scholarly journals How do you Jew in Finland?

2021 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 94-98
Author(s):  
Lars M Andersson
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
Vernacular Religion

Review of Mercédesz Czimbalmos's Intermarriage, Conversion and Jewish Identity in Contemporary Finland. A Study of Vernacular Religion in the Finnish Jewish Communities (Åbo Akademi University).

Jewish Identity and the Intercommunal Links between Diaspora Jewish Communities in the Second Temple Period

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Jonathan R. Trotter
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Second Temple ◽  
Asia Minor ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
Second Temple Period ◽  
Jerusalem Temple ◽  
Shared Identity ◽  
The City ◽  
The Temple

Abstract Many diaspora communities identify not only with a distant homeland but also with others distant from the homeland. How exactly do these intercommunal connections take place and contribute toward a shared identity? What specific aspects of diasporan identity are created or strengthened? What practices are involved? This study will begin to answer these questions through investigating two practices which were widespread among diaspora Jewish communities during the last two centuries of the Second Temple period (1st cent. B.C.E.–1st cent. C.E.). First, we will show how sending offerings and making pilgrimages to the Jerusalem temple from these communities enabled regular intercommunal contact. Then, we will suggest some ways in which these voluntary practices reinforced a cohesive Jewish identity and the importance of the homeland, especially the city of Jerusalem and the temple, for many diaspora Jews, whether they lived in Alexandria, Rome, Asia Minor, or Babylonia.

“An Essential Expression of the People”: Interpretations of Hasidic Song in the Composition and Performance History of Ernest Bloch's Baal Shem

2012 ◽  
Vol 65 (3) ◽  
pp. 777-820 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua S. Walden
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
Performance History ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
Jewish Music ◽  
The People ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Performance

Abstract This article examines Ernest Bloch's Baal Shem: Three Pictures of Chassidic Life, considering its score, its performance history, and early recordings of the second movement, “Nigun,” by Yehudi Menuhin, Joseph Szigeti, and Mischa Elman, to investigate the idea, promoted by the composer and many of his performers and critics, that the music represented Jewish identity through the evocation of Hasidic song. Bloch's score and Menuhin's performances were described as expressing what was often characterized during the early twentieth century as a self-affirming racial feeling that linked the modern diaspora in America to Eastern European Hasidic Jewish communities. With Baal Shem, Bloch and his performers and listeners participated in a self-conscious effort to construct a modern Jewish identity that they believed could be conveyed in the sounds and structures of art music. Menuhin's lifelong friendship and collaboration with Bloch underscores the crucial roles of Bloch's performers in working with the composer to devise compositional and performance tropes for the representation of Hasidic song, and in creating his broad reputation as a composer of a definitive Jewish music, a reputation Bloch would sometimes embrace and at other times disavow.

Terror, Race, Security

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yulia Egorova
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Identity ◽  
War On Terror ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
Security Issues ◽  
Caste Discrimination ◽  
The World ◽  
New Challenges ◽  
Muslim Communities ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
State Of Israel

The chapter engages with the two main themes of the book by focusing on the way in India the relationship between Jews and Muslims and imageries of Jewish and Muslim communities became affected by the Mumbai attacks and the general post 9/11 rhetoric of the “war on terror.” The chapter shows that these events and the securitization discourses that emerged in their aftermath created new challenges for local Jewish and Muslims groups, but it also complicates accounts that reduce Jewish-Muslim relations to problems of security. The ethnographic examples presented in this chapter suggest that concerns about the perceived Muslim threat that some of the Jewish respondents exhibited in relation to Indian Muslims ultimately had very little to do with Islam and were embedded in the wider problematics of security issues facing Jewish communities around the world, the politics of Jewish identity arbitration in the State of Israel, and even the reality of caste discrimination in India.

Attraction and Attribution: Framings of Sephardi Identity in Ashkenazi Prayer Books

2018 ◽  
pp. 221-240
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Cultural Identities ◽  
Cultural Goods ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
Jewish Culture ◽  
Cultural Objects ◽  
Prayer Books ◽  
Wissenschaft Des Judentums

This chapter recounts how maskilim and early representatives of Wissenschaft des Judentums divided the shares of Jewish culture between Ashkenaz and Sepharad in order to address questions of Jewish identity arising in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Germany. It looks at the perception of medieval Jewish culture that affected the views of their contemporaries. It also analyses the acceptance of cultural goods between the Jewish communities of Ashkenaz and Sepharad and the notion of the divide. The chapter reviews studies that show how texts and ideas were transmitted between the different communities that were adapted and incorporated into the regional Jewish cultures. It describes collective cultural identities and their dynamism that can be studied in a nuanced way through examination of the transfer of cultural objects from one region to another.

