Religious Population Share and Religious Identity Salience: Is Jewish Identity More Important to Jews in Less Jewish Areas?

2012 ◽  
Vol 74 (1) ◽  
pp. 82-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
B. A. Alper ◽  
D. V. A. Olson
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Identity Salience

The End of Exile: Jewish Identity and Its Diasporic Poetics

PMLA ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 113 (2) ◽  
pp. 273-287 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maeera Y. Shreiber
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Postcolonial Theory ◽  
Edward Said ◽  
Collective Identities ◽  
American Experience ◽  
Inclusive Language ◽  
English Bilingual

What is the location of Jewish identity? Cultural studies has provoked reexaminations of many long-standing tropes of ethnic and religious identity, including that of exile. Such inquiries have potentially explosive consequences for the already vexed notion of Jewish identity, especially in the context of an American experience. This essay means to trouble the relation between Jewish identity and the problematic marker of exile, within the contexts of cultural and postcolonial theory, drawing on the work of Jewish and non-Jewish thinkers, including Alain Finkielkraut, Daniel Boyarín, and Edward Said. This analysis allows for a sustained consideration of a diasporic poetics—an alternative aesthetic model for imagining community and the attendant terms of belonging. The experimental Yiddish-English bilingual verse of the contemporary poet Irena Klepfisz serves as a paradigmatic example of such a vision that challenges the familiar opposition between home and exile. Yiddish, a notoriously inclusive language and a by-product of the Diaspora, is central to her inquiries into the relation between individual and collective identities and into the role gender plays in the construction of such entities.

Creating Religious Identity: Rabbinic Interpretations of the Exodus

2018 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-59
Author(s):  
Günter Stemberger
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Active Force ◽  
Babylonian Talmud ◽  
Biblical History ◽  
Mount Sinai ◽  
As If ◽  
Babylonian Exile

Abstract:According to the rabbis, only those belong to Israel who have lived through the central events of biblical history, above all the Exodus and the Babylonian Exile. This is demonstrated on the basis of three texts, the Haggadah of Pesaḥ, the Mekhilta, and the interpretation of the Exodus story in the Babylonian Talmud Sotah. Every Jew is expected to re-enact these events in their own lives: “In every generation man is bound to look upon himself as if he had come forth from Egypt.” Converts may also opt into this history and consider themselves as if they, too, had stood on Mount Sinai. Biblical history remains an active force beyond the limits of time; the consciousness of this ever present history is part of the rabbinic understanding of one’s own present and thus essential for one’s Jewish identity.

Goddess Religion, Postmodern Jewish Feminism, and the Complexity of Alternative Religious Identities

1998 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 198-215 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melissa Raphael
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Religious Identities ◽  
Feminist Discourse ◽  
Ideological Perspective

ABSTRACT: This paper argues that Jewish Goddess feminism illustrates the complexity of alternative religious identities and their fluid, ambiguous, and sometimes intimate historical, cultural, and religious connections to mainstream religious identities.1 While Jewish Goddess feminists find contemporary Judaism theologically and politically problematic, thealogy (feminist discourse on the Goddess and the divinity of femaleness) can offer them precisely the sacralization of female generativity that mainstream Judaism cannot. And yet the distinctions between present/former, alternative/mainstream religious identities are surely ambiguous where the celebration of the Goddess can at once reconstruct Jewish identity and deconstruct the notion of religious identity as a single or successive affiliation. It would seem that Jewish Goddess feminism epitomizes how late or postmodern religious identity may be plural and inclusive, shifting according to the subject's context and mood and according to the ideological perspective of the observer.

Approaching ‘Religious Identity’ in Late Antiquity

2020 ◽  
pp. 15-27
Author(s):  
Éric Rebillard
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Academic Discourse ◽  
Category Membership ◽  
Identity Salience ◽  
Theoretical Considerations

The category of ‘semi-Christians’ has often been criticized, but nevertheless seems to endure in academic discourse. It is used for describing Christians who do not fully embrace Christianity. After a review of the use of this category and its critics, this chapter proposes a shift of paradigm for approaching ‘religious identity’ in late antiquity. Instead of classifying individuals according to one category membership, their ‘religious identity’, I introduce the notion of identity salience and that of arrangement of category membership sets. Finally, I consider what such theoretical considerations can bring to the understanding of individuals described as ‘semi-Christians’ with the case-studies of Ausonius and Macrobius.

