebrew, pick olives and oranges, and scuba dive among other pastimes. Most trips to Eastern Europe, like March of the Living, use the Holocaust as their source of identity tourism These tours and trips often attempt to reinforce traditional notions of diaspora and homeland by situating America as an exilic place of weakening Jewish identity, positing Israel as the center of Jewish life and Eastern Europe as the center of Jewish death.
In this sense, Israel and Eastern Europe are used as a theatrical backdrop on which to construct and strengthen Jewish identities for Jews in America and around the world. This kind of tourism and identity travel is part of what we call the diaspora business. If Poland and Eastern Europe are seen as dead, they cannot function as real places from which Jews are in diaspora. We imagine that ten years from now, diaspora business organizations will spend as much money sending young Jews to Vilnius to study Yiddish or to Prague to study Jewish art and architecture as they do sending young Jews to Israel.
While many will still choose to climb Masada at dawn or volunteer for six weeks in the Israeli army, we imagine new Jewish youth traveling to New York to study in yeshivas, visit Jewish museums, conduct family history research at Jewish archives, learn Russian in Jewish immigrant neighborhoods, and eat their way through Jewish New York as culinary targets. It may indeed be the most glorious of stories, but it is untold. We offer hospitality to every ethnic and cultural identity in American life. Guided by our respective memories, we seek together to continue building a society in which all of us can feel at home.
In the words of one critic: If it is a celebration of the melting pot or cultural quilt, it is also an assertion that Jews can maintain and have maintained a distinct Jewish identity in America even while being an integral group in American culture.
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It is the mythic narrative of acculturation without assimilation, something, the museum thinks, American Jews should be proud of. This is also one of the things that makes this museum a reflection of American Reform Jews, who strive toward modernity and integration, as opposed to the Museum of Tolerance, which has the imprint of American Orthodoxy, with its emphasis on separateness and difference. With regard to the story of Hanukkah and the Maccabees, the Skirball declares: Throughout American history, from the struggle for independence to the struggle for civil rights, those seeking to escape oppression have looked to the example of the biblical Israelites.
New versions of the Haggadah Passover narrative exploring a range of modern understandings, have flourished in the United States.
There is little emphasis on keeping kosher, gender separation in Judaism, or other aspects that mark Jews as different from others. Michael Berenbaum, the former U. If the Skirball is an example, he is absolutely right.
Michael Berenbaum, the former director of the U. Holocaust Memorial Museum, suggests that the use of the Holocaust in the U. New York is so gigantic and multifaceted, the site of so many different communities, agendas and visions, that any analysis of how and why New York has become a center of Jewish life and culture inevitably poses only more questions. It is ground zero of the diaspora business, of global Jewish tourism, philanthropy, research institutes and non-profit organizations.
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It is where Jewish identity and memory are manufactured, performed, reinvented, contested, and then circulated throughout the world. Taken together, these have helped us envision a new Jewish map, one with multiple homelands. Jews are establishing new kinds of roots, not just to particular pieces of land but also to concepts, ideas, and spaces.
At the same time, they are remaking their sense of home in various places. We suggest that a global politics that recognizes the tensions between rootedness and movement, and the realness of both, should guide our thinking about identities and spaces. So we begin with a simple thesis: In the literal sense, Jews have always had many diasporas and homelands, from Sephardic Jews who were expelled from medieval Spain in , to 19 th and 20 th century Jews who, before the Holocaust, viewed Germany as their homeland.
She was speaking for many Eastern European Jewish immigrants who felt that America was their true homeland. The concept of diaspora goes even farther back.
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In Hebrew and Yiddish, the term galut or golus is a closer equivalent, suggesting spiritual diminishment and exile. A common denominator may be the idea of a central place that a scattered group of people can identify with and think about, and perhaps yearn to return to. Even the latter meaning a place we yearn to return to can be problematic, though, when applied to Jewish history. For instance, many Hellenistic Jews in the Second Temple period chose to live outside the borders of the holy land.
While living throughout the Hellenistic empire, they sent money to Jerusalem and conceived of Jerusalem as the patris , but did not long to return there. Within a more mobile modern American Jewish culture, the symbol of the mezuzah roots Jews to their homes and also creates a sense of community. These acts of marking Jewish space are just several examples of how, from the beginning of mythic Diaspora, Jews have created a sense of home while simultaneously marking themselves as apart from those around them.
But for whom is Israel home, and how so? Or is it a polyglot of cultures and languages, a secular democracy? These questions underscore an important fact about Israel: Others, particularly recent immigrants, do not feel at home because of persistent stereotyping.