Negotiating and Performing “Jewish Australian” Identity in South-East Queensland's Jewish Community: Creolization, Nationa

Negotiating and Performing “Jewish Australian” identity in South-East Queensland’s

Jewish community: Creolization, national identity and power1

Jennifer Creese, School of Social Science, The University of Queensland, Australia. Email: [email protected]

Published in the Journal of International Migration & Integration (2019), First Online 12 November 2019, https://doi.org/10.1007/s12134-019-00714-8

Conflict of Interest: The author declares that they have no conflict of interest.

Compliance with Ethical Standards: The anthropological work of this study complies with the Code of Ethics of the Australian Anthropological Society, and has been approved by their institution’s Human Research Ethics Committee.

Abstract

The Jewish community of South-East Queensland, Australia, has always been in constant negotiation with the mainstream Queensland society around it regarding its relationship with dominant Australian national identity. This results in two different forms of identity – a compartmentalized identity, where Australianness and Jewishness are experienced and expressed separately within their own discrete situations, and a creolized identity, where elements of both Australianness and Jewishness are taken and blended into a distinctive new cultural form. Using ethnographic data, this article explores the negotiation between

Jewishness and Australianness in group identity. Rather than compartmentalising Jewishness

1 The author wishes to thank Professor David Trigger and Dr Gerhard Hoffstaedter of the School of Social Science, University of Queensland, for their comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this work. This research was made possible with the assistance of an Australian Government Research Training Program (RTP) Scholarship from the University of Queensland Graduate School.

away from Australianness, a creolized performative “Jewish Australian” identity is given collective expression by the community. This allows the community to showcase an identity that embraces an Australian identity which is predominant across the nation, but reframes this with Jewish values, behaviours and symbols to empower their minority Jewish identity which might otherwise be dismissed and subjugated.

Keywords: identity, multiculturalism, creolization, performativity, Jewish, Australia

Introduction

I drink limonana, an Israeli lemon drink, in Brisbane’s only Israeli restaurant with nineteen- year-old Elli 2, a local Jewish woman. She raves about the drink and how much it reminds her of Israel, though Elli herself is fourth-generation Australian with no Israeli family history. I ask her about how she sums up her identity:

I struggle to put it into words… although I am Australian, I feel Australian, my other

answer, I wouldn’t say I’m Israeli, but I’m Jewish, which is an interesting kind of

answer. It changes, depends where I am, who I’m talking to. Because I don’t look like

a typical Australian, people will say “where are you from?” I’d say Australia and

they’d say, “no, where are you really from?” and the only answer that would suffice

would be that I’m Jewish, and then they’d be like “oh, that’s it.” Even though I am

very Australian. I think I’d say that I’m an Australian Jew.

Later in the month, I attend an official community event. Elli acts as one of the official flag bearers for the event, wearing the uniform of the Betar Zionist youth organization and carrying an Australian flag. She gives a speech about the formative role of Israel and her

2 The names of all participants have been anonymised, as per the Code of Ethics of the Australian Anthropological Society, https://www.aas.asn.au/the-aas/code-of-ethics/.

family’s Holocaust history in her own sense of identity as an Australian child, and later leads the singing of both “Advance Australia Fair” and “Hatikvah” in a clear, pleasant voice.

Elli’s negotiation of identity between Australian and Jewish, in her private life and her public performance of identity, offers a window into the overarching identity negotiation of her community. As a minority ethno-religious group within multicultural Australian society, the

Jewish community navigates between dominant ideas of Australian belonging and identity, and its own cultural values and traditions, which can often clash. Such clashes can serve to reinforce the minority position of the community and its difference from dominant ideas of what it means to be Australian. The answer in the years before the advent of multiculturalism was to separate the two identities and limit each to its own space: Australian in everyday public life, and Jewish in discrete private spaces and situations. Indeed, some Jewish individuals still live in this way. However, by reforming and renegotiating an identity which collocates Australianness and Jewishness, the Jewish community can minimize clashes, and emphasize sameness, in the narrative of identity it presents. This empowers the community by giving it control over defining what it means to be Jewish within mainstream Australian society, and by allowing it to identify with the power of the dominant identity without sacrificing Jewish authenticity.

In this paper, I explore this negotiation of identity, and suggest that whilst the Jewish identity of some South-East Queensland Jews is compartmentalized into discrete, situational

Australian and Jewish identities, the performative Jewishness of the community within mainstream society is a re-formed, creolized “Jewish Australian” identity, reinterpreting

Australian identity in a Jewish way to empower the community within the multicultural social framework of the nation.

