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Questioning Jewish Caribbean Identities lends a fresh, psychological approach to identity and Jewishness in the Caribbean. It explores the ways in which individuals in the islands have maintained their connections to Judaism as lineage, as a religion and as a culture. Transported overseas from Spain and Portugal in the 1500s while fleeing the Inquisition, and later during the second wave of exodus from Europe under threat of World War II, the Caribbean provided safe harbours for a number of Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews. There is no doubt that their presence in the Caribbean and Latin America over the last 500 years has had a tremendous impact on the growth and development of industry, modern commerce and culture. Their contribution to their new island homelands has been a lasting one. From the technology for the cultivation of sugar and the development of trade and commerce across the Atlantic, to the arts and education, Jewish life within the region has left and continues to leave an indelible mark.For the author, there have been many stops along the way in completing this book. She has travelled and interacted with Jews across the globe, and these encounters were the genesis of the questions she asked herself about Jews of all descriptions. Indeed, many of the questions and their answers arise from an existential need to rationalise her own thoughts about her personal identity. This is a pattern that the author has noted among a number of the theorists included in this work. From Erickson with his Danish-Jewish background and the subsequent elaboration of his psychosocial theory; to Stuart Hall's cultural theory, born out of his own mixed heritage and later inter-ethnic marriage; and Nathan Blumenthal, who changes his rather Jewish name to Nathaniel Branden as he becomes known for his psychology of self-esteem. Of course, it is impossible to speak of identity without acknowledging the seminal contribution of Freud's psychoanalytic theory as a way of making meaning for ourselves in the world. Common to these theorist and many others, readers will encounter their own struggle with national, personal and ethnic identities while exploring the pages of this book. Claiming an identity suggests an autonomous act of loyalty to chosen identity, and for some this can mean the abandonment of previous ways of seeing themselves. This is the central threat of acts of identity; it signals, "I am with them" and equally, "I have no allegiance to you". These are the sentiments over which battles are waged, causing people who appear indistinguishable from each other to obliterate neighbouring nations. This book is a story of the survival of a people, practice, culture, and religion.
The Jewish diaspora of the Caribbean constantly redefined itself under changing circumstances. This volume looks at many aspects of this complex past and suggests different ways to understand it: as a Jewish diaspora dispersed under different European colonial empires; as a Jewish body joined together by a set of shared Jewish traditions and historical memories; and as one component in a web of relationships that characterized the Atlantic world.
Caribbean Jewish Crossings is the first essay collection to consider the Caribbean's relationship to Jewishness through a literary lens. Although Caribbean novelists and poets regularly incorporate Jewish motifs in their work, scholars have neglected this strain in studies of Caribbean literature. The book takes a pan-Caribbean approach, with chapters addressing the Anglophone, Francophone, Hispanophone, and Dutch-speaking Caribbean. Part 1 traces the emergence of a Caribbean-Jewish literary culture in Suriname, St. Thomas, Jamaica, and Cuba from the late eighteenth century through the early twentieth century. Part 2 brings into focus Sephardic and crypto-Jewish motifs in contemporary Caribbean literature, while Part 3 turns to the question of colonialism and its relationship to Holocaust memory. The volume concludes with the compelling voices of contemporary Caribbean creative writers.
The Jewish presence in Latin America has produced a remarkable body of literature that gives voice to the fascinating experience of Jews in Latin American lands. This book explores how trauma and memory influence the formation of Jewish identity for the fictional Jewish characters of five novels written by Jewish authors born in the Southern Cone.
Being Jewish in Brazil--the world's largest Catholic country--is fraught with paradoxes, and living in São Paulo only amplifies these vivid contradictions. The metropolis is home to Jews from over 60 countries of origin, and to the Hebraica, the world’s largest Jewish athletic and social club. Jewish identity is rooted in layered experiences of historical and contemporary dispersal and border crossings. Brazil is famously tolerant of difference but less understanding of longings for elsewhere. Celebrating both Carnival and the High Holidays is but one example of how Jews in São Paulo hold themselves together as a community in the face of the forces of assimilation. Misha Klein’s fascinating ethnography reveals the complex intertwining of Jewish and Brazilian life and identity.
