Mapping jewish identities

Is flourishing or in decline? Community leaders and scholarly researchers continually seek to determine the attitudes, beliefs, and activities that best measure identity. At issue, according to these studies, is the very survival of the community itself. But such studies rarely ask what actually is being examined when we attempt to assess Jewish identity or any identity. Most tend to assume that is a preexisting, relatively fixed frame of reference reflecting shared cultural and historical experiences. Drawing on recent work in such fields as cultural studies, poststructuralist theory, postmodern philosophy, and feminist theory, Mapping Identities challenges this premise. Contesting conventional approaches to identity, contributors argue that should be conceptualized as an ongoing dynamic process of becoming in response to changing cultural and social conditions rather than as a stable defining body of traits. Contributors, including Daniel Boyarin, Laura Levitt, Adi Ophir, and Gordon Bearn, examine such topics as American Jews' desires to connect with a lost immigrant past through photography, the complicated function of the Holocaust in the formation of contemporary Jews, the impact of the struggle with the Palestinians on Israeli group construction, and the ways in which repressed voices such as those of women, Mizrahim, and Israeli Arabs have changed our ways of thinking about and Israeli identity.