Minority identity negotiation: a literature review

Dominant Australian society and culture is “Anglo-Australian”, an identity in which

“Britishness, whiteness and Australianness… masculinity and Christianity” are core components (Levey 2008, 256). While “Anglo-Australian” has increasingly given way to

“mainstream Australian” rhetorically, both terms denote “certain ways of speaking, thinking, working and being in the world which are explicitly and implicitly valued and rewarded”

(Kalantzis 2000, 108) in Australian public institutions and life. However, Australia also highly values its multiculturalism, which “has virtually become a household term”, and is considered “integral to Australian national culture and identity” (Stratton and Ang 1998,

136). Within the multicultural framework, some level of integration of minority cultural identity and dominant mainstream cultural identity is argued to be crucial for members of minority communities to function in society (Bottomley 1992, Elder 2007, Hage 2000). There are several possible models of the way in which minority ethnic or ethnoreligious identity and dominant mainstream identity interplay. Firstly, ethnic identity can be partitioned off from mainstream identity, and each performed separately and situationally without informing each other – a compartmentalized identity. Alternatively, ethnic identity and mainstream identity can exist in synergy with one another, each feeding the other and producing a new identity form shaped by the time, place and situation – a creolized identity.

Identity compartmentalization, as described by Andreouli (2013) and Kunin (2001), is the separation of multiple layers of identity by a group or individual into discrete situation- specific components. The separation often follows public-private lines, where the behaviours of one identity are followed in public, and those of another in private. In the case of minority identity in multicultural society, the idea of compartmentalization manifests as the expression of mainstream identity in interaction with mainstream society and its institutions, and minority ethnic identity when in places, groups or events specific to the group (Andreouli

2013). The boundary lines between identities are clear, and both sides place strict demands for authenticity and ‘purity’ on individuals and “privilege… individuals with the strongest aspects of identity” (Kunin 2001, 57). These demands of authenticity can sometimes mean that those who are unwilling, or unable for some reason, to follow the requirements of ‘pure’ cultural practice are forced out of the minority identity completely. Compartmentalization often begins for initial generations of the minority group, for example first generation migrants, out of fear of reprisals for not following dominant norms, and continues for successive generations as a learned behaviour, even after threats against expressing the identity publicly are gone (Kunin 2001).

The negotiation between compartmentalized identities is labelled by Kunin as “jonglerie”, or

“identity juggling”. The individual, or “jongleur”, consciously emphasizes different elements of one identity or another, depending on a range of factors including who they are with, their point within their life cycle, their economic and social position, and the attitudes of the wider community (Kunin 2001). Kunin maintains that identity juggling can have benefits; switching situationally can allow for a stronger emphasis on each individual identity and its elements in its given space. However, he also cautions that compartmentalization is impossible for individuals to do long-term. Either the individual will abandon one of the identities and assimilate or isolate, or, more commonly, they will create in the overlap between the two identities a new form, taking elements from both and reconstructing into something new. This structuralist idea of new identity formulation is the essence of the theory of creolization.

Creolization, from the Latin “creare” to create, came into use in the 16th century to explore differences in cultural and linguistic forms between European-born colonizers and their New-

World-born children. Over time, the term has expanded and evolved to explore the many ways in which peoples and communities outside their traditional home mix “old” and

“traditional” cultural forms with those of the “new” and “modern” host land, though as many

scholars of creolization point out, it is important to be mindful of the significant historical context of the terminology, particularly outside the old colonising nations of the West (Cohen

2007, Knörr 2010, Palmié 2006). As opposed to compartmentalization, where pure homeland and host cultural forms are reproduced by the group in discrete spaces, in a creolization framework the group creates an identity by “selectively appropriating some elements, rejecting others, and creating new possibilities that transgress and supersede parent cultures”

(Cohen 2007, 381).

The creolized community identity is one constructed episodically, and situationally, from elements of both minority and mainstream identity, but also from elements taken from one identity but shaped by the other. Cohen states that in this way the group can be “interposed between two or more cultures” (Cohen 2007, 381), though Knörr (2010) argues that rather than an in between-ness, the goal of creolization is a whole new identity. Creolization rejects a primordial or biological interpretation of group identity and homeland, and “transcend[s] the claims for primacy, purity, and authenticity” (Cohen 2007, 375) from both the traditional and new host cultures. Instead, the creolized identity draws instead on multiple cultural sources, elements and forms which best suit the community and its needs. Of particular relevance in a settler society, like Australia, creolization allows the minority to include and embrace all population groups, both local-born and migrant, which join its ranks, strengthening group ties and identity (Cohen 2007, Knörr 2010). Creolization of identity is often used synonymously with syncretization, hybridization or transnationalism (Cohen

2007). However, as Knörr (2010, 734) argues, it is not the blend of unrelated oppositional cultures suggested by syncretization, nor the grafting of two “pure” original cultural organisms to create an alien hybrid, nor does it ignore the effects of localization as does transationalism. Instead, creolization is the conscious construction of an ethnicized new identity, one whose ethnic identity plays on, and in, the social structuring of both the

traditional and new cultures. The model of creolization has significant parallels with Claude

Lévi-Strauss’s concept of “bricolage” – the building up of cultural structures, like mythology or identity, from the breadth of cultural elements available, from discrete old forms into new forms for new purposes, often purposes they were never ‘meant’ to take initially (Lévi-

Strauss 1966).

