This study seeks to understand how young Swedish Jews experience their Jewishness in contemporary Sweden. Many have tried to understand Jewishness through surveys. However, this study uses a qualitative approach as well as the lens of lived religion and theories of practice to move focus to how people do their Jewishness. This means focusing on how young people make sense of their Jewishness by what they do and how it feels for them. Through ethnographic interviews, shared experiences and by using the insider/researcher position as a tool, the ambiguous ways in which young Swedish Jews do their Jewishness becomes visible. As the results show, young Swedish Jews carry out both individual and communal Jewish practices. Doing Jewishness on your own can mean doing “weird things”; to carry out unconventional, self-created, Jewish practices. It can also be about carrying on tradition; meaning reproducing more traditional Jewish practices, but with a high level of agency. When doing Jewishness together a “magical feeling of togetherness” and feelings of belonging showed to be important aspects. Ultimately, all these Jewish practices are formed by ambiguous elements such as creativity, temporality, agency, and negotiation. When doing Jewishness, regardless of whether it is about going to synagogue: “goggan”, planting avocado seeds, or creating your own interpretation of kosher, the young Swedish Jews negotiate between what is meaningful for them and what is possible in the context of the majority society. In sum, this alternative approach to Jewish experience, where its meaning is not predetermined by researchers or Jewish institutions, can challenge our understanding of what it means to be a young Jew in Sweden today.

This thesis is a cultural study of Jewishness in network sitcom television. Sources for the study included: historical film analysis, sociological studies on stereotyping and Jewish culture. The thesis studies how past forms of Jewishness impacted the current depictions of Jewishness on the television sitcom. After an introduction discussing Jewishness in general, the second chapter studies Jewishness in Vaudeville and early Hollywood film. The third chapter studies Jewishness in the first 40 years of network sitcom television. The fourth chapter studies Jewishness in the network sitcoms of the 1990s. The conclusions of the study focus on the state of Jewishness on network sitcom television at present, and ask what must be done within the industry to maintain a viable Jewish identity on network sitcom television in the future.

Ce mémoire propose des lectures croisées de la mémoire urbaine dans Dora Bruder de Patrick Modiano et La Québécoite de Régine Robin. Les deux récits mettent en scène des narrateurs héritiers de la mémoire de la Shoah qui déambulent dans les villes de Paris et Montréal. La ville est espace d’intelligibilité dont les signes sont porteurs de sens à activer par l’observateur. À l’aide de la sémiotique de la ville (Benjamin) et des pratiques de la ville (De Certeau) et en tenant compte de la position particulière des narrateurs autour des enjeux du témoignage et de l’écriture, ce mémoire cherche à étudier comment la ville participe au déploiement d’une mémoire juive en même temps qu’elle contribue à son inévitable perte. La Deuxième Guerre mondiale a eu lieu en partie à Paris, qui en porte les traces dans une forte densité mémorielle, tandis que Montréal, ville diasporique où les événements ne se sont pas déroulés, accueille les mémoires écorchées qui se fixent d’une autre manière dans l’espace urbain. Dans les deux récits, l’espace urbain est nécessaire à la mise en texte de la rupture et de la perte, qui se dévoilent à la fois au niveau thématique (destruction urbaine, échecs répétés, perte identitaire) et formel (remise en question du récit, hybridité générique.) / This thesis offers crossed readings of urban memory in Dora Bruder from Patrick Modiano and La Québécoite from Régine Robin. Both stories depict narrators heirs of the Holocaust memory who roam the cities of Paris and Montreal. The city is a space of intelligibility whose signs are meaningful to the observer. Using the semiotics of the city (Benjamin), the practices of the city (De Certeau) and taking into account the specific position of both narrators on the issues of testimony and writing, this study seeks to explore how the city spreads the Jewish memory while at the same time contributing to its inevitable loss. The Second World War took partly place in Paris, which bears the traces in a high density of memory, while Montreal, a city where Holocaust events did not unfold, is hosting memories otherwise within its urban space. In both stories, the city is necessary to the writing of the breakdown and loss, which reveal themselves both in the background (urban destruction, repeated failures, loss of identity) and form (question of the story, generic hybridity.)

