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LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
Nathan Abrams is a Professor of Film Studies at Bangor University of Wales. He is Editor-in-Chief of Jewish Film & New Media: An International Journal and author of The New Jew in Film: Exploring Jewishness and Judaism in Contemporary Cinema (2012).
Samantha Baskind is Professor of Art History at Cleveland State University. She is the author or editor of several books, most recently Jewish Artists and the Bible in Twentieth-Century America (2014) and Jewish Art: A Modern History (2011, co-authored with Larry Silver). The Jewish Graphic Novel: Critical Approaches, co-edited with Ranen Omer-Sherman, was published in 2008. She served as editor for US art for the 26-volume revised edition of the Encyclopaedia Judaica (2006).
Devorah Baum is a Lecturer in English Literature and Critical Theory at the University of Southampton. She is also affiliated to Southampton University’s Parkes Institute for the study of Jewish/Non-Jewish Relations. Her research interests include the religious and the secular, the rhetorical functions of knowledge, psychoanalysis, Jewish literature and philosophy, hermeneutics, critical theory (especially Jacques Derrida), and post-war American literature.
Marcy Brink-Danan is a cultural anthropologist and author of Jewish Life in 21st Century Turkey: The Other Side of Tolerance (2011). Her work has appeared in American Anthropologist, Anthropological Quarterly, Language and Communication, Political and Legal Anthropology Review, Religion Compass, and Visual Anthropology Review. She is currently Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Anthropology at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Marc Caplan is a native of Louisiana and a graduate of Yale University. In 2003 he received his Ph.D. in comparative literature from New York University. Since then he has held positions at Indiana University, the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard University, and Johns Hopkins University. His book comparing Yiddish literature with African literature in English and French, How Strange the Change: Language, Temporality, and Narrative Form in Peripheral Modernisms, was published by Stanford University Press in 2011.
Judah M. Cohen is the Lou and Sybil Mervis Professor of Jewish Culture and Associate Professor of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University. He has authored Through the Sands of Time: A History of the Jewish Community of St. Thomas, USVI (2004), The Making of a Reform Jewish Cantor: Musical Authority, Cultural Investment (2009), and Sounding Jewish Culture: The Music of Central Synagogue (2011). He has also co-edited, with Gregory Barz, The Culture of AIDS in Africa: Hope and Healing Through Music and the Arts (2011).
Yulia Egorova is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at Durham University. Her research interests include Judaizing movements and the socio-cultural significance of genetic research. She is the author of Jews and India: Perceptions and Image (2006), a co-author (with Tudor Parfitt) of Genetics, Mass Media and Identity (2006), and a co-author (with Shahid Perwez) of The Jews of Andhra Pradesh: Contesting Caste and Religion in South India (2013).
Ayala Fader is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Fordham University. She is the author of the award-winning ethnography, Mitzvah Girls: Bringing Up the Next Generation of Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn (2009). Currently, she is researching and writing her next book, Moral Panic in Brooklyn: Heretics, Skeptics and the Internet.
Rachel Garfield is an artist who teaches at the University of Reading. She has exhibited in the UK, US, India, Italy, and Canary Islands. Recent published work includes “A Particular Incoherence: Some Films of Vivienne Dick,” in Treasa O’Brien, Maeve Connolly, Rachel Garfield, Beverley Zalcock, and Vivienne Dick, eds., Between Truth and Fiction: The Films of Vivienne Dick (2009), and “Questioning Perceptions of Jewish Identity in the work of Ary Stillman,” in James Wechsler, ed., Ary Stillman: From Impressionism to Abstract Expressionism (2008).
Ben Gidley is a Senior Researcher at the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society at Oxford University. He has researched both the sociology and history of Anglo-Jewry, as well as antiSemitism and Islamophobia. He is the co-author, with Keith Kahn-Harris, of Turbulent Times: The British Jewish Community Today (2010).
Amelia Glaser is an Associate Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature at the University of California—San Diego. Her work lies at the intersection of Slavic and Jewish literary history. She is the author of Jews and Ukrainians: From the Shtetl Fair to the Petersburg Bookshop (2012), and the translator of Proletpen: America’s Rebel Yiddish Poets (2005).
Klaus Héd1l is a historian at the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Graz, Austria. He has published widely on Central and Eastern European Jews, the Jewish body, and Jewish identity. He has taught at various universities in Europe and at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His most recent book is Kultur und Gedachtnis (2012).
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett is University Professor of Performance Studies and Affiliated Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University. Her books include (with Mayer Kirshenblatt) They Called Me Mayer July: Painted Memories of a Jewish Childhood in Poland before the Holocaust (2007) and The Art of Being Jewish in Modern Times (2008). She currently leads the exhibition development team for the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw.
Misha Klein is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Oklahoma, where she is also affiliated with Judaic Studies, International and Area Studies, and Women’s and Gender Studies. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Brazil, her book, Kosher Feijoada and Other Paradoxes of Jewish Life in Sao Paulo (2012) examines the relationship between ethnic and national identity among the tiny minority of Brazilian Jews in the world’s largest Catholic country.
David J. Leonard is Chair and Associate Professor in the Department of Critical Culture, Gender, and Race Studies at Washington State University. He is the author of After Artest: The NBA and the Assault on Blackness (2012) and Screens Fade to Black: Contemporary African American Cinema (2006), and co-editor of Criminalized and Commodified: New Racism and African Americans in Contemporary Sports (2011).
Andrea Lieber is Associate Professor of Religion at Dickinson College, where she holds the Sophia Ava Asbell Chair of Judaic studies. She is the author of The Essential Guide to Jewish Prayer and Practices (2012), co-editor of Heavenly Tablets: Interpretation, Identity and Tradition in Ancient Judaism (2007), and has published numerous articles in the area of ancient Jewish and Christian mysticism.