Work on creolized group identity in anthropology has tended to focus on settler-colonial and later post-colonial populations, particularly in the Caribbean and South-East Asian regions, with Jewish individuals blended into general creolized white settler groups (Arbell, 2002;

Ferris, Greenberg & Evans 2006). However, Vink (2010) identifies specific issues particular to the creolization of Jewish settler communities in her historical examination of the Jewish community in Suriname, South America. Her findings suggest the possibility for a distinctively Jewish experience of creolization, the relocation and reframing of Jewish cultural identity within a particularly localised framework. Vink’s colonial Suriname Jewish community, and the contemporary Queensland Jewish community within multiculturalism, share similarities in drawing new forms of practice and discourse shaped by environment and the community’s position within the societal framework. Similarly, within anthropological studies of Australian multiculturalism, creolization is not widely used as an analytical lens through which to explore identity construction. However, Ang (2016) examines Chinese-

Australian identity performance and negotiation as a “thoroughly creolised Asian-

Australianness”, where Chinese-Australians have a similar relationship of migration history, diasporic connection to home and struggle with historical and contemporary economic and racialised stigmas to those Rutland (2005) describes in Jewish experience. These new forms in both cases are performed to create and contest bounded groupness and place within settler society as a whole.

At the heart of the differentiation between the two models of multicultural identity, the compartmentalized and the creolized, lies a question of power and privilege. The understanding of power in this exchange takes the definition offered by Foucault, as a force which “categorizes the individual, marks him by his own individuality, attaches him to his own identity, imposes a law of truth on him which he must recognize and which others have to recognize in him” (1982, 781). This is further supported by the theory of power and identity espoused by Knights & Willmott (1985) who view identity as self-construction within a framework of interdependent social relations, and that identity construction is a way of negotiating the “identity-damaging disciplinary controls” of social power frameworks through compliance, defiance or “acting as if they are independent of that control” (1985,

24). In multicultural Australia, such power lies in the hands of dominant mainstream society and its institutions, which has the ability to categorize what makes up the national identity – for example, what is “Australian” and “un-Australian” or foreign in terms of behaviours, values, and cultural practices – and to act as a gatekeeper to national identity (Elder 2007,

Hage 2000). In a similar way, Kalantzis (2000, 108) argues that Australian mainstream society both values and privileges particular “ways of being in the world” both explicitly and implicitly, and that “symbolic representation…fixed in a mirror-like relationship to the dominant group” governs belonging and claim to national identity. To be able to take a place within this mainstream national narrative, a minority group and its members make decisions whether to compartmentalize away ethnic identity or creolize it into an enriched form which takes on the potentials and possibilities of the mainstream. Such a decision reflects the desire, and more importantly, the ability, to take, use and even reformulate the power and symbolism inherent within the dominant identity.

The outward-facing display of minority identity is made up of the behaviours, symbols, ideologies and practices which are shown to wider society as performance by the minority

group. The conceptualization of this performance is best framed through theoretical understandings of performativity, namely through the work of cultural theorist Judith Butler.

Butler (1993, 70) defines performativity as the capacity of practice, born of discourse, to produce, regulate and constrain the identity inherent within the discourse. Rather than being a singular deliberate act, performativity of an identity is the repetition of a set of acts and statements that imitate the dominant conventions and set of norms specific to that identity.

Within the iterability of the acts and statements is a resignification, and then a social transformation, of them and of the identity which they represent. At the heart of performativity is power, which Butler reads as Foucault does. Butler states that

“performativity requires a power to effect or enact what one names” (1997, 49), and that the very act of performing is both taking and using that power, not only for “subject formation, but… the ongoing political contestation and reformulation of the subject” (1997, 160).

Although Butler’s work on performativity centres on discussions of gender, she offers a definition of performativity as “agency that emerges from the margins of power” (1997, 156), which makes it a model eminently suited to the examination of a minority group within a multicultural framework.

Compartmentalization, through a lens of Butler’s theories, might be seen as an acceptance that within the multicultural framework, minority identity has no power against dominant majority identity in mainstream life, but in situations specific to the minority culture it is this identity which holds the power. The group negotiates a performative identity which is powerful within its own space and over its own constituent individuals but remains outside the power of dominant society unless it assimilates into it. Andreouli’s own ethnographic work demonstrates this in recent migrants to Britain, where an example is given of a participant’s “being Afghan…as a son” in the home where his mother’s dominance

empowers Afghani identity, but being “his English self” within public institutions like school and in social settings (Andreouli 2013, 175).

Creolization, on the other hand, puts the power of identity and identification in the hands of the creolized group. Groups with a creolized performative identity can share situationally in the power of both ethnic and mainstream authenticity, each of which gives them legitimacy in a wider variety of situations. If, as Bottomley (1992, 63) argues, “ethnics are devalued minorities, not a central part of the nation”, then a reinvention where the ethnic performs the valued elements of dominant culture repositions the minority as a valued part of the nation.