Mentshlichkeit – Yiddish for the ‘art of being a good hu(man)’ - is offered as an invitation to participate in practices that may have the power to dispel the haunting of a ‘hegemonic masculinity’ (Connell 1995). Inspired by ‘Action Research’, what Reason & Bradbury call inquiry into the ‘quality of our acting’, the author uses futuristic narrative, interwoven with discussion and dialogue, to see if it is possible to reflect and act generatively, as a man who is mindful of feminism’s challenge that ‘the personal is political’ (Reason and Bradbury 2001). Within a post-modern discourse, the author heads towards the irony and discomfort to be found in a text that explores goodness and masculinity in the same breath. But he is not alone, like some hero on a quest – rather he is inspired by the voices of challenge and support he hears in the course of his roles in diverse communities: as a Jew, a facilitator/consultant at Roffey Park Institute and a father. It is my intention to playfully invite you into this story; to see if it moves you, if it usefully meets your own experience and helps you consider your own action, within the paradoxes and dilemmas you face. Too often we can disappear within the words we write. It is my intention to ‘show up’, and as a man to meet the challenge of feminism, to live within this territory and act with some awareness of its contours. The characters in this story are inspired by the people I encounter, who remind me I am not ‘selfmade’, and that we men, in the words of Philip Corrigan, may usefully ‘re-member our bodies’ (Corrigan 1988). Ultimately this is a human-scale story, designed to provoke good conversations. I look forward to hearing what you would like to discuss.

This thesis explores the spectrum of signification of disability, impairment and embodied difference in medieval drama. Drama is an important medium in which to explore what the body is used to signify as it provides an extra dimension in the physical embodiment and performance of these physical and spiritual conditions. Despite the value of medieval drama in understanding the significations of physical and psychological affliction, it remains a neglected area of scholarly research. In order to understand the meaning of dramatic representations of disability and impairment, it is necessary to explore the spectrum of signification attached to these conditions, since they could elicit such unstable and ambivalent responses. In this endeavour, this thesis consults medical, historical and cultural sources in addition to play-texts and performance evidence in order to understand the construction and representation of specific types of physical and psychological affliction in medieval drama, and what these conditions are used to signify through the body. Over the four chapters of this thesis I examine the ageing body (chapter 1); the unconverted Jewish body (chapter 2); the disease of leprosy (chapter 3); and wounds, mutilation and dismemberment (chapter 4). The play-texts I use deliberately draw upon a wide range of characters and personified abstractions, from the moral and the sacred to the immoral and the profane, from biblical drama to morality plays. These diverse conditions and identities allow an overarching insight into their use and meanings in medieval drama. Similarly, the diverse range of characters allows me to consider how the body is used to reflect the moral and spiritual condition of a character through the embodied mode of dramatic performance. For each of my chapters, the conditions I discuss possess ambivalence in their contrasting meanings, which binds the thesis together as a whole in acknowledging the changing and contrasting significations of disability, impairment and embodied difference according to the context.

Ce mémoire propose des lectures croisées de la mémoire urbaine dans Dora Bruder de Patrick Modiano et La Québécoite de Régine Robin. Les deux récits mettent en scène des narrateurs héritiers de la mémoire de la Shoah qui déambulent dans les villes de Paris et Montréal. La ville est espace d’intelligibilité dont les signes sont porteurs de sens à activer par l’observateur. À l’aide de la sémiotique de la ville (Benjamin) et des pratiques de la ville (De Certeau) et en tenant compte de la position particulière des narrateurs autour des enjeux du témoignage et de l’écriture, ce mémoire cherche à étudier comment la ville participe au déploiement d’une mémoire juive en même temps qu’elle contribue à son inévitable perte. La Deuxième Guerre mondiale a eu lieu en partie à Paris, qui en porte les traces dans une forte densité mémorielle, tandis que Montréal, ville diasporique où les événements ne se sont pas déroulés, accueille les mémoires écorchées qui se fixent d’une autre manière dans l’espace urbain. Dans les deux récits, l’espace urbain est nécessaire à la mise en texte de la rupture et de la perte, qui se dévoilent à la fois au niveau thématique (destruction urbaine, échecs répétés, perte identitaire) et formel (remise en question du récit, hybridité générique.) / This thesis offers crossed readings of urban memory in Dora Bruder from Patrick Modiano and La Québécoite from Régine Robin. Both stories depict narrators heirs of the Holocaust memory who roam the cities of Paris and Montreal. The city is a space of intelligibility whose signs are meaningful to the observer. Using the semiotics of the city (Benjamin), the practices of the city (De Certeau) and taking into account the specific position of both narrators on the issues of testimony and writing, this study seeks to explore how the city spreads the Jewish memory while at the same time contributing to its inevitable loss. The Second World War took partly place in Paris, which bears the traces in a high density of memory, while Montreal, a city where Holocaust events did not unfold, is hosting memories otherwise within its urban space. In both stories, the city is necessary to the writing of the breakdown and loss, which reveal themselves both in the background (urban destruction, repeated failures, loss of identity) and form (question of the story, generic hybridity.)

