New Jewish Identities - Hardcover

These trends and issues obviously bear directly on the future of European Jewry. The Talmud warns that since the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, the gift of prophecy was given to fools and small children. None of the contributors falls into either category and none would dare say with certainty what European Jewry will be like twenty years from now. But they have provided the most comprehensive empirically based portrait of a European Jewry that now includes populations once thought beyond the pale of world Jewry, one which is increasingly defining itself independently of Israeli and American Jewry, but will continue to stand under the same umbrella labeled "Jews."

Identity as a Jew is in most places a matter of choice, making for a wide variety of self-understandings and definitions. Even where tradition is attractive to many Jews, they increasingly sense that it is they who choose the tradition or whatever aspects of the tradition they choose to celebrate; the tradition is not imperative and cannot impose attitudes and forms of behavior.

A distinguished group of sixteen scholars from several countries addresses these issues in this volume. The chapters focus on Jewish meaning—how Jews define the Judaism to which they subscribe and how they define their Jewishness, how they relate to the organized Jewish community, what are the implicit or explicit boundaries of Jewishness. The authors present new data from west European and post-Communist countries (Hungary, Moldova, Poland, Russia, Ukraine) and re-interpret data from other European countries as well as from Israel and the United States, making this a truly comprehensive, comparative and contemporary work.