When in creolization “old boundaries are dissolved [and] new ones are produced” (Knörr

2010, 738), the authority to proclaim and police these boundaries shifts from the dominant mainstream to the group. Cohen (2007) terms this “fugitive power”, the subtle empowerment found in collective shifts of attitude and social behaviour, which can help strengthen communities in the face of mainstream social or political disempowerment. Likewise, Lévi-

Strauss’ “bricolage” might be said to bear the sense of the creation of an identity with purpose and power, made up of “indestructible pieces for structural patterns in which they serve alternatively as ends or means” (1966, 33). This aligns well with Butler’s concept of the performative identity, where ongoing political subject reformation and contestation comes down to the practice and discourse of the collective identity, and empowerment lies in the ability to reformulate the set of norms specific to that identity. Creolization is itself highly performative, in that it is “not only the amalgamation of diverse cultural forms and features, but also the latter’s ethnicization … [and] a new cultural representation plus a new ethnic identity associated with them” (Knörr 2010, 739). The act of ethnicizing cultural features and forms and then naming them as part of cultural representation and identity is a direct example of Butler’s definition of performativity being practice, born of discourse, producing, regulating and constraining the identity inherent within the discourse.

Methodology

Material for this exploration and analysis draws on a wider ethnographic analysis of the

South-East Queensland Jewish community conducted in 2017-2018. As a member of the community, my ethnographic project followed the model of “insider” anthropology (as per

Jacobs-Huey 2002). As part of the ethnographic process, 18 official community events were attended and observed. In attendance, I took the approach of “observant participation”, rather than traditional participant observation, which as Tedlock (1991, 69) explains, is where

“ethnographers both experience and observe their own and others' coparticipation within the ethnographic encounter”. I acted as a community-involved insider participant in all events, and this coparticipation directly informs the ethnographic findings.

Additionally, I conducted interviews with 25 members of the local Jewish community.

Interviews followed the model of person-centred interviewing (as per Levy and Hollan 2014), where the community members are asked for their own views, experiences and practices of their culture, rather than informing on their perceptions of their group’s cultural practice more generally. This approach allows for a more meaningful investigation of respondents’ negotiation of their own “social, material and symbolic contexts” (Levy and Hollan 2014,

296), as individuals who share a communal identity. Interviewees were selected purposively to represent a broad sample across the spectrum of the community. For instance, seven were aged 18-34, five were 35-54, eight were 55-74 and five were 75 or older. Thirteen were female, twelve were male; nine were Australian-born and sixteen were born overseas.

Eighteen had two Jewish parents, five had Jewish mothers only, and two were Jewish by choice3. Amongst other questions informing the wider ethnographic project, participants were

3 The terminology “Jew by choice” is preferred in contemporary Jewish circles over “convert” or Hebrew “ger”, which have come to have negative connotations (Tabachnik & Foster 1991)

asked specifically about their own description of their “ethno-national identity”, how their cultural identities informed one another, and factors that complicated their identification as

Australian.

Narrative analysis was applied to the spoken and enacted discourse documented in the field notes and interview transcripts. Looking at the narrative performed within the discourse of interviews, community documentation and publicly-observable activity, connections could be drawn between events and ideas being discussed. Moreover, insight could be gained into the culturally-based meaning of those events and ideas to the speakers, and how they were used to build a story about the speakers’ identity (Cortazzi 2001).

Background: The South-East Queensland Jewish Community

Jewish life in Australia began when the first Jewish inhabitants arrived as convicts from

England on the First Fleet of 1788 (Rutland 2005). Whilst a few Jewish convicts served their time in Queensland’s Moreton Bay penal colony between 1825 and 1839, true Jewish settlement in the South-East Queensland area began only in the early 1860s. Communal

Jewish life was established with the foundation of the Brisbane Hebrew Congregation on

March 19th, 1865, and the city’s first synagogue was erected in July 1886. A second congregation, South Brisbane Hebrew Congregation, was established in 1915 by Eastern

European Jewish immigrant families. A Jewish congregation was established in 1957 on the

Gold Coast, a growing seaside metropolis south of Brisbane, and Liberal congregations were established in both cities in the 1970s. All five congregations are still active to this day, though there is no true “Jewish quarter” or enclave within either city where Jewish homes and businesses come together (Creese 2016).

The South-East Queensland community makes up 3% of Australia’s total reported Jewish population of 91,000, with over 85% of Australia’s Jews living in the larger southern state

capitals of Sydney and Melbourne. Recent Australian Bureau of Statistics figures state that

2,740 Jewish individuals live in the Brisbane and Gold Coast local government areas, 0.16% of their overall 1.7 million population (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2018). Queensland

Jewish community officials estimate the number to be closer to 4,000, due to a global trend towards underreporting of Jewish identity in official censuses (as described by Graham and

Waterman 2005). The community has a diverse mix of origins, with some tracing their heritage back to the original founding families, and others to influxes of European and South

African migrants in different periods of the community’s history. An increasing number of

Israeli temporary and permanent migrants have also settled in South-East Queensland since the late 1990s. Additionally, contemporary global mobility has seen increasing numbers of

Jewish families from Eastern and Western Europe, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the Americas settle in South-East Queensland over the past 25 years, particularly within the professional classes.

