A Genesis of Jewishness: Collective Memory, Identity Work, and Ethnic Boundary Making Among Jews in Toronto

Joshua Harold

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Sociology University of Toronto

Joshua Harold

Doctor of Philosophy

Department of Sociology University of Toronto

2020

Abstract

Recent decades have seen exceptional growth in research investigating the social, political, and cultural lives of Jews in Canada, and for good reason. The Jewish experience in Canada is one that is often characterized as achieving the goals of multiculturalism, that is, retaining a rich and meaningful ethnic and cultural identity while integrating into the political and economic mainstream. Yet, absent from much of the work done on Jewish life in Canada is research into how Jews make sense of their Jewishness in a multicultural context. In this dissertation, I examine the group-making projects of Jews in Toronto by analyzing how collective memory informs what it means to be Jewish and how it is mobilized in the production and maintenance of ethnic boundaries. This dissertation is comprised of three interrelated studies that explore significant aspects of contemporary Jewish life in Canada, namely organizational participation, residential patterns, and the boundaries of Jewish otherness. Data come from qualitative interviews with Jews living in Toronto and the Greater Toronto Area who approximate the diversity of Toronto’s Jewish population and identify with a range of Jewish denominations, including no affiliation at all, and express their commitment to Jewish principles and practices in various ways. In the first study, I

ii consider overnight Jewish summer camps as an important site for the production of ethnic boundaries in the Jewish community and explore the boundary work of camp participants. In the second study, I examine Jewish residential patterns in Toronto and identify four collective memory schemas which serve as prominent scripts that shape the Jewish residential landscape in Toronto.

In the third study, I attend directly to the issue of Jewish otherness and examine how a fragmented collective memory around the Holocaust and State of Israel delineate boundaries of inclusion and separateness.

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To Suzanne and River with all my love

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the many people who supported my journey through the Ph.D. program. The time I have spent in the Sociology Department at U of T has been some of the most challenging and rewarding years of my life. The opportunity to study and work alongside the many people who make up the department’s vibrant academic community is something I never believed I would have the chance to do and I am extremely grateful to have had this opportunity. I am particularly grateful to my advisor, Eric Fong, for his guidance, support, and patience throughout my dissertation work. He has been a constant source of encouragement and has provided countless opportunities for my intellectual growth over the years. I have benefited in so many ways from his mentorship and collaboration, his generosity of time, and his thoughtful engagement with this work.

I am also grateful to my other committee members, Shyon Baumann and Dan Silver, for their support and comments on my work at various stages in the writing process. Their work has served as a model of excellence in scholarship to me since I started my graduate studies and I am fortunate to have learned so much from them. To all three of you – thank you!

This dissertation would not have been possible without the unwavering support of my wife, Suzanne. I am extremely fortunate to have a partner in life who motivates me to pursue new opportunities, encourages me to meet challenges head on, and is always willing to help me realize my goals.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments...... v

Table of Contents ...... vi

Chapter 1 Introduction ...... 1

1.1 Canadian Jewish Studies ...... 1

1.2 Collective Memory and Ethnic Boundaries ...... 3

1.3 Overview of the Dissertation ...... 5

1.4 References ...... 8

Chapter 2 Jewish Summer Camps and the Boundary Work of Camp Participants ...... 13

2.1 Introduction ...... 13

2.2 The Liminality of Jewish Summer Camps...... 15

2.3 Boundaries as a Cognitive Process ...... 18

2.4 Data and Methods ...... 20

2.5 Organizational Schemas of Jewishness ...... 22

2.6 Post-liminal Boundary-work ...... 24

2.6.1 Keeping Kosher ...... 24

2.6.2 Shabbat Observance ...... 27

2.6.3 Attachment to Israel ...... 31

2.7 Conclusion ...... 35

2.8 References ...... 37

Chapter 3 Collective Memory Schemas and Jewish Residential Patterns ...... 41

3.1 Introduction ...... 41

3.2 Collective memory and residential patterns ...... 43

3.3 Data and methods ...... 45

3.4 Collective memory schemas and spatial boundaries ...... 46

3.4.1 Cultural trauma schema ...... 47 vi

3.4.2 Ritual belonging schema ...... 50

3.4.3 Grounded community schema ...... 52

3.4.4 Fortitude/empowerment schema ...... 55

3.5 Conclusion ...... 57

3.6 References ...... 60

Chapter 4 The Holocaust, Israel, and the Boundaries of Jewish Otherness ...... 65

4.1 Introduction ...... 65

4.2 Otherness, Jewishness, and the Making of Jewish Otherness ...... 68

4.3 Data and methods ...... 73

4.4 Findings...... 74

4.4.1 Uniqueness in Holocaust Remembering ...... 76

4.4.2 Universalism in Holocaust Remembering ...... 79

4.4.3 The Fragility of Israel ...... 83

4.4.4 The Power of Israel ...... 87

4.5 Conclusion and Discussion ...... 90

4.6 References ...... 93

Chapter 5 Conclusion ...... 98

5.1 Boundary Making in Organizational, Spatial, and Temporal Context ...... 100

5.2 A Note on Comparative and Group-centered Approaches ...... 102

5.3 Directions for Future Research ...... 103

5.4 References ...... 105

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Chapter 1 Introduction 1.1 Canadian Jewish Studies

Canadian Jews are a difficult people to define. In part this is due to the still developing field of Canadian Jewish studies, a field that is largely comprised of historical, descriptive, and demographic works (Paris 1980; Tulchinsky 1992, 2008; see also Koffman and Weinfeld 2011 for an overview). Indeed, such research has provided exceptionally detailed portraits of Jews in Canada. Sociological studies of Jewish life in Canada are not altogether absent and have also contributed to understanding important social dimensions of Canadian Jewish life. Much of this work, however, has relied on official statistics and other data sources that limit our ability to provide meaning-based analyses of Jewish life in Canada. There are detailed works on the history of Canadian Jewish life (Tulchinsky 2008; Troper 2010; Jacobson 2013), the socio-economic standing of Canadian Jews and other ethnic groups in Canada (Breton 2012), rates of Jewish intermarriage in Canada (Goldmann 2009), Jewish residential patterns (Harold and Fong 2018; Fong and Chan 2010), and denominational identification and organizational affiliation (Shahar and Rosenbaum 2006). Yet we know surprising little about the motivations and factors behind such trends. In other words, we know what Jews are doing, where they are working, where they are living, if they feel connected to Israel, whether they attend Jewish day schools or overnight camps, but we know relatively little about why they live where they do, what feeling emotionally connected to Israel means, why maintaining some Jewish traditions over others is important, how Jewish identities take shape, and how memories of the past inform what it means to be Jewish today.

Contributing to the difficulty in understanding the Canadian Jewish experience is the long-standing emphasis on the Jewish diaspora in the American context. The story of the Canadian Jewish community has historically been overshadowed by narratives that place Jews in the United States at the center of the Jewish diaspora. One explanation for this could be found in the difference in community size. Outside of Israel, the United States is home to the largest Jewish population at around 6 million. At the moment, there is some uncertainty as to whether France is still home to the second largest Jewish diaspora population or whether Canada has already surpassed France or will in the coming years (Brym et al 2018; Cohen 2009; Pew Research 2015). With estimates

1 2 around 400,000, Canada’s Jewish population is substantial and growing, but remains far smaller than the American Jewish population. Another explanation can be found in the migration history of Jews to the United States and Canada. Jews in the United States precede Jews in Canada by at least a generation, which has placed the United States analytically at the center of Jewish immigration patterns and assimilation processes. This “generation lag” has often been invoked to explain the higher levels of traditionalism and communal engagement among Canadian Jews relative to their American counterparts (Schnoor 2011), and it may also help to explain the developing field of Canadian Jewish studies relative to scholarship on the American Jewish experience.

Over the last several decades, a rich literature has emerged on the religious and cultural lives of Jews, however, much of this work has focused on particular religious denominations, which has left unexamined the range of perspectives and experiences of diverse Jewish populations. There has been a significant amount of attention on Orthodox Jewish populations both in Canada and the United States (Shaffir 2013; Diamond 2000, 2002). This means that relatively little attention has been given to the bulk of the Jewish population in Canada, though by no means has it been absent (Menkis 2013; Koffman and Weinfeld 2011). Recent data indicates that Orthodox Jews comprise only a small proportion of the Canadian Jewish population at about 17%, with Conservative Jews at about 27%, and Jews who identify with no denomination or as “just Jewish” at about 28-30% (Brym et al. 2018; Schnoor 2011). In Toronto, home to the Canada’s largest Jewish community and the research setting for this dissertation, there is a similar pattern of denominational affiliation among Orthodox, Conservative, and secular Jews at approximately 16%, 27%, and 27% respectively (Brym et al. 2018). Though we know that as a group Jews tend to fare well economically, politically, and educationally compared to other ethnic and religious groups in Canada (Breton 2012; Dean and DeVoretz 2000), more research is needed on how Jews understand and make sense of their contemporary Jewishness.

In this dissertation, I extend the scholarship on Canadian Jews by exploring how Jews think about and understand their contemporary Jewish identities. Drawing on qualitative interview data collected in conversation with Jews in Toronto, I explore how Jews remember the past and how collective memory is mobilized in the construction and maintenance of ethnic boundaries. I focus on Jews living in Toronto and explore how understandings of past experiences or events are implicated in Jewish boundary-making and groupness. Like any religious or ethnic group, Jews

3 are a mnemonic community, that is, a grouping of individuals who remember more than what they have experienced personally by learning about the experience of other group members (Zerubavel 1996). As members of a mnemonic community we are able to “experience events that had happened to groups and communities to which we belong long before we joined them as if they were part of our own past” (Zerubavel 1996:290). It is our social environment and our interpersonal relations with important others that affects how we remember the past and construct a collective memory (Shahzad 2012; Zerubavel 1996, 1997). In this study, I examine how members of a Jewish mnemonic community draw on their ethnic, religious, and cultural group context to remember the past and its implications for the ethnic boundaries they draw.

1.2 Collective Memory and Ethnic Boundaries

This dissertation extends research on Jewish life in Canada specifically, and in doing so it also engages sociologically with collective memory studies and the field of ethnic studies given that Jews are simultaneously a religious and ethnic group, one whose experience has historically and in many ways continues to be that of the “other.” The contemporary life of Jews in Canada builds upon and is a reflection of socio-historical experiences that give meaning to Jewishness and what it means to be a Jew in Canada today.

Research on collective memory has generated a considerable amount of work that examines what, when, and where memory is recalled. Yet, much of this work has emphasized the institutionalization of memory and the projects of memory elites. In this light, collective memory research has tended to focus on the connection between memory and the nation, particularly the production and institutionalization of memory (Zerubavel 1995; Spillman 2003; Schwartz 1982, 1996). From this structural standpoint, collective memory is accessible in institutional forms and framed as a representation of historically significant events that are relatively stable over time (Schwartz 1982, 1996).

For Jews, the institutional basis for collective memory is often understood in relation to the Holocaust (Jacobs 2008; Baumel 1998; Holtschneider 2011). For example, Eschebach (2003) examines the memorial to inmates at the labor camp in Ravensbrück, Germany and shows how the commemoration of women depicts the martyrdom of mothers and the death of their children at the

4 expense of other, more valiant representations. Similarly, Jacobs (2008) examines the representation of women at Auschwitz and shows how women’s experiences are constructed through gendered narratives of suffering mothers or sexual objects belonging to the perpetrators. Indeed, the politics of representation (Berger 2012; Gregory Jr. and Lewis 1988), and the institutional basis for collective memory (Schwartz 1982), has dominated much of the research in this field. These studies emphasize how collective memory is a social process of symbolic expression that is manifested in institutional forms. While this line of work has generated valuable insights about the institutional basis of collective memory, it tends to promote a coherence of culture perspective that obscures how collective memory is fragmented and mobilized among populations (Beim 2007).

While scholarship has started to become increasingly concerned with what “ordinary people” believe about the past, more work is needed on the cognitive aspects of collective memory, a field that has hitherto been overshadowed by research on the institutional production of collective memory. As Beim (2007:9) argues, “collective memory research should focus on the bundles of memory schemata that people use to make sense of the past.” I suggest that research also needs to connect these memory schemata to people’s boundary-work in defining or otherwise shaping groupness, which is a central focus of this dissertation. The need for such connections is echoed by Wertsch (2002) who, in his comprehensive work on the interplay between individual and collective memory, notes that what are lacking are analyses of collective memory that consider the action associated with them. Some research has started to shape understanding of how collective memory affects identity formation among ethno-religious and other groups (Shahzad 2012; Sahdra and Ross 2007; Eyerman 2004; Greene 2007). However, there is relatively little on how collective memory is used by people to construct meaning about themselves and their communities. Memory needs to be better linked to its use, “unravelling how (if at all) recollections, celebrations, and commemorations…galvanize action or legitimate inaction, and condition morality and cognition in time present” (Griffin 2004:556).

The concept of ethnic boundaries is especially useful in better understanding how the past weighs on the present and its implications for the group-making projects of Jews in Canada. Indeed, the concept of ethnic boundaries has become a central feature of ethno-cultural scholarship in recent decades. In addition to elucidating precisely what constitutes an ethnic boundary, theoretical and empirical work has increasingly become directed toward the complex dynamics by which

5 boundaries are created, negotiated, diminished, and reinforced (Alba 2005; Wimmer 2013). Research in the area of ethnicity and ethnic boundaries has generated a robust body of literature that examines the various sites of ethnic identity formation and factors affecting the composition of ethnic boundaries. From a structural perspective, scholars have demonstrated that the state and its institutions play a central role in delineating ethnic boundaries (Nagal 1994; Wimmer 2008, 2013). While structural understandings of boundaries shed light on the location of group boundaries, it offers limited insight into the cognitive processes of boundary-making. Further, it tends to adhere to what Brubaker (2002) identifies as groupism, the tendency to treat groups as internally homogenous and externally bounded.

Despite the mounting theoretical work that points to the development of boundaries as a cognitive process (Brubaker 2002, Brubaker, Loveman and Stamatov 2004, Lamont and Molnár 2002), there is relatively little empirical work that links boundaries to memory cognition. Jewish history plays an important role in shaping contemporary identities, however, few studies have examined how memory is mobilized in the daily lives of Jews.

1.3 Overview of the Dissertation

For my dissertation, I employ a cognitive approach to memory and its linkage to ethnic boundaries among Jews in Toronto. In doing so, I examine some of the schemas that define the past for Jews and how these schemas inform Jewish identities and ethnic boundaries. Schemas, as Cerulo (2010:125) writes, are “mental structures that aid in our understanding of the world [… They are] abstract generalizations or composites built from a collection of specific exposures or experiences.” A cognitive approach is particularly well-suited for understanding processes of remembering and how memory informs what it means to be Jewish. The schema concept also resonates with the metaphor of the “toolkit-repertoire” as a set of ideas or cultural “tools” that can be used by individuals to construct strategies of action (Swidler 1986, 2001).

I use the term ethnic boundaries to refer to both the symbolic and social dimensions of boundaries. The symbolic or categorical dimension of a boundary refers to “conceptual distinctions made by social actors to categorize objects, people, practices, and even time and space” (Lamont and Molnár 2002:168). This dimension reveals classifications and collective representations that

6 divide the world into social groups. Their enactment at the individual level gives rise to differentiated patterns of social interaction that can ultimately reinforce cultural, religious, or ethnic distinctions between and among ethnic groups (Sanders 2002). It is these distinctions, revealed in stable behavioral patterns of association or “scripts of action,” which constitute the social or behavioral dimension of ethnic boundaries (Wimmer 2013; Lamont and Molnár 2002).

This dissertation is comprised of three interrelated papers that have been written as stand-alone articles. The papers attend to significant aspects of contemporary Jewish life in Canada and beyond, namely organizational participation, residential patterns, and the boundaries of Jewish otherness.

The first article (Chapter 2), published in 2015 in Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, considers overnight Jewish summer camps as an important site for the production and maintenance of ethnic boundaries in the Jewish community and explores the boundary work of camp participants. The article examines ethnic boundary formation by analyzing how former participants in a liminal organization mobilize organizational schemas of identity and practice. I envisage Jewish summer camps as liminal organizations that provide an undifferentiated setup for immersive ethnic engagement within a clearly defined temporal period. I posit that the liminality of camp helps participants overlook the complexities of identity by transmitting organizational schemas without the constraint of everyday structural pressures that exist outside of the immersive camp setting. I argue the concept of liminality makes visible structural pressures that stimulate deliberate cognition over organizational schemas. Using qualitative interviews with former camp participants, this article attends to the cognitive boundary work that underlies organizational participation. It contributes to understandings of how identity practices are shaped by institutional discourses and extends ethnic boundary theory to include liminal organizational types. I show that the structure of camp activities organizes liminality into three predominant schemas: keeping kosher; Shabbat observance; and Israel as homeland. I then show how, in the context of structural shifting, campers mobilize these schemas as salient ethnic boundaries in their daily lives.

The second article (Chapter 3), co-authored with Dr. Eric Fong and published in 2018 in Ethnic and Racial Studies, explores Jewish residential concentration in Toronto and the maintenance of spatial boundaries. The paper examines how collective memory informs residential choices and extends the literature on collective memory and ethnic boundaries to include understandings about

7 how our socio-historical and cultural worlds shape our environment and give it meaning. In the paper, we argue that collective memory functions symbolically within Jewish neighborhoods to reproduce meanings about group status and belonging as well as to direct association patterns that manifest as durable residential enclaves. The findings show how residential clustering patterns reflect the behavioral consequences of the group’s collective memory. We identify four collective memory schemas (cultural trauma; ritual belonging; grounded community; and fortitude/empowerment) for ethnic residential clustering which serve as prominent scripts that shape the Jewish residential landscape in Toronto.

The third article (Chapter 4) takes up the issue of Jewish otherness, a fundamental and persistent feature of the Jewish experience in non-Jewish societies. The relationship between Jews and otherness in Canada and the United States is far from simple. The decades following the Second World War brought about significant changes in the acceptance and integration of Jews into mainstream American and Canadian society, and today Jews are among the most successful ethnic groups in Canada. Yet, social integration, acceptance, and belonging remain tempered by histories of exclusion and persecution, and by rising levels of antisemitism and white nativism in many parts of the world. This makes Jewish identity in multiethnic Canada complex and contradictory. This paper examines how collective memory shapes the boundaries of Jewish otherness. I find that Jewish otherness is articulated around a fragmented and contradictory set of collective memory schemas that position the Holocaust as both unique and universal, and the State of Israel as both fragile and powerful. The paper contributes to understandings about groupness and symbolic boundaries by exploring the contradiction and tension in how Jews think about the past and how the Holocaust and Israel inform the boundaries of Jewish otherness.

1.4 References Alba, Richard. 2005. “Bright vs. blurred boundaries: Second-generation assimilation and exclusion in France, Germany, and the United States”, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 28(1): 20-49

Baumel, Judith Tydor. 1998. Double Jeopardy: Gender and the Holocaust. London: Valentine Mitchell.

Beim, Aaron. 2007. “The Cognitive Aspects of Collective Memory”, Symbolic Interaction, 30(1): 7-26.

Berger, Ronald J. 2012. The Holocaust, religion, and the Politics of Collective Memory. New Jersey: Transaction Publishers

Breton, Raymond. 2012. Different Gods: Integrating Non-Christian Minorities into a Primarily Christian Society. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Brubaker, Rogers. 2002. “Ethnicity without groups”, European Journal of Sociology, 43(2):163- 189

Brubaker, Rogers, Mara Loveman, and Peter Stamatov. 2004. “Ethnicity as Cognition,” Theory and Society, 33:31-64

Brym, Robert, Keith Neuman, and Rhonda Lenton. 2018 Survey of Jews in Canada, Final Report. Toronto: Environics Institute for Survey Research.

Cerulo, Karen. 2010. “Mining the Intersections of Cognitive Sociology and Neuroscience.” Poetics 38(2): 115-132.

Cohen, Erik H. 2009. The Jews of France at the Turn of the Third Millennium: A Sociological and Cultural Analysis. Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University, Faculty of Jewish Studies, The Rappaport Center for Assimilation Research and Strengthening Jewish Vitality. http://bit.ly/2HIHSVN.

Dean, James, and Don J. DeVoretz. 2000. “The Economic Performance of Jewish Immigrants to Canada: A Case of Double Jeopardy?”, In Recent Jewish Migration in Comparative Perspective, edited by Daniel Elazar and Morton Weinfeld. New Jersey: Transaction Publishers.

Diamond, E. 2000. And I will dwell in their midst: Orthodox Jews in suburbia. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.

Diamond, E. 2002. “The Kosher lifestyle: Religious consumerism and suburban orthodox Jews.” Journal of Urban History 28(4): 488.

Eschebach, Insa. 2003. “Engendered Oblivion: Commemorating Jewish inmates at the Ravensbruck Memorial”, pp. 126-42 in Gender, Place and Memory in the Modern Jewish Experience, edited by J.T. Baumel and T. Cohen. London: Valentine Mitchell

Eyerman, Ron. 2004. “The Past in the Present: Culture and the Transmission of Memory”, Acta Sociologica, 47(2): 159-169.

Fong, Eric, and Elic Chan. 2011. "Residential Patterns Among Religious Groups In Canadian Cities." City & Community 10(4):393-413.

Goldmann, Gustave. 2009. “Intermarriage among Jews in Canada: A Demographic Perspective”, pp. 105-114 in Jewish Intermarriage Around the World, edited by Shulamit Reinharz and Sergio DellaPergola. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers.

Greene, Dana M. 2007. "The Holocaust as Recurring Reality: Victimization Themes and Jewish American Ethnic Identity Formation." Sociological Spectrum 27:275-98.

Gregory, Jr., Stanford, and Jerry M. Lewis. 1988. “Symbols of Collective Memory: The Social Process of Memorializing May 4, 1970, at Kent State University”, Symbolic Interaction, 11(2): 213-233.

Griffin, Larry J. 2004. “Generations and Collective Memory Revisited: Race, Region, and Memory of Civic Rights”, American Sociological Review, 69(4): 544-557.

Harold, Joshua and Eric Fong. 2018. “Mobilizing Memory: Collective Memory Schemas and the Social Boundaries of Jews in Toronto.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 41(2):343-361.

Holtschneider, K. Hannah. 2011. The Holocaust and Representations of Jews: History and Identity in the Museum. New York: Routledge.