American Jews and the Construction of Israel’s Jewish Identity

2000 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-201
Author(s):  
Yossi Shain
Keyword(s):  
San Francisco ◽  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Religious Pluralism ◽  
American Jews ◽  
Jewish Family ◽  
Religious Identities ◽  
Public Campaign

In 1999, on the eve of the Jewish New Year, members of the Reform and Conservative Jewish movements funded a public campaign on Israel’s city billboards and in the Israeli media, calling on secular Israelis to experience their religious identity afresh. In a backlash against the monopoly and coercion exercised by religious orthodoxy—which has led many Israelis to shed their religious identities to an extent that goes beyond what their socialization by secular Zionism urged—the campaign called upon Israelis to embrace religious pluralism under the slogan “there is more than one way to be a Jew.” Financed by a grant from a Jewish family foundation in San Francisco, this campaign met with a harsh and somewhat violent response from the Israeli ultra-Orthodox sector. A leading ultra-Orthodox figure stated, “Ifthis situation continues, we will have a cultural war here, the likes of which we have not seen in a hundred years” (Sontag).

scholarly journals The concept of chosen people in the construction and maintenance of Jewish identity

2018 ◽  
Vol 74 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Brimadevi Van Niekerk
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Sense Of Belonging ◽  
Minority Group ◽  
Religious History ◽  
Religious Dimension ◽  
The World

Jews, as a group, are able to withstand the disintegrative forces of modernity by upholding certain notions of self-identification which are rooted in their ancestral and religious history. One such notion around which Jews have formed their identity is the concept of chosen people which lends credence to their sense of belonging. However, the concept of chosenness may be offensive to those who are not Jews. The aim of this article, therefore, is to examine what may be considered objectionable about the concept, to explain its persistence in the world and to explore the foundations on which Jews, a minority group of people, have formed their identity. Although many researchers now understand the concept of chosen people from the perspective of history, nations and nationalisms, ethnicities and myth, there has been little sustained critique in the religious dimension of identity. This article attempts to make a contribution to the work on religious identity of Jews in South Africa by drawing on literature in history, sociology and religion. The article concludes that chosenness, because it can be as onerous to Jews as it is beneficial, need not necessarily imply superiority and that claims to being chosen are rhetorical and not verifiable outside the discourse in which such claims are made.

CONVERSION TO HISTORY: NEGATING EXILE AND MESSIANISM IN AL-SAMAW'AL AL-MAGHRIBĪ'S POLEMIC AGAINST JUDAISM

2002 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-34
Author(s):  
Adnan Husain
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Religious Culture ◽  
The Political ◽  
Minority Status ◽  
Dynamic Tension ◽  
High Culture ◽  
The Past ◽  
Islamic Civilization ◽  
Political Success

AbstractThis article examines the autobiographical narrative and polemical treatise of a twelfth century Jewish convert to Islam. Samaw'al al-Maghribī's writings contend with the problems of reconciling exilic Jewish identity during the diaspora with the dominant Muslim high culture in which Jews participated. In particular, his autobiography reveals the profound importance for his conversion of his identitification with Muslim history as represented in historical literature that promoted an ideological vision of the past. Similarly, his polemic articulates a critique of Judaism and Jewish religious identity in remarkably historicist terms that associate the integrity of religious culture with an independent political power. Educated in Islamicate scientific and philosophical culture, Samaw'al privileges a culturally defined conception of "reason" over genealogical links and identifies with the political success of Islamic civilization. His writings exemplify the dynamic tension within Jewish exilic identity between conversion and messianism as resolutions to the conflicts of minority status. In choosing conversion, he denied the endless wait for the Messiah as an irrational failure to recognize the judgments of history.