Christian Non-Jews and the Polis

2020 ◽  
pp. 128-134
Author(s):  
Christopher Stroup
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Acts Of The Apostles ◽  
Christian Identity ◽  
Religious Identities ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
Christian Communities ◽  
Static Group

This concluding chapter summarizes the findings of this book. It argues that Acts of the Apostles' rhetoric of Jewish and Christian identity should be situated within the context of Roman-era cities, in which ethnic, civic, and religious identities were inseparable. Placing Acts within this broader ethnic discourse emphasizes the Jewishness of Christians, even in Acts. When one reads Acts with an eye to the writer's ethnic reasoning, it becomes clear that Luke did not represent Jews as a static group but instead presented Jewish identity in multiple, hybrid, and complex ways that allowed for the identification of Christian non-Jews as Jews. Luke also employs the ethnic, religious, and civic aspects of Jewish identity to privilege those Jews (and non-Jewish Jews) who follow Jesus. If Acts marks all Christians as Jews and Christian communities as Jewish communities, then the concept of “Christian universalism” should be understood as a particular form of “Jewish universalism.” The chapter then reflects on the use of ethnic reasoning and the challenge of anti-Judaism in the interpretation of Acts today.

scholarly journals The contradictions of Diaspora: A reflexive critique of the Jewish Diaspora’s relationship with Israel

2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-106
Author(s):  
Ilan Zvi Baron
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Research ◽  
Theoretical Investigation ◽  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Personal Reflection ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
The World ◽  
Survey Results

This article explores a question that is often assumed but rarely addressed: What does Israel provide ideationally for Diaspora Jews that serves as the basis for Diaspora/Israel relations and justifies the importance of Israel for Jewish identity? Whereas past literature on this topic has either assumed an answer to this question or debated survey results and demographics, this article takes a different approach by not assuming an answer to this question. The article argues that Diaspora Jews’ relationship with Israel is best understood phenomenologically. The significance of Israel for Diaspora Jews is found in a type of obligation that is political but is not based in sovereignty or law but instead in meaning that serves as a form of authority and functions as part of the phenomenological structure characterizing Jewish being-in-the-world in the age of Israel. Using a combination of personal reflection, empirical research, and theoretical investigation, the article concludes by suggesting that critique serves as an activity that reveals the normative character of Israel’s meaningful authority, but that Israel’s authority in this phenomenological sense needs to be undermined if it will be possible to move beyond the increasingly polarizing role that Israel is having in Jewish communities today.

Transgression in Jewish Literature

1994 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 119-120
Author(s):  
Jyl Felman
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Pulitzer Prize ◽  
Jewish Literature ◽  
Tony Kushner ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
Library Collection ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Angels In America

Jewish library collection policies as they relate to Jewish gay and lesbian issues are discussed. Questions considered are whether a book about gay Jews or a book written by a Jewish gay author should be included in Judaica collections. The issue is placed within a historical Jewish literary tradition which includes authors such as Grade, Ozick, Miller, Roth and Rukeyser-who write about such transgressive themes as sexuality, assimilation, self-loathing, agnostic rabbis, etc. Through personal examples drawn from her collection of Jewish short stories, Hot Chicken Wings, the author makes a case for including books with Jewish lesbian content. Also considered are the consequences of excluding such works and the ultimate arbitrariness of banning works with gay content from the Jewish library shelf. The author also comments on the Pulitzer Prize-winning play Angels in America, written by a gay Jewish man, Tony Kushner. Even though Angels is being touted as an AIDS play, it is replete with Jewish characters, questions about assimilation, and Jewish self-loathing as exhibited by the lead character Roy Cohn. The play derives from a long tradition of Jewish avant-garde writing dealing with the nature of Jewish identity. For this reason, the author uses Angels to make a case against censoring gay themes in Judaica collections. Jewish literature throughout the ages has had a transgressive bent, and gay themes must be read in this context and viewed by Jews as legitimate literary material worthy of reading by Jewish communities.

scholarly journals “I Want to Look Transgender”: Anti-Assimilation, Gender Self-Determination, and Confronting White Supremacy in the Creation of a Just Judaism

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
S J Crasnow
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Identity ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Hierarchical Approach ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
Alternative Models ◽  
Transgender Identity ◽  
The Creation

Abstract In this article, I consider transgender identity and white Jewish identity to argue that “passing” or normative assimilation is a trap, in that it extends the offer of privilege to individuals who can “successfully” conform within the confines of normativity, while leaving intact, or even reifying, the oppressive systems that are at work. As a corrective to normative assimilation, I consider alternative models for Jewish life offered by nonnormative Jewish communities that resist these oppressive norms. I further argue for the normativity and privileging of “passing” to be replaced with a non-hierarchical approach that lets all genders, all Jewish (and other) identities, be treated as valid or “real.”

scholarly journals Jewish Space Reloaded

2014 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-10 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eszter B. Gantner ◽  
Jay (Koby) Oppenheim
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Iron Curtain ◽  
Institutional Form ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
Construction Of Identity ◽  
Research Institutes ◽  
Jewish Intellectuals

In 1996 the historian Diana Pinto published her often since quoted and discussed article on ‘A New Jewish Identity for Post-1989 Europe’. She was one of the first Jewish intellectuals to reflect on the fall of the Iron Curtain and the resulting political changes and their possible consequences for Jewish communities in Europe. In her article, she introduced the term ‘Jewish space’ that motivates the focus of this issue, as well as the term ‘voluntarily Jewish’, which describes the construction of identity free of external prescription. Pinto situates Jewish space in the context of the Erinnerungspolitik European democracies engaged in during the 1980s, when Holocaust memorialisation began to assume an institutional form through the establishment of Jewish museums, research institutes and exhibitions.

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