Jacobs, Janet. 2008. “Gender and collective memory: Women and representation at Auschwitz,” Memory Studies, 1(2): 211-25.

Jacobson, Maxine. 2013. “Struggles and Successes: The Beginnings of Jewish Life in Canada in the Eighteenth Century,” pp. 21-28 in Canada’s Jews: In Time, Space, and Spirit, edited by Ira Robinson. Boston: Academic Studies Press.

Koffman, David S., and Morton Weinfeld. 2011. “Recent Developments in the Social Scientific Study of Canadian Jews,” Contemporary Jewry 31:199-221.

Lamont, Michèle and Molnár, Virág. 2002. “The Study of Boundaries in the Social Sciences,” Annual Review of Sociology, 28:167-195

Menkis, Richard. 2013. “Reform Judaism in Canada,” pp. 282-293 in Canada’s Jews: In Time, Space, and Spirit edited by Ira Robinson. Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press.

Nagel, Joane. 1994. “Constructing Ethnicity: Creating and Recreating Ethnic Identity and Culture”, Social Problems, 41(1):152-176

Paris, Erna. 1980. Jews: An Account of their Experience in Canada. Toronto: Macmillan of Canada.

Pew Research Center. 2015. “The future of world religions: population growth projections, 2010-2050: Jews.” https://pewrsr.ch/2riERpd.

Sahdra, Beljinder, and Michael Ross. 2007. “Group Identification and Historical Memory”, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 33: 384-395

Sanders, J. 2002. “Ethnic Boundaries and Identity in Plural Societies”. Annual Review of Sociology. 28: 327-357

Schnoor, Randal F. 2011. “The Contours of Canadian Jewish Life,” Contemporary Jewry 31:179-197

Schwartz, Barry. 1982. “The Social Context of Commemoration: A Study in Collective Memory”, Social Forces, 61(2): 374-402.

Schwartz, Barry. 1996. “Memory as a Cultural System: Abraham Lincoln in World War II”, American Sociological Review, 61(5): 908-927.

Shaffir, William. 2013. “Hasidim in Canada,” pp. 282-293 in Canada’s Jews: In Time, Space, and Spirit edited by Ira Robinson. Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press.

Shahar, Charles, and Tina Rosenbaum. 2006. Jewish Life in Greater Toronto. Toronto: UJA Federation of Greater Toronto

Shahzad, Farhat. 2012. “Collective memories: A complex construction”, Memory Studies, 5(4):378-391

Spillman, Lyn. 2003. “When Do Collective Memories Last?: Founding Moments in the United States and Australia”, pp. 161-192 in States of Memory: Continuities, Conflicts, and Transformations in National Retrospection, edited by Jeffrey K. Olick. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Swidler, Ann. 1986. "Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies." American Sociological Review 51:273-286.

Swidler, Ann. 2001. Talk of Love: How Culture Matters. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Troper, Harold. 2010. The defining decade: Identity, politics and the Canadian Jewish community in the 1960s. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press.

Tulchinsky, Gerald. 1992. Taking Root: The Origins of the Canadian Jewish Community. Toronto: Lester Publishing Limited.

Tulchinsky, Gerald. 2008. Canada’s Jews: A People’s Journey. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Wertsch, James V. 2002. Voices of Collective Remembering. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Wimmer, Andreas. 2008 “The Making and Unmaking of Ethnic Boundaries: A Multilevel Process Theory”, American Journal of Sociology, 113(4): 970-1022

Wimmer, Andreas. 2013. Ethnic Boundary Making: Institutions, Power, Networks. New York: Oxford University Press.

Zerubavel, Eviatar. 1996. “Social Memories: Steps to a Sociology of the Past”, Qualitative Sociology,19(3): 283-299

Zerubavel, Yael. 1995. Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Chapter 2 Jewish Summer Camps and the Boundary Work of Camp Participants

2.1 Introduction

In recent decades, concern over ethnic continuity has emerged as a critical facet of organizational agendas within many ethnic communities, including Asian Indian immigrants (Das Dasgupta 1998), Indigenous communities (Chandler and Lalonde 1998), and Japanese Americans (Morimoto 1997). Buttressed by rising intermarriage rates and declining ethno-religious affiliation, the “continuity crisis” has become especially palpable in the North American Jewish community (Sarna 1994). To address concerns about Jewish group survival, an array of communal strategies has been developed to enhance Jewish identification and bolster commitment to Jewish life, with overnight Jewish summer camps among the most ubiquitous (Sales and Saxe 2004).

In a history of the summer camp movement, Paris (2008:86) notes that by the 1920’s, “[Jews] were among the industry’s most enthusiastic supporters, at the epicenter of the summer camp marketplace.” This enthusiasm stemmed from camps’ efforts to acculturate second-generation Jewish immigrants into American society. More recently, in light of concerns about ethnic continuity, camps have emerged as a prominent institution in the Jewish educational landscape. Over 73,000 children attend about 120 Jewish camps across North America (Foundation for Jewish Camp 2012). Though this number currently represents a small proportion of the Jewish youth population, enrolment grows annually. Available data shows that between 2010 and 2014, attendance increased annually at about equal rates, totalling nearly 11% (JData 2014). Many camps have extensive waiting lists, with capital funding shortages contributing to limited beds (Arian 2002). Additionally, the high cost of many camps prevents less affluent Jews from participation, though this is being addressed with recent funding initiatives (Foundation for Jewish Camp 2012). Nevertheless, as Gerson Cohen, former chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary proclaimed, Jewish camps constitute “the greatest contribution made by American Jews to modern Jewish life” (Zola 2006:19).

13 14

Jewish camps provide youth with emotionally-charged immersion experiences centered on communal prayer, rituals, recreation, and social pastimes. Though programming is diverse, encompassing a range of activities tailored to the interests of youth, the emphasis across camps is to strengthen Jewish identification by making salient ethno-cultural practices and attitudes, including attachment to Israel and ritual observance (Sales and Saxe 2004). We know from survey research that compared to non-campers, campers exhibit stronger Jewish identities (S. Cohen et al. 2011). Yet while this research suggests that camps strengthen Jewish identity, we know little about how boundary-work and identity is constructed discursively in relation to organizational programs. For instance, as adults, former campers are significantly more likely than non-campers to feel “very emotionally attached” to Israel (S. Cohen et al. 2011), but it remains unclear what feeling attached to Israel means. Further, this research misses why not all campers become engaged in communal practices and it overlooks the challenges encountered when trying to translate their camp experiences into their adult lives.

This paper attends to the cognitive boundary-work that underlies organizational participation (Brubaker, Loveman, and Stamatov 2004). Drawing on Turner’s (1969) concept of liminality as a state of being “betwixt and between,” I envisage Jewish summer camps as liminal organizations that provide an undifferentiated setup for immersive ethnic engagement within a clearly defined temporal period. Camps separate youth from existing structural constraints that can restrict them from engaging in Jewish practices, rituals, and beliefs. Camps then equip campers with models of Jewishness by disseminating knowledge structures of identity and practice for directing boundary- work after camp. These institutionalized knowledge structures, what I refer to as organizational schemas, represent conceptual distinctions used to characterize collective identity and boundaries (Lamont and Molnár 2002). Organizational schemas reflect the constellation of frames or scripts in which ideology is represented and through which collective action is organized (see Brubaker, Loveman, and Stamatov 2004).

Through in-depth, semi-structured interviews with former campers from predominantly non- religious homes, I find that camps engage participants with schemas of Jewishness for shaping ethnic boundaries later in life, namely concerning 1) keeping kosher, 2) observing the Jewish Sabbath, and 3) attachment to Israel. Yet understanding the link between camp participation and adult Jewish boundaries requires attention to the challenges participants face translating camp schemas into their adult lives. I argue the concept of liminality makes visible the pressures that

15 stimulate deliberate cognition over organizational schemas. Extant conceptualizations of camp as a socializing experience obscures how long-term, recurrent structural shifting from home to camp, camp to home, and over again can encourage reformulations of organizational schemas. These reformulations as strategies to integrate camp schemas into daily life may ultimately complicate collective identity and undermine organizational goals. I use Jewish summer camps as a case study of liminal organizations to disaggregate boundary-work and for thinking generally about how institutions affect ethnic affiliations later in life. Studying how interpretations align with or diverge from organizational intentions establishes an important link between the institutionalization of ethnic boundaries at the organizational level and the cognitive nature of boundaries at the individual level.

2.2 The Liminality of Jewish Summer Camps

Research on Jewish identity tends to treat identity as a group-level rather than social-psychological phenomena and suggests that camps effectively bolster Jewish identification (S. Cohen et al. 2011). I argue that this tendency toward groupism, that is, treating groups as internally homogenous and externally bounded (Brubaker 2002), obscures how meaning is constructed by and through various organizational types. Rather than assess the “strength” of identification, my concern is the reflective, subjective meanings that emerge after long-term, repetitive participation in liminal organizations.

Turner (1969) offers a valuable framework for conceptualizing camps as liminal organizations. For Turner, liminality is the second stage in a three-stage ritual process. The first stage separates ritual subjects (e.g., campers) from their previous structural conditions. The second stage is one in which the ritual subject redefines their identity under conditions that have “few or none of the attributes of the past or coming state” (e.g., being at camp, a more structurally religious context) (Turner 1969:94). The final stage, aggregation, involves the subject’s reintegration or passage into the social structure from which they were removed (e.g., returning home from camp). Here, participants may employ some, none, or all of their reconstituted identity. I posit that participants’ mobilization of organizational schemas in their post-liminal lives is reliant on cognitive negotiations that arise from the divergent structural conditions of camp and home life.

In ethno-cultural and religious studies, liminality has been drawn on to better understand, for example, religious practices and beliefs (Fishman 1980), as well as the ambiguous space individuals occupy between the religious and the secular (Lim, MacGregor, and Putnam 2010). The “standard” approach here tends to separate individuals from their organizational context and assess levels of religiosity. There is little work connecting individuals to organizational types, especially types that institutionalize liminality as a strategy to address communal concerns.

Camps reflect this organizational type that has grown considerably in the last couple decades. With this type of organization, individuals are able to dip in and out of traditional ethno-religious participation, with the intention of taking it into the rest of their lives. Unlike other liminal experiences, including homeland tourism where tour participants can, within a clearly defined temporal period, engage with cultural and religious practices that can reshape their identity (Kelner 2010), the camp experience is typically one of repetitive, long-term liminality. Compared to homeland tours, campers generally return to camp summer after summer for years, even decades, with the Foundation for Jewish Camp (2012) reporting a return rate of around 90%. Liminality here is not a one-time experience. Most participants are living in the wake of these repetitive liminal moments, and it is unclear from existing literature on camps, ethnic boundaries, and identity how individuals relate to these experiences in their adult lives.

At camp, organizational schemas crystalize in a relatively undifferentiated environment characterized by freedom, egalitarianism, and “communitas” – the key traits of liminal situations (Turner 1969). For Turner, communitas takes shape as pre-existing hierarchical orders are leveled to create equal individuals who submit to the authority of ritual leaders (counselors, staff, directors, etc.). Camp participants are immersed in a Jewish social structure that is markedly different from hegemonic non-Jewish structures outside of camp. Further, the liminal experience is exceptionally intensive – camps actively serve as a barrier against the outside world, the time at camp is severely compressed, and camps engender their own cultural idioms, morals, and norms (Sales and Saxe 2004).

Jewishness is largely compartmentalized in North America and removed from many aspects of daily life (Reimer 2007). Many non-Orthodox summer camp participants do not attend Jewish day schools or come from religious households, often making their time at camp the only time of the year they are in a predominantly Jewish environment (E. Cohen and Bar-Shalom 2010). This does

17 not mean, however, that campers are not Jewishly engaged at home. Synagogue members send their children to Jewish camps more frequently than non-members, and parents who value Jewish learning tend to choose Jewish camps for their children (S. Cohen 2006; S. Cohen and Veinstein 2009). In this way, camp can operate as an extension of Jewish educational activities. But this engagement, through semi-regular synagogue attendance, Jewish day schools, or after school programs, is highly compartmentalized and interspersed with broader non-Jewish structural conditions. In short, they only operate for part of the day.

The liminality of camp operates twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and can be likened to a total society or “total institution” in Goffman’s (1961) sense (see E. Cohen and Bar-Shalom 2010). Among the most salient characteristics separating campers from previous structural conditions are communal living at camp and the integration of Jewish programming into daily life (Sales and Saxe 2004). Even for campers for whom camp is an extension of compartmentalized Jewish educational activities, the camp experience embodies liminality insofar as Jewishness permeates all aspects of daily life. For example, communal living at camp symbolizes traditional Jewish life of the Eastern European shtetl, which becomes “idealized and contrasted with artificial, eroded, inauthentic forms of assimilated, suburban American Jewish life” (Charmé 2000:137). The compartmentalization of Jewishness at home means that reintegration into this existing social structure necessitates a deliberate, cognitive response to structural pressures that are virtually non- existent at camp and can obstruct participants from enacting organizational schemas. These pressures appear when participants must decide how much or little of their experience they want to embrace, manage, and perform beyond camp.

The separation of camp from the outside world, and the ease with which organizational schemas can be engaged, means that Jewishness takes shape at camp without much effort on the part of participants. The “naturalness” of Judaism at camp materializes in a time-intensive, community- oriented environment with its own symbols, values, and language (Sales and Saxe 2004). In this way, camps involve spatial, temporal, and social separation from compartmentalized structural conditions, which situates campers in a purely liminal space (Turner 1969). It is within this space that many Jewish youth – including most participants in this study – first come into contact with Jewish rituals, traditions, song and dance, Israeli education, and Jewish texts (Chazan 2003). The liminality of camp, which promotes Jewish continuity beyond the camp setting, is set against

18 anxieties over the disaffection of Jews from organized, non-secular Jewish life (Amyot and Sigelman 1996; Mayer 2003).

Indeed, controlling for background, former campers are significantly more likely than non- campers to report feeling very attached to Israel, have Jews as their closest friends, light Shabbat candles, and be affiliated with a synagogue (S. Cohen et al. 2011). This work suggests that the liminality of camp fosters rather bright boundaries – where there is no ambiguity in the location of individuals with respect to the boundary (Alba 2005). For Jews, being a religious and ethnic group simultaneously means that religious observance and beliefs operate as ethnic boundaries. However, such findings do little to address what feeling “very attached” to Israel means or the challenges encountered in translating camp rituals into their adult lives. This ambiguity has educed criticisms from researchers who call for studies to delve deeper into the meaning of identity (Horowitz 2002), and for more elaborate phenomenology of group boundaries (Lamont and Molnár 2002).

I contend that the liminality of camp helps participants overlook the complexities of identity, temporarily, by transmitting organizational schemas without the constraint of, for example, counter-narratives or practical concerns over implementing organizational schemas. The concept of liminality helps illustrate that although research shows an impact of Jewish camping, this experience does not always translate directly into adult life. In the post-liminal life, organizational schemas may be confronted by societal conditions that complicate their implementation and necessitate micro-level negotiations over how they materialize as salient boundaries.

2.3 Boundaries as a Cognitive Process

Understanding the content of boundaries is critical because the grouping of members to an ethnic group may arise from individual, cognitive processes in relation to institutional arrangements (Brubaker 2002; Wimmer 2008). An institutional order is a significant factor in the development of these micro-level negotiations since it provides a discursive framework to members for structuring group boundaries (Wimmer 2008). Investigating the enactment of boundaries at the individual level is important because they can give rise to differentiated patterns of social

19 interaction that reinforce ethnic distinctions between and within groups (Lamont and Molnár 2002).

While measuring group boundaries as objective commonalities provides insight into the aggregate outcomes of micro-level negotiations, it provides little meaning of social-psychological processes across contexts. To this end, as mentioned above, previous studies on the effects of camp participation on identification tend to assess boundaries by cataloguing whether participants subscribe to objectivated categories. However, refraining from imputing identity categories to group members can overcome groupism and expound how organizational contexts permeate and form identity categories.

Buckser’s (2000) study of Jewish identity in Denmark illustrates the inadequacy of explaining ethnic persistence with objective commonalities. He shows that, “the strength of an ethnic community will depend not on its ability to hold members to a particular set of cultural practices, but on its ability to provide a range of practices and definitions with which individual members can engage” (Buckser 2000:730). Similarly, Faranda and Nolle (2011) argue that boundaries are often independent of objective commonalities, stressing the importance of perceived ethnic commonalities for distinguishing group boundaries. Interpretation is therefore important for understanding identity and boundary construction at the individual level (Brubaker 2002), especially in relation to external categorizations (Wimmer 2008).

Although belonging to a collectivity presupposes group membership based on the shared activation of specific schemas (Brubaker 2002), their structure is quite malleable. Schemas, as Cerulo (2010:125) writes, are “mental structures that aid in our understanding of the world. [They are] abstract generalizations or composites built from a collection of specific exposures or experiences.” In adopting a cognitive approach, ethnicity is treated as a way of seeing the world. As Brubaker, Loveman, and Stamatov (2004:45) explain, “rather than taking ‘groups’ as basic units of analysis, cognitive perspectives shift analytical attention to ‘group-making’ and ‘grouping’ activities such as classification, categorization, and identification.”

Camp participants experience repetitive and often long-term exposure to an intensive institutional order; that is, organizationally established ways of doing things (Wimmer 2008). Many campers

20 spend years, even decades at camp, often transitioning from campers to counselors and from counselors to directors. Research has shown that external classification of groups by institutions can significantly impact the formation of boundaries (Alba 2005; Nagel 1994), but boundaries are not determined solely by exposure to an institutional order. Rather, the impact of external classifications should be assessed alongside other factors, including their degree of institutionalization and mode of implementation (Cerulo 2010; Shepherd 2010). Institutionalizing liminality itself, as a tactic of boundary implementation, raises hitherto unanswered questions about cognition in ethnic boundary-making and its relationship to pressures that arise from structural shifting. Liminality and the organizational schemas crafted at camp thus have potentially meaningful cognitive impacts, though not necessarily outcomes that uniformly coincide with organizational intentions as prior studies suggest.

It has been suggested that over-routinization – where cues to direct attention are abundant – is a trigger for deliberate, inductive cognition in situations that are under-routinized (Heimer 2001). In the liminal camp setting, campers need give little thought to “being Jewish” insofar as Jewishness is over-routinized. However, I suggest that aggregation, or reintegration into the social structure, creates pressure to engage in deliberate cognition over the organizational schemas to which campers have had repetitive exposure. This refers to a process of slow, considered thought about behaviors and identity categories (Cerulo 2010). As I demonstrate below, the post-liminal life is one where classification systems and self-definitions are evaluated and take shape as salient ethnic boundaries.

2.4 Data and Methods

In-depth, semi-structured interviews were conducted with non-Orthodox, Canadian and American former overnight Jewish camp participants between the ages of 18 and 40. This age range generally reflects the population toward whom concern about Jewish continuity is directed. The sample consisted of 12 women and 13 men. Each participant engaged in a 1-2 hour long interview about their camp experience and Jewish identity. Qualitative interviews, compared to quantitative studies, permit a more robust examination of how camp experiences materialize later in life. Five participants attended camp for between 13 and 15 summers, nine attended camp for between 10

21 and 12 summers, six attended camp for between 8 and 9 summers, and five attended camp for between 4 and 6 summers. All respondents therefore experienced long-term, repetitive liminality and engagement with organizational schemas. Further, nearly all respondents participated in camp as both campers and counselors, enabling them to speak cogently about the organization and implementation of camp activities.

All participants identified as confidently Jewish. Though participants came from a range of backgrounds in terms of their parents’ Jewish engagement, none of the participants identified themselves as having been raised in particularly religious homes. For most, the camp experience provided their first and most powerful exposure to Jewish rituals, prayers, and Zionist ideology. For others, their first exposure came from home life, with camp providing more immersive and comprehensive exposure to such things. Indeed, all participants identified their camp experience as providing their most vivid and memorable Jewish experiences as youth.

Participants were recruited in two ways. The first strategy employed referral sampling techniques. Having well established contacts within Jewish camp networks enabled me to recruit participants via email. These contacts were instrumental in locating participants and forwarding information about the study. To encourage variety, I ensured my contacts had networks at different North American camps. The second strategy entailed posting information about the study on social media sites. While not a random sample, a good representation from a variety of different camps was achieved. Though this sample cannot be considered representative of the Jewish camp population, the point is instead to illuminate the boundary-work that underlies participation in a liminal organization.

Jewish camps were defined as having some form of Jewish curriculum. The content of Jewish curriculum was left intentionally broad to encompass a range of programs. In taking a Jewish curriculum established by the camp as the condition, I ensured that post-liminal reflections over organizational schemas were valid.

Ten camps were represented in participants’ collective experience. Nevertheless, in response to questions about how Jewishness took shape at camp, participants identified marked consistencies in their exposure to and engagement with specific organizational schemas. While much of the work

22 on Jewish summer camp is ethnographic, exploring the liminal phase itself, this study inductively examines the boundary-work of individuals in relation to organizational schemas. Exploring post- liminal boundary-making permits a richer understanding of cognitive processes as they relate to the durability of organizational schemas, including how they are mobilized among participants.

2.5 Organizational Schemas of Jewishness

In response to questions asking how Jewishness arose and was experienced at camp, interviewees described three predominant organizational schemas constructed through camp activities. First was the observance of dietary laws, or keeping kosher. Camps adhered to religious laws which regulate the consumption of particular foods. Keeping kosher is a historically symbolic act that reflects one’s commitment to traditional Jewish principles and law. Indeed, for many ethnic groups, food delimits group boundaries and is a fundamental marker of identity (Ziegelman 2010). Keeping kosher took shape effortlessly in daily life at camp. One camper noted: “we didn’t really think about keeping kosher at camp because we didn’t have to prepare our own food, we were served all our food” (Female, age 32). Most participants were raised in non-kosher homes, making keeping kosher at camp a conspicuous shift from home life. For participants raised in kosher homes, camp nevertheless reflected a shift from home life in that they described their families as not being “strictly kosher.” This meant that outside the home non-kosher food was often consumed, and, within the home, exceptions were made by eating non-kosher food (e.g., pepperoni pizza) on disposable plates. For all participants, then, camps established a liminal space in which ritual consumption, or keeping “strictly kosher” occurred uniformly and without exception.