Judéité et personnages juifs ont hanté l’œuvre et les diverses réflexions de Marguerite Duras (1914-1996). En 1980, dans Les Yeux verts, elle se demande : « Qu’est-ce que la judaïté représente dans une problématique personnelle d’un non-juif ? Contre quoi est-elle ce recours absolu à nul autre pareil ? ». L’un des principaux objectifs de cette recherche est d’essayer de répondre à ces interrogations. Il s’agit de comprendre pourquoi ce qu’elle appelle la « chose juive » est aussi omniprésente, et comment à partir de « cette rencontre d’autrui », a évolué, au fil du temps, l’image récurrente du « juif ».Nous essaierons, tout d’abord, de retracer cette approche en répondant à deux questions primordiales : d’une part, qu’est-ce « juif », ce « nombre pur », ou ce possible « mot trou » ; et d’autre part, qu’est-ce qu’être juif, comment a pu autour de cette « appréhension » se mettre en place l’idée que le « juif » pouvait représenter « un état à venir de l’homme informé », donnant ainsi naissance à une sorte de modus vivendi ou à une éthique ? Nous verrons, ensuite, comment cette circonscription toute personnelle s’est immiscée dans l’écriture de Duras, et en privilégiant une approche génétique, comment elle a tenté de prendre forme, par exemple, au niveau des ses étranges personnages. Nous terminerons notre réflexion en nous demandant si son rapport au livre et si « les lectures illimitées » qui s’offrent au lecteur ne s’inscrivent pas finalement dans une certaine attitude hébraïque, talmudique, et, au-delà, comment cette judéité a pu éventuellement faire naître une mélodie, un phrasé, voire même une poétique proche d’une conception « juive » de l’écrivain et de l’écrit. / Jewishness and Jewish characters have permeated the entirety of Duras's work as well as her various thoughts. In 1980, she wondered in Les Yeux verts: “What does Jewishness represent in the personal questioning of non-Jewish ones? What does that unrivalled and absolute recourse stand up against?” One of the main goals of this research is to try and answer those questions. The point is to understand why, what she called “the Jewish entity”, is so pervasive and how the recurring image of the Jew(s) has evolved through time from that very first encounter with the other(s).We will first try to go through the different steps of that approach by answering two essential questions. On the one hand, what “Jewish”, that “genuine number” or that possible “hole word” is and on the other hand, what it means to be Jewish and how the idea that the Jew could symbolize “an upcoming condition of man informed” giving birth, in the process, to a kind of modus vivendi or to some ethics, could be formed. We will continue with reflecting on how that very personal delineation of the topic has gradually pervaded the way Duras wrote and how, by singling out a genetic approach, that writing took shape in the characterization of her odd protagonists. We will end our study by wondering whether both her relation to books and the unlimited interpretations the reader is faced with are typical of some sort of Hebraic, Talmudic attitude and, beyond that, how that Jewishness eventually gave rise to a melody, a chain of words or even some poetics that would resemble a Jewish conception of the writer and of the written work.

