As I have shown, throughout his essays, Gordon establishes a narrative of the past in the Diaspora which is distinctly negative, drawing on images of the Jewish people as passive and parasitic, alienated from nature and labor and accordingly without a living culture. Through his ideology, Gordon establishes an idea of the perfect relationship between people, nature and labor; a relationship that must be withheld in order for a people to be a living, creative culture. Gordon asserts that the Jewish people have been kept apart from the natural sphere in their own land in which they developed as a people, and have been severed from direct contact with nature in the countries where they are living in Diaspora, thus creating a strictly negative identity for the Diasporic Jews. The Diaspora experience is presented by Gordon as an identity defining experience that is presupposed as part of the Jewish self-understanding. The ideology of Gordon indicates that the Diaspora was a degrading and negative experience for all Jews:
“I look at you, my people. I see you degraded, hungry, poor, thirsty, beaten and wounded, torn and martyred, no longer a giant; the light of your countenance has faded… you are wretched, very wretched, no one as wretched as you - only wretched, nothing else! You crawl in the mire and your little ones cry deafeningly”
(Letters, III:137).
The idea of the Diaspora and the identity of the group influenced each other, so that the concept of Jewish identity was shaped by the experience of the Diaspora, and the perception of the Diaspora was influenced by the perceived identity as the Jewish people destined for Palestine.
As the Diaspora experience is presented as a distinct identity trait of the Jewish people, there is ...
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...omy created through strong opposite identities helps Gordon consolidate his goal of reasserting the Jewish people as a strong nation rebuilding their homeland and their faith. Gordon’s goal is to create a new kind of Jew, who works in the land with manual labor in unison with nature. For this ideal to be attractive he needs to establish a strong opposite in order to crystallize the necessity for the change. As a narrative construction, the negation of the Diaspora serves an important function in Gordon’s essays, first because it establishes a certain ideology within his community of readers, and second because it effectively establishes a set of boundaries between the future in Palestine and the past in the Diaspora. By determining Jews certain downfall in the Diaspora through the estrangement from labor, pioneers are encourages to embrace hard labor in the Yishuv.
In order to obtain religious, social, political, and equality 23 million Jews immigrated to America during the years between 1880 and 1920 (Chametzky, 5). Anzia Yezierska wrote about her experiences as a poor immigrant in her fictional work becoming a voice of the Jewish people in the1920s. She struggled to obtain an education that allowed her to rise above her family’s poverty and gain a measure of autonomy. Rachel and Sara, the female protagonists, mirror the author’s life going from struggling immigrant to college graduate. Yezierska uses her own experiences to portray the Jewish immigrant experience with a woman’s perspective. She successfully gained a commercial following that allowed her to mediate the cultural differences between the mainstream culture and the Jewish people that helped resolve differences between the established Americans and these new immigrants for a time (Ebes...
I chose to write about Jewish-Americans after my mother, who was raised Christian, chose to identify herself as Jewish. In my reading I examined Jewish culture and how it is in American society. I looked at how Jewish-American culture has become a prominent component of American society. I looked at the historical forces that have shaped Jewish-American experience in the United States. I looked at demographics of where most Jewish-Americans live. I examined how Jewish-Americans have contributed to our culturally pluralistic society in the United States.
When Hasidim, who belong to an ultra-pious movement within Orthodox Judaism, immigrated during the post World War ll era in large numbers to America, they sought to build a community similar to the European Shtetl culture to which they were accustomed. In the Shtetl they had lived a traditional and insular lifestyle. Hasidic leaders of the new immigrants founded communities that shunned contemporary Western Culture. Their successors continue to lead the mainstream Hasidic establishment with the same ideals. The only contact with society at large these communities accept is the contact that is necessary for them to nourish themselves.
So what can we understand about Jewish identity from this piece? Brandeis does not shy away from the importance of Jewish history. In fact he lauds it as the impetus behind the outstanding qualities which the Jews of his day possessed. “…They have not come to us by accident; they developed by three thousand years of civilization…” (Glatzer 707).
With the creation of Israel, Jews have all the objective accoutrements of a civilization: religion, language, customs, literature, institutions, and a territorial and political home. But what about subjective identification? Jews living in other cultures have distributed themselves along a continuum stretching from total identification with Judaism and Israel to nominal Judaism and full identification with the civilization within which they reside, the latter, however, occurr...
"On Ethnic Definitions" is one of the shortest poems in Eleanor Wilner's anthology Reversing the Spell, but it is arguably one of the most powerful. In "Definitions," Wilner addresses issues of Jewish identity. As the title implies, she defines the Jewish people in ten lines. The nature of her definition is not immediately obvious, however. At first, readers unfamiliar with Jewish theology may believe that Wilner's definition is a bleak one that centers around death. It does at first appear that Wilner is saying that the very definition of the Jewish people is their death and burial, their destruction. However, after a brief explanation of the Jewish theology behind the poem, readers will see that Wilner's definition of the Jewish people is by no means a sad one, but rather a definition that includes hope and a future.