Second was the observance of Shabbat, the Jewish Sabbath. Participants described Shabbat celebrations as camp-wide, weekly events occurring on Friday night, leading to a “special” day of programming on Saturday focusing on reflection and relaxation. This was a time when the “communitas” of camp visibly surfaced as campers came together to celebrate their Jewish heritage through rituals of communal, Hebrew prayer, Yiddish song and dance, and food. As one interviewee recalled: There would be a procession, all the campers would stand outside their cabin and a procession would come by playing some Shabbat related song and you all join in and go do the prayers together… Then you’d have a nicer Shabbat meal (Female, age 32).

Group prayers such as the Hamotzi (before meal) and Birkat Hamazon (after meal) were also integrated into meals. Friday night dinners, however, had a unique, special character with the addition of Shabbat-specific songs, dance, and prayers over candles. All respondents recalled Shabbat as their most vivid and enjoyable Jewish ritual at camp, in part because many did not experience it at home. As one interviewee described: “I really loved Shabbat. It was something neat, and I got a lot out of it… I would get a tingle down my spine and I didn’t get that at home” (Male, age 24). Participants embraced Shabbat as a communal, social activity that generated feelings of closeness and group unity: “The fact that everyone in the camp is in one room, singing these songs together, gives you a feeling of community” (Male, age 33).

Third was the incorporation of Zionist ideology into camp life. After Israel’s establishment in 1948, camp programming evolved to foster a love of Israeli culture, language, and people (Sinclair 2009), with the aim of augmenting one’s attachment to Israel (Sasson, Kadushin, and Saxe 2010). Interviewees recalled Israel being commemorated at camp with Israeli flags, Israel-themed carnivals, recitations of Israel’s national anthem, and other symbolic acts. For example, dressing in blue and white, Israel’s state colors, was a symbolic act that interviewees recalled: “Everyone had to dress up nice for Friday night dinner and…wear blue and white…, no shorts or anything like that” (Male, age 33). In most cases, respondents also reminisced about Israelis participating at camp as campers and counselors. Camps used a direct-contact approach that literally brought Israel to camp. This was achieved through encounters with Israeli schlichim, a term referring to Israeli emissaries who participate fully in camp life. As one interviewee explained:

“[Israelis] are put right into cabins…They run activities and they integrate fully with kids, one on one, to talk about Israel… kids can go to them and ask questions about anything…you can’t get that experience from watching TV…do you know how mind- blown you are, in a good way, after talking to them for ten minutes?” (Male, age 24).

Interviewees discussed Israel as being presented with an intrinsic primordial connection, namely as a Jewish homeland. As one camper explained: “they talked of Israel and it was always being spoken of as it is in [the] religion, as the holy land, the homeland, as where it all began” (Female, age 30). The schema of Israel as a “homeland” imbues it with both a historical and contemporary relevance for Jews by casting it as symbol of Jewish identity and pride. Though exposure to Zionist ideology at home varied among participants, they described their camp experience as providing

24 them with something that was absent at home, that is, Israel as tangible and an integral part of Jewish life. Consequently, interviewees recalled having unproblematic and positive connections to Israel as youth, much of which was attributed, in their minds, to the immersive camp experience.

2.6 Post-liminal Boundary-work Participants self-identified as predominantly ethnic or cultural Jews rather than as Jews by religion. As I demonstrate below, however, participants relate to and mobilize organizational schemas in ways that complicate understanding identity categories and practices as mutually exclusive in ethnic, cultural, or religious terms. Rather, their post-liminal reflections over organizational schemas draw attention to the pressures that stimulate deliberate cognition and the resultant variable constitution of the ethnic, the cultural, and the religious in projects of boundary-work.

2.6.1 Keeping Kosher As adults, where keeping kosher is not necessarily over-routinized as it is at camp, deliberate cognition is needed to evaluate this organizational schema’s relevance for one’s Jewish identity. Only one interviewee accepted the kosher schema as a bright boundary. Having been raised in “semi-kosher” home, keeping kosher at camp was a more steadfast extension to his home life. As an adult, keeping “strictly kosher” emerged as a religiously significant act that reinforced group belonging:

Eating kosher at camp was never an issue. It never made you feel uncomfortable or different…Actually, I liked how it connected me to my Jewish roots…Now, I like keeping that connection (Male, age 30)

Connecting to his Jewish roots through consumption practices required actively resisting social pressures to consume non-kosher foods. Accordingly, keeping kosher was, at times, strenuous during social interactions. He continued:

If [co-workers] offer me some shrimp or bacon or something I just say no thanks…maybe I’ll explain that I keep kosher….but it’s easier for me to just say I’m allergic, even though I’m not. I don’t always want to have a religious discussion.

Keeping kosher in his post-liminal life was underscored by a feeling that his actions required justification to others. Here, food as an expression of group belonging was tied to reflexive

25 cognition over how it situated campers in the broader social matrix of daily life. Keeping kosher as a bright boundary had clear consequences for his social relationships insofar as it delineated categorical and behavioral differences between others and him as a Jewish person (Wimmer 2008).

Far more common among respondents was a post-liminal rejection or negotiation of the camp’s kosher schema, which participants demonstrated through a tension between what they came to see as adults as a restrictive, religious ideology at camp and a contemporary, liberal one beyond it. Just over half of the interviewees did not keep kosher in their post-liminal lives. These respondents were predominantly raised in non-kosher homes and discussed keeping kosher as a superfluous part of their Jewish identity. Nevertheless, not keeping kosher was not an affront to their Jewishness. As one interviewee proclaimed: “I don’t follow kosher laws, but I do see myself as a Jewish person” (Male, age 30). The choice to not adopt the kosher schema after camp was tied to reflexive understandings of keeping kosher as a dated, restrictive practice that was incompatible with modern life. Having been raised in non-kosher homes, the camp experience was admittedly the only time of the year when they adhered to clear dietary restrictions. To this end, one respondent told of feeling like somebody else while at camp:

I just felt like I was a different person there. I remember my first summer I thought things were so weird, like, the Jewish stuff, keeping kosher or whatever. I knew about it, but it wasn’t stuff I was used to (Male, age 29)

Another participant responded similarly when asked how camp was different from her home life:

I loved being at camp. It was completely different from home…It’s not that I was excited to eat kosher all summer, but it wasn’t that bad, you get used to it. It was a change from my usual bacon and eggs but I was so excited to be there (Female, age 22)

Significantly, these reflections point to a discontinuity from the everyday that was reinforced by the camp’s kosher schema. The kosher schema was linked to reflections of the camp experience as a break from the structural conditions and webs of social relationships that defined their lives beyond camp. Many highlighted how this discontinuity offered a window for them to act “more Jewish,” contributing to feelings of ephemeral self-metamorphosis.

In their post-liminal lives, the kosher schema was rejected as participants evaluated it amidst the uninterrupted constraints of life in a modern, non-Jewish world. As long-term campers, respondents had the opportunity to passively dip in and out of this kind of practice, whereas the

26 post-liminal life requires more deliberate cognition to evaluate this practice’s relevance for one’s Jewish identity. Ideationally, the kosher schema was rejected as being antiquated and incompatible with contemporary values of a liberal, non-restrictive cultural (and culinary) ethos. As one interviewee succinctly explained: “keeping kosher just seems very dated… it seems like a ridiculous obligation…I find kosher food bland…Food is such a fundamental part of life, you know, variety is the spice of life” (Male, age 29). Prescriptive claims of this sort were grounded in the worldview that the historical, religious symbolism of keeping kosher had no place in modern societies. It was communicated as a restrictive practice that interfered with the structural realities of life in a hegemonic non-Jewish society, including heterogeneous social relationships:

I think in any religion, the goal is to structure your life in such a way that you can live a happy life, but I think the way it’s structured in Judaism is too strict, and not really conducive to my life. Like, in terms of food restrictions, like keeping kosher and what you can eat, where you can eat. That’s a big one. How could I go out for dinner with my non- Jewish friends? ...I love to try new things (Female, age 24)

Though most interviewees did not appropriate the kosher schema, several were more cognitively active in its post-liminal mobilization as an ethnic boundary. For these respondents, it was sufficient to make an effort to keep kosher where possible, a sort of “realistic kosherism” for structural contexts not set up to seamlessly facilitate its implementation. Living in a predominantly non-Jewish society meant it was not always as easy to adhere to strict dietary laws as it was at camp. As one participant said: “If you want to keep kosher, you really have to work at it when camp is over. It’s not easy. You really need to think about whether it’s worth all that effort” (Female, age 22). The effort required to oblige strict dietary edicts can be expansive if, for example, kosher foods are not readily available in your neighborhood. Significantly, negotiating the tension between keeping kosher as a restrictive, religious ideology and a contemporary, liberal ethos in society at large was underscored by issues of affordability. On the cost of keeping kosher, one participant explained:

I try to eat kosher… I'm glad that [grocery store] isn’t a kosher supermarket, but has a kosher section…. If I want to have cheaper meats, or non-kosher milk, at a cheaper price, it’s there. If I want to have kosher milk, and kosher meat, it’s there (Male, age 24)

Kosher food is typically more expensive than non-kosher food, and this expense reflected a substantial structural constraint for respondents. The lack of financial constraints at camp meant

27 that all campers had equal access to kosher food, which became a liminal feature of the camp communitas (Turner 1969). In their post-liminal lives, however, such constraints became unavoidable and encouraged campers to negotiate the camp’s schema as a salient boundary. The kosher schema was negotiated through decisions to select into and out of certain practices that eased structural pressures associated with cost while still conforming to particular communal codes. As another interviewee explained:

I don’t keep strictly kosher, it’s not always kosher meat, but I do have separate dishes for milk and meat. Personally, I don’t eat pork…but I have eaten milk and meat together before and I would. I don’t go and look to do so necessarily, but if I’m in a situation where I’m like at [a restaurant] then I’ll do it (Male, age 25)

This respondent, and others who kept kosher selectively, made conscious distinctions between acceptable and non-acceptable measures for keeping kosher, praxes that were echoed for some in their home life as youth. That their post-liminal negotiation of keeping kosher may reflect something they already did, however, means that the camp schema as such was rejected and did not meet its organizational intention. Keeping separate dishes for milk and meat, and not eating pork, were important symbolic acts which adhered to traditionally religious tenants and reinforced ethnic belonging. But not always eating kosher was, for him, an acceptable deviation from traditional dietary laws in the routine, non-Jewish structural conditions in which he lives. In this sense, negotiating the camp’s classification system delimited categorical differences from others, but not to the extent that it reinforced distinctions in everyday relationships (Wimmer 2008).

Indeed, camps effectively help campers overlook the ideational and practical complexity of implementing kosher practices beyond camp by transmitting organizational schemas without the constraint of adversative structural pressures – in this case pressures relating to affordability and value conflicts between restrictive, religious consumption practices and a liberal cultural (and culinary) ethos.

2.6.2 Shabbat Observance

Participants uniformly described Shabbat as the most enjoyable and central event shaping their Jewish camp experience. As one participant expressed:

I loved doing Shabbat at camp. I never really had any formal Jewish studying. I didn’t go to Hebrew school. I didn’t do anything like that so it was interesting to me because I didn’t know about a lot of this stuff, like the prayers before eating…It was just like a different energy, very respectful, a peaceful energy (Female, age 24)

Shabbat celebrations at camp were described as having a “religious feel to them” and participants expressed a clear affinity for the communalism Shabbat rituals engendered. For most participants, their time at camp provided their only regular exposure to communal Shabbat services and prayer.

Concomitant with research demonstrating a direct effect of camp attendance on Shabbat celebrations in later life (S. Cohen et al. 2011), interviewees made clear that Shabbat remained a salient identity category after camp. However, such research relies primarily on survey data, which overlooks questions about how former campers relate to their liminal experiences. I found that post-liminal reflections diverged from this camp schema in two important ways. First, Shabbat celebrations took a familial over communal form, and, second, the religious symbolism and practice of Shabbat was transposed into culturally specific expressions of groupness. The post- liminal restructuring of Shabbat in these ways indicates a clear disjuncture from the communalism and religiosity of the schema embraced at camp. Individualizing Shabbat in such ways may reflect, for instance, the religious autonomy of Reform Judaism familiar to some participants, but the camp experience, then, becomes all the more liminal in that it is not coterminous with this institutional component.

Of interest here is the meaning-making around Shabbat and why post-liminal Shabbat celebrations take shape in ways more consistent with, for example, the individual autonomy of Reform Judaism over the camp schema. Rather than celebrating Shabbat collectively with others in the Jewish community, as adults, interviewees celebrated Shabbat exclusively with family members as a common expression of Jewishness. Much of this cognitive reformulation was attributed to Shabbat at camp as antiquated, emulating Jewish life in the shtetl centuries ago. As one respondent explained:

Shabbat at camp was kind of like in the old days, you know, back in time. It was great! We all lived together in a tight community and celebrated all together. In the real world it’s not so easy…I wish it was. I don’t really live in a Jewish community…I have to work most Friday nights and when I’m not working, the last thing I want to do is go to shul and sit through prayers I don’t understand (Male, age 33)

As this respondent makes clear, the kibbutz-style communal life of camp and the regularity with which Shabbat is celebrated is not easily transposed to “real world” conditions. As another respondent added:

It doesn’t make sense in today’s world. Why should I do that? Because Jews once, a billion years ago, did it like that? The way they did Shabbat at camp is great when you’re a kid, but it’s not so easy when you grow up. I’d love to do more for Shabbat, but it just takes more commitment than I can give now (Female, age 30)

Participants expressed considerable frustration resulting from their interest in re-creating the feelings of closeness and community they experienced at camp, but noting that such models did not work in the “real world.” Consequently, few respondents celebrated Shabbat every week as they did at camp. Still, participants conveyed the sentiment that Shabbat was a time to get together with family and that it was important in locating their identity through traditional practice. As one interviewee noted:

I was making sure that I wasn’t working on Shabbat so that I could make sure to have dinner with my family; that is a priority for me… Not necessarily every single Friday night, but I’d say like 75 per cent of the time. That quality time with my family like when at camp, it was the quality time with friends, and you were doing something different (Female, age 24)

The cooptation of the camp’s schema into family celebrations reflects the structural pressures inherent in operationalizing communal practices in a social setting characterized by non-communal living and diurnal commitments.

Interviewees’ propensity to participate in communal Shabbat celebrations was further predicated on their perceived level of religious competence performing rituals and prayers independently after camp. Lacking proficiency with Hebrew meant that respondents were unable to subscribe to its normative use during communal services, as is characteristic of camps. As one interviewee stated:

I just don’t see the value of sitting in a [Shabbat] service when I don’t understand most of what’s being said…It makes me feel like an outsider really. With my family, like when I was at camp, I don’t have to wear a suit and I can just be myself…I can celebrate comfortably (Male, age 34)

Indeed, knowledge of Hebrew requires a significant amount of Jewish human capital, excluding many Jews from this normative, religious practice (Chiswick and Chiswick 2000). At camp, communal Shabbat celebrations are tailored to the aptitudes of campers and often supplemented with English explanations. Accordingly, camps helped participants overlook the challenges of implementing normative, communal practices beyond camp. In their post-liminal reflections, participants expressed an acute awareness of such challenges and were generally uneasy about adopting a model of celebration that required conformity to normative practices, including weekly celebration and the use of Hebrew.

Despite the attendant structural pressures brought on by normative practices and human capital requirements, Shabbat remained a dynamic social activity. Yet the groupness constituted by familial Shabbat celebrations was not expressed as a religious activity. Interviewees made a clear distinction between Shabbat as an ethno-cultural tradition and a religious one. As one interviewee stated:

I observe Shabbat due to tradition, not religion. By observe I mean we get together as a family…and we do it in our way. I think being a good Jew is observing in the way you want to observe (Male, age 28)

While rejecting the camp’s schema surrounding communal prayer was common among interviewees, traditionally religious acts, including blessings, did occur in Shabbat celebrations. However, in their post-liminal reflections, participants conceptualized reciting prayers as a cultural, rather than religious, exercise. As one interviewee explained:

I don’t necessarily go to shul on Shabbat, but I try to have a Shabbat dinner every week. It’s less about the religiosity; it’s about being around people and sharing in that. We’ll still do the blessing over the wine, the candles and the bread. We’ll do that and dinner will generally be chicken and there’ll be challah (Male, age 25)

The reconceptualization of Shabbat as a cultural rather than religious practice can be seen as an adopted strategy to deflect the structural pressures experienced beyond camp. Feeling uncertain in their ability to adhere to the organizational use of Hebrew and to commit to the regularity with which Shabbat is celebrated according to the Jewish religion, interviewees negotiated the religious schema of Shabbat at camp into a cultural one to which they could more easily subscribe. One participant even expressed a strong sense of guilt over not adhering to regular, communal Shabbat

31 celebration as she did at camp: “I don’t celebrate Shabbat as often. I’d like to get back into it, but no…I do feel guilty but we shouldn’t do something just because we feel guilty” (Female, age 33).

The liminality of Shabbat at camp focused on communalism and religiosity through prayer and was experienced by participants as such. But they expressed a clear aversion to mobilizing the Shabbat schema in this way. Instead, the significance of Shabbat in their boundary-work was expressed as an ethno-cultural tradition. Though the external classification systems regarding Shabbat were reconstituted by participants in this way, it endured as a tradition worth celebrating. Here, the active reformulation of the camp schema resulted in the shared use of categories which produced culturally specific and familial expressions of groupness (Brubaker 2002). Shabbat observance therefore remained a salient identity category and ethnic boundary for participants, a finding supported by survey research (S. Cohen et al. 2011). But the conceptual distinctions between communalism/family and religiosity/culture illustrate their active negotiation over the camp’s Shabbat schema in their post-liminal lives.

2.6.3 Attachment to Israel

Israel emerged as a prominent feature of the camp experience for all participants. While respondents’ exposure to discourses about Israel varied in their childhood from home, after-school programs, attending synagogue, or some combination thereof, the camp context remained the only experience in which Israel was integrated fully into daily life. For this reason, participants cited their camp experience as factoring prominently into their meaning-making about Israel, especially as youth. As one interviewee recalled:

Sure, I would hear about Israel at shul or my parents would talk about Israel, but what can you really learn like that as a kid? It was different at camp. Camp made Israel feel real…We would live Israel; I mean Israel came alive at camp through music, crafts, and Israelis themselves…and of course falafel! That’s where I first ate it, now I eat it all the time (Male, age 40)

The ubiquity of Israel at camp and its impact on emotional attachment to Israel has been well documented (Sales and Saxe 2004), with camp attendance raising the likelihood of feeling very attached to Israel by 55% (S. Cohen et al. 2011:12). Missing in these findings, however, is what it means to feel attached to Israel and how participants relate to their liminal experiences as adults.

In their post-liminal reflections, participants’ boundary-work and emotional attachment to Israel diverged in meaningful ways indicative of how Israel education is institutionalized at camp.

Israel at camp can be seen as a low-resolution view of Israel, which “sees the contours of a picture, the basic outline of what is going on” (Sinclair 2009:82). This contrasts to a high-resolution view which provides a more detailed, nuanced picture (Sinclair 2009). A low-resolution view at camp is, perhaps, sensible given that campers are young and interrogating the geopolitics of Israel can spoil the fun of camp. In their post-liminal lives, though, participants became increasingly exposed to and cognisant of (counter-) narratives that stimulated deliberate cognition over the camp’s schema. For some, primordialist understandings were reinforced and emerged as a high-resolution boundary. For others, the schema was rejected and a high-resolution boundary antithetical to it emerged. Nevertheless, for interviewees on both sides of the boundary, Israel remained a salient component of their Jewish boundary-work.

The schema of Israel as a Jewish homeland was reiterated by just over half of the interviewees. For some, Israel was a “safe place” for Jews in a world where antisemitism remained an ever- present reality. Several participants conflated antisemitism with anti-Zionism, which, for them, strengthened the need for a Jewish homeland: “Antisemitism and anti-Zionism these days are very linked…it’s a time where as a Jew I feel threatened… I believe Jews need a homeland” (Male, age 26).

More common, however, were ineffable concerns over the volatility of the region. As one interviewee stated:

Camp was really where I learned about the importance of Israel…I feel very strongly about Israel. I guess I’m a bit of Zionist in that regard…I’ve never been to Israel but I feel close to it… It makes me sick what’s going on over there. It really upsets me… I think [Jews] would be screwed if anything happened to Israel and that’s scary. God forbid if there’s any sort of crazy war, that’s our homeland, it’s our safety net… you need to protect your homeland (Female, age 33)

The sense of security Israel provided was further revealed in recollections of past cultural trauma. Memories of war were conspicuous historical events through which participants substantiated Israel’s existence as a Jewish homeland:

[Israel] needs to exist, more so because of historically what happened, so that we never repeat, you know, the history, events like the Holocaust… As long as there is hatred against Jews, then they deserve to protect themselves and have a land where they can do that (Female, age 30)

In addition to Israel as a homeland within a context of hostility, Israel was framed in more positive light and connected to their Jewishness. One interviewee explained the significance Israel held for him:

I like knowing there’s a home for me there. From my understanding, any Jew is welcome to move to Israel. And to me that is something very special… Canada is my home, but Israel is my homeland. It’s about the history of it. That’s what makes Israel a special place. It’s not that Jews decided one day, let’s go establish Australia as a homeland, there are historical ties that connect Israel to Jews and make it special (Male, age 30)

These participants expressed their attachment to Israel in strikingly similar terms to the organizational schema. Though such connections may not be solely attributable to their camp experience, the power and intensity of the camp experience admittedly had a profound impact on campers’ boundary-work concerning Israel.

