The Making of an Eastern European Jewish Legacy in Contemporary South Africa

This paper was written in 2004 on the tenth anniversary of the end of Apartheid. It responds to the disproportionately large amounts of writing by Jews around that time, reflecting back on the role of Jews during the struggle to end Apartheid. The paper explores the assumption (widely held in that literature) that an Eastern European Jewish heritage lends itself to a concern with justice and asks questions about the function that asserting that particular lineage served for Jewish South Africans living within the borders of South Africa in 1994. Against this homogenizing of identity, the paper calls for a history of South African Jews that includes occlusions and ellipses, as well as a diversity of South African Jewish voices.