This collection of loosely-linked personal essays explores the fluid nature of individual and cultural identity. In the opening essay, "Midrash," I utilize my past and my ancestor's immigration story to explain my complicated identity as a Texan, Californian, New Yorker, twenty-something woman, and Jew. This is a recurring element in most of the essays in the collection. The settings and contexts of the essays often set the stage for a sense of Diaspora or loss within my own narrative world. I do not offer these moments in time to merely showcase confusion in one's sense of self, but rather to interrogate the complex and multidimensional identities that today's world forces each of us to inhabit. / Graduation date: 2012 / Access permanently restricted to the OSU Community at author's request.

This thesis on Swedish-Jewish identity studies shows that this identity has been constructed between three points that can be found in Lars Dencik’s model “the diasporas star of David”, these points being “the Swedish” “the Jewish” and “the Israeli”. The thesis studies the period between 1948 to 1988 and uses Judisk Krönika as source material. The thesis looks at two keywords of importance to the Swedish Jews, the first being the summer camp “Glämsta” and the second being “religious freedom”. The usage of Albert O. Hirschmann and his theory of people in exile is used to try and se how the Swedish-Jewish group react to when questioned or when they have the need to explain their rights for maintaining a Jewish identity.  The Swedish-Jewish identity was constructed and based explicitly on “the Jewish” and the “Israeli” with a small tendency to favor “the Jewish”. “The Swedish” aspect was not mentioned but can be seen as implicit because of the fact that the Jews live in Sweden.  The main issue was not internal conflict within the Jewish group but rather with the Swedish majority. The results suggest that the Swedish-Jewish group based their identity on a mixture of all of the parts, just at different times. The Swedish-Jewish group changed their reasoning behind motiving their identity over time, firstly they tried to argue that there are no need to react towards Jewish traditions but later during the period they started to protest more when questioned or denied their Jewish traditions.

Can we be accountable to privilege? Can we find a space for coherent anti-racist secular Ashkenazi Jewish identity in North America, where Jews have been deeply implicated in structural violence? Can we be agents of both complicity and change? This auto-ethnography describes a haunting; focusing on the ghostly presences of my deceased uncle Larry Treiman and Bruno Bettelheim, child psychologist and director of the residential treatment facility where Larry was institutionalized as a child, it creates a deeply personal explanation for how the whitening of Ashkenazi North American Jewish identity, the shifts in discourses of madness and major sociological and economic change in Chicago and New York over the second half of the 20th century constituted my subjectivity and my privilege. This text proposes accountability through genealogy, teasing out the possibility for ethical thought and action through cultivating a deeply personal relationship to the ghosts that make us.

Can we be accountable to privilege? Can we find a space for coherent anti-racist secular Ashkenazi Jewish identity in North America, where Jews have been deeply implicated in structural violence? Can we be agents of both complicity and change? This auto-ethnography describes a haunting; focusing on the ghostly presences of my deceased uncle Larry Treiman and Bruno Bettelheim, child psychologist and director of the residential treatment facility where Larry was institutionalized as a child, it creates a deeply personal explanation for how the whitening of Ashkenazi North American Jewish identity, the shifts in discourses of madness and major sociological and economic change in Chicago and New York over the second half of the 20th century constituted my subjectivity and my privilege. This text proposes accountability through genealogy, teasing out the possibility for ethical thought and action through cultivating a deeply personal relationship to the ghosts that make us.

This work consists of a portfolio of creative writing in the form of a collection of short stories, The Jerusalem Syndrome, followed by a thesis, “Biblical Perspectives on the Holiness of Place, Body, and Mortality in The Jerusalem Syndrome Collection”. Attempting to engage the question, ‘what does it mean to be Jewish?, the latter seeks to provide the academic lens to unearth the former. In its stories of ancestry, land, rituals, body practices, theological beliefs and the nature of God’s relationship with his people, the Hebrew Bible lies at the heart of ancient and modern Jewish constructions of identity. The stories of The Jerusalem Syndrome Collection draw on a number of these biblical themes, and similarly seek to explore diverse constructions of Jewish identity in worlds seemingly far removed in time and context from the ancient social contexts from which the biblical texts emerged. Critical biblical scholarship offers modern readers various ‘lenses’ with which to engage the biblical texts — not as ‘scripture’, or even ‘history’ — but ancient literature rich in ancient cultural and ideological debates about the construction of identity, many of which continue to impact modern notions of Jewish identity today. Illustrations of this impact suffuse the stories of The Jerusalem Syndrome Collection. As such, this discussion explores the socio-religious, mythological and theological themes pervading The Jerusalem Syndrome Collection by bringing them into dialogue with critical, scholarly reflections on Judaism’s biblical traditions. A number of these themes cluster around the notion of Israel and the city of Jerusalem as the place at which Jewish identities are negotiated. The characters of The Jerusalem Syndrome Collection encounter various Jewish identities in bodily and material ways, as well as by topographical indices. With particular emphasis on the themes of how place, body, and death are sanctified, this piece will explore the ways in which Jewish identity continues to be contextualized in terms of the cultic, mythological and ritual language derived from the Hebrew Bible. This portfolio — the stories and their dialogue with the Hebrew Bible — is an exploration of some of the key aspects of how Jewish identity unfolds, and how the stories are re-mythologized through biblical history.

