The Politics of Fear: Israel and American Jewish Collective Identity
Description
While the state of Israel has long been at the center of Jewish collective identity, there has been increasing fragmentation among American Jews with regard to Israel over the last several years, with the most pronounced disaffection occurring among young people. It is within this shifting, unstable dynamic that the dominant Jewish organizations cultivate Jewish collectivity, explicitly constructing American Jews’ attachment to Israel as inextricable from collective Jewish identity. Based on 18 months of ethnographic research in the Bay Area of Northern California, this paper looks at how these organizations construct Jewish collective identity, arguing that they do so largely through promoting a form of collective memory that highlights persecution, threat, and fear of annihilation as essential characteristics of Jewish collectivity. Using data gathered through hundreds of hours of participant observation in Jewish community gatherings, this paper explores the ways in which Jewish leaders and laypeople understand authentic Jewish identity as revolving around the expression of fear over perceived threats to Jewish existence.
As more young American Jews seem to disengage from Israel and Jewish life, conventional wisdom holds that the cause of their distance is a problem of memory. This logic asserts that generational distance from the Holocaust and from a fledgling Israeli state have led young Jews to feel safe in the world and therefore to be less inclined towards Israel, seen to embody Jewish survival in a threatening world. Acting in response to this logic, dominant Jewish organizations seek to promote a collective identity that rests on a vision of Jewish vulnerability. This version of collective identity illustrates the use of collective memory as a social construction used to shape culture and forge identity. In this case, dominant Jewish organizations take the Jewish past as primarily an experience of trauma, the proper response to which is advocating for Israeli interests. This paper shows how, given American political, financial and military support for Israel and the American Jewish community’s political influence, American Jews’ fear-focused identity project has both symbolic and material ramifications for Jews and Palestinians in Israel and the Palestinian Territories.
The Politics of Fear: Israel and American Jewish Collective Identity
While the state of Israel has long been at the center of Jewish collective identity, there has been increasing fragmentation among American Jews with regard to Israel over the last several years, with the most pronounced disaffection occurring among young people. It is within this shifting, unstable dynamic that the dominant Jewish organizations cultivate Jewish collectivity, explicitly constructing American Jews’ attachment to Israel as inextricable from collective Jewish identity. Based on 18 months of ethnographic research in the Bay Area of Northern California, this paper looks at how these organizations construct Jewish collective identity, arguing that they do so largely through promoting a form of collective memory that highlights persecution, threat, and fear of annihilation as essential characteristics of Jewish collectivity. Using data gathered through hundreds of hours of participant observation in Jewish community gatherings, this paper explores the ways in which Jewish leaders and laypeople understand authentic Jewish identity as revolving around the expression of fear over perceived threats to Jewish existence.
As more young American Jews seem to disengage from Israel and Jewish life, conventional wisdom holds that the cause of their distance is a problem of memory. This logic asserts that generational distance from the Holocaust and from a fledgling Israeli state have led young Jews to feel safe in the world and therefore to be less inclined towards Israel, seen to embody Jewish survival in a threatening world. Acting in response to this logic, dominant Jewish organizations seek to promote a collective identity that rests on a vision of Jewish vulnerability. This version of collective identity illustrates the use of collective memory as a social construction used to shape culture and forge identity. In this case, dominant Jewish organizations take the Jewish past as primarily an experience of trauma, the proper response to which is advocating for Israeli interests. This paper shows how, given American political, financial and military support for Israel and the American Jewish community’s political influence, American Jews’ fear-focused identity project has both symbolic and material ramifications for Jews and Palestinians in Israel and the Palestinian Territories.