This is also true of the just less than half of respondents who, in their post-liminal reflections, rejected the camp schema. Here, Israel was a source of contention in their boundary-work, but they remained emotionally attached to Israel. As adults, they came to see the exuberance of Israel at camp as uncritical and unreflective of socio-political realities there. As one interviewee said:

A lot of what I learned at camp was actually what taught me to then question and to become anti-Zionist…Outside of camp I was being challenged by other people and I think the belief in a Jewish democratic state is a contradiction…At camp Israel is kind of this socialist utopia…It’s socialism for a very exclusive group of people, you know, for Jews only (Female, age 31)

For this respondent and several others, interaction with people holding critical views of Israel served to challenge the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish homeland espoused at camp. Amidst post- liminal reflections, primordial understandings of Israel at camp, which largely had “an absence of Palestinians,” became complicated by the absorption and evaluation of information that contradicted the camp’s schema. In several cases, after being challenged by others and exposed to

34 more high-resolution views of Israel in the media, college, and social circles, participants expressed a sense of being misled by camps about Israel:

I was learning. I had this sense of having been lied to, or at least having things been covered up…I was watching the way the media was covering the Second Intifada and just seeing the differences from camp…I started to open my eyes to things and then it was a process of learning, relearning, unlearning, and getting involved (Female, age 31)

The process of learning, relearning, and unlearning exemplifies how the camp experience concerning Israel is one of low-resolution, whereby camps overlook the complexities surrounding Israel (Sinclair 2009). While camps connect Jewish youth to Israel, the connection can, as a result of exposure to counter-narratives, become antithetical as participants gain deeper understandings of Israel and its role in the Jewish diaspora. To this end, one participant explained:

The way Israel has been sold is as a Jewish homeland at camp, a place where Jews can go to be free from oppression. I disagree with the validity of those claims in this day and age...For a lot of people, especially people coming out of the war, Israel represented freedom, so they will always support it… I know this is kind of crass, but I don’t think it matters as much to Jews today as it did to that generation. I don’t think there’s a link between being Jewish and Israel. I think the linkage that we see today has been constructed over the last 60 years for political purposes (Male, age 28)

The participant here is referring to the ongoing struggle for peace between Israelis and Palestinians, a conflict that participants recalled as being conspicuously absent in their camp experience. As participants learned more about Israel in their post-liminal lives, the schema of a relevant and unproblematic homeland broke down. The waning relevance of Israel was tied to understandings of state-sanctioned discrimination and apathy toward Palestinians, ultimately contributing to their anti-Zionist stance:

I don't think Israel serves as any kind of beacon for Judaism…I understand the importance of [Israel] at the time that it was formed, but I get into big arguments with people who are Zionists. I have a pretty strong anti-Israel opinion. I relate to the Palestinian struggle (Male, age 33)

Beyond relating symbolically to the “Palestinian struggle,” one participant was actively involved in rallying against Zionism and the unjust power dynamics she felt were embedded in Israeli politics:

I definitely have an oppositional relationship to my Judaism…and I don't know that ever will change. I do think it's possible for it to change, in some kind of general sense…Fighting against Zionism for me is a way of fighting for future generations of Jews to have non-problematic Jewish identities…I need to do this to kind of repent, to make up for what has been done in my name, so it's sort of not in my name (Female, age 31)

These participants’ attachment to Israel was clearly impassioned, but it diverged considerably from those who accepted the schema of Israel as a Jewish homeland. These interviewees did not see Israel as a source of pride in their Jewish identities, but rather as a source of conflict. In some cases, this conflict arose directly from engagement with the camp’s schema. The dissonance among interviewees demonstrates the tensions inherent in boundary-work when institutional contexts that define group membership are evaluated in structural conditions that permit a more nuanced and sophisticated reading of a given issue. Although these participants rejected the organizational schema, Israel permeated their Jewishness in emotionally meaningful ways.

2.7 Conclusion

Jewish camps provide participants with immersion experiences where organizational schemas are efficaciously diffused within a clearly defined temporal period. Drawing on Turner’s (1969) concept of liminality, I envisage Jewish summer camps as liminal organizations that disseminate knowledge structures of identity and practice for directing boundary-work outside of the organizational setting. I posit that the concept of liminality makes visible the pressures that stimulate deliberate cognition over organizational schemas. Participants’ reflections indicate their camp experiences provided powerful exposure to and engagement with Jewish rituals, practices, prayers, and Zionist ideology. The result is that campers typically exhibit stronger Jewish identities than non-campers (Keysar and Kosmin 2005). Yet their reflections illustrate that liminal experiences are not always easily translated into their adult lives.

Far from seamlessly implementing organizational schemas in their post-liminal lives, this study demonstrates the boundary-work that underlies long-term organizational participation. The kosher schema was negotiated as an ideological tension between a restrictive, religious ideology on the one hand and a contemporary, liberal one on the other. This tension was further underscored by pragmatic concerns over affordability. The Shabbat schema was uniformly adopted as a salient

36 boundary, though the communalism and religiosity of Shabbat took a familial and cultural form. This was attributed largely to non-communal living beyond camp and being unable to commit to the use of Hebrew and the regularity of Shabbat celebrations according to the Jewish religion. The boundary-work concerning Israel was somewhat more polarized. Participants either accepted the schema of Israel as a Jewish homeland or they emphatically rejected it. Nevertheless, in both instances, Israel remained an important part of how participants defined their Jewishness.

Rather than providing evidence of a continuity crisis, these findings reveal projects of boundary- work that structure groupness. In examining how organizational schemas are processed and mobilized by former campers, this paper draws attention to how boundaries themselves can be liminal phenomena, as well as how boundaries and collective identity rely on cognitive negotiations that arise through organizational participation. At camp, participants have “bright” boundaries about what it means to be Jewish and how to perform Jewishness (Alba 2005). However, in the post-liminal life, structural pressures encourage inductive cognition to evaluate organizational schemas as salient boundaries. As these findings show, this process can blur boundaries and restructure them in ways that deviate not only from their institutional context, but also from the boundary-work of other participants.

By disaggregating the elements of identity categories, these findings contribute to scholarship that examines how boundaries are a function of subjective commonalities (Brubaker 2002), and how institutional contexts permeate ethnic identity (Nagel 1994; Wimmer 2008). The findings also have important implications. First, the study of Jewish identity and of communal programming tends to subscribe to groupism and relies on survey data that misses important information. This study suggests the effectiveness of communal programming needs to be understood alongside processes of boundary-work. Such an approach explores how participants relate inductively to organizational schemas. Second, this study speaks more generally to the field of race and ethnicity. Some ethnic, racial, or religious groups may have more or less ease implementing organizational schemas depending on their schematic content and the group’s degree of marginalization in the broader structural context. Ethnic boundary research can benefit greatly from systematically evaluating boundary-work across organizational types and unpacking the structural pressures affecting how particular schemas are accepted, rejected, or negotiated.

2.8 References

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Chapter 3 Collective Memory Schemas and Jewish Residential Patterns

3.1 Introduction

Sociological inquiry into the boundaries of ethnic and religious groups has generated a multitude of explanations about group dynamics and community development. Social boundaries delineate social spaces within social fields by structuring association patterns and group interaction (Lamont and Molnár 2002; Tilly 2004). Among the most socio-politically and economically salient manifestations of social boundaries is residential segregation (Massey 1990). The typical analysis in this regard follows the Chicago ecological approach and looks at how socioeconomic characteristics and demographic backgrounds shape residential spaces (Alba and Logan 1991; Clark 2007). Other studies incorporate group relations and draw attention to the choices people make about living among co-ethnics, arguing that in-group preference plays an important role in residential patterns (Alba and Logan 1991; Iceland and Wilkes 2006). Such studies suggest that individuals prefer to move out from neighborhoods with higher proportions of their own group when their socioeconomic standing improves, or when they have been in the country for longer periods of time.

Research into residential patterns has generated innovative questions and insights about the causes and trends of residential patterns. Yet, findings show the effects of socioeconomic factors vary considerably among groups. To explain this variation, some researchers point to the unique socio- historical experiences of groups (Crowder, Pais and South 2012; Logan, Stults and Farley 2004; White, Fong and Cai 2003). However, few studies have explored the suggested relationship. Further, the durability of residential enclaves over time among some groups has raised serious challenges to the conventional understanding of residential patterns.

In this study, we investigate how our socio-historical and cultural worlds shape our material world. We attend directly to how the collective memory of a group can affect their residential patterns. Research across the social sciences attests to the significance of the past in shaping meaning for the present day. To date, much of the work on collective memory has centered on the institutionalization of memory, commemorative projects of memory elites, and the construction of

41 42 non-elite memory (Schwartz 1996; Schwartz and Schuman 2005; Shahzad 2012). Our study extends this work by analyzing how the past affects present-day behaviors, particularly how collective memory is used discursively within groups to enact social boundaries.

Through an analysis of the residential patterns of Jews in Toronto, this paper examines the mobilization of collective memory in the production of spatial boundaries. Our study extends the literature on collective memory and residential patterns to include understandings about how mnemonic communities reinforce symbolic meanings that define group parameters, shape our environment, and give it meaning. We posit that collective memory functions symbolically within Jewish neighborhoods to reproduce meanings about group status and belonging, as well as to direct association patterns that manifest as durable residential enclaves. We argue that Jewish clustering patterns in Toronto in part reflect the behavioral consequences of their collective memory.

Jews are among the most residentially segregated groups in Canada (Balakrishnan and Gyimah 2003; Fong and Chan 2011), despite their collective socio-economic achievement and high degree of political efficacy (Tulchinsky 2008). Drawing on open-ended questionnaires and in-depth, semi- structured interviews, we build on this prior literature by adopting a cognitive approach (Beim 2007), and by exploring how social historical relationships within the Jewish community are implicated and mobilized in residential clustering practices. The Toronto Jewish community is one of the foremost metropolitan centers of Jewish life in North America (Shahar and Rosenbaum 2006), and therefore lends itself as a fruitful research site for this investigation.

From our data, we identify four collective memory schemas for residential concentration: cultural trauma; ritual belonging; grounded community; and fortitude/empowerment. These schemas shape the Jewish residential landscape in Toronto by transforming neighborhoods into sites for the socialization, recollection, and mobilization of collective memory. As our findings demonstrate, Jewish neighborhoods are places of communal and social cohesion, not because neighborhoods have specific memories attached to them, but because they are critical sites for the preservation, reinforcement, and transmission of collective memory.

3.2 Collective memory and residential patterns

Much of the discussion on collective memory can be attributed to Durkheim’s (1947) work on religion. More recent discussions of the topic, however, are largely indebted to his student, Maurice Halbwachs, and his now seminal work on the social frameworks of memory. Halbwachs (1992) argues that memory is a social rather than individual phenomenon. Individual memory presupposes a social framework because it operates within a sociocultural environment. It is through participation in a collective symbolic order that memory becomes a social construction. This is especially pertinent for memories with which people have no direct, personal experience (Zerubavel 1996). For example, memories of the Holocaust among younger generations are largely acquired through education and interaction with media and institutions that reflect shared versions of the past (Erll 2011).

It was his conceptualization of memory as a shared social framework that set Halbwachs apart from dominant psychological interpretations of memory. As Halbwachs (1992, 38) writes, “It is in society that people normally acquire their memories. It is also in society that they recall, recognize, and localize their memories.” Collective memory is important in defining group membership, which leads to mutual support and develops in-group interaction and trust (Olick 2007; Zerubavel 1994). The sharing of collective memory among group members gives rise to group identity and delineates the group’s symbolic boundaries (Brog 2003; Olick and Robbins 1998). This line of research has contributed to our understanding of the politics of representation and the social forces in memory production. For example, Schwartz (1982) makes salient the linkage between collective memory and social structure by examining commemorative projects in the US capitol. Gregory Jr and Lewis (1988) analyse monument building in relation to the Kent State University murders and point to the centrality of powerful institutions in the memorializing process. In relation to the Holocaust, a ubiquitous basis for collective memory among Jews, scholars draw attention to the gendering and contestation of collective memory in commemorative projects (Holtschneider 2011; Jacobs 2008). These studies, and others that examine the institutionalization of memory, speak to the intertwining of politics and power inherent in commemorative projects where narratives of past events are selected, edited, and (re)presented to others (Berger 2012; Nora 1998).

Focus on the social forces of memory production has meant the reception and consumption of collective memory is underdeveloped (Conway 2010). Some work brings the individual into memory discussions and demonstrates the significance of demographic factors in shaping people’s worldviews. In a study of Israeli Jews, Shuman, Vinitzky-Seroussi, and Vinokur (2003) find education level, ethnic origin, gender, and religiosity factor differentially into which world events are considered most important. Other work has looked at cohort location in understanding meanings of the past, highlighting the meanings cohorts attach to events such as the Second World War (Scott and Zac 1993). Understanding the consumption and reception of collective memory among group members means bringing people into the field. It implies we can better understand how memory matters to individuals. In a study connecting “ordinary people” to institutional representations, Schwartz and Schuman (2005) examine people’s beliefs about the past, relating them to memory elites’ representations of Abraham Lincoln. They find individuals’ images of Lincoln are rather unidimensional today compared to more multidimensional images in the past.

One approach to understanding the reception of collective memory is to explore mechanisms for how collective memory is used among group members to develop group boundaries (Eyerman 2004; Griffin and Bollen 2009). Particularly useful in this regard is a cognitive approach to the study of collective memory (Beim 2007). As Beim (2007) contends, collective memory studies should pay more attention to the “bundles of memory schemata” by which the past is defined. This permits more nuanced assessments of how collective memory is collective beyond its institutionalization in objects or texts. Collective memory schemas provide scripts for understanding the past and organizing action (see Brubaker, Loveman, and Stamatov 2004). By examining collective memory schemas, we are able to better understand how collective memory is mobilized among group members and how they materialize as durable residential enclaves.

We suggest that the residential patterns of a group can be a behavioral outcome of group members responding to collective memories that reinforce identity and guide group relations. In fact, the literature on residential patterns has alluded to the significance of collective memory in community development and residential settlement. For example, Firey’s (1945) classic work on Italian immigrants in Boston demonstrates the importance of value and sentiment in shaping the urban form. Of particular importance were symbolic qualities that residents believed certain areas possessed. He showed these qualities had a “retentive power” over area residents who shared prevailing values. Some years later, Gans (1962) expanded this idea and suggested that area

45 residents engage in ethnic activities that foster collective memory of the past and meaningful ethnic ties.

In more recent years, scholars have confirmed the significance of a group’s unique socio-historical experiences on residential locations by pointing to the different effects of socioeconomic resources and demographic backgrounds (Logan, Stults, and Farley 2004; White, Fong, and Cai 2003). When looking at the segregation of minority groups in the USA, for example, Logan, Stults, and Farley (2004:20) suggest that variation in socioeconomic effects on groups are “necessary to deal with each group on its own terms.” White, Fong, and Cai (2003:165) compare the residential patterns of major racial groups in the US and Canada, and explicitly conclude, “some of the variations may relate to other factors, such as group migration history…” Most recently, Crowder, Pais, and South (2012:349) made similar comments: “Especially fruitful would be analysis of factors related to specific demographic, historical, and economic dynamics of race relations in metropolitan areas.” Despite the awareness demonstrated in the preceding examples, virtually none of the studies identify how socio-historical experiences affect residential patterns.

3.3 Data and methods

This paper employs qualitative methodology to examine how group members mobilize the past in relation to residential clustering. Because we rely on a nonprobablistic sample, we do not make claims to the population’s representativeness from the sample. The analysis is therefore more exploratory than explanatory, but nevertheless lends itself as an important point of departure for future correlational or causational frameworks.

Our analysis relies on two data sources. We analysed open-ended questionnaires collected from Jewish residents in the greater Toronto area (GTA). The GTA refers to the city of Toronto and its four neighboring municipalities (Durham, Halton, Peel, and York). The area usually is considered to be one economically integrated region. Because the Jewish population resides in various neighborhoods and municipalities within the GTA (Shahar & Rosenbaum 2006), electronic questionnaires were well suited to access this generally non-visible population distributed across a large geographic region (Van Selm and Jankowski 2006). We collected 160 open-ended questionnaires. The questionnaire was designed to enable participants to discuss their choices in

46 residential location and explain in-depth why living close to religious institutions and other Jews is or is not important to them. The participants were between eighteen and seventy-eight years old and identified with various Jewish denominations, namely conservative Judaism (n=63), orthodox Judaism (n=17), reform Judaism (n=44), humanist and reconstructionist branches of Judaism (n=10), as well as secular and non-denominational formulations of Judaism (n=26). Participants were recruited by snowball sampling techniques, as well as by posting information about the study on social media discussion boards containing a link to the questionnaire. The proportion of religious denominations in our sample, though not strictly representative, approximates the distribution of Jewish religious categories in Toronto (Shahar and Rosenbaum 2006).

This paper also draws on in-depth, semi-structured interview data culled from a larger project on collective memory and the boundary work of Jews in Canada involving thirty-five participants who reside in the GTA. Interviews lasted approximately sixty minutes each. Interviewees self- identified with various Jewish denominations ranging from orthodox to secular, though all participants identified as confidently Jewish. During the interviews, participants reflected on their identities, which included discussions about Jewish history, socialization, their local experiences in the GTA, global experiences as part of diaspora communities, and Jewish politics both nationally and internationally. Participants made clear the importance of the past in shaping their Jewish identities and directing their boundary work, particularly their spatial boundaries. The qualitative data used in this paper allows us to not only examine participants’ remembering, but, more significantly, their implications for boundary making.

3.4 Collective memory schemas and spatial boundaries

Toronto is Canada’s largest city and home to most of the country’s Jewish population. From the earliest years of the city’s development, Jews have lived together in large numbers and they remain among the most residentially concentrated groups in Canada (Fong and Chan 2011). Early Jewish immigrants arrived with little money and faced exclusionary practices which limited their housing options. Religious considerations also influenced and continue to influence immigrants’ decisions, though in-group residential concentration remains an important objective for fostering community integration (Mandres 1998). With few choices, many settled into commercial areas, finding accommodations near to their work (Hiebert 1993). This trend established a Jewish residential

47 pocket known as “the Ward” or “St John Shtetl” (Speisman 1979). This changed following the Second World War when Jews, driven by filiocentric ideals and having more options available to them, settled in the suburbs in favor of larger houses (Tulchinsky 2008). Klaff (1983) notes that in 1951, Jews comprised 6.7 per cent of the Toronto city population and 2.1 per cent of the outer suburbs. By 1961, the city percentage declined to 2.8 per cent and the outer suburbs increased to 7.2 per cent.

The in-depth, qualitative analysis makes clear that recollection of past experiences plays a pivotal role in shaping the Toronto Jewish residential landscape. Still, residential patterns arise from diverse socio-political and economic forces. Residential choices are themselves conditioned by external factors, including discrimination, economic limitations, and intra-group diversity. In a recent study of Indian Jews in Toronto, Train (2016) demonstrates how the Ashkenazi Jewish majority maintains essentialist understandings of identity that preclude non-white Jews from full communal participation, including living in Jewish neighborhoods. Religious necessities, such as living within walking distance of a synagogue, also factor into residential choices, and this was articulated by respondents more observant of traditional Judaism. Clearly and significantly, however, the collective memory of Jews as a people with a unique socio-historical trajectory was highlighted by respondents from all denominations as a key determinant in their residential choices.

The majority of respondents indicated that living in a Jewish neighborhood was important to them. For the few who reported living in a Jewish neighborhood was not important to them, they typically cited exposure to cultural diversity and religious apathy as their foremost reasons. Nevertheless, these respondents identified confidently as Jewish. While they did not see living in a Jewish neighborhood as particularly important for them, their expressions of Jewishness indicate they share in the collective memory schemas described below and value Jewish neighborhoods as discursive settings to reinforce memories.

3.4.1 Cultural trauma schema

We identify this schema as the most salient in shaping the Jewish residential landscape because of its symbolic power for reinforcing collective memories of persecution. This schema links temporal

48 experiences involving cultural trauma to collective understandings of a shared ancestry. Despite the varied backgrounds of our sample and Toronto Jewry more generally, as Schoenfeld, Schoenfeld, and McCabe (2007:102) explain, Jews in Diasporas like Toronto have “great- grandparents whose lives were similar, and they share a historical memory of that similarity.” These collective understandings delineate clear spatial boundaries of belonging. As one respondent notes, living among other Jews was a critical aspect of maintaining a closeness that had been devastated in the past:

It’s important for me to live close to other Jews because of what’s happened to us historically. For thousands of years we have been targeted by people who blame Jews for the world’s problems…It was only seventy years ago that the Holocaust devastated the Jewish community to the point where it nearly disappeared. Living in a Jewish community is a way for me to easily maintain those Jewish connections that were nearly lost (female, conservative, age 46)

The way this respondent positioned herself within a distinctively Jewish, historical narrative was common among respondents. Phrases like “what’s happened to us” and “we have been targeted” elicits a collective memory that is made to be continuous, demonstrating a need for historical continuity from earlier generations. Jewish neighborhoods offered respondents a platform on which “mental bridges” that fill gaps between the past and the present could be constructed (Zerubavel 2003). Respondents often located themselves in events with which they had no direct, personal involvement and framed Jewish neighborhoods as spaces of historical continuity. As another respondent noted, “We’ve not had an easy time – from Egyptian slavery to the Holocaust to anti-Israel campaigns…Living near other Jews just makes it easier to deal with the past” (male, secular, age 31). By locating oneself within a group’s historical narrative, ineffable and traumatic experiences crystalize as part of one’s ethnic consciousness and structure identity categories that define group membership. Electing to live in a Jewish neighborhood speaks to participants’ willingness to recall and experience the past as members of a mnemonic community (Zerubavel 1996). Affiliation with the past through a sense of historical continuity ultimately provides a consistent identity source for the present.

The Holocaust was an important historical event that reinforced group solidarity and a sense of peoplehood. On this note, one respondent expressed the centrality of the Holocaust in his decision to live near other Jews:

I think it’s important for Jews to maintain a strong sense of togetherness. We’ve been through a lot together as a people, much of it unfortunately centered on war and destruction… The Holocaust is something that connects all Jews, regardless of your religious beliefs, and it really showed us how important it is to stay connected… This can’t happen if there are no Jewish communities… (male, conservative, age 56)

Sentiments surrounding the historical significance of togetherness were salient characteristics cited by respondents from all denominations for the importance of living in a Jewish area. The historical discontinuity of familial and communal ties resulting from cultural trauma was a shared framework through which respondents constructed collective memory, and the neighborhood leveraged a mutual bond through co-ethnic relations.

