Being and becoming Jewish: kinship, memory, and the politics of Jewishness in post-socialist Slovakia
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Date
06/08/2020Item status
Restricted AccessEmbargo end date
06/08/2024Author
Ockova, Katarina
Metadata
Abstract
This thesis, based on fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork, examines the
entanglement of kinship, religion and politics among Jews in Bratislava. It uses
marriage as a lens to explore how young Jews identify with their often newlydiscovered Jewishness and secure its socio-cultural reproduction into the future.
Studying the lived experience of three generations of Slovak Jews – Holocaust
survivors, their children, and grandchildren – I describe the intergenerational
transmission of knowledge about Jewishness and Jewish heritage, marital
preferences and practices, and choices and decisions involved in the upbringing of
children in the context of changing political regimes. I focus in particular on the
generation of Jews who reached adulthood after the Velvet Revolution of 1989, and
explore how their families’ memories and experiences of the Holocaust and Socialist
persecution, as well as the current socio-political situation and rising extremism
influence the ways young Jews navigate their Jewishness – both within the Jewish
community, and in the unpredictable non-Jewish public sphere. To demonstrate their
allegiance to this community while keeping it hidden from non-Jews, I argue, young
Jews stretch and shrink the boundary between the ‘public’ and ‘private’,
complicating the distinction between these categories, and allowing the emergence of
new ‘publics’ and ‘privates’. The chronic uncertainty affecting Slovak Jews’
everyday lives exacerbates the fragility of trust, and underpins a constant need to
negotiate their Jewishness across this elastic boundary, as well as within their
intimate relations. The thesis sheds light on the role of social distinctions and
processes of boundary-making and maintenance that characterise the politics of
Jewishness in post-Socialist Slovakia. It shows how, for young Jews, discovering
their Jewishness, demonstrating their devotion, and gaining recognition, is more a
matter of becoming than of simply being Jewish.