Sarah Lightman is an award-winning artist and curator currently researching a Ph.D. at the University of Glasgow in “The Drawn Wound: Hurting and Healing in Autobiographical Comics.” She is the co-curator with Michael Kaminer of Graphic Details: Confessional Comics by Jewish Women (forthcoming) and has published in Trauma Narratives and Herstory (2013), Studies in Comics, and Expressions of the Unspeakable: Narratives of Trauma (2013).
Barbara E. Mann is Associate Professor of Hebrew Literature at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. She is the author of Space and Place in Jewish Studies (2012), A Place in History: Modernism, Tel Aviv, and the Creation of Jewish Urban Space (2006), and co-editor in-chief of Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History.
Jonathan S. Marion is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. His research explores various issues of performance, embodiment, aesthetics, gender, globalization, translocality, ritualized activity, and activity-based communities. He also writes on visual ethics, theory, and method in social research, and is the author of Ballroom: Culture and Costume in Competitive Dance (2008), and Visual Research: A Concise Introduction to Thinking Visually (with Jerome Crowder, 2013).
Nils Roemer is the Stan and Barbara Rabin Professor at University of Texas at Dallas. He is the author of Jewish Scholarship and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Germany: Between History and Faith (2005), German City—Jewish Memory: The Story of Worms (2010), numerous articles, and several co-edited volumes.
Laurence Roth is Professor of English and Jewish Studies at Susquehanna University and editor of Modern Language Studies, the scholarly journal of the Northeast Modern Language Association. He is the author of Inspecting Jews: American Jewish Detective Stories (2004) and numerous essays on American Jewish popular literature, as well as essays on Jewish bookselling and on scholarly publishing.
Michael Rothberg is Professor of English and Conrad Humanities Scholar at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he is also Director of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies Initiative. His latest book is Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (2009), and he is also the author of Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation (2000). He is co-editor of The Holocaust: Theoretical Readings (2003) and Cary Nelson and the Struggle for the University: Poetry, Politics, and the Profession (2009).
S. I. Salamensky is an associate professor in the School of Theater, Film and Television at the University of California, Los Angeles. A scholar, editor, and writer working across the fields of literature, performing arts, film, and culture, she is the author of The Modern Art of Influence and the Spectacle of Oscar Wilde (2012), Talk Talk Talk: The Cultural Life of Everyday Conversation (2001), and the forthcoming Diaspora Disneys.
Naomi Seidman is Koret Professor of Jewish Culture and Director of the Richard S. Dinner Center for Jewish Studies at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. Her first book, A Marriage Made in Heaven: The Sexual Politics of Hebrew and Yiddish, appeared in 1997; her second, Faithful Renderings: Jewish-Christian Difference and the Politics of Translation, in 2006.
Larry Silver is Farquhar Professor of History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Jewish Art: A Modern History (2011, co-authored with Samantha Baskind), Rembrandt’s Faith: Church and Temple in the Dutch Golden Age (2009, co-authored with Shelley Perlove), and Marketing Maximilian: The Visual Ideology of a Holy Roman Emperor (2008).
Sherry Simon teaches in the Département d’études francaises at Concordia University. Among her recent publications are Translating Montreal: Episodes in the Life of a Divided City (2006) and Cities in Translation: Intersections of Language and Memory (2011). She is a member of the Royal Society of Canada and of the Académie des lettres du Québec.
Jon Stratton is Professor of Cultural Studies at Curtin University, Perth, Western Australia. He has published widely in Jewish cultural studies, popular music studies, and studies in race and ethnicity. His recent books include Jewish Identity in Western Pop Culture: The Holocaust and Trauma through Modernity (2008), Jews, Race and Popular Music (2009) and Uncertain Lives: Culture, Race and Neoliberalism in Australia (2011).
Ted Swedenburg is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. He is the author of Memories of Revolt: The 1936-1939 Rebellion and the Palestinian National Past (2003) and co-edited Palestine, Israel, and the Politics of Popular Culture (2005) with Rebecca L. Stein, and Displacement, Diaspora, and Geographies of Identity (1996) with Smadar Lavie.
Nadia Valman is Senior Lecturer in the School of English and Drama, Queen Mary, University of London. She is the author of The Jewess in Nineteenth-Century British Literary Culture (2007) and co-editor of six books on Jews, literature and popular culture from the nineteenth century to the present day. She is currently researching the Jewish literature of London.
Abigail Wood lectures in music at the University of Haifa, Israel. She has written widely on contemporary Jewish musics including a recent monograph, And We’re All Brothers: Singing in Yiddish in Contemporary North America (2013). Her current research focuses on sounds and music in the public sphere in Jerusalem’s Old City.
INTRODUCTION
Laurence Roth and Nadia Valman
A young man in black trousers and an untucked white dress shirt paces in front of his three-piece band crowded onto a small stage in a darkened nightclub, waiting for them to tune up. Not an unusual scene in music venues around the world, except that hanging from four corners around his waist are tzifzit, ritual fringes, and on his head is an oversize white knit kippah topped with a pom pom and the Hebrew words “Na Nach Nachma Nachman Meuman” woven around the edge. A full beard and sidelocks frame his face as he holds the microphone close to his mouth. “This world is nothing,” he shouts, “There’s only Hashem, people. Wake up!! Meet Yishai Romanoff of the Jewish punk band Moshiach Oil, one of the stars of the documentary Punk Jews, directed by Jesse Zook Mann and produced by Evan Kleinman with the help of Saul Sudin. Yishai grew up in an Orthodox home in Long Island, went astray in his teens, and returned to Judaism on a mission, making a name for himself in the New York club circuit playing songs influenced musically by the Dead Kennedys, Bad Brains, The Germs, Circle Jerks, and the like, but with words borrowed from the songs and writings of the Bratslav Hasidim, followers of the charismatic nineteenth-century Hasidic mystic, Nachman of Bratslav. On YouTube you can see Yishai regaling audiences with his mash up of the Ramones’ “Blitzkrieg Bop” and the Bratslaver song embroidered on his kippah. He calls it “Blitzkrieg Nach.”
