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.”

The Challenge of a Jewish State

2015 ◽  
pp. 135-180
Author(s):  
David H. Weinberg
Keyword(s):  
The Netherlands ◽  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
The State ◽  
Modern History ◽  
Jewish State ◽  
The Creation ◽  
First Time ◽  
State Of Israel

This chapter investigates the first of three external challenges which defined Jewish life in western Europe in the late 1940s and 1950s. This was the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. For the first time in modern history, Jews could choose whether or not to live in the diaspora. There were hundreds of survivors in Belgium, France, and the Netherlands who were convinced that they had no future in Europe and migrated to Palestine as soon as they could. Those who chose not to were now forced to think more seriously about their decision to remain in western Europe. Zionist stalwarts, in particular, were challenged to reassess their role now that the Jewish state was a reality. What resulted was a transformation in collective and personal behaviour and attitudes that largely strengthened collective Jewish identity and commitment.

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.

The OAU and the Mozambique Revolution

1973 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-32
Author(s):  
D. Elwood Dunn
Keyword(s):  
Self Determination ◽  
Keynote Address ◽  
African Unity ◽  
Regional Organization ◽  
Kwame Nkrumah ◽  
Organization Of African Unity ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Total Agreement

One of the strongest impulses that led to the creation of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) in 1963 was the desire of free Africa to hasten independence in colonized Africa. When the leaders of independent Africa convened to inaugurate the first international regional organization of its kind in Africa, there seemed total agreement on the principle of self-determination. What Kwame Nkrumah had proclaimed six years earlier upon Ghana's accession to independence was echoed in the keynote address of the Ethiopian Emperor: “Our liberty is meaningless unless all Africans are free. Our brothers in the Rhodesias … Mozambique … cry out in anguish for our support and assistance.”

Introduction

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Wagner
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
World History ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
World Region ◽  
Collective Self ◽  
History Of ◽  
Northern Atlantic ◽  
The Creation ◽  
History Of Europe

This book examines the temporality of modernity by focusing on the relations between Africa, America and Europe. More specifically, it considers the extent to which the supposed arrival of modernity in Europe affects the ways in which human beings situate themselves in time and history worldwide. It also explores how institutionally entrenched interpretations of modernity based on inequality and oppression are transformed into novel forms that are shaped by the drive to inclusive–egalitarian collective self-determination. In linking the history of Europe to world history, the book shows that what is often referred to as ‘the rise of Europe’ was the creation of an Atlantic world region with increasingly dense but highly asymmetric commercial and communicative ties. This introduction discusses the debate over the relation between the history and the theory of modernity, the connection between the Northern Atlantic West and the origins of modernity, and novel interpretations of modernity in Africa and Latin America.

They Sure Will Be of Minority Groups

2018 ◽  
pp. 112-135
Author(s):  
Samira K. Mehta
Keyword(s):  
Minority Groups ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
The Other ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
American Jewish Life ◽  
The Family ◽  
American Jewish ◽  
The One

Interfaith families that are also interracial are less able to seamlessly fit into “mainstream” American Jewish life, which is dominated by Ashkenazi culture and racially coded as white. On the one hand, this can make interactions in Jewish communities more challenging. On the other, these families are often given more freedom and flexibility for including traditions from the Christian side of the family than their white interfaith counterparts.

The Art of Sankofa and Re-Establishing Kujichagulia

2019 ◽  
pp. 41-71
Author(s):  
Kalvin DaRonne Harvell
Keyword(s):  
Black Males ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
The Real ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Creation

As many social critics are just now discovering the racial treatise W.E.B. DuBois advanced more than 100 years ago, the academy continues to devalue, marginalize, and ignore specific voices while choosing to champion, protect, and canonize others. This exclusion allows, or directs, each generation of new scholars to carefully dance around the real problems in education by judiciously repackaging the discourse of their predecessors. This is not to suggest that the intellectual past of a discipline should not be revisited. This does suggest that some aspects of that past, a past often marred by cultural incompetence and the intellectual marginalization of specific groups a discipline pretends to be educating, needs to be considered and critiqued by those groups the discipline has objectified and transformed into others. Intentionally connecting educators to the history of Black self-determination in education may potentially serve to assist in the creation of pedagogy and programs to address the challenges of Black males in education.

Conclusion

2012 ◽  
pp. 360-370
Author(s):  
Shaul Stampfer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Young People ◽  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
Effect Change ◽  
Jewish Society ◽  
Traditional Approaches ◽  
Desire To Change

This concluding chapter examines changes to the role of yeshiva in Jewish society as well as several developments to yeshiva history after the nineteenth century. By the end of the nineteenth century, the changes and conflicts that had struck the Jewish world had affected the yeshiva too. Contemporary discussion of the yeshiva was frequently in the context of the Haskalah and noted its power to effect change. There is no clear answer as to what it was that persuaded young people to abandon traditional Jewish life, but the wholesale attribution of this to the Haskalah is not self-evident. It seems much more likely that the threat to traditional ways came from indifference to Jewish identity rather than from any desire to change that identity. Indifference is naturally hard to identify, and it was easier for conservatives to battle against a concrete enemy, equally eager to do battle, than to engage with an attitude that was so contemptuous of traditional approaches that it did not even bother to argue with them.

scholarly journals “Zwischen allen Stühlen”: Reflections on Judaism in Germany in Victor Klemperer’s Post-Holocaust Diaries

Humanities ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 168
Author(s):  
Sepp
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
Social Situation ◽  
Jewish Origin ◽  
Soviet Occupation ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
German Jewish ◽  
Soviet Occupation Zone

This article focuses as a case study on Victor Klemperer’s diaristic representation of German-Jewish identity and culture after 1945 in the Soviet Occupation Zone and the GDR. The contribution shows how Klemperer’s professional and social situation remained very uncomfortable even in East Germany. For the diarist, the communist code ‘antifascist/fascist’, just like the code ‘German/un-German’ before it, was tantamount to concealing Jewish origin. His post-Holocaust journals provide an immediate insider’s view of Jewish life in Germany after the Holocaust from the perspective of a victim of active persecution. Against this backdrop, the contribution examines how the author’s original German nationalism gradually makes way, caught between contradictory impulses of assimilation and decreed Jewish identity, for a much more complex understanding of his own cultural identity. Klemperer’s diaries highlight a number of tensions that ultimately reflect on the disjunction between living and writing: The divide between a single and changing self lies at the heart of his diaries after 1945, which depict an astute, complex psychogram of the assimilated German-Jewish bourgeoisie that survived the Holocaust and tried to continue living in communist Germany.

Between Race and Nation: Marcus Garvey and the Politics of Self-Determination

2020 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 271-302 ◽  
Author(s):  
Desmond Jagmohan
Keyword(s):  
White Supremacy ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Black Diaspora ◽  
Irish Nationalism ◽  
Independent State ◽  
Marcus Garvey ◽  
Collective Self ◽  
Self Rule ◽  
Argument Proceeds ◽  
The Right

This essay argues that Marcus Garvey held a constructivist theory of self-determination, one that saw nationalism and transnationalism as mutually necessary and reinforcing ideals. The argument proceeds in three steps. First it recovers Garvey’s transnationalist emphasis by looking at his intellectual debts to other diaspora struggles, namely political Zionism and Irish nationalism. Second it argues that Garvey held a constructivist view of national identity, which also grounds his argument that the black diaspora has a right to collective self-determination. Third it explicates Garvey’s further contention that the right to self-determination and the persistence of oppression give the African diaspora a pro tanto claim to an independent state, which he considered essential to vanquishing white supremacy and realizing collective self-rule.

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