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Towards Post- Holocaust Flourishing of Jews in Australia Towards Post- Holocaust Flourishing of Jews in Australia Dr Melanie Landau 2015 7 978-0-9874195-9-0 Acknowledgements 1 Executive summary 2 Note on research methodology 4 Chapter 1: Let the nation congregate: community, leadership and inclusivity 9 Chapter 2: Reflections on Jewish day school education 25 Chapter 3: Interrogating continuity: intergeneration opportunities and the relationship between parents and children 43 Chapter 4: Israel engagement 54 Summary 64 Appendix 66 Bibliography 68 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Every writing project is the culmination of the thinking and experience of many people. This work is based on focus group discussions conducted under the auspices of the Gen08 project and I am grateful for the focus group participants without whom none of it would have been possible. In particular, I would like to thank Professor Andrew Markus for his guidance and ever‐measured feedback and input. Timnah Baker, Dr John Goldlust and Professor Leah Garrett offered very helpful input and I appreciate their efforts that far exceeded my expectations. I would like to express my gratitude to Debbie Dadon for her friendship and support for me and for the project. At the eleventh hour, Nadine Davidoff brought her editorial professionalism and her wisdom and insight. Finally, thanks also to the director of the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation, Associate Professor Mark Baker, for his support and encouragement of this project. Mays thi research make a modest contribution to the vitality and thriving of Jewish life in Australia. GEN08: Towards Post‐Holocaust Flourishing of Jews in Australia 1 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY We’re a post‐Holocaust community … people shouldn’t want to be Jewish because they don’t want to break the chain, they should want to be Jewish because it’s awesome to be Jewish … that message doesn’t come out strong enough in the community … it’s [often] all about breaking the chain … posthumous victory to Hitler … [We need to move] from negative to positive. (Syd03) The more I progressed, the more I was forced to abandon the myth of ‘One People’. I was searching for what I believed in: continuity. I found only discontinuity. And the more Jews I met, the less I understood what a Jew looked like. Frederic Brenner, Diaspora, 2003 Community diversity is strengthened when it is expressed through diverse leadership, which in turn requires active mentoring of successors who are different from the people who have preceded them. Although women have served and continue to serve on the boards of and in leadership of communal organisations, they are particularly underrepresented in the leadership of the roof‐ body organisations, and other organisations most likely to be playing a visible and vocal representative role on behalf of Australian Jewry. There are many Jews in Australia and around the world who value and express their Jewishness and are not connected in any significant or quantifiable way to organised Jewish community. In many cases, they may be connected to multiple spheres of belonging and community. This requires us to adopt new ways of considering their identities if we want to understand them. While many people who attended non‐Jewish day schools envy the social connections and knowledge attained by Jewish day school attendees, they also appreciate their access to multicultural Australia, and in many instances, to a broader education than that offered by Jewish day schools. A number of respondents who attended Jewish day schools reported feeling like they were in a ‘Jewish bubble’, separate and not belonging to Australian society. This bubble was hard to break out of after school. They reported feeling as though they had missed out on more 2 GEN08: What we think about when we think about Australian Jews sophisticated information about both Jewish pluralism and Israel. There is some indication that this has changed in recent years with a new cadre of Jewish Studies teachers. Israeli Jews living in Australia expressed their lived experience of feeling both at home in Australia and elsewhere, providing a possible model for Australian Jews struggling to feel at home in Australia. Some of the more notable generational shifts include the unwillingness of many Gen Y Jews to simply carry on with traditions for their own sake, and out of guilt. A number of Jews who care about their Judaism are marrying non‐Jews and this means that the Jewish community needs to strategise and plan accordingly to embrace these families. Although many participants in Israel programs experienced a meaningful connection with Israel, they also expressed deep ambivalence and concern about how Israel is currently dealing with its great challenges, including the Israeli‐Palestinian conflict, and the lack of religious freedom in Israel. Participants expressed a lack of openness in the organised Jewish community concerning discussion of Israel and relationship to Israeli government policy. GEN08: Towards Post‐Holocaust Flourishing of Jews in Australia 3 NOTE ON RESEARCH METHODOLOGY As part of the Gen08 survey of the Jewish communities of Australia and New Zealand, researchers conducted and digitally recorded over fifteen focus group discussions. This report is predominantly based on the focus groups with young adults. Aside from two focus groups in Byron Bay and one focus group with women leaders in Melbourne, the rest of the focus groups analysed in this report took place in Sydney and Melbourne were comprised of young adults, 20–30 years old, with a range of Jewish backgrounds. All participants had some institutional involvement in the Jewish community including attendance at a Jewish day school and/or being a youth group leader and/or working in the community. Only one focus group consisted of those who self‐define as religiously observant. Some participants were born outside of Australia, and some of them were born in Australia, outside Sydney and Melbourne. The focus group participants are not necessarily representative of the whole community, but given their familiarity with and commitment to the community, their comments serve as an important complement to the more quantitative nature of the Gen08 survey and the associated report on Jewish Continuity. Most focus groups comprised 8‐10 participants and the discussion lasted up to 2 hours. Participation was voluntary, with no payment for participation; food was provided when the meeting was held at lunchtime at university or in the offices of Jewish communal organisations. Further detail is provided in the Appendix, ‘Focus groups: Core Questions and Issues’. I was not present at the focus group recordings and this report, in its present form, was not conceptualised at the time of the discussions. We devised this additional project to capture the richness of the material from the focus groups and to supplement the findings and reports of Gen08 that were based on quantitative data. The focus groups were initially recorded to complement the larger Gen08 research survey. I listened to recordings of the focus groups and took notes of selected discussions and statements. After my initial encounter with the digital audio records, they were professionally transcribed. I then analysed the focus group transcripts and highlighted salient points for this publication. Some of the statements here discussed are not necessarily the most representative, but were selected because they open up important issues for consideration. References in brackets identify the focus group discussions from which quotations are taken. 4 GEN08: What we think about when we think about Australian Jews Once I had a long list of various statements and excerpts, I coded them according to themes. I then organised the themes into smaller groups. Some excerpts cited in the report are longer dialogical exchanges and others are single comments that are brought out of their conversational context. I chose them because they represent an important perspective.1 No one lives outside his or her social milieu. Hence, I have chosen certain comments from individuals because I think they represent an important aspect of the conversation. These reflections and comments are not merely personal; they also represent a certain moment in social and cultural history and speak beyond their own particularity. This dynamic between the choices of the individual as located within a social, historical and economic context is well‐described by the social theory framework that looks at agency‐choices of individual and their relationship with structure as represented by the various contexts in which the individual operates. Some comments as recorded by the professional transcripts were slightly revised to achieve clarity. Great care was taken to ensure that the meaning of comments was not changed. At the outset it is important to acknowledge some of the potential pitfalls of focus groups. Reed and Payton (1997,p770) argue that because of the powerful role of the group we may not get an accurate picture of what individuals actually think. There may be dominant members of the group who unduly influence the sequence and direction of the discussion; and where people know each other they may act and speak differently because of a certain image they project in social situations. It is hard to get the full picture of the social dynamics within the group setting with access only to the audio recording and without knowing the identity of the participants and the existence of prior relationships between them. It seemed apparent, however, that in most groups individuals were comfortable to disagree with each other and disagree with the rest of the group. Due to the expert facilitation of most of the groups by Professor Andrew Markus, Dr John Goldlust and Dr Miriam Munz, a space of inquiry and genuine curiosity was created that lessened the potential of dissenters to feel threatened or silenced. Reed and Payton acknowledge that an assumption of focus groups is that the group interaction produces data that would otherwise not be produced by individuals being interviewed alone.
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