But this is no musical shtick. True, Yishai exhibits the sly wit common to many punk performers; he knows he seems like an oddity even as he yells at, cajoles, and then jokes easily with the crowd. Still, as he told a French Canadian television interviewer, he believes his brand of music and Judaism is consistent with Judaism’s foundational, “alternative” sensibility, Abraham rebelling against the status quo. Hasidism, too, was punk in its initial appearance because it was for illiterate Jews who wanted to express themselves spiritually by trusting in their own capabilities and knowledge, cleaving to God outside the formal constraints of that age’s normative Judaism. For Yishai, music is an authentic expression of human longing for spiritual sustenance, of delight in God’s creation, and a way to hasten the coming of the Messiah, a view promulgated by Bratslavers the world over, though not quite in the same fashion. Like Y-Love (Yitz Jordan), The Sukkos Mob, the Amazing Amy Yoga Yenta, Bulletproof Stockings, Shaindel Antelis, and other performers featured in and caught up in the press for Punk Jews—a term that refers not so much to a musical style as to the DIY (“do it yourself’) aesthetic associated with punk—Yishai comes across as absolutely serious about his Judaism and clearly having fun. He seems ecstatic in both the usual and mystical senses of the word. There is a joy in his performance devoid of irony or self-awareness; he never winks at the audience with his influences. This is a contemporary Jewish culture as performed in New York, a happily serious affair unconcerned with what it is, or what others accuse it of being, and more interested in where it is—in nightclubs, in quasiunderground gatherings in the heart of Orthodox Williamsburg, or literally on the streets of Brooklyn. It is not so much a community as it is a network of young and not so young Jews with shared interests and attitudes about how to make Jewish music in the twenty-first century.
Overburdened by the past, profoundly ambiguous, and highly self-conscious about the politics of Jewish identity, And Europe Will Be Stunned (2007-11), a trilogy of short films by the Israeli-born artist Yael Bartana, could not be more different from the music of Yishai Romanoff. The films document three events in the history of the Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland (IRMiP). In the first, a young Polish JRMiP leader stands in a derelict sports stadium, passionately urging the return of three million Jews to their historic homeland of Poland. The second film, made in the style of 1930s political propaganda, depicts a band of young pioneers building a kibbutz on the site of the former Warsaw ghetto. In the third film, the leader has been assassinated and the movement convenes to mourn his martyrdom and pledge to spread his message and realize his vision.
Bartana’s narratives take place in an imaginary time zone that resembles the present, anticipates the future, but simultaneously looks backwards. Their style parodies the visual and aural rhetoric of early twentieth-century nationalist movements: the modernist logo, upturned youthful faces, and stirring anthems most obviously reference Zionism, but also socialism and fascism. These symbols are so familiar and so tainted with associations of atrocity that they are impossible to read except as kitsch. And yet they are employed here not in the service of an ideology of racial purity, but as a moving fantasy of multicultural harmony and the redemption of a traumatized European past. Bartana’s irony registers the impossibility of utopian politics today and at the same time, beyond irony, she also evokes nostalgia and longing for collective idealism.
The films confuse the viewer in other ways, blurring the borders of fictionality. Carefully attuned to the theatricality of nationalism, each is a small, carefully staged melodrama. Yet the “actors” are in fact real people playing themselves, including the Polish politician Slawomir Sierakowski. A further dimension of Bartana’s project involved the actual creation of the Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland that she imagines in her films. Her work gives form to a concept so audacious and counter-intuitive that it is virtually unthinkable—reverse Zionism—and then asks the viewer: what if this were real?
Bartana’s trilogy speaks to a specifically Jewish history of dispossession and nation-building but, as she says, “This is a very universal story ... These are mechanisms and situations which can be observed anywhere in the world” (Bartana 2011). The imagery of the second film, Wall and Tower, for example, recall for some viewers the structures built by early Jewish settlers in Mandate Palestine. For others they may resemble concentration camps. These images and the music soundtrack flow seamlessly between the histories of Poland and Palestine, Poles, Jews, and Arabs. Meanwhile the artist belongs to no single country: she lives in Tel-Aviv and Berlin, and (with the JRMiP) she represented Poland in the 2011 Venice Biennale.
And Europe Will Be Stunned is a critically acclaimed work that has been exhibited internationally. Moshiach Oil, on the other hand, represents a subculture unique to particular neighborhoods of New York City. Yet, replete with paradoxes, both are examples of contemporary Jewish culture that pose the kinds of new questions that this book aims to showcase. These questions are born of the same curiosity and fascination that journalists and audiences exhibit when they discover such productions. But for the scholars gathered in this volume that excitement is also informed by a sense that these cultural performances reflect new improvisations on the ever-shifting modes of modern hybrid identity, on the current global circulation of commodities, fashions, peoples, and knowledges, on the fast developing technologies of information dispersal, on artists’ blurring of distinctions between high, middlebrow, and popular culture, on the complex relationships between people and material objects, and on the uses of religion to order and filter human experience. To explain how and why Jewish studies scholars have come to interpret contemporary cultural phenomena and activities in light of these issues, and what is at stake in doing so, we must first survey recent history in theory and cultural studies and trace how both have shaped present understandings of Jewish culture.
Jews in theory
In the last 30 years, critical theory has proved to be transformative for Jewish studies, bringing new perspectives to the analysis of both ancient texts and contemporary life. Psychoanalysis, deconstruction, postcolonial, and queer theory have been used in numerous creative ways to examine the interpretation and self-interpretation of Jews and Judaism in and through culture. The application of critical theory to Jewish cultural production, however, has its roots in discussions of Jews and Judaism in the work of European poststructuralist thinkers in the 1980s and 1990s. Preoccupied with the question of anti-Semitism, the psychoanalytic philosophers Julia Kristeva and Jean-Frangois Lyotard aimed to theorize ancient and modern responses to Jews; the ideas they formulated were to shape critical discourse on Jews and Judaism lastingly.
In Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1982), Kristeva argues that Judaism is distinguished from pagan religions by its particular means of “purifying the abject” (Kristeva 1982: 17). The abject—the alien, bodily, maternal aspect of the self incompletely repressed by the subject—is controlled in Judaism through a “series of separations” (Kristeva 1982: 94). This logic—as seen, for example, in the dietary laws of the Hebrew Bible, which distinguish clean from unclean (the unclean pointing to “admixture and confusion”)—replaces the violence of pagan sacrifice (Kristeva 1982: 98). For Kristeva, anti-Semitism can be understood as the repeated eruption of rage against the Law, the repression of the pagan and the feminine (Kristeva 1982: 180). For Lyotard, in Heidegger and “the jews” (1990), on the other hand, it is anti-Semitism, rather than Judaism, that constitutes part of the psychic apparatus of repression. The replacement of pagan/ Christian sacrifice by obligation towards an implacable Law means that
“the jews” are the irremissible in the West’s movement of remission and pardon. They are what cannot be domesticated in the obsession to dominate, in the compulsion to control domain, in the passion for empire, recurrent ever since Hellenistic Greece and Christian Rome. “The jews,” never at home wherever they are, cannot be integrated, converted, or expelled. They are also always away from home when they are at home, in their so-called own tradition, because it includes exodus as its beginning, excision, impropriety, and respect for the forgotten.
(Lyotard 1990: 22)
As Geoffrey Bennington argues, “just as Jahweh in Judaism and the unconscious in psychoanalysis occupy, according to Lyotard, a position of incomprehensible and unidentifiable but imperative alterity, so Judaism ... occupies just that position in Lyotard’s own work” (Bennington 1998: 190). In this position of radical alterity, and especially in their obligatedness, “the jews” are a reminder of what Western thought has systematically forgotten and cannot represent.
The version of this argument most influential in cultural studies came from the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman. In Modernity and the Holocaust (1989) Bauman insists that we must understand responses to the Jews in terms of an “ambivalence” first established in pre-modern Christendom, where the notion of the “Jew,” detached from real Jewish men and women, functioned as “the battle ground on which the never-ending struggle for the self-identity of the Church, for the clarity of its temporal and spatial boundaries, was fought” (Bauman 1989: 39). The “Jews” were the ancestors of Christianity yet persisted into the present; they were neither heathens nor believers in the true faith. Continuing into the modern age of nations, the “conceptual Jew,” cast as the embodiment of disorder, continued to perform “a function of prime importance; he visualized the horrifying consequences of boundary-transgression, of not remaining fully in the fold, of any conduct short of unconditional loyalty and unambiguous choice; he was the prototype and arch-pattern of all nonconformity, heterodoxy, anomaly and aberration” (Bauman 1989: 39) — what Kristeva describes as the abject. For Bauman, however, it is not Jewish theology that is the origin of the Jews’ alterity but rather their social function as guarantors of the stable identity of Church or nation.
The work of these thinkers, concerned with the psychic or social dynamics of anti-Semitism, focuses on “conceptual Jews,” and provided the stimulus and theoretical grounding for a rising tide during the 1990s of new research in cultural history on the figure of the “Jew,” across a broad range of texts from race theory to high literature to painting to film and television (Gilman 1991; Cheyette 1993; Cheyette 1996; Cheyette and Marcus 1998; Nochlin and Garb 1995; Stratton 2000; Freedman 2000). Nonetheless, the abstract notion of the “Jew” that underlies much of this analysis of Jews in culture has also been subjected to critique. For Max Silverman, the Jews figure in poststructuralist thought as “an ethnic allegory to characterize the tension between order and disorder, reason and the resistance to reason, the self-constituted self and the heterogeneous self, Europe and its other(s)” (Silverman 1998: 198-99) or, as Elizabeth Bellamy puts it, “tropes or signifiers for the decentred, destabilized postmodern subject in a theoretical system that persists in defining (or ‘fetishizing’) them from without” (Bellamy 1997: 78). Indeed, Jewish difference in the form of specific religious and cultural practices was conspicuously absent from both theoretical and historical work (Boyarin and Boyarin 1993; Weingrad 1996). It was in this context that the first generation of Jewish cultural studies scholars turned to Jewish history. Armed with the toolkit of contemporary critical theory they aimed to overturn, rather than explain, deeply ingrained pejorative notions that had been associated with Jews.
One of the earliest and most striking works in this vein, Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man (1997) by the Talmud scholar Daniel Boyarin, re-read classical Jewish texts through the lens of gender theory. As George Mosse and Sander Gilman had influentially argued, in the process of instituting modern masculinity as muscular and militaristic, European culture had established a derogatory association between Jewish men and effeminacy (Mosse 1985; Gilman 1991). But, Boyarin argued, early Jewish texts, composed when Jews were subject to Roman rule, evidence a different set of values, in which humility and scholarliness are held in the highest esteem as markers of masculinity. “The vector of my theoretical-political work,” Boyarin declared, “ ... is not to deny as anti-Semitic fantasy but to reclaim the nineteenth-century notion of the feminized Jewish male, to argue for his reality as one Jewish ideal going back to the Babylonian Talmud.” Such work constitutes a “project of reclamation of Jewish culture from the depradations of the civilizing, colonializing onslaught to which it has been subject” and also “may help us precisely today in our attempts to construct an alternative masculine subjectivity” (Boyarin 1997: xiv, xviii). Thus for Boyarin, postmodern theory can open up ancient Jewish texts to uncover the oppositional potential of Jewish culture in both its original and modern contexts.
The binary structures that organize the interpretation of Jewishness were challenged in other ways by new theoretical work in Jewish cultural studies. If modern European culture established the racial categories of “Jew” and “Aryan,” and the advent of the state of Israel produced the opposition of “Jew” and “Arab,” scholars of Middle Eastern culture have argued for different models of identity, uncovered from the texts of the past. Gil Anidjar looks to the Enlightenment category of the “Semite,” which, in constituting modern conceptions of religion and race, brought together the Jew and the Arab (Anidjar 2008). For Ammiel Alcalay, too, relocating Jewish culture within the Arab world of the Levant “problematizes many of the prevalent divisions and suppositions regarding the study and categorization of ‘Jewish’ texts” (Alcalay 1993: 23). The fissure in the contemporary world between Jews and Arabs, especially brutal in the context of Israel/Palestine, “makes the need to stake claims on a past that offers possibility instead of closure both urgent and necessary” (Alcalay 1993: 33). For these scholars, studying literary texts and the complex, multilingual environments of cultural exchange that engendered them, enables us to remember and imagine alternative identities in the present.
