Shades of Jewishness : the creation and maintenance of a liberal Jewish community in post-Shoah Germany
Year: 2009
Type: dissertation
Abstract: This PhD thesis focuses on the creation and maintenance of the liberal Jewish \ncommunity in present day Cologne, Germany. The community has the telling name \nGescher LaMassoret, which translates into „Bridge to Tradition.‟ The name gives away \nthat this specific community, its individual members and its struggles cannot be \nunderstood without the socio-historic context of Germany and the Holocaust. Although \nthis Jewish community is not a community of Holocaust survivors, the dichotomy \nJewish-German takes various shapes within the community and surfaces in the \nnarratives of the individual members. These narratives reflect the uniqueness of each \nindividual in the community. While this is a truism, this individual uniqueness is a key \nelement in Gescher LaMassoret, whose membership consists of people from various \ncountries who have various native languages. Furthermore, the community comprises \nmembers of Jewish descent as well as Jews of conversion who are of German, non- \nJewish parentage. Due to the aftermaths of the Holocaust and the fact that Gescher LaMassoret houses a vast internal diversity, the creation of this community which lacks \nany tradition happens through mixing and meshing the life-stories and other narratives \nof the members, which flow into the collective narrative of the community. On the \nsurface, the narratives of the individual members seem in conflict, they even contradict \neach other, which means that the narrative of the community is in constant tension. \nHowever, under the dissimilarities on the surface of the individual narratives hide \nsimilarities in terms of shared values and attitudes, which allow for enough overlaps to \ncreate a community by way of braiding a collective narrative, which offers the \nmembers to experience a 'felt ethnicity.'
Author: Daniela Kranz
Language: English
Topic: Jewish Identity and Society
Subfield: Religious studies
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1561283490