Explores the full diversity of Black Jews, including bi-racial Jews of both matrilineal and patrilineal descent; adoptees; black converts to Judaism; and Black Hebrews and Israelites, who trace their Jewish roots to Africa and challenge the dominant western paradigm of Jews as white and of European descent. The book showcases the lives of Black Jews, demonstrating that racial ascription has been shaping Jewish selfhood for centuries. It reassesses the boundaries between race and ethnicity, offering insight into how ethnicity can be understood only in relation to racialization and the one-drop rule. Within this context, Black Jewish individuals strive to assert their dual identities and find acceptance within their communities. Putting to rest the notion that Jews are white and the Black Jews are therefore a contradiction, the volume argues that we cannot pigeonhole Black Hebrews and Israelites as exotic, militant, and nationalistic sects outside the boundaries of mainstream Jewish thought and community life. it spurs us to consider the significance of the growing population of self-identified Black Jews and its implications for the future of American Jewry.
"He should have seen it coming. His life had been one mishap after another. So he should have been prepared for this one..." Julian Treslove, a professionally unspectacular and disappointed BBC worker, and Sam Finkler, a popular Jewish philosopher, writer and television personality, are old school friends. Despite a prickly relationship and very different lives, they've never quite lost touch with each other - or with their former teacher, Libor Sevick, a Czechoslovakian always more concerned with the wider world than with exam results. Now, both Libor and Finkler are recently widowed, and with Treslove, his chequered and unsuccessful record with women rendering him an honorary third widower, they dine at Libor's grand, central London apartment. It's a sweetly painful evening of reminiscence in which all three remove themselves to a time before they had loved and lost; a time before they had fathered children, before the devastation of separations, before they had prized anything greatly enough to fear the loss of it. Better, perhaps, to go through life without knowing happiness at all because that way you had less to mourn? Treslove finds he has tears enough for the unbearable sadness of both his friends' losses. And it's that very evening, at exactly 11:30pm, as Treslove hesitates a moment outside the window of the oldest violin dealer in the country as he walks home, that he is attacked. After this, his whole sense of who and what he is will slowly and ineluctably change. The Finkler Question is a scorching story of exclusion and belonging, justice and love, ageing, wisdom and humanity. Funny, furious, unflinching, this extraordinary novel shows one of our finest writers at his brilliant best.
Generations of marginalized Jewish immigrants and refugees migrated to Chile during the first half of the twentieth century, only to live through persecution during Pinochet's military coup. Maxine Lowy asks how individuals and institutions may overcome fear, indifference, and convenience to take a stand even under intense political duress.
Jews and Judaism played a significant role in the history of the expansion of Europe to the west as well as in the history of the economic, social, and religious development of the New World. They played an important role in the discovery, colonization, and eventually exploitation of the resources of the New World. Alone among the European peoples who came to the Americas in the colonial period, Jews were dispersed throughout the hemisphere; indeed, they were the only cohesive European ethnic or religious group that lived under both Catholic and Protestant regimes, which makes their study particularly fruitful from a comparative perspective. As distinguished from other religious or ethnic minorities, the Jewish struggle was not only against an overpowering and fierce nature but also against the political regimes that ruled over the various colonies of the Americas and often looked unfavorably upon the establishment and tleration of Jewish communities in their own territory. Jews managed to survive and occasionally to flourish against all odds, and their history in the Americas is one of the more fascinating chapters in the early modern history of European expansion.
"This book adds an important new dimension to the worldwide history of the Jewish refugees during the Holocaust."—Jonathan D. Sarna, Brandeis University "Lesser's book explains the Latin American Jewish experience more than any other book I know."—Robert M. Levine, University of Miami