The work of Boyarin, Anidjar, and Alcalay aimed to undo assumptions about the relationship between Jews and gender, nation and race. Another freighted term in interpretations of Jewish experience—diaspora—underwent re-evaluation by Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin in their influential article “Diaspora: Generation and the Ground of Jewish Identity” (1993). The ancient loss of political sovereignty and the experience of unrootedness, they argue, far from a tragedy, was in fact constitutive of rabbinic Judaism and centuries of Jewish life. The idea of a Jewish state, therefore, “represents the substitution of a European, Western cultural-political formation for a traditional Jewish one that has been based on a sharing, at best, of political power with others and that takes on entirely other meanings when combined with political hegemony” (Boyarin and Boyarin 1993: 712). The Boyarins look to rabbinic Judaism and the prophetic scriptural texts to reclaim the notion of Diaspora as “a theoretical and historical model to
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replace national self-determination,” in which identity can be based on both attachment to “ethnic, cultural specificity but in a context of deeply felt and enacted human solidarity” (ibid.: 711, 720). The Jewish Diaspora, they argue, offers a universal lesson for our own times, that “peoples and lands are not naturally and organically connected”; moreover that “cultures are not preserved by being protected from ‘mixing’ but probably can only continue to exist as a product of such mixing. Cultures, as well as identities, are constantly being remade” (ibid.: 723, 721).
For queer theorists too, studying Jews has liberatory potential. A number of queer theorists have been interested in the figure of the assimilated Jew, especially at the moment, in late nineteenth-century Europe, of the simultaneous emergence of the sciences of sexology and race (Boyarin et al. 2003). After emancipation, when Jewish identity might not be overtly visible in form or predictable in content, it could read as coded or closeted. In this context, Janet R. Jakobsen argues, the analogy between Jewish and queer enables us “to recognize, and then resist, the constitution of their relation within a negative discourse” (Jakobsen 2003: 73). However, she then turns to contemporary culture to pose the question: “Must we think ... of Jews as the stable ground for an identity? Is Jewishness something that we are? Or, could it, like queer, be something we do?” (ibid.: 82). Drawing on Judith Butler’s theory that bodies are not physical facts but are produced by an iteration of performed, recognizable norms, Jakobsen pursues a discussion of the public self-fashioning of Barbra Streisand. In particular, she reads Streisand’s nose “not simply as a physical characteristic but as an action—a refusal, in fact—a refusal to get it ‘fixed’.” Thus, in Jakobsen’s argument, “Streisand’s Jewishness is related not to her heritage per se but to her actions” (Jakobsen 2003: 83). This approach enables us to consider the Jewish body, once the denigrated object of racial theory, as an aspect of Jewish cultural practice.
Yet while the image of Barbra Streisand has proved remarkably amenable to theoretical analysis, it is something of an exceptional case. Indeed we might note the more common disjunctions between theorists and practitioners of modern Jewish culture: writers and _ artists working in the late twentieth century were more concerned with reconstructing identities than with deconstructing them. One key feature of Jewish art and literature, for example, has been the persistent challenge it has posed to a heritage of assimilation and its erasure of Jewish difference. Recent British Jewish writers, for example, according to Bryan Cheyette, deliberately subvert the values of upward social mobility and staunch patriotism that characterized the immigrant generation (Cheyette 1998). In the American art world, meanwhile, argues Norman Kleeblatt, the complex nature of Jewish identity has only been voiced since the 1990s, emerging from a period when assimilated Jewish artists and critics were highly visible while Jewish particularism remained marginalized. American artists began to address Jewishness through irony, paradox, and humor; they confronted normative physical and aesthetic values through parodic reworkings of ethnic stereotypes in popular culture, they commented on the commodification of Judaism through the visual rhetoric of pop art, they produced witty feminist reworkings of traditional ritual (Kleeblatt 1996). On the entry wall to the New York Jewish Museum’s exhibition Too Jewish? Challenging Traditional Identities (1996) were inscribed the questions: “Who represents us? How are we represented? How do we represent ourselves?” (Boris 2007: 21). Rather than drawing on a Jewish identity conceived in terms of alterity or indeterminacy, these writers and artists articulated their critique of the dominant culture through self-assertion—through being “too Jewish.”
As the twenty-first century began, however, theorists and cultural producers began to have more and more to say to each other. The curatorial principles informing The New Authentics: Artists of the Post-Jewish Generation (2007) at the Spertus Museum in Chicago were underpinned by some new assumptions: that all identities are constructed, that they are multiple, hybrid, and uncertain, that Jewish communities are plural and dynamic. Following similar developments in the curation of black and ethnic minority artists, artists were no longer required to speak exclusively to their identities as Jews. Their work might draw partially or obliquely on Jewish heritage and memory, but could also respond individually to both personal circumstances and social forces. The legacy of the Holocaust, for example, often appears indirectly, its imagery used, the curator Staci Boris explains, “as source material in the service of raising broader issues, from universal humanitarian concerns to aesthetic challenges. For these artists the Holocaust has global implications as well as personal meaning and becomes part of a larger discourse on the ways in which history and identity are transmitted, constructed and interwoven” (Boris 2007: 24). The work of Orthodox-raised painter Shoshana Dentz, for example, explores the imagery of the keffiyeh design, creating “an undulating optical abstract pattern that conjures myriad politically laced references: a shrouded body, a rolling landscape, or a seemingly endless chain link fence, like one that might surround a refugee camp or define a border” (Nelson 2007: 73). Later work constructed around the form of barbed wire pursues the symbolism of enclosure, containment, and power derived from and alluding to multiple sites: the concentration camp, abandoned non-spaces in US inner cities, the Israeli security fence. In Dentz’s repeated manipulation of perspective, Sarah Giller Nelson insightfully notes, ““What side of the fence are you on?’ takes on literal, political and moral dimensions” (Nelson 2007: 77); yet neither the artist’s nor the viewer’s own identity can provide easy answers.