The cultural trauma schema was further predicated on a past consisting of experiences with modern anti-Semitism. The desire to share neighborhoods with other Jews was heightened by recollections of and concerns about anti-Semitism. This was particularly evident among older respondents who had experienced anti-Semitism directly. That Jews have been persecuted for their ethno-cultural differences throughout history was the impetus driving many respondents to live in an area with a visible Jewish presence. For them, living among co-ethnics who share their cultural and religious history offered a feeling of existential security and reassurance, especially in light of emotionally- charged events such as the Holocaust. As one respondent explained:

[Jews] have similar backgrounds and beliefs. Most of my friends have parents who survived the holocaust in Europe. Although my parents were born here, my husband’s parents survived the war. We are also very strong supporters of Israel. The news and most of the world are not very pro-Israel… We seek out Jewish people to associate with because it provides a certain comfort level. There is still a huge amount of anti-Semitism in the world today and I think many Jewish people find it hard to believe non-Jews can actually accept and be friendly with Jews (female, conservative, age 60)

Here, a narrative of anti-Semitism delimits a clear boundary of belonging and constructs a discursive frame defining in-group members against a threatening other. It was evident that living in a Jewish neighborhood mitigated feeling of otherness by establishing a space where understandings of a shared past reinforced an imagined cultural bond. Significantly, with this schema, place is secondary to the people who occupy it in marshalling a collective memory. Among younger respondents and those who did not see living in a Jewish neighborhood as

50 important for them personally, they still upheld the value of Jewish neighborhoods for the broader Jewish community. As a strategy to alleviate anxiety over a historically situated yet omnipresent anti-Semitism, living in Jewish neighborhoods reflected a desire to preserve memory of a collective past. As another respondent noted, “Living close to other Jewish people means I’m around people who not only understand my past but share it with me” (female, humanist, age 28).

3.4.2 Ritual belonging schema

In this schema, the recollection of a ritualistic and sacred history bolsters Jewish identification and reinforces group solidarity. In turn, this motivates Jews to live in neighborhoods where they, at least symbolically, share rituals, traditions, and customs. Respondents almost uniformly expressed their neighborhoods as sites of ancestral, cultural, and historical homogeneity. Many respondents took comfort in knowing their neighbors and believing that they shared a similar background and heritage. As one respondent noted: “We also felt it was safer for [our children] to grow up Jewish in a Jewish community where they can have Jewish experiences and feel they belong in the community” (male, conservative, age 64). Through mutual affirmation and the use of abstract phrases like “shared traditions,” “Jewish community,” “common faith,” “shared value system,” and “common bond,” respondents constructed a mythical past which expressed a shared moral system and history (Durkheim 1947). This was linked to neighborhoods, which provided the terrain on which group members conveyed their belonging. Indeed, sharing neighborhoods with other Jews mitigated feelings of otherness. For example, one respondent stated: “It is important for me to live in a neighborhood with a Jewish presence... I don’t wish to feel that I am part of a tiny minority…” (male, secular, age 39). Similarly, another respondent explained how living in a predominantly non-Jewish neighborhood made her feel like a ritualistic outsider:

…I live in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood, but I didn’t always. For many years I lived in an area of Toronto that was mostly non-Jewish. My neighbors were friendly, but I never really had a close connection to them…. Living in an area where all the houses had Christmas lights made me feel like I didn’t really belong. It made me feel like an outsider and I would think about how being Jewish made me different. Now that I live in a more Jewish area, I don’t really feel that way anymore. I like knowing that my neighbors and I celebrate the same holidays. There’s a strong sense of heritage being surrounded by other Jews…I’m not the only one with a mezuzah on my door anymore (female, reform, age 52)

Respondents expressed a strong desire to stay in Jewish neighborhoods because of this historical connectedness, but also the desire to raise their children around other Jews. This was articulated as a strategy to ensure their children learned about Jewish history, including its associated rituals and practices, and forged meaningful Jewish connections propelled by social frameworks of memory. As one respondent noted:

It important to me that my kids remember their grandparents couldn’t always observe Shabbat so easily like we do. I want them to understand that even in a place like Toronto, Jews haven’t always been accepted…I remember hearing about the Christie Pits riot from my dad – it was terribly upsetting for him. I want my kids to remember how lucky they are to be able to practice their Jewishness openly but not to take it for granted (female, reform, age 65)

Interacting with “mnemonic others” is among the most effective means of mnemonic socialization, a process which sets out the rules of remembrance (Zerubavel 1996). The term “Jewish connections” was used somewhat ambiguously by respondents, but most described Jewish connections as dynamic social relationships that connect individuals to a common Jewish past. In the words of one respondent:

It’s important for me to live in a Jewish area so that my children can have Jewish friends and feel connected culturally. It’s important for them to have a sense of our heritage and history… I don’t think they’d get that if they were the only Jewish kids at their school (female, secular, age 37)

Indeed, routine exposure to collective memory in Halbwach’s (1992) sense, as shared social frameworks of individual past recollections, figured prominently among reasons for living in a Jewish area.

Jewish neighborhoods emerged as sites in which the consumption and reproduction of Jewish rituals and history was tied to social networks. In this way, the neighborhood served a utilitarian purpose insofar as it provided a space to cultivate networks that connect Jews to one another and to their past. Of note, however, was that interaction between individuals did not have to materialize in this collective memory schema. Connections to other Jews were often imagined, situated exclusively in ideas about a shared past. Several respondents noted they had little or nothing to do with their neighbors, but were mollified knowing Jews lived in the area. Here, collective memory

52 was mobilized around a vision of community that did not require active participation, but rather passive reflexivity. As one respondent noted:

When we bought our house I told the realtor, who was Jewish, that it’s important for there to be other Jews there. To be honest, I don’t have anything to do with them, I don’t even really know them, but it’s good to know I’m in a place I belong culturally. I know we’re all coming from the same place (male, secular/ethnic, age 40)

The notion that neighborhood residents are coming from the same place serves a dual function. First, it simplifies complex and divergent stories of Jewish migration by casting these experiences as uniform. Second, it enables residents to construct and digest a collective narrative that propagates cohesiveness within neighborhoods that may not actually exist. Indeed, many Jewish subgroups have their own networks and institutions in Toronto (Schoenfeld, Schoenfeld, and McCabe 2007), while other subgroups find themselves excluded from the Ashkenazi majority (Train 2016). From our data, however, we find an imagined common ritualism being employed cognitively to reconcile intra-group diversity with collective memory. Consequently, spatial boundaries materialize from this schema, which informs residential choices and imposes a normative notion of the past.

3.4.3 Grounded community schema

With this schema, Jewish neighborhoods are linked to historical understandings of communal dislocation and alienation. Among the most salient recollections were memories of forced Jewish migration at the turn of the twentieth century. Though Jews in contemporary North America are generally assimilated into the broader culture, memories of expulsion from non-Jewish lands greatly informed residential choices. This schema recalls memories of Toronto Jews as wandering Jews, and then positions Jewish neighborhoods as disruptive to collective understandings of this script. With a minority of Toronto’s Jews being native-born – many emigrating from elsewhere in Canada, Israel, and parts of Africa and Europe – they know migration to be characteristic of the Jewish experience (Schoenfeld, Schoenfeld, and McCabe 2007). As one respondent noted when asked why living near other Jews was important to him:

We [Jews] have been all over the place, I mean, it’s only since Israel was recognized as a Jewish state that Jews have had a real homeland. Before that, the Jewish people were basically homeless. Egypt, Spain, Russia, Poland, where have Jews really had a home we can call our own? Think about it…in all of Jewish history, the Jewish people have been cast out (male, secular, age 32)

Beliefs about historical dislocation tie into sociological ideals like Simmel’s (1971) “stranger,” whereby Jews have fixed historical relationships within a particular spatial group but do not belong to it. Here, Jews constitute the “potential wanderer” as they historically lack social and institutional anchorage, making them vulnerable to displacement. As one respondent said in reference to his Passover Seder:

Every year we get together with family and close friends to remember Jewish exile from Egypt so long ago. What we don’t talk about is the massive Jewish exile from Europe that wasn’t so long ago. I think we [Jews] always have these thoughts at the back of our mind and like to live in Jewish areas because of it (male, conservative, 50)

Jewish neighborhoods were assembled cognitively by respondents as sites that provided discontinuity from memories of spatial dislocation, and as sites which permitted opportunities for new memories to be fashioned. Choosing to live near other Jews reflected a desire to establish a rootedness in the city. As another respondent said:

Living in a Jewish neighborhood allows me to feel like I belong in society, like I have a certain level of recognition in a world where Jews have never really belonged…Our whole history centers on settlement and resettlement…I don’t live far from where I grew up and I hope my kids will live near here also (female, orthodox, age 50)

In addition to social grounding, respondents expressed a clear desire to be institutionally grounded. The most ubiquitous Jewish institutions in Toronto are synagogues and Jewish community centers, which act as mnemonic institutions. Mnemonic institutions are socially constructed organizational symbols of collective identity that link the present to the past, either symbolically or through direct use. The notion that synagogues ground the Jewish community was expressed by respondents of all Jewish denominations, including secular respondents who reported little or no use of them.

Living contiguously to Jewish institutions has a clear utilitarian function when it comes to religious observance. Orthodox respondents made clear that living near synagogues was “essential” to

54 ensure they could walk to services on the Sabbath. Strikingly, the vast majority of respondents (including our orthodox respondents) saw living in Jewish neighborhoods and the synagogue’s role in it as more symbolic than utilitarian. Jewish institutions have lost much of their utilitarian appeal. In Toronto, over seventy-six per cent of Jews do not attend synagogue regularly, and only about twenty-two per cent report using Jewish community centers (Shahar and Rosenbaum 2006). Still, Jews elect to live in enclaves with an institutional presence. The grounded community schema illuminates respondents’ choice to reside in Jewish enclaves not for their utilitarian function, but for their symbolic function in reinforcing and liberating memories of dislocation.

Synagogues and Jewish community centers signal the presence of a Jewish community. As one respondent explained: “Their presence tends to identify an area as being a Jewish area…[They] act as a beacon to draw Jewish families together in an area to form a Jewish community” (male, conservative, age 64). Though synagogues and Jewish community centers do, in some cases, grow out of pre-existing Jewish concentrations, they nevertheless encourage communal growth and intransience.

Respondents referred to the synagogue as “the heart of the community” and a “central resource” for Jewish living. In this light, mnemonic institutions became institutions that “grounded the Jewish community” so it would not be “free-floating.” For most respondents, living near a synagogue helped keep the Jewish community from becoming spatially dislocated, a situation that would make Jewish socialization exceptionally challenging. As one respondent explained, “In a predominantly Christian or pluralistic society, there is a need for these places to keep individuals and the community centered [and] reinforce Jewish values, particularly with kids” (male, reconstructionist, age 42).

Attending a synagogue or Jewish community center was far less important for Jewish socialization than simply living near to one. Knowing that a synagogue was close by provided a sense of community where our respondents found cultural familiarity and a sense of belonging being in an area with like-minded individuals. This was still evident among those who did not use the synagogue regularly. As one respondent noted:

I don’t go to [synagogue] often. I usually only go for the high holidays. But living near a synagogue is important because it means there are other Jews in my neighborhood…I like knowing I’m around people who share my values and traditions (female, reform, age 44)

The grounded community schema stresses how mnemonic institutions play an important role in respondents’ desire to maintain a connection to their history. For more religious respondents, Jewish neighborhoods provide a space to practice their religion with relative ease. As one respondent said, “[The synagogue] plays a pivotal role because it connects members with their Jewish roots through activities and holiday celebrations and family affairs like weddings” (male, conservative, age 56). This differed from our less religious and secular respondents who rarely or never used Jewish institutions, but nevertheless lived in Jewish areas with the presence of synagogues or Jewish community centers.

The salience of this schema for residential clustering emerges from how it ties communal institutions to collective memories of dislocation and instability. For respondents, regardless of their level of utilization, the neighborhood synagogue strengthened ties to the past. Among those living in more integrated neighborhoods, they too shared memories of communal dislocation but believed living in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood reinforced historically-situated prejudices about Jews as insular and devious.

The synagogue, like all religious institutions, promotes group solidarity by providing its members with a way to become conscious of their history (Durkheim 1947). Of particular interest is how the synagogue connects Jews to their roots, not exclusively through its utilitarian function, but through its conjuring of the past and directive for the future. The visibility of synagogues stimulated a connection to a Jewish past that was independent of active participation. As one person explained, “despite the fact that I don’t attend [synagogue], seeing the synagogue in my neighborhood reminds me who I am and where I come from” (female, reform, age 36).

3.4.4 Fortitude/empowerment schema

Jewish history is fraught with episodes of perseverance in the face of adversity, and respondents were keenly aware of this. Yet, much of the memorialization of Jewish history centers on victimization and marginalization, permeating identities in meaningful ways (Greene 2007). The fortitude/empowerment schema counters prevailing narratives that characterize Jews in such narrow terms. Here, residential choices were underscored by sentiments that Jewish neighborhoods empowered group members to embrace and confidently assert their Jewish identities. As one respondent succinctly said, “I want my family to be proud of their heritage [and] my children to

56 not be a minority. I think living in a neighborhood that’s mostly Jewish will allow them to do this best” (female, conservative, age 36). The fortitude/empowerment schema assured the continuance of Jewish life and a future that reflects the fortitude of the group. Living in a Jewish community enabled Jews to engage a troubled past and ensure a Jewish future. As one respondent noted:

I live in a Jewish area, an area where people walk to [synagogue] on Saturday mornings…I think people who live very much outside of an established Jewish community will eventually and inevitably, unfortunately, I believe, will grow up to be, will continue to grow up to be non-Jewish, no exposure, no Shabbats, no holidays, none of it. It eventually will dilute and become lost in time if people are not part of some organized structure…I want my lineage, my existing family to be part of a stable community, and that has a history, you know, the history goes here and there, and it all has to do with being Jewish and the movement of Jews (male, conservative, age 24)

This participant is referring to Jewish neighborhoods as organized, stable structures for the community that empower Jews to assert their Jewishness. As with the ritual belonging schema, this empowerment was tied to Jewish institutions. Living contiguously to synagogues factored prominently in responses because of its symbolic function as a testament to Jewish fortitude. Respondents frequently stated that synagogues provided evidence to Jews and non-Jews alike of an organized, self-aware, stable, and vibrant Jewish community. As one respondent noted about Jewish institutions:

The Western Wall is the holiest site in Israel. Every Jew in the world knows it. It’s all that’s left from the Temple’s destruction. It’s a constant reminder of Jewish instability, but it’s still standing. Jews are still standing. The list goes on and on. Hitler tried to wipe us out, but Jews are still standing (female, reform, age 65)

Framing Jewish institutions as a source of empowerment was done by linking them to shared memories of past cultural trauma and experiences of social exclusion. Given the long-standing historical fragmentation of Jewish communities, evidence of communal fortitude creates a rupture between the past and the present, an experience of historical discontinuity (Zerubavel 2003). For instance, one respondent made a clear (dis)connection between past experiences and Jewish fortitude, ascribing a historical significance to mnemonic institutions as symbols of contemporary Jewish strength and resilience. As she notes, “these places represent, particularly to the anti-Jewish world, that our people will not be undermined ever again, and that we are a people who have a

57 support network…promote education, culture, and involvement with the community” (female, reform, age 65)

The fortitude/empowerment schema informs residential choices by casting Jewish neighborhoods as sites of resilience and it paves a collective future that breaks from memories of subjugation, instability, and vulnerability. The Jewish neighborhood therefore becomes an instrumental site on which a new, empowered Jewish future can take shape. As we found with the grounded community schema, the utilitarian purpose of the synagogue yielded to more symbolic principles as respondents articulated Jewish areas and institutions as emboldening the community to affirm their Jewishness.

3.5 Conclusion

The schemas we identify illuminate how collective memory informs residential choices in this sample of Toronto Jews. Despite their collective socioeconomic success relative to other ethnic groups, Jews remain among the most residentially concentrated groups (Fong and Chan 2011). This pattern challenges conventional wisdom on the subject, which suggests that as groups’ socioeconomic standing improves, there is a tendency (or at least a desire) to integrate residentially. For Jews, however, this has not been the case. This study advances the collective memory and ethnic boundaries literature by attending to how ideas about the past are mobilized in the construction of spatial boundaries.

The schemas we identify are not an exhaustive list of the schemas for Jews, nor are they intended to fully explain the residential patterns of Jews in Toronto. Indeed, spatial separateness emerges from a host of socio-political and economic considerations (Massey 1990; Train 2016). Rather, they provide information about how the past is implicated and mobilized in social boundaries (Lamont and Molnár 2002). We interpret these schemas as not just a form of resistance to cultural assimilation, but as a strategic form of cultural preservation. They illustrate aspects of the past that are emphasized to generate the significance of place. The neighborhood is a means to reinforce memories of persecution, placeless-ness, vulnerability, and ritualism.

The cultural trauma schema centers on historical understandings of the group as being socially marginal and the target of symbolic and physical violence. It links collective experiences of hostility to understandings of a shared history and provides a script on which group members can draw to inform their residential choices. The ritual belonging schema hinges on providing group members with a sense of cultural and historical familiarity within neighborhoods, which eases formal and informal mnemonic socialization. The grounded community schema recalls a history of communal dislocation and positions Jewish neighborhoods as sites of social and institutional stability. The fortitude/empowerment schema provides evidence, both symbolically and structurally, to Jews and non-Jews, of an organized, empowered, and vibrant Jewish community. It is noteworthy that the collective memory schemas we identify were contested by some. The majority of respondents felt it was important to live in Jewish neighborhoods, but this sentiment was not unanimous in our sample. Though they shared memories in line with the schemas we identify, a small but nevertheless evident number of participants did not believe living in a Jewish neighborhood was desirable. For them, the relative insularity of Jews was not overtly negative but nonetheless problematic. At the collective level, it was seen as restricting socialization to in-group members thereby stimulating the homogenization of social networks. Further, and perhaps more consequential, was an understanding that observable residential clustering – namely from the non- Jewish world – reinforced negative stereotypes about Jews as outsiders. Here, residential integration was articulated as an essential tactic to counter undesirable beliefs about Jews. Whereas respondents living in Jewish areas saw doing so as empowering and providing existential security, those who lived in more integrated areas contested such beliefs. One respondent summed this up well when he said:

I think the stereotypes that people believe about Jews are upheld when you don’t know any…you know, a non-Jew in my neighborhood, will probably have a less offensive view of Jews than somebody who grew up in a neighborhood with no Jews.

The belief that Jewish residential concentration perpetuates negative stereotypes, or at least fails to dispel them, speaks more broadly to how memory is contested and mobilized differentially. In this case, memories of Jews as cultural outsiders are exacerbated by their insularity and perceived clandestineness. Indeed, contested memory has emerged as a significant strand of collective memory scholarship (Alexander 2013). Though our paper does not attend directly to this strand, it is nevertheless suggestive of how contested memory shapes urban forms and is implicated in social

59 boundary development. We encourage future researchers to systematically unpack the subethnic dynamics by which memories are contested, and how intra-group diversity affects residential patterning.

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Zerubavel, Yael. 1994. Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Chapter 4 The Holocaust, Israel, and the Boundaries of Jewish Otherness

4.1 Introduction

Questions about Jewish separateness and inclusion have long preoccupied theological, sociocultural, and political discussion. In medieval and early modern discourses, constructions of Jews generated varied representations of Jews as the “other.” Jews were often depicted with dark skin to connote “inferiority” and “evil” in classical Christian sources, while at the same time also being depicted in lighter (or whiter) skin shades and described as “pale” (Kaplan 2013). The range of shades depicting Jews reflects what Kaplan (2013:41) argues is a “historical ambivalence toward Jews in relation to Christian identity.” Much of the preoccupation with the “Jewish Problem” stems from the myriad contradictions that Jews have embodied historically in terms of their national, religious, cultural, and, more recently, racial identities (Goldstein 2006). Jewishness has long been constructed as a set of contradictions and the Jewish experience has largely been that of the “other” in non-Jewish societies. The figurative Jew is constructed as both a socialist and capitalist, sexually deficient and oversexed, meek and assertive, Holocaust victim and territorial aggressor, insider and outsider.

Constructions of the Jew as the “outsider within” is one that dates back to Medieval Christendom and continues to fuel much of the antisemitism that has become increasingly visible in recent years in Canada and other countries around the world. The anti-Jewish discrimination of the past was premised on Judaism and understanding Jews as “backward” in their refusal to accept the divinity of Jesus. Charges of deicide were interspersed with accusations of ritualized murder of Christian children (blood libel), images of the Jew as a shylock, and charges of well-poisoning that were used to explain Jews’ relative avoidance of widespread illness like The Black Death. Over the last century, anti-Judaism has taken on a new racial and national tenor that has carried aspects of anti- Judaism into the modern era. Indeed, as Kaye/Kantrowitz (2007:15) writes, “Racism against Jews represents the secularization of Christian antisemitism, but let not categories obscure essence: difference translated into others equals indifference, hatred, and fear.” In the postwar era and in

65 66 the aftermath of the Holocaust, antisemitism in Canada was expressed less in a violent and explicit form, but nevertheless remains a reality for Jews in Canada (Robinson 2015).

Understanding antisemitism, as Weinfeld (2018) notes, requires attention to the paradoxical relationship between two trends. Compared to earlier periods in Canada, antisemitism is not a major problem, certainly not the major structural problem it was for Jews at the turn of the 20th century and in the decades leading up to the Second World War. Few Jews in Canada today experience discrimination in the housing market, in employment, or have their property vandalized because they are Jewish. On the other hand, antisemitism does remain and can be more difficult now to identify and overcome given that it tends to be less overt and is often conflated with issues of nationalism, Holocaust denial and the like (Robinson 2015).

Recent Canadian hate crime data reveal that hate crimes directed toward Jews are increasing. In 2017, the largest number of hate crimes toward Jews was recorded, and since 2006 there has been a general upward trend in the data (Statistics Canada 2018). The number of hate crimes toward Jews decreased slightly from 2017 to 2018, from 360 to 347 reported hate crimes, respectively. Notwithstanding this modest decrease, Jewish hate crimes in 2018 accounted for nearly 20% of the national total, despite Jews only accounting for approximately 1% of the Canadian population (B’nai Brith Canada 2019; Statistics Canada 2019). While most hate crimes are non-violent and include things like vandalism, and various forms of harassment, Jews also report experiencing antisemitism in the form of being snubbed in social settings, being called offensive names, or being criticized for holding views about Israel that may be unpopular (Brym et al. 2018). Still, there remain more extreme and overt expressions of antisemitism. The recent white supremacist marches in the United States and the deadly shootings in San Diego and Pittsburgh synagogues serve as vivid reminders of the persistent and extreme forms antisemitism continues to take. Such acts and their connection to white supremacy have recast much of the concern in Jewish communities from a focus on Jewish continuity to Jewish security. It has also reopened a question both Jews and non- Jews have long carried in their minds: where do Jews belong?

