Jewish life facing new challenges: Diaspora and Transnationalism revisited

• In Event: Transnational Jewish Identities, Intersections, and Contexts

Abstract

In recent decades, complex systems of interrelations have developed on different planes: global, regional, national and local, enhancing the expansion, intensification, and acceleration of actors, flows and interactions in an increasingly mobile world. Jewish life and Jewish communities are consequently developing amid diversified and expanded migratory processes, interconnectedness and new diasporas, thus experiencing changing models of historical interactions through bonds of cohesion and inner diversity. Whereas classical notions of diaspora imply mainly a return to a real or an imagined homeland, newer realities and uses of this concept supplement or replace return with dense onward migrations and continuous linkages across border. In this changing horizon, new meanings of the Jewish historical center and transnational ideational motives develop.
Indeed, transnationalism as analytical angle focuses on cross border mobility and links. It unleashes and accounts for continuous and intense interactions along new fields and spaces while ascriptions, belongings, and identities are redefined. Diaspora and Transnationalism are thus conceptual clues to read the past and present of the Jewish condition worldwide, and epitomised in Latin American Jewish communities changing contexts and socio-cultural intersections.
While focusing on current socio-political processes investigated in the region- an ethno-national diaspora becoming transnational- this paper aims to contribute to conceptual and methodological dilemmas that stand before Contemporary Jewish research. In Diaspora Studies, the Jewish case has been attenuated and lost centrality, whereas Transnational Studies tend to loose sight of boundary maintenance and the diasporic density of Jewish life (often subsumed under the critic of the “ethnic lens”). Transnational studies have typically focused on individuals, their links and networks as the principal units of analysis; however, the Jewish case is necessarily grounded on the collective dimension and on the institutional underpinnings of transnationalism; its structural effects, however, face today radical challenges. The individual and communal levels interact through dense and stable Jewish associational and institutional channels (the dialectics of boundary maintenance/boundary erosion complement the view of diasporic practices of émigré ethnic communities). On its part, significant research of Contemporary Jewry tends to leave out the current global dimension of Jewish life, focusing on national cases and, therefore, underscoring exceptionalism. On light of these consideration, we will focus on substantive and conceptual dimensions of the questions raised by this panel.

author

• Judit Bokser Liwerant, Unam Mexico