Perhaps most challenging of all manifestations of contemporary Jewish culture is the development of what Ruth Ellen Gruber has called the “Jewish-style” restaurant, entertainment, and souvenir industry in post-Communist eastern Europe. The branding and marketing of a set of signifiers associated with Hasidic Jewry (beards, black hats, earlocks) in Krakow, Kiev, and Prague has facilitated a successful tourist economy and local economic regeneration. However, these kitsch, and often crass, forms of nostalgia for the lost world of east European Hasidic Jewry frequently draw on the use of racial stereotypes with little regard for the historical weight they carry. This commercial appropriation of “Virtual Judaism” in places where Jewish populations were decimated has attracted considerable critique. Yet, as Gruber shows, the same souvenir object (the widely available, mildly caricatural “Jew” figurine) is understood differently by different Jewish and non-Jewish purchasers: as an example of traditional folk art, an ironic reflection on stereotyping, or a representation of Jewish authenticity. The social picture, moreover, is also growing more complex, with the recent involvement of Jews in these enterprises, the revival of Jewish religious and secular lives in these locations, and the new forms of Jewish cultural life that are now emerging, more integrated with the contemporary non-Jewish environment than oriented towards an imagined past (Gruber 2011). Rather than reading representations of Jews entirely in terms of the historical associations they evoke, analysts of contemporary Jewish culture must also consider its multiple sites of consumption and interpretation.
New work on contemporary, rather than historical Jewish cultures has also resulted in a rethinking of the theoretical terms in which Jews are discussed. In their study of Jews in western urban centers, for example, Caryn Aviv and David Shneer point out that the notion of diaspora, so central in recent years to an understanding of the particularity of the Jewish historical experience, now appears redundant in the context of the increasing affluence of the Jews on the one hand and increasing global mobility on the other. Jews no longer understand themselves in terms of their affiliation either to nation-states or to Jewish nationalism, but instead identify with local sites of belonging that they themselves have created. Aviv and Shneer assert: “Jews today craft identities, not as diasporic, homeless, or exilic subjects but as people rooted in and tied to particular places” (Aviv and Shneer 2005: 19).
It is crucial to bear in mind, however, that there is no more consensus in the contemporary world than there ever has been about who is a Jew. While Jews in Moscow or New York display a confident rootedness, and require authorization by neither nation-state nor Zionism, others remain outside the pale. The Lemba tribe of Southern Africa, for example, or the Igbo of Nigeria, who have longstanding traditions of Judaic cultural practice, are not regarded as halakhically Jewish. It is these marginalized Jews who are the subject of the newest subfield of Jewish studies, genetic anthropology; in a strange irony, discussion of Jewish origins and Jewish identity has, most recently, returned once again to the Jew’s body. As the twenty-first century gets underway, then, this appeal to biology joins the array of divergent directions for theorizing contemporary Jews. While many critics continue to explore Jewishness as a site of radical ambiguity, others now consider the specific ways that it is produced, reproduced, and consumed in everyday life.
Jews in contemporary cultures
Many of these new directions exploring the various constitutions and representations of Jewish identity and cultural diversity were anticipated and illustrated by the groundbreaking 1997 critical anthology, Jews and Other Differences: The New Jewish Cultural Studies, edited by Jonathan and Daniel Boyarin. Essays on memory and self-fashioning, the rhetorical and political uses of discourses about Jews, and on the ways that bodies, languages, and material goods articulate and construct Jewish identities reflected the adoption and hegemony of poststructuralist and postcolonial theory and criticism among researchers in the social sciences and the humanities. As we have shown, those critical perspectives transformed the ways in which scholars questioned the making and meaning of cultures and they greatly expanded the topics and subject matters they addressed. They also reflected the ways that attention to race, class, gender, and sexuality had transformed the landscape of the modern university. The Boyarins pointed to the formation of British cultural studies in the 1970s “when the dismantling of the British empire was beginning to force a reshaping and rethinking of the British university system” (Boyarin and Boyarin 1997: vii), but readers in the US would also have recognized that the impact of British cultural studies on the American academy coincided with changes in the US university system in the aftermath of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, which both expanded and remade the departments in which faculty taught and the canons that students encountered.
The Boyarins’ introduction explained what the new Jewish cultural studies looked like in practice toward the end of the millennium, and what issues and concerns connected and distinguished it from cultural studies in general and US ethnic studies in particular. Perhaps it is too personal a note to say how refreshing it was to read, finally, an acknowledgment of the friction between an older model of Jewish studies in the academy, which seemed self-referential and overly text-centered, and “programs such as Latino, African American, or gay and lesbian studies—those ‘particulars’ where the most exciting work in cultural studies often gets argued through and articulated” (Boyarin and Boyarin 1997: ix). It was inspiring, as well, to read that “one of our main goals is to move toward recognition of Jewish culture as part of the world of differences to be valued and enhanced by research in the university, together with the differences of other groups hanging onto cultural resources similarly at risk of being consumed by a liberal and that such work “will have political and social effects” (ibid.: xi). The new Jewish cultural studies thus promised young scholars and a new generation of students not
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universalist ethos,’
only new intellectual work to engage, but also a meaningful place at the university table and a renewed significance amidst programs and researchers at the cutting edge of work exploring the heterogeneity of cultures and identities.