“I’d describe myself as Australian and Jewish”: Compartmentalized Identity

Sociologist and historian of Australian Jewry Peter Medding states unequivocally that

Jewishness and Australianness “are on separate planes and address different aspects of individual and group existence” (2004, 238). Until the mid-20th century, the contributions of minority ethnic groups like Jews to mainstream Australian society went largely ignored, and their significance marginalized. Publicly, Jewish communities presented “a Jewish communal ideology of non-distinctiveness… more concerned with being Australian than with being

Jewish” (Rutland 1985, 91). Jewishness was reserved for religious and, more rarely, cultural situations only, and was only expressed in private Jewish spaces, such as homes, neighbourhoods and institutions. Such a separation was helped historically in South-East

Queensland with the existence of Jewish ethnic enclaves within the city like the Russian

Jewish “Little Jerusalem” neighbourhood of South Brisbane, or the riverside suburb of New

Farm popularly known as “Jew Farm” from the 1910s to the 1960s, though neither neighbourhood exists in the present day (Creese 2016, 2017). The advent of multiculturalism in Australia in the 1960s and 1970s, coinciding with increasing Australian interest in Israel due to the Six Day and Yom Kippur Wars, created space for the potential exploration and expression of Jewishness publicly, and the contemporary Queensland multicultural framework maintains this space.

However, despite the new acceptability of minority culture within Australian multiculturalism, Levey (2008) claims that even within this framework, the minority culture is “bracketed” and a necessary choice is made by individuals to keep it apart from their participation in mainstream Australian life. Stratton and Ang identify a similar bracketing, though they attribute this not to personal determination but to the binary construction of

Australian multiculturalism which “pigeonholes” ethnic identity away from Australian identity, where the migrant is “permanently marginalised, forever ethnicised” (1998, 158).

Aizen, commenting specifically on the Jewish situation in Australia, similarly claims that

“there is no room for Jewishness in the hegemonic construction of Australianness” (2005,

246), suggesting that Jewish cultural identity is kept out of Australian identity not by the

Jewish bearer of the identity, but by dominant mainstream understandings of what it means to be Australian.

Such separation of the two facets of identity – Australian and Jewish – was evidenced by a few participants – 20-year-old Arman stated that “I see myself as someone who lives here

[Australia] but participates more in the other cultural sides I have due to my ancestry and religion”, and 60-year-old Evelyn said “I’d probably call myself Australian first. I don’t necessarily openly identify myself as being Jewish, particularly”. These narratives

Andreouli’s model of “compartmentalization”; both Australian and Jewish identities and traditions exist for the individual, but they are discrete and dislocated from each other. In

narratives of compartmentalization, many participants separated their identities based on a performative construct of Australianness, “doing Australian things”. 21-year-old Jori, for example, stated “when you say what’s an Australian thing to do, oh you go to the beach and you have sausage sizzles and things like that, eat lamingtons on Australia Day and Anzac biscuits on Anzac Day, all those things. But also every single year we have matzo ball soup on Pesach [religious festival]. I guess when you’re Australian you do those things, when you’re Jewish you do these other things”.

When participants did compartmentalize their Australian and Jewish identities, their narratives echoed Kunin’s concept of jonglerie. As in Kunin’s ethnography, jonglerie sometimes allowed for enrichment of each cultural identity within its own situation and space. For example, 40-year-old Rachael, who identifies herself as an Australian in most of her life, relayed a narrative of reviving her Jewish identity situationally when participating with Jewish institutions: “I used to say to friends when I’d pay my annual fee to the NUJS

[National Union of Jewish Students] and the SZC [State Zionist Council] ‘I’ve Jewed myself this year.’” Likewise, 60-year-old Nathan, who described himself as “Australian first, not openly Jewish”, spoke about the revival of his Jewish identity when attending life cycle events like funerals: “at times like that you realize that there is a connection to your

Jewishness that you can’t get away from”. Compartmentalising identities can easily make for conflicts: Kunin (2001) cautions that for this reason, compartmentalization is not necessarily manageable and sustainable. Some participants identified this themselves; 35-year-old Devir told the story of a Jewish friend his own age whose “parents really wanted him to have a

Jewish education so he went to the cheder [Sunday School] in Margaret Street [synagogue] all his childhood while all his friends went surfing. He was a good kid so he did if for his parents. But when he grew up, he just stayed away from all of it, he doesn’t want any of it, he’d rather go surfing.”

Thus, the individual identity for many South-East Queensland Jews is compartmentalized:

Australian in the public sphere, and Jewish in the home or in defined Jewish institutions. Yet despite individual narratives of discrete and dislocated Jewish and Australian identities, the community’s public narrative shows no evidence of such compartmentalization. Instead, the public performed identity is that of Jewish Australians, a combination of both Australian and

Jewish identities which intermingle and inform each other – a creolized identity.