Antisemitism may not be the structural problem that it was for Jews for centuries in Europe, and in the decades in North America leading up to the Second World War, but real and perceived antisemitism and Jewish otherness continues to shape the Jewish experience in Canada. This paper examines how, in particular, experiences with and memories of antisemitism delimit the

67 boundaries of otherness for Jews in Canada. The focus on remembering is particularly important given that very few Jews have had direct experiences with antisemitism and that antisemitism in Canada is not, at least relative to earlier periods in Canada and other parts of the world, a major problem. Still, as Weinfeld (2018) notes, antisemitism is a “defining feature of the Canadian Jewish consciousness,” one that is “determined by memories and the received wisdom of the past” (p. 310). The past plays a significant role in shaping present day meanings and social patterns, but much of the work in this area explores the commemorative projects of memory elites (Schwatrz and Schuman 2005) or documents historical changes in racial classification and other bases of otherness (Jacobson 1998; Goldstein 2006), with less attention to how memory shapes the everyday politics of belonging (Maghbouleh 2017; Beim 2007).

Through an analysis of the collective memory of Jews in Toronto, this paper aims to better understand how belonging and power do not converge in an absolute sense, but rather intersect at stronger and weaker points. Empirically, the paper addresses the question of how white Jews make sense of their Jewishness in an era of increased white nationalism/nativism and their continued racialization in antisemitism, whether that racialization is real, perceived, or anticipated. Many Jews consider the Holocaust and the State of Israel to be essential components of their Jewish identity (Brym et al 2018). This paper explores how Jews understand and think about the Holocaust and Israel and what this means for their understanding of Jewish otherness. The paper attends directly to how Jews think about and remember the past in their interpretation of their Jewish identities. Presently, there is relatively little scholarship on the boundaries of otherness in the Canadian context, and in the Canadian Jewish context in particular. Scholarship in this area has elaborated Jewish belonging and marginalization as shifting historical and political processes (Jacobson 1998; Brodkin 1998), but less attention has been given to how otherness is negotiated and rearticulated as a group-making processes. In this paper, I argue that Jewish otherness is articulated around a fragmented and contradictory set of collective memory schemas that position the Holocaust as both unique and universal, and Israel as both fragile and powerful. These schemas illustrate important aspects of Jewish otherness and can help explain why Jews may not identify with being white, despite being classified by others as such and benefiting from white privilege.

The analysis explores the collective memory schemas of Jews to understand how Jews select scripts, narratives, histories, and other elements from a larger culture – both Jewish and non-Jewish

– when constructing identity claims. Schemas provide cultural resources from which people draw to delineate group boundaries and to construct identity claims (Brubaker, Loveman, and Stamatov 2004). As Cerulo (2010) writes, schemas are “mental structures” collected from various exposures and experiences that provide a worldview used to direct action. Adopting a cognitive approach in this way “uncovers a process of remembering” (Kubal and Becerra 2014:865), and provides opportunities to understand how meaning is constructed and shapes symbolic and social boundaries (Lamont and Molnár 2002). As Kubal and Becerra (2014:871) elaborate, “memories are shaped within a social setting and use past ideas to provide an interpretive framework for understanding the present.” In taking a cognitive approach to how the past is defined and mobilized in identity claims (Beim 2007), this paper extends collective memory research beyond the institutionalization of memory to the everyday politics of collective memory mobilization (Schwartz and Schuman 2005; Eyerman 2004). Analyzing how Jews use scripts to understand their Jewishness allows for better understanding of how racial, ethnic, and religious group members more generally engage with their unsettled and often contradictory statuses. From the data, I identify four collective memory schemas Jews use to make sense of the otherness paradox surrounding being Jewish (“outsider”) and being white (“insider”): Uniqueness in Holocaust Remembering, Universalism in Holocaust Remembering, The Fragility of Israel, and the Power of Israel. While these schemas certainly do not reflect the entirety of Jewish identity, their salience attests to the centrality of the Holocaust and Israel for Jewishness, while also exemplifying the tensions and contradictions in remembering the past, understanding the present, and projections about the future.

4.2 Otherness, Jewishness, and the Making of Jewish Otherness

The Jewish experience in the United States and Canada today, much like the Jewish experience in Europe historically, is a paradoxical one. Jews are often held to be a “model minority” with their perceived beneficial cultural particularisms juxtaposed to African Americans and other so-called culturally “deficient” groups as a way to explain Jewish social mobility (Glazer and Moynihan 1963; Brodkin 1998). At the same time, Jews remain cast as outsiders, eternal “strangers” whose qualities and history are conspicuously foreign, which simultaneously gives them the proportion of nearness and remoteness (Simmel 1971). The in-betweenness and ambiguity of Jewish belonging therefore begs the question of where do Jews fit in? In addressing this question, studies

69 have elaborated the socio-historical, legal, and “scientific” processes by which Jewish otherness is tied to racialization and how Jews became white (Brodkin 1998; Jacobson 1998). As Levine-Rasky (2008:58) demonstrates, Jews are proximal to normative whiteness, which disturbs the stability of the category and means that “Jews – especially Ashkenazim – may be white, but they can never be fully assimilated. Racially, they will always be ambiguously placed.” The otherness of Jews is therefore an ambiguous one, but Jews in the postwar era have attained the option to identify with whiteness, which casts them as “inside outsiders” and distinguishes them from “outside outsiders” whose racial identities are unambiguously non-white (Mills 1998). Further, reducing Jewishness to race or religion obscures the complex interplay of religion, culture, ethnicity, and history that Jewishness embodies (Kaye/Kantrowitz 2007).

There is a well-developed and increasingly nuanced literature on whiteness that informs how we understand the structural and everyday benefits white people, including the overwhelming majority of Jews in Canada and the United States, enjoy from their racialization as white (Garner 2007; Mills 1998; Sullivan 2006). Whiteness studies have shifted an almost uniform focus on subordinate and non-white identities and experiences with racism within race scholarship to include the practices and identities of the dominant group. Indeed, whiteness studies have elaborated how whiteness not only contributes to and sustains the social construction of racism, but how it functions as a discrete yet concrete symbolic, ideological, and experiential reality for white people who are often unconscious of its power. The invisibility of whiteness has been enabled culturally by its normalization, which situates whiteness as the “unexamined center” of society (Doane 2003).

Conceptualizing whiteness as a racial category marked by skin color, however, limits understandings to somatic difference and presents challenges in the categorization and identification of Jews and other liminal whites whose ambiguity can make them somatically undetectable (Cohen 2002). Rather, approaches to whiteness are better understood more robustly as part of racialized, sociopolitical systems within which race privilege, or perhaps more accurately white supremacy, can be contextualized (Mills 2003). Because whiteness is a location of structural advantage, a privileged position within judicial, economic, cognitive, and other social dimensions (Frankenberg 1993; Mills 2003), meanings of whiteness lack a stable consensus. As Garner (2007) argues, whiteness exists within national racial regimes and is therefore an analytical perspective to generate questions about social relations (Garner 2007). In other words, as a perspective,

70 whiteness needs to be theorized and applied to social relationships as they take shape in time and place.

A productive way that whiteness and what it means to belong has been employed is in scholarship attending to immigration and race. As Satzewich (2000:276) has noted of this literature, “whiteness is analyzed as both an assigned racial category and a racial identity.” The analytical distinction here allows for whiteness to be regarded as a fluid and unstable racial category that is geographically and historically contingent. Research on whiteness as a category of belonging and otherness as a category of exclusion builds largely on the racial formation perspective, which emphasizes the processes by which socio-economic and political forces shape the content and significance of racial categories (Omi and Winant 1994).

While the racial formation perspective tends to emphasize racial categorization from a top-down perspective, making central the role of the state and political struggle, other works have elaborated how white racial identities are negotiated across various social axes like class, religion, and nationality (Hughey 2010; Maghbouleh 2017; Wray 2006). For example, Wray’s (2006) study on the boundary making around “white trash” in the United States illustrates how morality and otherness become infused in symbolic distinctions separating “poor whites” from others. The whiteness of poor rural whites in America is a flexible set of boundaries that give meaning to the category white. Garner (2007) extends these discussions to the UK and Australia, and other work extends this line of research beyond European contexts. For instance, Moosavi (2015) takes up an interesting empirical case of white converts to Islam in Britain to explore how whiteness is often but not always privileging. As Moosavi (2015) demonstrates, whiteness can “lead to being marked, excluded, suspected, harassed and stereotyped in a way that is more commonly experienced by non-whites” (p. 1928). Further, the recent work by Maghbouleh (2017) on Iranian Americans explores the tensions between legal categories and lived experiences, and theorizes how whiteness operates for non-Western groups.

A considerable amount work on immigrant groups’ movement across the “color line” and the dismantling of otherness is in the American context. For example, Roediger’s (1991) work on the Catholic Irish in United States attends to the construction and appropriation of whiteness among the Irish-American working class that positioned them in opposition to “undesirable” black workers. Similarly, Ignatiev’s (1995) study of the Irish in America documents how they made their

71 way into white society and took up an oppositional stance against African Americans with whom they shared an unfavorable class position. Other Europeans including Italians also once occupied a “racial middle ground” in the dichotomous caste system of white/black because, like Jews, they were “white enough” for naturalization, but nevertheless represented “the other” because they did not “act white enough” (Jacobson 1998). The positioning of Jews and other European immigrant groups as “not white enough” began to shift more dramatically in the 1920s. The emergence of new scientific paradigms recast “divisions” in humankind into the broadest terms, which shifted the national consciousness away from less significant “minor differences” within racial groupings. As Jacobson (1998) points out, the 1920s and subsequent decades were a time when a “pattern of Caucasian unity” took place, albeit one that did not happen overnight (p. 91). In other words, as the particularisms between “white races” gave way to broader and more “scientific” categories, distinctions between unambiguous whites and liminal white European groups eroded, although a sense of otherness did not disappear entirely. Similarly to Italians and the Irish, Jews were increasingly extended a new positionality within a racial hierarchical structure that positioned them as distinct from blacks, a discourse increasingly reified over “lesser” distinctions between ethnic whites.

For Jews, the extension of whiteness meant being recast in a racial hierarchy, but it also necessitated rearticulating their Jewishness in ways more compatible with normative whiteness. This was most fully done in the aftermath of the Holocaust and within the context of American postwar prosperity, when Jewishness was reformed in what Brodkin (1998:10) describes as “America’s philo-Semitic 1950s…where Jews were a wonderful kind of white folks.” Indeed, Jews in Canada and the United States were dispersing geographically into suburbs and elsewhere where “whiteness itself eclipsed Jewishness in racial salience” (Jacobson 1998:188). In Canada and the United States, barriers to economic and social integration gradually fell away. In cities like Toronto, for example, legal restrictions that prevented Jews from buying homes in certain neighborhoods were overturned and Jews moved out from the cramped Jewish quarters of the city into surrounding suburban communities. They also entered universities in numbers previously prohibited by strict quotas. The result has meant that Jews have achieved rather high levels of educational attainment and are among the highest income earners among ethnic and religious minorities in Canada (Tulchinsky 2008). Nevertheless, despite Jewish acceptance and evidence of structural assimilation, Jews remain “not quite white” in their retention of a strong sense of

72 otherness and maintenance of social boundaries. For example, Phillips (2016) shows that in Los Angeles, the residential patterns of Jews do not follow the patterns of other ethnic whites. While Jews may consider themselves to be white and may be perceived that way by others, their residential patterns are more reflective of non-whites, particularly in the establishment of “Ethnoburbs” where Jews concentrate by choice. The desire to settle in Jewish neighborhoods is one that reflects memories of and experiences with antisemitism and historical constructions of otherness that generate uneasiness over acceptance into the social and cultural mainstream (Harold and Fong 2018).

The Holocaust and Israel are significant bases of Jewish identity and both have been shown to give Jews a sense of distance from mainstream whiteness, even while being embraced by the mainstream as white (Brodkin 1998; Kaye/Kantrowitz 2007). This distance creates an ambiguity around Jewishness where Jews have benefitted economically from being recast as “insiders,” but histories of persecution and current antisemitism mean that otherness has not been lifted unequivocally from Jewishness. As Levine-Rasky (2008:62) argues, “the claim of unequivocal white privilege becomes difficult to make. Yet it is also difficult to deny. It is ambiguous.” The Holocaust serves as an eternal reminder of Jewish otherness and stands in contradiction with Jews’ social mobility which has made them privileged. Jewish whiteness therefore stands as an “eternal contradiction.” Many Jews, particularly Ashkenazim, are aware that their white skin affords them privilege, however, the privilege is conditional and dependent on one’s ability to “pass” without detection or otherwise risk being treated as “off-white” (Blumenfeld 2006). Such privilege therefore is distributed unevenly among Jews, with the visibility of religious Jews’ and of non- white Jews removing the option to “pass” as mainstream.

Describing white Jews as only privileged because of their whiteness neglects the important ways that history and memory intersect with race, which means that white Jews may benefit from white privilege in some instances while not in others. In the postwar period, Jewish institutional power and collective gains mean that Jews have surely benefited from the boundary expansion that included them in the white mainstream. At the same time, however, their Jewish identity and heritage, however well concealed and compartmentalized, makes it problematic to equate their structural gains with an unfettered sense of belonging.

In the discussion that follows, I take up schemas of difference that describe otherness, and I attend to the question of how Jews understand their Jewish identities in a context of belonging and separateness. Has otherness been lifted from Jewish identity in the minds of Jews in Canada? By exploring the self-perceptions and collective memory schemas used to make sense of their Jewishness, this paper attends to the historically volatile and presently ambiguous relationship of Jews to white mainstream society and the terms of their own membership (Levine-Rasky 2008).

4.3 Data and methods

Data for this article come from qualitative interviews with a sample of white Jews who reside in the Toronto Census Metropolitan Area, which includes the City of Toronto and the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). Respondents primarily lived in the city of Toronto proper or in a few of the surrounding suburbs north of the city, including North York, Thornhill (Vaughan), and Richmond Hill. These areas do not represent the entirety of Toronto Jewry, but these regions do represent a significant proportion of the Toronto Jewish population (Shahar 2014; Shahar and Rosenbaum 2006). Semi-structured interviews with thirty-five Toronto Jewish participants, split about evenly between men and women, explored a wide range of topics concerning Jewish identity and reveal the complexities and contradictions of participants’ Jewishness. Respondents were asked a variety of questions about their involvement in Jewish organizations, their commitment to Jewish practice and traditions, their relationship to Israel, their perceptions about and experiences with antisemitism, as well as their understanding of Jewish history and events and of their own Jewish roots. Interviews lasted between sixty and ninety minutes.

All respondents self-identified as Jewish or as being a Jew. There was considerable variation in participants age, levels of religiosity, whether they attended religious services, their participation in cultural organizations, and their denominational affiliation. Participants identified with Jewish denominations raging from Orthodox to no denominational affiliation at all. Recent data shows that in Canada, Jews are split relatively evenly between Conservative Judaism (26%) and being “just Jewish” (28%), with Orthodox (17%) and Reform (16%) comprising the next largest affiliation (Brym et al. 2018). In Toronto, Jewish denominational affiliation is similar to the national distribution with the exception of Reform Jews who comprise 21% of Toronto’s Jewish population (Brym et al. 2018). The participants in this study include the range of Jewish

74 denominational affiliation in Toronto, although Orthodox respondents in particular are underrepresented in the study relative to their proportion in the Toronto Jewish community. Participants were recruited through referral sampling techniques and because the study relies on a nonprobability sample, the findings are not presented as being representative of the population and should not be taken as such. Rather, the findings develop theory by exploring how Jews remember the past, think about the present, and what it means for their understandings of Jewishness and otherness.

The vast majority of Jews in Canada are of Ashkenazi ancestry, with migration stemming from Western and Eastern Europe. A much smaller minority of Jews are of Sephardic or Mizrakhi ancestry, with migration stemming from Southern Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. The sample for this study, similarly, is predominantly Ashkenazim, with only two respondents indicating that they are of Sephardic ancestry. In all cases, respondents are visibly white in skin color. Jews in Canada are quite diverse in terms of many of the characteristics identified above (see Weinfeld 2018 for a detailed overview). One area where there is much less diversity, however, is in the racial diversity of Jews, or what Canadian census data identify as visible minority status. In Canada, approximately 98% of the Jewish population is white, but we know very little about how Jews in Canada understand their Jewishness and what it means for their sense of otherness.

The analysis is primarily inductive, although discussions of the Holocaust and of Israel as bases of Jewish identification are commonplace in studies of Jewish identity. Indeed, both were topics I expected to arise in discussions. Still, data were reviewed and coded according to participants’ definition of these bases of identity and organized around how they functioned symbolically in self-understandings of otherness and inclusion.

4.4 Findings

The findings point to two key aspects of Jewish identity around which boundaries of Jewish otherness are delineated. Memories of the Holocaust and the oft-contested relationship Jews have with the State of Israel featured prominently in discussions about Jewish identity, belonging, and the group-making projects of Jews. Of particular interest were the points of agreement and contention among the collective memory schemas. Memories of the Holocaust were also situated

75 within contemporary experiences and perceptions of antisemitism in local and global context. Indeed, perceptions about contemporary antisemitism and what it means for the future of Jewish identity, practice, and life in Canada and abroad, or what I dub prospective memory in this case, means that the process of remembering is largely a function of shifting political and social contexts in which collective memories arise. The schemas must therefore be understood as Jewish self- perceptions at a particular moment in time and space and not as reflecting a universal or eternalized set of understandings.

Respondents make use of competing and often contradictory collective memory schemas to manage the contradictions and paradoxes of being Jewish and being white in multicultural Canada and in a multi-ethnic city like Toronto. On the one hand, participants frame themselves as historically maligned members of ethno-religious communities through the recollection of memories of oppression, dislocation, and persecution. These memories carry into the present in personal and embodied ways. Such histories are remembered through a contradictory lens of uniqueness and universalism which positions events of racialization and persecution as being a unique historical experience for Jews while at the same time providing space to generalize Jewish- centric events like the Holocaust to wider populations.

This paper takes up four collective memory schemas that center around memories of the Holocaust, experiences with and perceptions of antisemitism, as well as the relationship Jews have with the State of Israel. The Holocaust and Israel are significant bases of Jewish identity, but they are by no means the only bases. Further, as I demonstrate below, there is not absolute consensus around the significance or meaning of either, nor is there absolute consensus around other bases of identity like religion, culture, or politics. The present study takes up schemas that are articulated through discussions about the Holocaust and the State of Israel, but they should not be taken as representing the only schemas around which Jewishness, otherness, and belonging are understood. Rather, these schemas reflect more deeply institutionalized cultural repertoires both from within North American Jewish communities and outside Jewish communities to characterize, frame, and make sense of Jewish life in the diaspora.

4.4.1 Uniqueness in Holocaust Remembering

Discussions with participants reveal that the Holocaust remains a significant aspect of their identities and the in-group perception of how Jews are othered. For many respondents, the Holocaust was a uniquely Jewish event, one that was centered around the racialization and persecution of Jews. As one respondent made clear with respect to the Holocaust being uniquely Jewish: “We can never compare what European Jews went through at the time of the Holocaust” (female, age 60). For this respondent and others who framed the Holocaust in isolation from other genocides, the scale, scope, and ideology of the Holocaust could not be compared to other mass killings because the “final solution” to the Jewish question devised by the Nazis and their collaborators was unlike any other to the extent that, in their minds, antisemitism and Jewish persecution has a global history unlike any other religious or ethnic minority. To compare the Holocaust to other genocides was to make a false equivalence by situating antisemitism and its effects on Jewish life alongside other forms of racism.

Much of the uniqueness in Holocaust remembrance was articulated through what some respondents viewed as a unique history of persecution experienced by few other religious or ethnic groups. Participants were keenly aware of past and present forms of racism against minority groups in Canadian society and elsewhere, but their responses indicate that antisemitism and its culmination in the Holocaust was something different than other racisms, something unique to the Jewish experience. Memories of persecution and social dislocation were frequently articulated in timelines that position the Holocaust as the manifestation and ultimate expression of centuries of anti-Jewish sentiment. As one respondent explained:

My ancestors suffered continuously from persecution in Eastern Europe. For my parents, it started as children when they were ridiculed in school, continued as young adults when they were barred from activities and opportunities and then in later years, they were sent to ghettos from where they were sent to concentration camps (female, age 66)

Memories of the Holocaust as the culmination of centuries of Jewish persecution positions the event on the one hand as distinct from other forms of persecution experienced by religious or ethnic minorities, and on the other hand constructs the Holocaust as Jewish history. Six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust by the Nazis, but the Nazis were not alone. Jews were also murdered by their neighbors and other collaborators. Townspeople were often recruited to assist the Nazis in identifying and murdering their Jewish neighbors. Still, millions of non-Jews were also

77 murdered: Soviets, Poles, those with disabilities, and others who did not meet the criteria for the “perfect” Aryan race.