Almost two decades later the Boyarins’ volume remains a prescient documentation of where Jewish studies was headed as it entered the twenty-first century. In addition, its emphasis on modernist and contemporary phenomena suggested that contemporary changes in Jews’ social, cultural, and political arrangements in the US, UK, Europe, and Israel—especially evident in popular and mass culture—were ripe for scholarly investigation. To be sure, the Boyarins and the contributors to their volume were not the only ones in Jewish studies who intuited these portents, who engaged research projects that considered race, class, gender, and sexuality, or who militated for Jewish representation and inclusivity in university curricula and faculty. But the volume gave prominent voice to a shift in Jewish studies that took place over the latter half of the twentieth century and whose outcome is evident in the title of David Biale’s Cultures of the Jews: A New History (2002): the emphasis is on cultures in the plural, with “culture” very broadly defined as not “just the literary or aesthetic products of a society,” but also “the practice of everyday life. It is what people do, what they say about what they do, and, finally, how they understand both of these activities” (Biale 2002: xvii). As Ra’anan Boustan, Oren Kosansky, and Marina Rustow argue in their introduction to Jewish Studies at the Crossroads of Anthropology and History: Authority, Diaspora, Tradition (2011) this “pluralist trend,’ now dominant in Jewish studies, is characterized by scholars’ examination of a wider range of texts, their interest also in other modes of cultural expression, and their inclusion of previously neglected social groups and geographical regions (Boustan et al. 2011: 2). This Handbook, then, offers a look at where this pluralist trend has led in terms of scholarly research into contemporary Jewish cultures as well as at the material and phenomena inciting such work and revealed by it.
In that light, the most important development this Handbook reflects is that the earlier emphasis in Jewish studies on cultural identity has given way to an emphasis on cultural dynamism. The Boyarins’ book focused—not surprisingly given their historical moment—primarily on identity and on identity politics. The motivating questions their contributors asked were meant to interrogate and unmoor intellectual certainties about defining Jews, Jewishness, Jewish discourses, or a unitary Jewish culture and to expand the social and political meanings of a Jewish identity. As the Boyarins say right at the start of their introduction, the new Jewish cultural studies seeks, first, “to discover ways to make Jewish literature, culture, and history work better to enhance Jewish possibilities for living richly; and second by uncovering the contributions that Jewish culture still has to make to tikkun olam, the “repair of the world” (Boyarin and Boyarin 1997: vii). While that elevating and redemptive stance is of a piece with the Boyarins’ intellectual project at the time, their mission for Jewish cultural studies no longer speaks to a new generation of students and scholars, who are less interested in reclaiming the meaning and purposes of a Jewish identity than in tracking the varieties and import of contemporary Jewishness and Jewish cultural productions. The vexing questions now are not about—or at least not simply about—selfhood, difference, and the politics of inclusion and representation in higher education. They are about trying to grasp the fast moving shape and dynamics of contemporary Jewish cultures as they are produced and experienced by people in real time within specific material locations and while enmeshed by the fluctuating, interconnected influences of human social and political relations.
Such questions about cultural dynamism owe their formulation to a number of new perspectives in the humanities and social sciences, one of the most important being the “new materialism.” This critical perspective is attuned to the uses and meanings of matter when interpreting contingent and fluid social and cultural formations or the production, circulation, and consumption of both the canonical and the popular arts. It responds to what its practitioners believe was an over-emphasis on language and textuality in late twentieth-century critical theory that limited attention to the social, cultural, and political implications arising from the inter-relation of bodies, objects, and ideas. That oversight resulted, Diana Coole and Samantha Frost argue, in the dominance within the academy of “idealist assumptions” about human reality that focused on subjectivity—which is to say on the vagaries of human consciousness and_self-understanding—and so privileged thinking about, and investigations of, “idealities fundamentally different from matter and valorized as superior to the baser desires of biological material or the inertia of physical stuff’ (Coole and Frost 2010: 2). Their call for a new materialism, one no longer under the shadow of older approaches indebted to phenomenology or Marxism, resonates in many ways with the ambitions of the scholars gathered in this volume, and reflects a renewed attention to the quotidian and performative aspects of contemporary human activity and experience:
This means returning to the most fundamental questions about the nature of matter and the place of embodied humans within a material world; it means taking heed of developments in the natural sciences as well as attending to transformations in the ways we currently produce, reproduce, and consume our material environment. It entails sensitivity to contemporary shifts in the bio- and eco-spheres, as well as to changes in global economic structures and technologies. It also demands detailed analyses of our daily interactions with material objects and the natural environment.
(Coole and Frost 2010: 3-4)
Scholarship in this mode is thus prepared to acknowledge and take seriously a very wide range of contemporary cultures and cultural productions, and to analyze them in creatively cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary frameworks. Its ethos is also conducive to pragmatic views about the dynamism of social and cultural power, what Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing calls the “friction” inherent in the shared places, spaces, and networks of human activity and experience. For Tsing and others it is crucial now for scholars to acknowledge “the awkward, unequal, unstable, and creative qualities of interconnection across difference” that characterize today’s unpredictable global flows of “goods, ideas, money, and people” because they so aptly illustrate “that heterogeneous and unequal encounters can lead to new arrangements of culture and power” (Tsing 2005: 4-5).
In Jewish studies this turn toward questions about cultural dynamism has fueled a new surge of investigations into the flux and surprising combinatory shapes of contemporary Jewish cultural practices, performances, negotiations, translations, discourses, and artistries. Jonathan Freedman, who works in the intersection between American studies and Jewish studies, has perhaps best expressed the excitement and intellectual purpose scholars find in examining contemporary Jewish cultures from “multiple conceptual contexts” that acknowledge the quicksilver nature of these cultures: “It is, I have come to believe, in the dynamic interplay between individual and collective imaginations, new technologies and the social and cultural institutions they spawned, and the enlarging but reshaping reading, listening, and viewing publics that new configurations of social life are scouted out, tested, and shaped well before they enter into political consciousness” (Freedman 2008: 16). The goal for scholars who share Freedman’s outlook is not so much fixing the distinctiveness or singularity of these new configurations, but rather trying to understand their construction and dissemination as well as their implications for future social and political relationships and cultural arrangements.