Notre travail de thèse se propose d’interroger la production littéraire des écrivains d’origine judéo-maghrébine en France en tant que littérature d’exil, dans la période de la décolonisation. La démarche, se basant sur une étude prosopographique, porte dans un premier temps sur les contextes favorables et pertinents à l’action d’une série d’individus, autrement dit sur l’état des conditions de la production d’une littérature née d’un déplacement. S’en suit une classification d’écrivains rendue possible par la mise en relation des caractéristiques sociologiques et des dispositions propres à cette génération d’auteurs avec les cadres culturels, historiques et cognitifs qui sont les leurs. En s’appuyant sur des entretiens semi-directifs avec des écrivains sélectionnés selon la typologie dégagée de l’étude précédente ainsi que sur l’étude de leurs œuvres littéraires, la recherche s’attache, dans un second temps, à vérifier si cette écriture « minoritaire » peut nous renseigner, et jusqu’à quel point, sur les relations qu’entretiennent entre elles histoire, mémoire, littérature et identité dans le contexte migratoire. Enfin, dans cette perspective, ses usages sociaux et ses fonctions sont étudiés à travers l’analyse des mécanismes et des thèmes récurrents de cette production littéraire, qui se construit comme le témoignage singulier d’un moment de vécu historique et ce faisant, nourrit notre compréhension des processus d’ajustements littéraires. / My dissertation research is focused on the literary production written by authors of North-African Jewish origin. Meaning a literature in exile, in the post-colonial era. My approach includes a prosopographical study, exploring the conditions and the social context that favorized this literature’s creation. The study proposes a classification of a number of authors, linking the sociological characteristics and particular attributes of this generation of writers with their cultural, historical, and cognitive backgrounds. The method uses semi-directive interviews with these subjects, as well as the study of their works, to see whether this “minority” literature can enlighten, and if so to what extent, about the interaction between history, memory, literature, and identity. In this perspective, the social usages and functions of this literature are examined, driving to the analysis of mechanisms and recurring themes that appear as the singular testimony of a moment of lived history. In doing so, it helps us to understand adjustment through literature.

Dans le cadre des politiques migratoires québécoises du début des années 2000, quelques familles juives argentines ont décidé de s'établir à Montréal. Ces migrants adhérent à un judaïsme culturel, où l’ethnicité devient une dimension identificatoire plus importante que la religion. Les Juifs argentins sont porteurs des histoires de migration familiales des ancêtres, lesquelles sont encore présentes dans la mémoire collective. Dans le cadre de leur établissement au Québec, ils se trouvent confrontés au contexte juif montréalais qui présente d’autres façons de vivre les judéités. Comment ces migrants perçoivent la rencontre et la cohabitation parmi les judéités montréalaises? Continueront-ils à se reconnaitre dans la spécificité de leurs judéités argentines? Les histoires migratoires de famille jouent-elles un rôle précis dans leur actuel processus d’établissement? Au-delà de l’adhésion à un judaïsme culturel, ces migrants croient-ils à une forme de transcendance? / In the context of Quebec’s migratory policies of the early 2000s, some Jewish Argentinean families decided to settle in Montreal. These migrants adhere to a cultural Judaism in which ethnicity becomes an identification dimension that is more important than religion. The Argentinean Jewish are bearers of their ancestors’ migratory histories, which are still present in the collective memory. In the framework of their settlement in Quebec, they find themselves confronted with the Jewish context of Montreal, which presents other ways of living the Jewishness. How do these migrants perceive the encounter and cohabitation with Montreal’s Judaism? Will they continue to recognize themselves in the specificity of their Argentinean Jewishness? Do migratory family histories play a precise role in their current settlement process? Beyond adhesion to a cultural Judaism, do these migrants believe in a form of transcendence?

American Jewish rappers have become an increasingly prevalent topic in Jewish popular and scholarly media, where critics and scholars seek to understand how hip-hop performance and consumption serves as a platform for exploring and articulating Jewish identity. This thesis explores the work of what I term “Jewish parody rappers”—rappers who foreground Jewishness while destabilizing normative American Jewish identity using humor or parody—in order to demonstrate how nuanced gender and ethnoracial identity performances can be found in an often overlooked segment of Jewish rap. Using Jamie Moshin’s concept of “New Jewishness,” I argue that Jewish parody rappers recontextualize tropes of Jewish masculinity through black hip-hop codes, evoking a long history of Jewish engagement with African-American performance. Through an examination of Jewish parody rappers and their performances—including the Beastie Boys, 2 Live Jews, Chutzpah, and Athens Boys Choir—I demonstrate how these New Jews destabilize, or queer, Jewish identity through hip-hop performance. The Beastie Boys’ parodic performances highlight Jewishness as a liminal identity as they use the malleable and performative markers of Jewish masculinity to foreground their whiteness in the black-dominated arena of hip-hop. 2 Live Jews and Chutzpah recuperate tropes of effeminate and impotent Jewish masculinity through their extended parodies. Harvey Katz of Athens Boys Choir plays with tropes of Jewish masculinity not only to queer Jewishness, like other Jewish parody rappers, but also to articulate an explicitly queer Jewish identity. Each of these core samples illuminates various ways in which Jewish parody rappers perform New Jewish identity; however, these rappers do not evade the specter of problematic racial appropriation as they articulate Jewishness through and against tropes of black hip-hop hypermasculinity. / text