The Contribution of Jewish Lawyers to the Administration of Justice in South Africa

1995 ◽  
Vol 29 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 250-290
Author(s):  
Reinhard Zimmermann
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Jewish Community ◽  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Cape Town ◽  
Comparative Law ◽  
Home Town ◽  
Administration Of Justice ◽  
Jewish Students ◽  
To Come

When I grew up in Hamburg, my home town, I had no Jewish friends or acquaintances. And if I had, I did not notice. Indeed, the very inquiry into whether someone was a Jew would have seemed awkward and inappropriate to me. In 1981 I went to Cape Town, where I was to spend seven years teaching Roman and comparative law. There I had the good fortune to come into contact with a vigorous, selfconfident and highly visible Jewish community. I had Jewish friends and colleagues, Jewish students and team mates. On account of my name I was even sometimes invited, on ceremonial occasions, to the synagogue. I suddenly realized how, for obvious historical reasons, our attitude towards national, racial and religious identity, and towards Jewish identity in particular, has been warped and to what extent we, as Germans, have lost any sense of unselfconscious innocence in these matters. It also struck me how much our culture has been impoverished by the absence of its specifically Jewish ingredient.

Nathan Birnbaum

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jess J. Olson
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Political Organization ◽  
Young Generation ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
Central European ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
Theodor Herzl ◽  
European Jewish ◽  
Anti Jewish

Nathan Birnbaum (b. 1864–d. 1937), also known by the pseudonym Mathias Acher (“another Mathias”), was a journalist, theorist of Jewish nationalism, and political activist. Birnbaum was a pioneer in the emergence of both secular Jewish nationalism and Orthodox political organization. Deeply affected by his exposure to rising anti-Semitism in fin-de-siècle Vienna and alienated by what he would term “assimilation mania” (Assimilationssucht), Birnbaum’s ideology was shaped early by two themes that developed throughout his career: belief that there was an intrinsic, unique Jewish identity, and that this identity could be activated as a solution to the oppression afflicting European Jews. Birnbaum’s early work integrated models of central European nationalism filtered through the writings of Moses Hess, Peretz Smolenskin, and Leon Pinsker. In the wake of anti-Jewish violence in Russia in 1882, Birnbaum and other Jewish students at Vienna University founded Kadimah, the earliest Jewish nationalist organization in central Europe. He cultivated an important presence among central European Jewish nationalists, and he was a significant influence on a young generation of “cultural” Zionists. In the early 1890s, he coined the term “Zionism” (Zionismus) to describe Palestine-oriented Jewish nationalism. When Theodor Herzl arrived in Zionist circles in 1896, he sidelined Birnbaum along with nearly everyone else who had preceded him in the movement, but Birnbaum’s opinion on the nature of authentic Jewish identity was already evolving. He eventually became an internal, and ultimately outside, critic of Zionism, concluding that an organic Jewish identity already existed in the folkways, Yiddish language, and communities of eastern European Jews. As an extension of this, he led in organizing the first conference of the Yiddish language in 1908. In the aftermath of the conference, Birnbaum deepened his engagement with the Yiddish language and eastern European Jewish culture and increasingly turned his thoughts to issues of spirituality and religion. After the outbreak of the First World War, Birnbaum announced himself a “ba’al teshuva,” a penitent returnee to Torah-observant Judaism. He was embraced by the Agudah, and his skills as a journalist and activist were put to use in Agudah organizing. Now Birnbaum revolutionized his understanding of the foundation of Jewish identity. Maintaining the ideal of Jewish authenticity as the only route to Jewish cohesion, Birnbaum rejected his earlier ethno-nationalist understanding of Jewish identity, replacing it with Orthodox religious observance and belief in the Torah. He aligned himself with a Hasidic religiosity that was an organic extension of his admiration for eastern European Jewry. A transformation that earned him respect in the Orthodox world and derision among the secular nationalists he had left behind, Birnbaum considered his change consistent with his views on Jewish authenticity. As the situation of European Jewry declined in the late 1920s and 1930s, Birnbaum felt vindicated in his dim view of the possibility of Jewish life outside of a religious identity, and wrote in this vein for the rest of his life. He died in Scheveningen, The Netherlands, in 1937.

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