Hebrew Language in New Zealand

• In Event: Crossing Continents: Jewish Experiences and Identities in Latin America and Oceania

Abstract

No one comes to New Zealand to be ‘more Jewish’: community infrastructure is intensely limited, communities are small, and Jewish education initiatives are irregular and rare. Outside of the larger ‘Jewish epicentres’ of Auckland and Wellington, resources are even more scarce. Still, families across the country agentively and independently transmit Jewish and Hebrew linguistic resources within their broader transmissions of Jewishness, coping with little to no external support. Taking a constructivist grounded theory approach to interview data collected for my PhD, my presentation explores how three families living outside of metropolitan areas respond to the demand of bringing Jewish and Hebrew transmission into the home. This is an existential necessity, as pre-existing communal structures in which Jewish education can be expected to be situated are simply unavailable. How they transmit a family-specific mode of Jewishness and the Hebrew proficiencies it requires will be explored, theorised as a transformation in what Hebrew is and what Hebrew does within the far-flung reaches of New Zealand’s Jewish community. This will be supported by a discussion of how community is ‘created’ despite dispersal, isolation and diversity, and the linguistic implications of this will be contextualised through both quantitative and qualitative insights gleaned from a large-scale community survey.
Ultimately, my presentation argues that ‘doing Hebrew and Judaism’ in New Zealand differs from what we’ve come to expect from research elsewhere. Understanding this is relevant to broader understandings of contemporary Judaism.

Author

• Annabel C Noar, Monash University