Pautando-me pelos dados colhidos em formulários enviados a um grupo de pessoas convertidas ao judaísmo, entre os anos de 2006 e 2016, pela sinagoga da Associação Religiosa Israelita do Rio de Janeiro, pretendo avaliar se aqueles que se convertem causam augum tipo de reconfiguração na identidade da A.R.I. / Guided me on data collected from forms have sent to a group of people converted to Judaism (between 2006-2016) by the synagogue of the Israelite Religious Association (IRA) of Rio de Janeiro, I intend to present the perspectives of those who was converted to cause some kind of reconfiguration of identity IRA.

In this paper, I consider the collection of short stories and photographs Neighborhood Album A by Yemeni Israeli author Simha Zaramati Asta. I argue that Asta contributes to a distinctively Yemeni Jewish literature and identity in Israel. While Asta could be considered a Mizrahi author, I claim that a study of Asta’s text as Mizrahi in fact erases the distinctive Yemeni elements of Asta’s writing. Instead, Asta is purposeful about her inclusion of Yemeni culture and her establishment of Yemeni identity in her text. This Yemeni culture is evident in Asta’s inclusion of the songs of Yemeni Jewish women which constitute an oral tradition of memory within Yemen and Israel. Asta further creates a distinctive Yemeni identity through a sense of place in the Yemeni Quarter of Tel Aviv in both her stories and photographs. Through descriptions of the sights, smells, and traditions of the Yemeni Quarter of Tel Aviv, Asta elevates the neighborhood, claiming it as a place where the divine spirit can be found. While Asta is purposeful in her creation of a distinctively Yemeni Jewish literature and identity, she demonstrates the hybridization of this Yemeni Jewish literature and identity with Israeli literature and identity. By noting the importance of Yemeni Jews to the creation of Israel and the influence of Israel on these Yemeni Jews, Asta claims Israeli identity for Yemeni Jews. She demonstrates the hybridization of the Yemeni Jewish identity and Israeli identity through intertextual references to canonical Israeli poets and authors. Yet while Asta values this hybridization, she uses the characters in her stories to question whether the hybridization of Yemeni Jews in Israel can in fact succeed. / text

This PhD thesis examines the pre-exile writings of Soma Morgenstern, a Jewish- Austrian writer born in 1890 in Budzanów, Galicia. Morgenstern moved to Vienna before he was forced to flee from the Nazis to Paris, where he lived with Joseph Roth. A few years later, he left for New York, where he died in 1976. The 1990s saw the publication of a complete edition of his works, and since then researchers have started, albeit slowly, to pay closer attention to his writings. Nevertheless, even up to present day there has barely been any detailed academic treatment of his writings (1921-1938) of the interwar period. The aim of this thesis is to explore Morgenstern’s fictional and dramatic works and his Feuilleton in terms of formal as well as content, focussing on aspects such as his representations of Jewish identities found between the wars not only in urban Vienna and Berlin but also in rural Galicia. I aim to show how Morgenstern’s works present a new awareness of traditional Jewish values. These, however, are always critically reflected, ironically refracted and occasionally even parodied. An introduction to the corpus is followed by the second chapter, which focuses on places and the way urban and rural spaces are construed in Morgenstern’s works. In Chapters 2 and 3 I will analyse a selection of prominent characters in Morgenstern’s writing and the semiotics of characters’ clothes in interdependency with concepts of identity. The last chapter explores the treatment of the First Austrian Republic in Morgenstern’s interwar works, focussing more closely on the Habsburg-Mythos as well as the growing anti-Semitism of that period in urban and rural spaces.

No description available.

The relationship between the Epistle to the Hebrews and Second Temple Judaism has long been a subject of debate within biblical scholarship. For most of the history of New Testament interpretation, Hebrews has been understood to be a Christian text written for the purpose of deterring Christians from relapsing back into their former religion, Judaism. Recently, however, scholars have argued for a variety of alternative proposals, and some have attempted to situate Hebrews as a text within Judaism. Consensus regarding Hebrews’s relationship to Judaism remains elusive, however, suggesting that a different way of approaching this issue is necessary. This dissertation argues that Hebrews is best understood as addressing the pastoral needs of a Jewish-Christian community facing a crisis related to issues of Jewish socioreligious identity. Using frameworks of social-historical description, theories of Jewish identity, and thematic analysis assisted by semantic domain theory, this research assesses Hebrews’s relationship to Judaism by examining the author’s treatment of themes related to the Law, the Temple, and the Promised Land, cultural frameworks which were significant for Jewish social and religious identity in the first century CE. This research finds that the writer of Hebrews textually constructs for himself and his audience an unmistakably Jewish identity. However, it will also be demonstrated that Hebrews evinces patterns of, as Steve Moyise says, ‘"both tradition and innovation” in how the writer appropriates vital identity-forming traditions from Judaism for his own pastoral purposes. This study, therefore, further contends that Hebrews evinces a community with an emerging Jewish-Christian identity as theirs is an expression of Judaism which has become largely defined by their devotion to Jesus. The context of looming crisis which permeates Hebrews and the writer’s treatment of traditions from common Judaism further suggests this community also has likely become estranged from Jerusalem and its temple system. This research thus contends that the traditional ‘‘relapse theory” interpretation which historically has interpreted Hebrews as taking a polemical stance against Judaism is without adequate support. Conversely, this research also suggests that some of the various “within Judaism” approaches which have become more popular in recent New Testament scholarship, while promising, require further nuancing when applied to Hebrews. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)