Cultural Disjunctions: Post-Traditional Jewish Identities
Paul Mendes-Flohr
Abstract
Jews are no longer only Jews. They have acquired multiple identities. These identities are often discontinuous. One’s professional, social, political, and cultural affiliations may engender an identity that might not overlap with one’s inherited identity. As much as they may enrich one personally, this whirl of discontinuous identities might also yield a destabilizing tension with one’s self-understanding as a Jew. The following essay considers this dialectical tension as it is manifest in the expansion of the Jew’s cultural horizons beyond those established by rabbinic tradition. Under the ru ... More
Jews are no longer only Jews. They have acquired multiple identities. These identities are often discontinuous. One’s professional, social, political, and cultural affiliations may engender an identity that might not overlap with one’s inherited identity. As much as they may enrich one personally, this whirl of discontinuous identities might also yield a destabilizing tension with one’s self-understanding as a Jew. The following essay considers this dialectical tension as it is manifest in the expansion of the Jew’s cultural horizons beyond those established by rabbinic tradition. Under the rubric of post-traditional identities (which may still be informed by religious sensibilities and concerns, nor are they necessarily indifferent to traditional Jewish teachings and precept), the volume explores the existential and cognitive ramifications of the resulting cultural disjunctions. These reflections are guided by overarching concern how post-traditional Jews may circumvent the Scylla of a cosmopolitan syncretism and the Charybdis of ethnic patriotism.
Keywords:
cultural disjunctions,
post-traditional Jewish identities,
second innocence,
identity politics,
Jewish learning,
phenomenology of faith,
rooted cosmopolitanism
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2021 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780226784861 |
| Published to Chicago Scholarship Online: January 2022 |
DOI:10.7208/chicago/9780226785059.001.0001 |