“I am Jewish, and I’m Australian. I’m a Jewish Australian”: The creolized identity

The dominant narrative for the South-East Queensland Jewish community, and many of its individual members, is one of the hybridity of their Jewish and Australian identities. Labels for this creolized identity varied: “Jewish Australian”, “Australian Jew”, and even, for 21- year-old Israeli-born Jori, “Israeli Jewish Australian”. Despite Aizen’s argument that

“culturally there is no typology of a distinctively Australian Jewishness” (2005, 75), many of those interviewed spoke about their Jewishness and Australianness informing one another, both physically and philosophically. 45-year-old Raphael, who was born in the United

Kingdom but migrated to Australia as a child, asserted that “the Jew that I became was very much a product of living in Australia… there were opportunities to free yourself within the community, and then re-form yourself.” 20-year-old Lila framed her family’s Jewish practice alongside her Australian localization as Jewish Australianness: “I have a family who would do a lot of Jewish stuff in Australia, and growing up here we did this Jewish stuff, so that was sort of my Australian identity too, doing Jewish stuff... Like for me, Rosh Hashanah is being on the farm, being with family, and that’s where the Australian side kicks in.” For some, this

Jewish Australianness was a superior identity, better than being merely Australian or Jewish.

Both 25-year-old Rebecca and 40-year-old Danny, for example, spoke about being more laid- back as a Jewish Australian and “not maybe so black and white”, in Danny’s words, as Jews

from other countries they had met travelling. Danny also identified superiority for Jewish

Australians in the “values and ethics that we have as opposed to an “Ocker” Australian… in the work ethic, in everyday values”. 60-year-old Evelyn likewise identified negative “things that are quite endemic in the broader Australian community, which I’ve not necessarily had exposure to in my [Jewish] upbringing.” This sort of “covert prestige” over the creolized identity’s parent forms is identified by Cohen in other examples of creolized culture and language (2007, 372).

The community also performed to the mainstream an identity that was at the same time

Australian and Jewish, as is evident in public community events. Unlike the participants in

Kunin’s ethnography (2001), who in performing their Jewish identity were actively non- performing and subverting their Catholic identity, public-facing activity and rhetoric promote the community as Jewish Australians, performing Australian cultural activities in Jewish ways and Jewish cultural activities in Australian ways. Historically, a good example is the reinvention of Yiddish culture in South Brisbane in 1919, in the wake of an anti-Russian and anti-Semitic crisis. The previously diasporic identity of the Russian Jewish community in

South Brisbane was reimagined as a new type of Jewish identity that embodied different elements of Anglo-Australian, working-class socialist, Zionist and religiously Jewish identities in different situations (Creese 2017). Within the contemporary community, Jewish

Australianness is performed through a blending of symbols and practice, either with Jewish symbols reshaping Australian practice or Australian symbols reshaping Jewish practice. For example, the Australian Flag is always incorporated into the visual discourse of community meetings, State Zionist Association events and the annual Yom Hashoah or Holocaust

Remembrance Day ceremonies. Australian and Israeli or Zionist flags frame the podiums for guest speakers at these events or are borne side-by-side by the youth colour guards serving at ceremonies. Singing of the national anthem of Australia by community attendees is part of

the formal program of each of these events, and always goes hand-in-hand with Hatikvah, the

Israeli national anthem; each is performed in the same key to align them in an auditory sense for listeners. Australian symbolism is even incorporated into Jewish religious and cultural items by the community; when kippot, or skullcaps, are handed out to visiting male political dignitaries at community events, they feature a motif of white printed kangaroos, boomerangs and Southern Cross decorating the blue cap, combining the Australian visuals with the noted blue-and-white Jewish colour scheme. Much has also been made by the community of Jewish participation in the Australian armed forces in the First World War, particularly during the

2014-2018 centennial celebrations – as part of a national “Centenary of ANZAC Jewish

Participation” campaign, the community staged photographic exhibitions and memorial services in synagogues, and dedicated an ANZAC memorial garden at the Jewish cemetery.

The community also promotes its Australian character in less formalized ways, embracing other aspects of a performative Australian national identity. Food is used as part of the narrative situating Jewishness within Australianness. For example, many Queensland Jewish community events where food is served feature the “sausage sizzle” – a barbecued sausage in bread. The barbecue, according to Santich, is the culinary heart of “distinctly Australian culture and… represent[s] Australian identity” but is also “chameleon-like…[and] could be shaped and moulded” (2013, 15) – essentially, creolized. In the Jewish community’s case, the sausages, sauces and bread products used are always selected from Kosher Authority- approved sources, and visibly promoted to event attendees as such. The Australian near- reverence for beach culture is also performed, like the beach-themed pool parties held by the

Jewish University Students’ organization, or the giant menorah candlestick fashioned out of surf-boards which was on public display at the Gold Coast’s Hanukkah in the Park event for the Jewish religious festival of Hanukkah.

The Australian virtue of participation in sports is particularly encouraged and publicized within the community through its own internal sporting organization, Maccabi Queensland.

