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. 1 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/. 2 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. 3 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 4 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