The uniqueness expressed in Holocaust remembering was particularly salient among respondents who identified with more traditional and conservative branches of Judaism. These respondents felt particularly strongly about preserving the Holocaust as a uniquely Jewish historical event. One participant describes the significance of the Holocaust for Jews as a unifying cultural bridge within Judaism:

The Holocaust is such an unbelievable thing that still, despite the enormous documentation, people deny it happened. It really was a defining aspect of Jewish life, and continues to be that. The Holocaust informs so much of what it means to be Jewish today, the fact that we are still Jewish today. I think a lot of [Jews] have lost touch with that, that we’re all connected. All the different denominations, practices, beliefs….the Holocaust transcends all of that and connects Jews no matter where you live or what you believe (male, age 39)

For many participants, Holocaust remembering was able to transcend intra-ethnic and intra- religious differences and connect Jews to one another in powerful symbolic ways. Connecting one another to the fate of millions of European Jews meant that the Holocaust served as way to preserve Jewishness by providing respondents with a consistent identity source in the present. It offered something that respondents could identify with, even if they did not share other bases of Jewish identification. In this way, Jews become representable as a group by their connection to the Holocaust, which generates a kind of “Holocaust-Jewishness” that depends on the event retaining a uniquely Jewish character (Stratton 1996). As one respondent further explains, experiences with the Holocaust and inter-generational remembering not only provides Jews with an opportunity to envision themselves as part of a Jewish collective, but an obligation to do so:

Because of the Holocaust and what our grandparents went through and how that influenced our parents and therefore how it influenced their energy to us, I feel like we maybe are more kind of closed off and feel a sense of unity between us and that maybe other people that, non-Jews don't necessarily feel… I feel like I can't reject the religion entirely because my grandparents went through the Holocaust, and so many of my family members died in the war (female, age 30)

For participants like this one, memories of the Holocaust served as an important reminder about Jewish difference and informed what it meant to belong. For these respondents, the perception of the Holocaust as an event connecting Jews across time and space constructed an imagined Jewish

78 community that obscures Jewish diversity, not only in terms of language, region, and ancestry, but by homogenizing the experience of Jews during the Holocaust. The Holocaust was experienced quite differently between Ashkenazi, Sephardic, and Mizrakhi Jews, for example. For most of the respondents, however, the Holocaust was remembered as contributing to an across-the-board Jewishness and sense of otherness. As one participant explained, the Holocaust is instrumental in uniting the world’s Jews and providing a sense of peoplehood:

I don't know what would be of Jewish people, if the Holocaust never happened. I think it’s a huge contributing force to why Jewish people feel Jewish and what makes us feel connected to that religion. It's knowing that our ancestors went through something and feeling like we need to keep that spirit alive, out of respect for what they went through (female, age 30)

Framing the Holocaust as a uniquely Jewish event held implications for participants’ social relationships and their perception of non-Jews. The Holocaust was tied to memories of and experiences with contemporary antisemitism, and, significantly, perceptions about how non-Jews think about Jews. Together, this informs ideas about the prospect of Jewish persecution in Canada and elsewhere, and reaffirms a sense of otherness for Jews. Respondents reported having limited direct experience with antisemitism in terms of physical violence, with two respondents reporting having been in a physical altercation in their youth directly related to being Jewish. In one instance, the participant was called a “dirty Jew,” which led to a physical altercation, and another recalled being “beat up” by locals near a resort that prohibited dogs and Jews. Still, many respondents indicated they have experienced discrimination and antisemitism because of being a Jew. More common were experiences of ridicule and indignity, which reinforced feelings of otherness thereby calling their whiteness into question. One respondent recalled an instance where he was “put down” by border agents who were making comments that made him uncomfortable when travelling with his Israeli passport. Another respondent recalled being at school when “neighboring Catholic school children threw pennies across the school field” at her and her friends while taunting them with racial epithets. While these instances are certainly not the kind of antisemitism Jews experienced in the Holocaust, one respondent was clear that they should not be dismissed as insignificant or irrelevant:

The gas chambers didn’t appear overnight. It started with things we still see today but are quick to dismiss or pass off as not being so bad. In the context of the Holocaust, I guess, I mean, nothing really seems that bad, but we need to remember what led to it (male, age 45)

Underlying experiences of exclusion was the belief for some that the non-Jewish world harbored deep-seated negative sentiments toward Jews, even if those sentiments were not mobilized into action. The perception that Jews continue to be othered socially means that their whiteness also is called into question. As one respondent stated, “A lot of people have preconceived ideas about Jews. They truly believe the stereotypes. I think it’s actually getting worse in many ways due to rise of alt-right and the anti-Israel faction” (male, age 32). The notion that non-Jews hold negative ideas about Jews was articulated by several other respondents who were reluctant to reveal their Jewish identities in public. One participant, for example, said she downplays her Jewishness “always when traveling, I never wear my Star of David necklace whenever I leave my Jewish neighborhood.”

When respondents articulate the Holocaust as a uniquely Jewish event, one that has lasting implications for how they understand their Jewishness, their relationship to other Jews, and their social relationships with non-Jews, it becomes clear that Holocaust remembering generates insecurity and a sense of isolation, one which Kaye/Kantrowtitz (2007) suggests makes Jews possessive about the Holocaust and their linked status as victims. The sense of existential insecurity and isolation respondents convey through uniqueness in Holocaust remembering has powerful implications for how they understand the limits of their belonging and the boundaries of their otherness. The particularism for which the Holocaust comes to stand positions Jews as the unique recipients of hatred in its most extreme form and contributes to collective understandings of Jews as vulnerable to future persecution.

4.4.2 Universalism in Holocaust Remembering

Respondents paradoxically also recalled the Holocaust within a more universalistic framework. Participants often oscillate between unambiguously Jewish lessons about the Holocaust (i.e. “never again to Jews”) and more generalized lessons that blur boundaries between Jewish persecution, the Holocaust, and discrimination targeting diverse minority groups (i.e. “never again to anyone”). When participants expressed more universalistic remembering of the Holocaust, the event itself became generalizable to wider populations and Jewish persecution was framed within a history of global fascism and divisive politics. Although the Holocaust was still understood as the

80 culmination of centuries of anti-Jewish hatred, the event provided lessons for all of humanity, not Jews alone. In this way, participants situated themselves as Jews who are “like everyone else” and Holocaust remembering moved from particularism to universalism.

Universalism in Holocaust remembering relies heavily on a script emphasizing Holocaust education and awareness. The Nuremberg trials following the war sparked decades of increased Holocaust awareness and education campaigns, commemorative projects, and institutionalization of memories in countries around the world, especially in the United States, Israel, and Germany. Participants placed a strong emphasis on the need for far-reaching Holocaust education as a strategy to minimize Jewish vulnerability to future victimization, but also as a strategy to inform other groups that they are potentially at risk for victimization. As one respondent said: “It is a very distinct part of history that is defined by the horrific effects of hatred on humans and as such, the citizens of the world need to be made aware of it, regardless of their background” (female, age 66). Indeed, this quote and the use of terms like “hatred on humans” and “citizens of the world” highlights how the education script universalized the Holocaust by framing the Jewish aspects of the event within a “cosmopolitan memory culture” (Levy and Sznaider 2007).

Broadening the frame of reference extended to groups whose current social conditions reflect widespread integration into the economic and political mainstream. As one participant noted: “Non-Jews need to learn about the Holocaust, because this kind of heinous activity can just as easily happen to them” (female, age 79). Another respondent extended the notion that “it could happen to anyone” by focusing on how Jews in Germany at the time of the war were very much an active part of German society and were assimilated into the culture:

I think the whole story of the Holocaust is a giant reminder of what can happen when you adopt the philosophy that it can't happen here. I’m sure the German Jews, who thrived and were mostly assimilated…always felt safe and part of German society and would never have contemplated the possibility of the fate that awaited them. We always need to beware” (female, age 70)

As this participant makes clear, the fact that German Jews were well integrated into German society at the time of the war did not safeguard them from National Socialism and the racialized boundaries that were drawn between “us” and “them.” Indeed, the paradox of Jewish success, which is linked symbolically and materially to the paradox of Jewish whiteness, is that Jewish integration into German society was used as evidence of their ability to “pollute” German blood-

81 lines and effectively undermine the interests of the nation-state by pursuing their own interests. At the same time, Jewish failure to integrate into society has historically also been cast as evidence of their “dual-loyalty” and clandestineness. History has shown that both instances can leave Jews in a precarious and potentially dangerous situation.

In universalizing the Holocaust, the importance of Holocaust education extended beyond the Jewish community to include non-Jews and was connected to Canadian multiculturalism and shifting immigration patterns. Perceptions about the increasing ethnic diversity of Canada meant that the Holocaust was at risk of losing its significance. One respondent noted: “Canada welcomes all kinds of people into the country, it’s great, it’s a good thing for the country, but how relevant is the Holocaust to people who come from India or the Philippines?” (male, age 29). Several participants noted that shifting immigration and demographic trends, including an aging population and Holocaust survivors dying, means that there is less focus on the Holocaust and less connection to it. Another respondent who works in education commented about this: “Jews tend to think other people know a lot more about [the Holocaust] than they really do. But I’m continually surprised at how much people don’t actually know about the Holocaust, especially young people, it’s kind of scary actually” (female, age 36).

The universalism in Holocaust schema further combines Holocaust education and awareness with the prospect of the event happening again to Jews in particular and to other groups more generally. Several respondents invoked the long-held mantra of the Jewish community, “Never Again,” in contradictory ways and in ways that drew clear boundaries between Canada and the rest of the world. The idea that the Holocaust or an event like the Holocaust should never again happen was contrasted with a worldview that an event like the Holocaust could happen again. This was particularly evident among older respondents in the sample and among the respondents who noted that their parents were Holocaust survivors. As one respondent whose parents were survivors said: “I can never say never. Anything is possible. However, I think living in Canada now, with its current levels of tolerance, it is one of the safest places for a Jewish society to exist and thrive” (female, age 66). Canada was positioned as a relatively safe place for Jews, whereas abstract phrases like “other countries,” “the rest of the world,” and “Arab countries” were used to juxtapose Jewish security in Canada with perceived insecurity elsewhere.

While many of the respondents expressed concern that another Holocaust was within the “realm of possibility,” most were notably more concerned about other expressions of violence and discrimination. As one respondent said on this subject: “I’m more concerned about things like shootings and bombings than I am about another Holocaust. It’s concerns I think a lot of minority groups have, Muslims, Jews, people of color, how to protect yourself from hate” (female, age 29). As with this participant, younger respondents in the sample tended to discuss Jewish oppression within broader issues of inequality and in the context of other marginalized groups. In reflecting on this issue, one participant discussed Jewish social mobility:

Jews are a group that I think for the most part, are a group that went very quickly from being an oppressed minority, to a largely non-oppressed minority. But, that's not, you know, that's obviously not true of people of color. I have not felt like I'm oppressed because I'm Jewish, and yet, we act like an oppressed community… it feels to me like Jews are more of dominant society or one of the dominant societies, or certainly have all the privileges that dominant society has (female, age 31)

The view that Jews represent dominant society and are no longer an oppressed minority group was uncommon among respondents, but not completely absent. Other participants noted that Jews now “have a voice” and “have made progress,” but that their “progress” is – or could be at any moment – tempered by an increasingly uninformed and ambivalent public on the atrocities of the Holocaust. Universalism in Holocaust remembering provides participants with the opportunity to reposition themselves as no longer a uniquely oppressed minority. However, the particularisms of the Holocaust limit understandings of Jews as a dominant group. Jewishness and otherness therefore remain ambiguous, being invoked and suppressed as participants generalize from the particular and particularize the general.

The dichotomy between particularism and universalism in Holocaust remembering has also been taken up by scholars interested in representational politics, and this tension expressed by respondents is reflected in broader communal debates (Young 1993; Linenthal 1995). Debates over how to represent and commemorate the Holocaust and its victims has occupied a prominent place in efforts to memorialize the event. For example, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which opened in April 1993, was placed adjacent to the National Mall with other American landmarks, a space that was contested by some and debated by the Holocaust commission on the grounds that the Holocaust was not an American event. Other distinctions between particularism and universalism in Holocaust memorialization centered on questions about

83 how to balance the Jewish aspect of the Holocaust and its “uniqueness doctrine” with its universal connotations (Linenthal 1995).

Holocaust memory also has as much to do with matters of interpretation as it does with matters of representation. Rather than understand participants remembering as a dichotomy between particular and universal memoryscapes, I suggest that the universal and particular in participants’ Holocaust remembering be understood as existing in a dialectical relation. As Levy and Sznaider (2007:317) argue on this point about the Holocaust, “every particularization is a particularization of a universal, and…every universal is universalization of a particular…they define and influence each other.” As respondents make clear, the Holocaust is an event which embodies simultaneously the local, the national, and the global, as well as the particular and the universal.

4.4.3 The Fragility of Israel

One of the critical ways that Jewishness and feelings of otherness came up among respondents was in discussions about the State of Israel. The formation of the State of Israel in 1948 was referenced extensively by participants as one of the most, if not the most, significant events in Jewish history and aspects of their Jewishness. Control over and the development of the land of Israel was framed as a “marvel” of Jewish accomplishment and ingenuity. As a nation-state committed to the preservation and endurance of Jewish life, Israel represented the ultimate form of structural achievement for the world’s Jewry and an end to thousands of years as an involuntary diaspora community. Concomitant with recent survey research on Canadian Jews (Brym et al. 2018), most participants expressed an emotional attachment to Israel, which stemmed from some combination of religious belief, travel to the country, having family or friends living there, or believing Israel to be a “safe haven.” As with the findings in recent survey data cited above, participants were more divided around Israeli policy and the building of Jewish settlements in certain regions of the country. Of particular interest was how respondents framed both the success/strength of Israel and its perceived vulnerability as increasing the visibility of their Jewishness and consequently underscoring a sense of otherness.

Understandings of Israel as vulnerable centered on historical and contemporary understandings of Jews being socially and politically marginal. Israel’s perceived insecurity in the Middle East and

84 the boundaries of otherness were articulated through memories of war, including the Holocaust, and of contemporary anti-Zionist efforts that respondents frequently conflated with antisemitism. In making these associations, some respondents expressed the need for Israel in the maintenance of Jewish life:

With the continual growth of worldwide antisemitism, it [another Holocaust] is not beyond the realm of possibility. Thank God that Israel exists, it’s absolutely essential. Israel is the spiritual and cultural epicenter of Judaism and a strong Israel is critical for the Jewish people (male 65)

As this respondent makes clear, the essentialism around Israel was framed within historical understandings of Jewish victimization and a broader context of prospective Jewish persecution. Israel emerged as “essential” to bridge memories of war and the ability to prevent future atrocities. Some participants, particularly among older respondents, were skeptical that countries other than Israel could be relied on to uphold their ability to live freely as a Jewish person in the face of increased white nationalism and global antisemitism. One participant discussed this in the context of Israel’s Law of Return: “It is the only place that unconditionally will accept any Jew. It is vital for the survival of the Jewish religion and the Jewish people” (female 66). For other respondents like these ones, concerns about the survival of Jews were grounded in histories of cultural trauma and aligned with the survival of Israel. Memories of the Holocaust and other conflicts offered an identity source for the present, and concerns about Israel’s vulnerability carried over into concerns about Jews’ vulnerability.

One of the ways memories and expressions of Israel’s fragility took shape was around the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict. On this issue, several participants perceived the tensions between the two sides as contributing to a volatile existence not only for people in the region (particularly Israelis and Palestinians), but for North American Jews as well. This was evident in one participant’s discussion about Israel being subject to what she saw as extensive and disproportionate condemnation in global arenas:

You can see in the UN how much antisemitism there is in the world, out of the human rights violations, you can Google it, at least 70% of the human rights violation condemnation are on Israel while countries like Saudi Arabia, North Korea, Somalia, Sudan, Iran have only one or two violations (female, age 60)

The perception of disproportionate attention given to Israel over human rights violations draws unwanted, negative, and many respondents argued undeserved, attention to the country. In doing so, Israel was seen as being held to human rights standards that did not apply equally to other countries. Ultimately, this serves to erode the legitimacy of the country and its claims that military intervention is necessary and defensive. For many, the conflict was a source of consistent frustration and generated uncertainty about Israel’s ability to exist peacefully with its Arab neighbors. As one respondent explained: “There’s been fighting as long as I can remember. It’s a defining feature of the country, not the only one, but a big one, certainly the most prominent one. I don’t know if that will ever change” (male, age 47)

With a focus on the condemnation of Israel and conflict as a defining feature of the country, many respondents communicated the idea that anti-Israel sentiment was also an expression of antisemitism and therefore an indictment of the Jewish people. As one respondent who was critical of the Israeli government’s policies explained, Israel and Jews are often conflated in the popular imagination:

So I think that a lot of people equate Jews and Israel. Um, which is a problem on a number of levels. I think that it’s what maintains Zionism. And then it’s also, on the flip side, what kind of increases anti-Semitism, when people start to see things that Israel is doing. And then they think ‘Oh, Jews are doing it. And Jews all support this.’ And you know, when there is this monolithic view of Israel, I think that is does increase some kind of hatred of Jews, or ah, degrading of Jews in some way (female, age 31)

For this respondent and others like her, a monolithic view of Israel and the equating of Jews and Israel left both open to criticism for the other’s actions, and it posed a dilemma in their ability to distinguish themselves from the actions of a nation-state to which they do not belong. For some, Israel’s precariousness and the association of Jews with Israel was in part the result of media representations that misrepresented the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Israel’s response to attacks. As one respondent explained about media reporting on Israel:

Jews put up signs in Toronto supporting Israel, and other people see it and they see it in the news, and it’s not that Palestinians fired ten rockets into Israel yesterday, it’s that Israelis shot two militants in Gaza. They hear this stuff, and it’s terribly bias, and it’s stupid and sad that people associate every Jew in the world with Israel (male, age 30)

Notably among younger respondents, and as the previous quotes makes clear, Israel’s fragility lay largely in efforts to delegitimize the state. With selective and only partial coverage of the conflict, participants viewed media reports of Israeli action as disproportionate to the threats the country faces. The Boycott-Divest-Sanctions (BDS) movement that has grown in prominence and become a feature of university campus life in North America was further articulated by several respondents as a way to delegitimize Israel and express antisemitism in a politically acceptable way. As one respondent explained: “There’s one group in the world that people can focus their frustrations on. They focus it on the Jews, it’s always been that way. It’s just like for thousands of years, the Jews have been shit on. Israel is the new political Jew” (male, age 30). When Israel comes to stand for everything Jewish, negative perceptions of Diaspora Jews is tied directly to Israeli action or inaction on issues with which North American Jews may not agree. Indeed, several respondents voiced their concerns about and disapproval over Israeli policy, expressing their support for Palestinian self-determination. As one respondent said on his views about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: “I get into big arguments with people who are Zionists. Most of the stuff I agree with is on the Palestinian side of the argument and I can kind of understand their struggle more than the Israelis” (male, age 33).

Still, the topic of Israel remained a complicated one in the lives of participants. Many expressed their discomfort and unwillingness to engage with the topic because they believed it made them vulnerable to criticism on the basis of their Jewishness and called their belonging into question. As one woman explained:

I always feel uncomfortable when Israel comes up in discussion with non-Jews. Even though I don’t support everything Israel does, it’s settlements, the treatment of Palestinians, I feel like non-Jews just assume I do, that my loyalty lies with Israel. I mean, I’ve never even been to Israel (female, age 37)

While older respondents similarly shared thoughts about efforts to delegitimize Israel, much of their framing of Israel’s vulnerability resided in the less abstract prospects of war and destruction of a Jewish peoplehood. Memories of war were a feature in many discussions about Israel and sustained ideas that the state – and by association a Jewish peoplehood – was vulnerable to attack, building on memories of a history of war. Some participants framed Israel as a standalone country in terms of its unique geopolitical location: “Is there any other country in the world surrounded by nations that want to destroy it and publicly say so?” (male, age 65). The idea that Israel is reviled

87 for its existence came out further in discussions about the country’s history of war. In thinking about Israel’s vulnerability to attack, another respondent recalled histories of war: “Israel has been fighting for its life since day one. Now with Iran’s potential nuclear weapons, do we need to find out what happens if Israel can’t defend itself? I think we know the answer” (male, age 57).

The fragility of Israel schema demonstrates a constraining of participants’ whiteness by accentuating a sense of otherness through memories of war, the prospect of future or continued war, and contemporary anti-Zionist efforts that are conflated with antisemitism. Participants identification with Israel, while not universally shared, demonstrates how the visibility of their Jewish identities is tied to the visibility of Israel in global context. Perceptions about Israel’s vulnerability permeated the self-identities of participants as Jews, accentuating a sense of otherness and making it difficult to identify as only white.

4.4.4 The Power of Israel

The paradox around Israel and Jewish otherness lies in how a vulnerable and fragile Jewish state can simultaneously come to stand for Jewish strength, fortitude, and leadership. The collective memory schema of Israel’s formation and sovereignty positioned the state as a global “powerhouse,” which was articulated, in part again, through memories of war and Israel’s ability to defend itself against “hostile neighbors” and “against all odds.” For some respondents, this was referred to as beshert, a Yiddish word meaning inevitable or something that is meant to be. As one respondent explained, Israel’s resilience in overcoming the perils of war was a source of pride in her Jewish identity:

No matter what the circumstances Israel shows it has the ability and perseverance to live and thrive. It also gives me a sense of pride knowing that whatever Jews have been faced with in history, they always rose up stronger and more united (female, age 36)

The circumstances to which this respondent referred centered largely around the context of war. Indeed, the military capabilities that respondents perceived Israel as having at its disposal were important for their sense of security in a world where persistent antisemitism highlighted their otherness. Recollections of European Jews being denied entry to various countries in their efforts to flee Nazi occupied territories, including Canada’s stance that “none is too many” (see Abella

88 and Troper 1982), situated Israel’s strength in its ability and willingness to accommodate diasporic Jewish communities in the event of widespread persecution. As one respondent emphasized about Israel and Jewish otherness:

We will always be reminded of our Jewishness and our otherness, and not in a positive way, one way or another. The only difference that we have now is that since 1948 we have the safety of Israel if we ever need to flee. I know that sounds very dramatic and reactive but over all the years, things really haven't changed (female, age 70)

Many respondents expressed the view that Israel was a critical and defining feature of their Jewish identity in the context of Holocaust remembrance, but still others called into question the current relevance of Israel as a predominantly Jewish state. This was especially evident among some of the younger respondents. For them, the connection between Israel and Jewishness was a political one, a way of “raising a lot of money outside the country.” The constructedness of the connection between Jewishness and Israel was evident in reflections about family roots. As one respondent explained: “For my grandparents, they were first and foremost Jewish, and second they were Polish, Austrian, or German, so there’s not that linkage there” (male, age 28). He continued by saying:

The way the country’s been sold is that if you’re Jewish you have a connection to the only Jewish state in the world… I don’t think that because someone is Jewish they necessarily should have a link to Israel

For others, the linkage to Israel posed a challenge for their Jewishness. Some were conflicted and had difficulty reconciling a discrepancy between what they viewed as Israel’s contemporary exercise of power and Jews being deprived of their rights and autonomy historically. As one participant explained:

Post World War II/Holocaust, people felt the need for having a homeland. But looking back on it now…it seems like a pretty, like, this thing was forced upon these people that lived there and were essentially forced out of their homes, the same way the Jews were forced out of their homes in Poland and Germany (male, age 33)

While Israel’s strength was often expressed through its ability to protect Jews from persecution and the (mis)use of military power, it also brought attention to Jewish success in transforming the region. For many, memories of Israel’s formation constructed a narrative where Jews turned an otherwise “barren landscape” into one of the most productive and technologically innovative

89 countries in the world. The narrative of Israel “blossoming” after its formation as a Jewish state often evoked religious symbolism in transforming a “desert into paradise” akin to the Garden of Eden. Several respondents took great pride in the accomplishments of Israeli Jews, noting that Jewish innovation continued to build a better life for people around the world. As one participant proclaimed: “We have the biggest number of Nobel prizes in the world, all make feel proud of the Jewish people, proud to be Jewish” (male, age 57). Other respondents discussed their emotional attachment to Israel in what they saw as its ability to use its power for the betterment of the world. As one respondent explained:

And I think Israel has the potential to be an amazing state, not really for the Jews and I’m not, you know, I think it’s often associated with the homeland component, but I think for the rest of the world and really, you know, playing not only its part, but being a leader in communities worldwide. Developing, you know, technology to help third world countries and health measures, you know, dealing with health issues and catastrophes worldwide. I think we have a lot to offer to the world and I think Israel can sort of be that outlet, that mechanism that sort of does it (male, age 26)

The power of Israel in these ways, while contributing to a source of pride for many respondents, also illustrates how otherness is conditional for Jews when Israel comes up in conversation, to the extent that Jews may elect to suppress their Jewishness. Many respondents were reluctant to reveal or otherwise draw attention to their Jewish identities when Israel was a topic of discussion. For example, one respondent took measures to limit her public exposure to Israeli politics and downplay her Jewishness when she said: “always on social media…I mean I will share a page for a kosher restaurant to try to win a gift certificate but I won’t comment on anything political, I won’t post anything too political” (female, age 57). Others highlighted their unwillingness to share their views on Israel, even if they were critical ones, in “mixed company” because they could not be confident what others’ “true feelings” are about Jews and Israel.