Established in 1945 as the Queensland Judean Sports Club, focuses its efforts on encouraging children and young teens to participate in various sports as Queensland Jewish community representatives at the annual Maccabi Australia sporting carnival, held in different Australian

Jewish centres each year. Young adult Maccabi members also compete in teams, under the

Maccabi name, in various local sporting leagues – historically in table tennis, soccer and cricket, and today in netball, with a new soccer club in the process of setting up. The organization runs intra-community swimming and tennis competitions, as well as previously a torch relay of runners across the city on the festival of Hanukkah (Creese 2016). As Hughes

(1999) states, sporting programs are ideal fodder for the Jewish community's narrative of its

Australianness through a shared dedication to sport and its associated ideals of mateship, physical strength, sociability and fair play.

The performative Jewish community identity in Australia tends to follow the American cultural model and promote the equivalency of “Jewish” and “Anglo-European”, a phenomenon labelled as “Ashkenormative” by American Jewish blogger Jonathan Katz

(2014). A conflation of “Ashkenazi”, referring to the culture of Jews of Anglo-European,

German or Eastern European descent, and “normative”, meaning a standard of normalized behaviour, the concept of “Ashkenormativity” has entered general usage in global discussions of Jewish community identity. There are many geographically-differentiated forms of Jewish culture, including the Sephardi cultural tradition, which came from the Iberian Peninsula and spread around Southern Europe and to the Americas, and the Mizrachi cultural tradition which came from Babylon and spread around the modern Middle East and North Africa.

Indeed, South-East Queensland’s Jewish population is decidedly heterogenous, and many individuals and families and even one of its congregations follow Sephardi customs in their

religions and cultural practices. However, the public identity of the community is

Ashkenormative in that the Jewish identity performed to the Australian mainstream is predominantly formed within a traditional Ashkenazi Jewish framework of cultural practice.

65-year-old Max, who migrated to Australia from a Sephardi European community, describes his identity now as “more Ashkenazi than Sephardi, because this is what the community does.” For example, the “Jewish” food served at public celebrations of Jewish culture presents a particularly Ashkenazi identity, like hot dogs, Reuben sandwiches, and bagels.

Klezmer music is also regularly performed throughout the day at these public events.

Ashkenormativity in the South-East Queensland Jewish identity ties the community to the cultural powerhouse of American Jewishness. This form of Jewishness is highly identifiable to the mainstream through popular culture – 30-year-old Susannah describes an experience of online dating where a non-Jewish potential match, on learning she was Jewish “sent me this completely crazy message about… shows like Seinfeld, and ‘Jew York City’”. However, where American Jewish whiteness is built on the basis of not being black and polarising away from blackness (Brodkin 1998), Australian Jewish whiteness is tied to European-ness, as evidenced by the exclusion of darker-looking Sephardi Jews from Australian immigration in the mid-20th century (Stratton 1996). This runs parallel to the theme of “the norm of the white-look Australian” (Elder 2007, 139) dominant in mainstream Australian culture.

It would be unrealistic to completely dismiss the existence of tensions and factors that act as barriers to total Australian socio-cultural participation by Jews. Elli’s introductory example, where her interlocutors struggled to accept her as “coming from” Australia because of her physical appearance, was also reported by others, like 40-year-old Israeli-born Dalya who said that “because we [Israelis] are a bit ‘out there’ and we speak loud and use our hands, and they look at us like ‘oh no.’” Linguistic difference also proved a barrier: 40-year-old Israeli- born Gal complained that “all my interaction with Australia is influenced by my Israeli

culture and the way I talk”. 80-year-old Hannah, born into a Sephardi family in Singapore, joked that “with my accent, all the time, they think I’m Italian or Greek. So now, if they ask I say “yes, I’m Italian”, or “yes, I’m Greek”. It’s easier.” Nevertheless, for most South-East

Queensland Jews, major barriers like skin colour and language do not exist. The lack of such barriers, according to Vasta (2017), puts a minority community in a position where it has the power to choose its insider/outsider narrative accordingly, rather than being easily labelled as outsider by the mainstream. Where there are barriers, the community’s narrative of creolized identity attempts to overcome these factors by highlighting sameness and speaking about barriers in ways which minimize their difference.

Third Culture: Other influences on Australian Jewish Identity

While the dominant narrative performed by the community may be an Australian Jewish one, many other cultural forces shape the individual identities of South-East Queensland Jews.

Elder (2007) comments on the important role family and kin play in generating cultural identity; family nationalities, birthplaces and backgrounds did have a significant effect on modifying Jewish identity for many community members. Some of the most common identities which shape the experience of being Jewish in South East Queensland for individual community members are British, European, South African, and Israeli. British

Jews made up a significant portion of the South-East Queensland Jewish community in its formative years, and during the 1950s and 1960s the community welcomed a number of

British migrant families as part of a federal government assisted migration scheme to attract

British immigrants, colloquially known as “ten-pound poms”, to Australia. European Jews migrated to Australia fleeing unrest, some in the late 1930s, others after the Holocaust, and smaller numbers in the 1990s from the USSR and other European countries with perceived high levels of antisemitism (Creese 2016). South African Jews migrated in large numbers to

Australia between 1981 and 2005, leaving due to political and social unrest in their home

country (Kalman 2014). Israelis have also made their way to Australia in large numbers since the mid-1990s, with emigration fuelled by political, economic and religious tensions within

Israel (Forrest and Sheskin 2015, Porat 2015).