In order to showcase the diversity of phenomena and research that this new focus on cultural dynamism brings into view, we commissioned essays, and opted to reprint a few landmarks of current scholarship, that provide as broad a survey as possible of new work, and that link particular case studies to a wide range of scholarly issues and concerns. The volume begins by surveying how various disciplines define “Jewish” and “culture,” two very slippery terms. While interdisciplinarity is one of the key features of contemporary Jewish cultural studies—an acknowledgment of the overlap in research interests among scholars as well as their openness to borrowing methodologies as they see fit—disciplinary perspectives help clarify the distinctive tools and analytics that may be employed in defining and examining something called “Jewish culture” and in gaining purchase on the cultural implications, social challenges, and intellectual stakes involved in such phenomena. The eight disciplinary perspectives included in this Handbook allow readers to consider the gamut of approaches to cultural activities that generally have multiple aesthetic effects and interpretive audiences. They underline that scholars have numerous methodological choices and combinations available to them. Disciplinary perspectives thus provide scholars and students with questions and terms of reference to which they might otherwise not have access from outside their own discipline. They also suggest the ways that traditional disciplines themselves have been challenged and expanded by studying Jewish culture. In short, new patterns of research into Jewish cultures have broken down and reinvigorated disciplinary boundaries, a development we wanted this Handbook to acknowledge and reflect.
This critical refiguring and re-inscription of the arenas in which Jewish studies research is taking place is reflected as well in the section that follows introducing new theorizing about contemporary Jewish cultures. Instead of commissioning reports from specific theoretical perspectives (i.e. psychoanalysis, Marxism, postcolonial theory, queer theory, etc.), we divided this section by theoretical themes. These better capture and present the scholarly approaches—all operating at the interface between Jewish and non-Jewish literatures and cultures, all employing insights from a variety of theoretical schools and movements—that insert Jews and Judaism into broader debates in contemporary critical theory. Importantly, it is not just the practice of Jewish cultures but also their study and theorization that is hybrid and in dynamic relation to non-Jewish contexts and environments. These themes thus help to illustrate those relations and to sort out different modes of understanding contemporary cultural dynamism, especially as those modes are brought to bear on particular aspects of literary and artistic expression and on everyday life among Jews around the globe. Some, like “textuality” and “religion/secularity,” illustrate continuing concern with and speculation about Jewish identity, albeit as a process marked by polyvocalism and negotiation, and one always informed by changing aesthetic, historical, and political contexts. Others, like “power” and “memory,” stress how Jewish cultures are continually subject to social and political forces from both within and without that ultimately privilege certain cultural formations and practices over others, but that are also mustered in service of cultural reflection and introspection that can lead to new configurations of Jewish social and cultural life. And “bodies,” “space and place,” and “networks” introduce new scholarly idioms for the various ways that modern and contemporary Jewish subjectivities are mutually constituted with matter, as well as for the mobile, hybrid, and contingent nature of Jewish materialisms, cultural geography, and social/cultural interconnections in the digital era.
It is precisely in the interest of bringing matter to bear on the abstractions of scholarly research and theorizing that we close this Handbook with “Case Studies.” These illustrate the numerous ways that scholars investigating contemporary Jewish cultures deploy the disciplinary, interdisciplinary, theoretical, and thematic perspectives mapped out in the first two sections. But they also exemplify the focus and rationale of this Handbook in that they are grouped in mini-clusters that speak to specific topics related to the dynamism of contemporary Jewish cultures. The section begins with three essays on Jewish identity performances by both Jews and non-Jews in Europe, Central Asia, Australia, the UK, and Israel that explore memory and memorialization, the performativity of ethnicity/race/gender/sexuality/nationalism, and discursive history. These make clear the sweep, scale, and diverse locales of contemporary Jewish cultures, and their relay through global media and social networks by performers and audiences. An essay considering the place of non-Jewish audiences for a Turkish—Jewish cultural production and two essays on Yiddish, globalization, and urban space—both of which reflect on the inter-relations between the local and the global in North America—comprise the next mini-cluster. These explore media production and minority representation, cultural intercommunication and the politics of translation, and spatial mediation; they indicate why language is in many ways the issue of the moment in Jewish studies because it is quintessentially mobile and contingent, embodied and mortal. Two essays on Orthodox Jewish cultures and their public, material presentations make up a mini-cluster that interrogates gendered spaces, self-identification, religious consumer culture, and the significances of bodies (and their voices) for cultural negotiation and presentation. Both underscore the dynamic nature and cultural diversity of contemporary Orthodox Judaism, which is still too often viewed by journalists and the general public as a homogenous cultural entity and a kind of recrudescent “fundamentalism” that is unaffected by or at best unconcerned with contemporary cultural changes and trends. Two essays on Jewish subjectivity in art and an essay on Jewish identity in sports return attention to the ways that Jewish identity politics are bound up with shifting historical and ideological contexts, as well as the ways that gender, power, and privilege affect constructions of contemporary Jewish memory, Jewish agency, and Jewish subject positions. The section ends with a mini-cluster on two important new developments in contemporary Jewish cultures that speak directly to the scholarly concerns of the new materialism: the rise of a “Jewish genetics” and the overwhelming prevalence of philanthropic venture capital in stoking new Jewish cultures and religiosity.
Any conclusions this volume might offer about contemporary Jewish cultures and their study will by necessity be in the details each section and every essay brings to light. We trust that the cultural patterns those details suggest, and the future social and cultural arrangements they augur, will be evident through the ways that our readers make connections between the case studies, new theorizing, and disciplinary perspectives. As the contributors to this volume will show, there is no one approach to interpreting the two cultural productions that began this introduction, and no one answer to the questions they raise about film and music, contemporary European, Israeli, and US Jewish cultures, and the quick changing spaces and places of vernacular and imaginative Jewish performances. But we do believe the approaches and questions presented in this volume are the most persuasive and productive, that they better equip us to recognize and appreciate the next innovative filmmaker or the next unorthodox musician who even now is stepping in front of a crowd somewhere, ready for a show.
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