In this essay, I will break down this passage from Antin’s book, The Promised Land, into its components. I will explain how those components fit together and discuss their possibilities of meaning. Antin’s discourse will be reviewed and the fit of this piece into her discourse will be evaluated. In doing these steps, it will put the meaning behind Antin’s words that the attempts of the Gentiles to break and convert the Jewish people of Russia brings them closer together and to God in the face of the tyranny of the Czar.
...f society. The second point of view held that Jews were inherently bad and can never be salvaged despite any and all efforts made by Christians to assimilate them. These Christians felt that there was absolutely no possibility of Jews having and holding productive positions in society. All the aforementioned occurrences lead to the transformation of traditional Jewish communities, and paved the way for Jewish existence, as it is known today. It is apparent, even through the examination of recent history that there are reoccurring themes in Jewish history. The most profound and obvious theme is the question of whether Jews can be productive members of their country and at the same time remain loyal to their religion. This question was an issue that once again emerged in Nazi Germany, undoubtedly, and unfortunately, it is not the last time that question will be asked.
The seventeenth century not only marks an important era in Jewish history, the arrival of Jews in the New World, but it marks a shift in Jewish ideology as well. Traditionally, in the Old World prior to the Inquisition, Jews did not live as individuals but rather as a part of a social network or community that worshipped together, studied together, at times lived together, and had the same set of beliefs. During, and for sometime after the Inquisition, some secret Jews were part of an underground community but other secret Jews chose not to be part of any Jewish community, secret or not, out of fear. It was not until the seventeenth century that there was a conscious break in the tradition of being part of a community and some Jews chose the path of individualism, because they were dissatisfied with the confines of their current Jewish community or they were forced to abandon their community and worship individually. When Jews began to move from the Old World to the New World they were forced with the challenge of figuring out how they were supposed to practice Judaism when there was no current Jewish framework in place. When Portuguese Jews arrived in the New World they were forced to live outside of the traditional community because there was no Jewish community to greet them in New Amsterdam. In the seventeenth century, it was not the norm for a Jew to live outside of the Jewish community, but it was possible; one’s willingness or necessity to live outside of the community depended upon one’s geographical location, fear, or personal convictions.
...lized, empowered and disempowered. The most basic binary pair in identity creation is the distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’. The ‘other’ is an essential component of any group’s project of self-definition (Barth: 15). Most sociological studies of groups self-identity an boundary creation deals with the relationship between two different groups within the same period and vicinity. However, in Gordon’s essays the binary pair is between the ‘us’ of the future and the ‘them’ of the past; As will be evident further on in my analysis Gordon establishes the Jewish diasporic past as an anti-thesis to the Jewish future in the Yishuv. Gordon builds his creation of the Jewish diasporic identity on the discourse used within Zionism, and establishes the future as the opposite. Throughout my analysis I will show how Gordon effectually establishes these two opposing identities.
For a Jew arriving in America from Europe starting anew marked a defining point. After losing six million Jews in the Holocaust, the United States of America served as one of the most secure havens for reestablishing a strong Jewish presence ...
Most interpretations of history are to some extend based on an arbitrary selection of events influenced by ideology. Accordingly, they can easily assume a mythical character, which can function to legitimize social and political practices or mobilize action or identification with a cause through anchoring of the present in the past and actualization of the past in the present. Through this mythologization, nations, social groups or set of individuals produce its collective memory and establish their distinctive identity (Wistrich and Ohana 1995: ix). In order to understand how the Zionist movement creates their specific view on the Diaspora, and how Gordon uses this view to establish a distinct identity for the Jewish people, we must understand the mechanics of collective memory.
Knott , Kim, and Seán McLoughlin, eds. Diasporas Concepts, Intersections, Identities. New York : Zed Books, 2010. Print.
In Judah Leib Gordon’s poem, the speaker expresses a favorable tone toward his Eastern European partners while criticizing the traditional Jewish education system, one popular idea that assisted the divide in Jewry. Gordon pointedly states, “This land of Eden [Russia],” bringing forth a clear analogy of Russia to Eden, which emphasizes the respect he shows towards Russia. He further emphasizes that “already [the people of Russia] have removed the weight of suffering from [the Jewish] shoulder” (Awake My People!). Through his sentimental appeals, he asks the Jewish people to realize that the land that they are in and the people they are surrounded by are those who have helped the Jewish people reach a land of safety much like
For the purposes of this study I have defined cultural identity as the feeling of self-definition an individual has which is formed through a sense of belonging to a certain group. In this presentation I will be looking specifically at the effects of religion to this sense of cultural identity.