The influence of culture from their country of birth, described as a “third culture” (Moore and

Barker 2012) in addition to their Jewish and Australian identities, in many cases acted as an additional influence on their Australian and Jewish identities in some way. Most of the

British expatriate Jews of the South-East Queensland community feel their Britishness as a significant part of their identities. For example, 45-year-old British-born Rafael labels his identity as “complicated… I see myself as an Anglo-Jew [but] I also see myself as Australian, and as British… I’m a migrant.” Likewise, 50-year-old British-born Sarah labels herself as a

“British Australian Jew”, saying “mostly I’m just a Jewish girl from London.” In contrast, most of the South African expatriate Jews of the community kept their South African identities compartmentalized. 60-year-old South African expatriate Rena, for example, identifies as “very much Australian Jewish [because] we’ve been here long enough… most of the South African heritage is gone. There's still certain foods that we make, dishes that were family favourites that we still like, but it's not enough for us to make it a big part of our lives.” Many Europeans interviewed shared this compartmentalization: for example, 55-year- old Elka, who migrated from France, identifies herself as “more Australian than French, to be honest”, and sees in her Jewish identity “an Anglo-Saxon mentality” where France “didn’t fit with our philosophy of life”.

Israeli expatriates also compartmentalized, but unlike South Africans, separated their Israeli identities from any Jewish identity they felt they possessed, as well as differentiating between themselves and Jewish Australians. 40-year-old Noam, for example, declared he could not identify with the Jewish Australian identity performed by the community: “I'm not sure that the Jewishness of Israelis and the Jewishness of Jewish Australians is exactly the same… We

are very Jewish, Israelis, but we don't put the Jewishness as a separate thing that you need to, you know it's like, we take it for granted.”. Likewise, 20-year-old Tamar separated her own

Jewish identity as an Israeli from the Jewish Australian identity – “[it] has a lot more to do with our remaining connection to Israel, and how people do things in Israel, as opposed to how people do things in Australia”. Zionism as a philosophy unites the Israeli and Australian factions of the South-East Queensland Jewish community in the public sphere, as with most

Australian Jewish communities (Markus, Jacobs, and Aronov 2009). Yet many Israeli interviewees identified themselves as left-wing and liberal, and struggled with the perceived conservative political alignment of the Jewish organized community and of mainstream

Queensland society. One of the other major barriers to Jewish communal participation by

Israelis in South-East Queensland is the conflation of Jewish participation with Jewish religiosity, particularly Orthodox religiosity, in the minds of many Israelis. 40-year-old

Dalya, for example, recounted a negative experience of discrimination by Orthodox neighbours in her childhood, and states that “Israel made me quite secular”. On the other hand, the perceived prominence of Christian symbolic cultural tradition in mainstream

Queensland social and institutional life also serves to isolate the particularly secular Israeli migrant community from mainstream society; 20-year-old Tamar theorized that her reluctance to identify as a Jewish Australian was because “there’s definitely a Christian sentiment about being Australian…I think that has a lot to do with it”, and this Christian element of Australianness presented a barrier to her own identification as Australian.

Despite a variety of “third culture” identities within the South-East Queensland Jewish community, with the exception of Israeli culture which is embraced as part of the community’s Zionist identity, none of these other cultural identities form part of the community’s performative public identity. Homogeneity is crucial for effective performativity; Butler states that the performative identity must repeat “acts and statements

[and] dominant conventions and set of norms specific to that identity” (1993, 70), and cultural homogeneity provides a more robust set of dominant norms with which to frame the narrative of identity. Thus, the narrative of performative Jewish identity for the community, no matter the birthplace of its individual members, is one of Australian Jewishness.

Conclusion

The negotiation between Australian and Jewish identities is clearly complex both for Jewish individuals in South-East Queensland and community institutions and organizations.

However, whilst individually some community members may compartmentalize the different facets of their identity, the community as a whole performs a creolized identity within multicultural Australian society, one which is simultaneously Australian and Jewish and promotes a narrative of the best of both worlds. As 45-year-old Rafael puts it,

“multiculturalism gives us a sense of connection to Australia again, makes us feel not so much isolated in the mini-shtetls of our minds when we go into our homes. We can connect to that wider world, and that is something that is only possible in Australia with its multiculturalism”. Within the framework of multiculturalism, performing a creolized Jewish

Australian identity permits the community more authority to contest and negotiate an authentic position both as a part of mainstream society, and as a distinct part of a whole, far more than compartmentalization of identities could do.

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