Imagining Jewish Geography: New Orleans as Self and Other

• In Event: Jewish Identities - Interdisciplinary Approaches

Abstract

In the years following Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans became a prominent destination for Jewish service-tourism and Jewish conferences as well as for Jewish activists looking to participate in longer-term aid and recovery projects. In this paper, I argue that the concept of “imagination”—a term Arjun Appadurai understands to reflect the increasingly agentive role individuals and groups now play in defining their identities in relation to the uneven and multidirectional global circulation of people, capital, and ideas—is crucial to understanding a set of contradictory and ethically charged meanings that motivated and complicated travel to post-Katrina New Orleans.[1] The paper develops this argument through a series of ethnographic vignettes that illuminate the various meanings Jewish activists, volunteers, and funders ascribed to the city.
At the 2010 General Assembly conference, held in New Orleans, organizers emphasized the connection between the Jewish Federation response to Hurricane Katrina and the movement to save Soviet Jewry. This association exemplifies the ways in which Jewish post-Katrina New Orleans was upheld as a paradigmatic example of a Jewish community “in need,” a category that is often used to justify Jewish philanthropy’s inward focus. As such, post-Katrina New Orleans came to symbolize an imagined international Jewish community unified by past, present, and future vulnerability.
By contrast, post-Katrina New Orleans also came to symbolize an idealized and essentialized “other.” Some of the philanthropists and activists I studied while on location in New Orleans viewed the city as a pseudo-foreign destination where they might assist the “global poor,” while others interacted with New Orleans in order to express a politically charged identification with marginalized Americans. In either case, New Orleans became a site of identity formation premised on the idea of social responsibility for non-Jewish others.
Building on my ethnographic analysis, I link Jewish understandings of post-Katrina New Orleans to a broader, national focus on service-learning travel to a variety of locations.
Ultimately, I argue that the intensified interest in Jewish service-learning and travel in the years following Hurricane Katrina (e.g. the founding of Repair the World) represents a fraught and now declining effort to synthesize competing and contradictory understandings of the relationship between geography and Jewish social action. ________________________________________
[1] I refer to Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), especially “Chapter Two: Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy.”

author

• Moshe Kornfeld, University of Michigan