Being Jewish in the New Germany

Chapter 8: Toward a New German Jewish Diaspora in an Age of Globalization

The preceding chapters have contributed to my thesis that the dramatic fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and its geopolitical repercussions precipitated the creation of a new Jewish and Diaspora identity in Germany. The movement of peoples and ideas, as well as their representations in public spheres—in literature, journalism, and museums—support this viewpoint. Film and television are, of course, other examples which I do not address here. A new Diaspora community is forming, one that has a “GermanJewish ” identity rather than, as in postwar terms, being made up of “Jews in Germany.” In time, the notion of a new German Jew may come to dominate the more evasive categories that tried to represent the complex identities of postwar Jews in Germany in so many different terms. This transformation is shaped by the domestic, continent-wide, and international (especially American and Israeli) influences that are part of a globalized environment which must be taken into consideration if we are to understand changing notions of Diaspora today. The Jewish literature on the subject of Diaspora (voluntary exile) and the Galut (involuntary exile) is quite extensive and complicated for English speakers. Howard Wettstein notes in his introduction to the volume aptly titled Diasporas and Exiles: Varieties of Jewish Identity (2002), “the term ‘exile’ rather than the more modern Diaspora better translates Galut, the traditional Hebrew expression for the Jew’s perennial condition. . . . To be in Galut is to be in the wrong place; it is to be dislocated, like a limb out of a socket.”1 From the biblical expulsion of Adam and Eve to the historical destruction of the Second Temple in 70 C.E. and the defeat of Bar Kokhba in 135 C.E., dispersal, defined as “galut[,] became not an exception, but the rule for Jewish life.”2 In the opinion of the scholars in this volume, 154 8 To w a r d a N e w G e r m a n J e w i s h D i a s p o r a i n a n A g e o f G l o b a l i z a t i o n Galut and Diaspora need to be distinguished because the first, defined as exile, suggests “anguish, forced homelessness, and the sense of things being not as they should be”3 and the latter “suggests absence from some center . . . [but] does not connote anything so hauntingly negative.”4 These distinctions are very important not for merely semantic or pedantic reasons. Rather they offer the possibility to differentiate the potential positive and negative meanings of displacement, commonly connoted with the word “diaspora” and applicable to all peoples who are not in any socalled center associated with the homeland, but rather in the “periphery.” Like Sander Gilman, whose notion of the “frontier” seeks to avoid such absolutes that ascribe only positive or negative characteristics to one or the other, I am seeking to highlight the fluidity of meanings traditionally associated with Israel and the Diaspora.5 This developing new Jewish identity and the new German Jew will have an altered relationship not only to a potentially positive Diaspora rather than Galut in its strictest sense, but also to German Jewry’s prewar past, to its collective memory of the Holocaust , and to its future in Europe. But diaspora and the movement of peoples associated with a phenomenon that has become all the more pervasive since 1989–1990 cannot be disentangled from the international processes of globalization mediated by advances in technology and mass communication. As the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai has aptly noted: “Electronic mediation and mass migration mark the world of the present not as technically new forces but as ones that seem to impel (and sometimes compel) the work of the imagination. Together, they create specific irregularities because both viewers and messages are in simultaneous circulation. Neither images nor viewers fit into circuits or audiences that are easily bounded within local, national, or regional spaces.”6 In short, images and ideas are on the move as much as people. Global technology has created communication, dialogue, and exchange irrespective of time and space. Obviously, Jewish identity has also benefited from these new kinds of links as borders are crossed or redrawn, be they of nation-states or in virtual cyberspace. There exists a “virtual Jewishness” created, for example over the Internet, much different than the one Ruth Gruber fears is being created on the ground in...