The power of Israel schema further jeopardizes belonging in that Israeli force feeds into left-wing antisemitism that views Jews, and by proxy Israel in the minds of respondents, as colonizers, imperialists, and opportunistic capitalists – a deeply rooted trope about Jews with a long history in the Middle Ages when Judaism and usury merged in the popular imagination. This was evident among respondents who expressed their solidarity with Palestinians, but noted that they felt being Jewish meant people were guarded around what they had to say. As one Jewish woman active in the Palestinian solidarity movement explained:

In terms of being listened to, I think within the Palestine solidarity movement, there's, I think, there are ways in which I think Jews are listened to more; there are ways in which, I think, people are cautious in listened to Jews more (female, age 31)

Underlying these feelings was the belief that some non-Jews may regard Jewish criticism of Israel with skepticism because of stereotypes about what being Jewish means. As another respondent explained:

There’s a lot of misunderstandings and misconceptions about who a Jew is. There’s that idea about how they dress, what their beliefs are. I’m talking about the black hat and payos, long black coats. ...The other misconception is that we all support Israel… I have a manager who asked me what do you guys do on this holiday? I always try to help her out, but, being Jewish doesn’t have one set of guidelines or one set of rules (male, age 28)

Jewish governance over Israel posed a challenge for respondents who saw Israel’s strength being cast by others as a way to subjugate the country’s Arab minority population and advance Jewish interests, which came to stand for the Israeli-Jewish connection in popular and media discourse. Equating Jews and Israel, and transferring what is perceived as Israel’s abuse of power onto Jews, meant that for many respondents, Israel’s exercise of power reinforced the view that Jews were powerful actors in a global context. This serves to highlight Jewishness and otherness over belonging and whiteness and illustrates the complex interplay between nationalism, religion, and race that underlies Jewish identity in the diaspora. With the overwhelming association of anti- Zionism with antisemitism made among respondents, it is important to note these associations are not clear-cut in the literature, which at best offers mixed conclusions. Strong criticism of Israel is not necessarily antisemitic, but strong criticism of Israel is more likely to be associated with some level of antisemitism (Baum and Nakazawa 2007; Beattie 2017; Staetsky 2017).

4.5 Conclusion and Discussion

The collective memory schemas identified in this study illustrate the contradictions and tensions in how Jews think about the past and how remembering informs the boundaries of Jewish belonging and otherness. The study demonstrates the utility in a grounded, “bottom-up” approach to collective memory and identity articulation beyond the institutionalization of memory and the socio-political and legal dimensions of race formation. Uniqueness and universalism in Holocaust remembering positions Jews as distinctively targeted members of a minority group, while also

91 framing their persecution as symptomatic of broader inequalities that manifest as violence, a universal process of dehumanization not limited to Jews. In this way, participants’ connection to the Holocaust is one that is uniquely Jewish, but in a way that also universalizes the particular. Similarly, the collective memory schemas related to the State of Israel illustrate the contradictions between Jews’ remembering and what it means for Jewish acceptance, visibility, and belonging. While the schemas demonstrate the fragmentation of collective memory and how it functions symbolically for Jews in the present, they should not be taken as exhaustive. Rather, I suggest these schemas are illustrative of dominant cultural schemas found both within the dominant Ashkenazi Jewish community and the dominant culture available to Jews and non-Jews alike.

The point about Ashkenazi dominance, however, is an important one. The symbolic connections participants make between the Holocaust and what it means to be Jewish, for example, constructs but also draws on a particular narrative and collective memory about the Holocaust that excludes the experiences of other Jews. For example, non-white Jews and Jews who are not of Ashkenazi decent may remember such events in ways that are inconsistent with dominant Ashkenazi schemas. The dominance of Ashkenazi cultural schemas means that the identities and histories of Jews who are Arab or Indian, for example, are erased or delegitimized in cultural repertoires that privilege Ashkenazi Jewish history including Holocaust remembrance (Train 2016). While this differentiation is beyond the scope of this study, I suggest future work take stock of the varied collective memory schemas among more diverse samples of Jews both in Toronto and across Canada. Indeed, regional differences and divergent migration histories are important but understudied aspects of collective memory mobilization in identity claims.

Expressions of Jewishness that are consistent with broader cultural repertoires helps to alleviate anxieties that Jewish difference is expressed through values and norms that exceed dominant expectations. Consequently, movement too far beyond vague claims to Jewishness risks Jews no longer being ambiguously white and being re-racialized from “inside outsiders” to “outside outsiders” (Mills 1998). At the same time, expressions of Jewishness that are consistent with dominant expectations risks reinforcing historically powerful, antisemitic, yet salient perceptions about Jews: that their adaptability propagates an undetectable kind of difference, a “natural mimicry” that enables them to transform into any nation or people (Levine-Rasky 2008).

The findings also confirm a larger problematic with 21st century Jewish identity. They illustrate vividly how North American Jewish identity, having deep-seated roots to centuries of culture, language, music, arts, traditions, and diversity are increasingly reduced to Israel and narratives of antisemitism or victimhood (Kaye/Kantrowitz 2007; Novick 1999; Budick 2001; Lazar and Litvak-Hirsch 2009). As the data suggests, understanding Jewish whiteness as Jewish privilege is problematical when one considers the social cost that accompanied assimilation, even if cultural preservation (usually in the form of Holocaust remembrance and emotional attachment to Israel) remains an active pillar of Jewish organizations like Jewish summer camps and other community programming (Harold 2015). In this way, the findings attend to a broader issue concerning Jewishness: the path of assimilation has been accompanied by severe cultural loss and has led to an ambiguous Jewish identity that is largely defined by limited cultural schemas.

I contend that these collective memory schemas are themselves a reflection of the path to assimilation in that they are consistent with dominant repertoires in American culture – they are components of American and Canadian identity that have been legitimated in the media and elsewhere in the culture. Beyond the Holocaust and Israel, the maintenance of a Jewish cultural identity risks no longer being able to “pass” for white. As Jews experienced the imposition of a white identity by shifting structural arrangements and embraced newfound claims to whiteness, they also found themselves in a position to articulate only vague and ambiguous claims to Jewishness. Privilege in this context becomes something of a misnomer. The collective memory schemas that emerged in the data reflect the cultural repertoires that have been institutionalized and preserved in Hollywood (for instance, Sophie’s Choice, Schindler’s List, The Pianist, Life is Beautiful, Inglorious Basterds, and numerous others), in local and national events like Holocaust Education Week, and more directly within the Jewish community through the bourgeoning homeland tourism industry that includes trips to concentration camps and other pertinent war- related sites in Europe, as well as free “Birthright” tours for Jewish young adults to Israel. In short, whiteness has not come without its communal costs.

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Chapter 5 Conclusion

This dissertation examines how ideas about collective memory are mobilized in the construction and maintenance of ethnic boundaries. The project envisages how understandings of past cultural experiences or events affect boundary-making processes by examining inductively how group members remember and talk about the past. In doing so, it explores broader questions about identity, meaning, and groupness. I use the Jewish community in Toronto as a case study for this investigation. The aim here is to examine the landscape of collective memory among Jews and how memory is linked to action. This study engages sociologically with three bodies of literature: 1) Canadian Jewish studies; 2) collective memory studies; and 3) the study of ethnic boundaries. Through this engagement, this study seeks to advance cross-disciplinary dialogue to further develop theory and forge more explanatory power when it comes to studying ethnic boundary formation and maintenance. Bringing collective memory into the study of ethnic boundary formation and maintenance can help provide a more robust understanding of collective identity formation and group relations more generally.

Taking Jews in Toronto as an empirical case for this study, this dissertation explores the retrospective construction of collective memory and how collective memory is mobilized in everyday group-making projects. In other words, I ask how mnemonic knowledge structures inform boundary-making processes and what the logic is behind these processes. While this investigation provides much needed research on Jews in Canada specifically, the more general significance of such an investigation is to develop a boundary-making framework with broader applicability to various national, religious, cultural, and ethnic contexts. Nation building is very much connected to collective memory formation in that historical meanings give rise to a national consciousness or “imagined community” (Anderson 1983; Hobsbawm 1990). For example, using the case of Cambodia and its wars with Vietnam, Takei (1998) demonstrates that the source of ethnic and national identity hinges on the collective memory of group members, rather than ancestry and culture per se. In the Columbian Pacific region, Hoffman (2002) shows that the construction of collective memory around black identities is an involved process that reflects both

98 99 individual interests and collective strategies to respond to national needs. Further, as Ma’s (1998) work in Hong Kong demonstrates, collective memories can be powerful in refiguring the collective imagination of membership in the Chinese nation-state. Though such work illuminates the centrality of collective memory in national identity, more research is needed on how historical meanings more broadly and of collective memory in particular shape the symbolic and social boundaries that characterize groupness.

In bringing group members’ historical context into the purview of ethnic boundaries, this dissertation provides a more elaborate phenomenology of group-making and classification (Lamont and Molnár 2002). It attends directly to the historical, cognitive mechanisms associated with the activation or dissolution of ethnic boundaries. Specifically, it explores the “bundles of memory schemata” (Beim 2007) Jews mobilize into meaningful symbols and group boundaries. Such an examination is important when we consider how much is at stake when group members and collectivities grapple with the meaning of the past. Because groups tend to see the past through the lens of their own interests and historical experiences, perception of the past can also sustain or intensify social conflict (Schwartz, Fukuoka, and Takita-Ishii 2005). Understanding the mechanisms through which group members remember the past and classify themselves in relation to others has important implications for understand group relations more generally.

In the boundaries literature, group boundaries are often treated as an outcome of structural and institutional arrangements (Alba 2005; Nagel 1994; Olzak 1992; Wimmer 2013). While analyses of political landscapes, labor markets, and other social institutions have generated considerable insight into ethnic boundaries, other scholars have also looked at daily experience as an important factor that shapes boundaries (Lamont 2000; Brubaker et al. 2007). What this dissertation contributes is an understanding of the cognitive bases of collective identity and group formation and how historical experience, both lived and imagined, materialize in daily life. Though we know that history plays an important role in delineating the boundaries of an imagined community (Anderson 1983; Hobsbawm 1990), the mechanisms that tie collective memory to ethnic boundaries in terms of their permeability, salience, durability, and visibility remain an important but understudied area.

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5.1 Boundary Making in Organizational, Spatial, and Temporal Context

The findings of this study contribute to understanding how the past is used by group members in collective identity formation. Building on existing boundary literature, this dissertation identifies several fundamental mechanisms and processes associated with social and symbolic boundaries for Jews, and, in doing so, it contributes to the development of theory by detailing the construction of collective memory in Jewish identity.

Taking the case of overnight Jewish summer camps, chapter 2 explores the boundary work of former summer camp participants in relation to organizational schemas of Jewish identity and practice. Summer camps have emerged in recent decades as a critical institution responsible for addressing what some refer to as an intensifying “continuity crisis”, that is, a disinterest among Jews, particularly younger Jews, in participating in organized Jewish life and maintaining conventionally Jewish lifestyles. Among other things, the continuity crisis draws attention to increasing intermarriage rates, emotional detachment from (or ambiguity around) Israel, and weakening participation in organized religious activities.

I envisage Jewish summer camps as liminal organizations that provide campers with an immersive Jewish experience and equip them with models of Jewishness to direct boundary work after camp. I argue that a context of structural shifting between immersive camp life and non-immersive home life encourages Jews to reformulate organizational schemas in ways that diverge from organizational goals but nevertheless produce meaning for their Jewishness. The liminality of camp helps participants temporarily overlook the complexities of identity by transmitting organizational schemas around keeping kosher, communal shabbat celebrations, and attachment to Israel, without the constraint of practical concerns over their implementation.

By documenting how campers make sense of and negotiate these schemas in their lives, we see multiple projects of boundary work that structure groupness and reveal the liminal aspects of boundaries themselves. Jews relate to and make sense of such organizational schemas in varied ways, which reveals tensions in identity categories and highlights the benefits of disaggregating categories to better isolate mechanisms that inform boundary making. This study therefore contributes to our understanding of boundary making processes in organizational context.

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Chapter 3 attends to how the collective memory of group can affect their residential patterns and contributes to understanding how boundary making is grounded in place, space, and broader group relations. The residential patterns of ethno-religious and racial groups have occupied a prominent place in scholarship on inequality, group relations, and urban studies, yet the role of socioeconomic conditions in shaping residential patterns varies considerably. In this study, we take up the question of how our socio-historical and cultural worlds shape our material world by exploring how Jews’ recollection and construction of the past shapes the Jewish residential landscape in Toronto.

The collective memory schemas of cultural trauma, ritual belonging, grounded community, and fortitude/empowerment that we identify and elaborate serve as prominent scripts in the maintenance and durability of Jewish neighborhoods. Taken collectively, these schemas offer some much-needed explanation for Jewish spatial patterns and residential trends that have been described in various North American cities, but have not been studied in sufficient detail. While there is reason to believe that the schematic content and collective memory mobilization of Jews will both align and diverge in meaningful ways in different regions, this study contributes theoretically to place-based boundary processes and empirically uncovers the cognitive boundary work that underlies residential choices.

In Chapter 4, I turn my attention to how Jews understand their Jewishness as contributing to their otherness, with particular attention to what the Holocaust and Israel mean for those self- perceptions. Over the course of the twentieth century and especially in the latter half of the century, Jews have increasingly been accepted into the white mainstream as whiteness has taken root over Jewishness as the sine qua non of belonging and social inclusion. However, persistent antisemitism and collective remembering around the Holocaust and Israel mean that Jews continue to see themselves as outsiders in ways that make it difficult to identify Jews as only white.

I find that collective remembering of the Holocaust and Israel reflects broader tensions of being Jewish (“outsider”) and being white (“insider”). The Holocaust and Israel are framed in ambiguous and contradictory ways with the Holocaust being simultaneously position as uniquely Jewish and universally important, and Israel being framed simultaneously as fragile and powerful. In developing theory, the study demonstrates how Jews’ understanding of their past and the significance these memories hold is associated with the development and maintenance of boundaries of Jewish otherness that have largely been dissolved in the broader culture. Still,

102 notions of Jewish otherness permeate the self-understandings of Jews in meaningful ways that make visible the mechanisms associated with boundary work.

5.2 A Note on Comparative and Group-centered Approaches

This dissertation has approached empirical questions of Jewish history, identity, and groupness by exploring meanings among Jews themselves. The chapters identify several points of convergence and divergence in the identity work and boundary making of Jews of different ages, backgrounds, and levels of religiosity and ethnic engagement. Indeed, much of the literature on Jewishness, conceptualized widely in terms of religiosity and in relation to assimilation processes such as intermarriage, has adopted a comparative lens in understanding contemporary Jewishness (Lee et al. 2017; Sheskin and Hartman 2015; Cadge and Davidman 2006). For example, comparative work has examined a range of topics pertinent to Jewish communities across North America including gender differences in identity and in educational and occupational outcomes (Halbertal and Cohen 2001; Hurst and Mott 2006), attitudes toward interfaith relationships (Haji et al. 2011; Marshall and Markstrom-Adams 1995), and experiences of secularization (Keysar 2010; Sharot 1991). Much of this work has also compared Jews to other ethnic, religious, and racial groups. Still other work has made use of comparative frameworks by comparing Canadian Jews to their American counterparts (Schoenfeld 1978; Taras and Weinfeld 1990; Chertok et al. 2009).

The comparative approach to understanding Jewish life in Canada and elsewhere, however, has recently been a topic for reflection by scholars who urge caution in adopting comparative frameworks. For example, reflecting on the question of whether the Jewish experience, Jewish identity, and Jewishness are comparable to other religious, ethnic, and racial groups, Weinfeld (2018) indicates that he has “serious doubts” about the utility of comparisons between Jews and other groups because of a unique set of circumstances around which the Jewish experience in Canada has taken shape. For example, Weinfeld points to the fact that Jews occupy a liminal space between being a religious group and an ethnic group. As this dissertation has also elaborated, Jewish whiteness and ambiguous racial classification is central to the Jewish experience, making comparisons along these categories complex and potentially misleading. Further, he draws attention to Jews’ long history and experience as a diaspora community, which sets them apart from most other immigrant communities in Canada and the United States.

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In a recent theoretical piece, Gonzalez-Lesser (forthcoming) takes up extant classifications of Jews as a religious, ethnic, or racial group and theorizes Jewishness as comprising all three classifications. Because Jews are not easily classified by others or themselves into one or the other, their functioning simultaneously establishes a rather unique quality of Jewishness, one that is not easily compared to other group contexts. Jewishness therefore requires theorizing as interconnected racial, ethnic, national, and religious frames that overlap and are constituted by one another (Gonzalez-Lesser forthcoming; Brubaker 2002, Brubaker, Loveman and Stamatov 2004). In this dissertation, rather than employ a comparative framework that makes use of existing categories, I explore the variable scripts that Jews use to understand themselves and to guide their action. In doing so, the papers extend relational understandings of boundary processes (Barth 1969) to include the cognitive, emotional, and sentimental mechanisms that activate boundary processes.

5.3 Directions for Future Research

Changes over the last several decades among Canada’s Jews have meant significant transformations in a number of important social, economic, and political arenas. One dimension in particular that has contributed to such changes is the increasing number of Jews who do not identify with Judaism or an organized denomination, but rather identify as “just Jewish.” What this means exactly remains poorly understood, particularly in the Canadian context. The change in identification has, however, been linked to numerous “crises” centering around emotional detachment from Israel, lower levels of Jewish practice, and declining participation in Jewish institutions likes synagogues (Keysar 2010; Phillips 2010). Jewishness is constructed in complex ways that combine religious, cultural, and ethnic expressions (Rebhun and Levy 2006), which means that changes of this sort do not necessarily signal a “continuity crises,” but rather, as the research in this dissertation demonstrates, group-making projects that generate meaning for Jewishness.

There is good reason to believe that in-group and out-group variation exists in terms of ideas about collective memory. Beim (2007) contends that collective memory analyses should be sensitized to the culturally available schemata to which people have access. When group members have access to similar but not entirely over-lapping collective memory objects, their differing collective

104 memory schemata create different ways of making sense of, thinking about, and thus remembering events like the Holocaust. For example, some African Americans might relate the Holocaust to slavery, while Jews may associate the Holocaust with the Zionist movement. Although this example draws on two different groups of individuals, Jewish denominational variations have been documented in relation to views of Israel, the Holocaust, and Israel’s six-day war, for example (Cohen 2003; Schuman, Vinitzky-Seroussi, and Vinokur 2003). More detailed, cognitive, and inductive work will continue to enrich our understanding of mnemonic communities and the strategies people use to do boundary work.

In an effort to continue building theory, future research would do well to better identify the conditions under which institutional and interpersonal mnemonic socialization occurs. This line of research would shed light on collective memory fragmentation and consensus by focusing on how collective memory is understood through the language, conventions, and value expressions of the social groups to which we belong. Mnemonic socialization has tremendous power to ensure personalized manifestations of a single common, collective memory (Zerubavel 1996). Indeed, an important implication for the social construction of memory is that we must learn what is worth remembering, along with its specific mnemonic value. But what happens when socialization processes within a mnemonic community differ, as one might expect in a community as diverse as Jews in Canada? How might mnemonic socialization contribute to competing collective memories and how might efforts be made to align them? As we saw in chapter 2, for example, the organizational efforts of Jewish summer camps do not translate one-for-one in the lives of organizational participants.

As Schuman, Vinitzky-Seroussi, and Vinokur (2003) have also demonstrated, religiosity plays an important role in memories of the Holocaust, suggesting that culture and belief play more of a role than other demographic factors. The authors show that among Israelis the Holocaust has an inconsistent relation to religiosity: mentions of “World War II” show a highly significant relation to the secular end of the religiosity continuum, whereas mentions of the “Holocaust” tended to be mentioned more by those more orthodox. It remained unclear, however, whether World War II and the Holocaust represent the same or different events in Israeli memories. Future research should continue to explore boundary work across a range of formal institutions as well as informal processes of mnemonic socialization to identify additional mechanisms by which collective identity and boundary processes occur.

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Chapter two of this dissertation was published in Sociology of Race and Ethnicity in February 2015 as a sole author article entitled “Institutionalizing Liminality: Jewish Summer Camps and the Boundary Work of Camp Participants,” available online: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2332649215569074

Chapter three of this dissertation is derived from a co-authored article with Dr. Eric Fong entitled “Mobilizing Memory: Collective Memory Schemas and the Social Boundaries of Jews in Toronto” first published online in Ethnic and Racial Studies in July 2017, available online: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01419870.2017.1344719