Being Jewish in the New Germany

Chapter 1: A New Jewish Life in Germany: From “Why” to “How”

1 As is often the case with everyday moments that turn into ethnographic material, my visit to a Berlin bagel shop on a Saturday morning, the Jewish Sabbath, in the mid-nineties, was auspicious. My best friend, a tall, blue-eyed, blond German named Wolfgang, suggested we have breakfast in this new establishment. Knowing his penchant for Jewish specialties, I never expected to be exposed to a situation that even in its innocence gave me striking new insights into Jewish life in Germany since reunification. Even I, Berlin-Kenner (connoisseur of Berlin) that I am, was not only surprised to find that such a place existed, but that it was one of three, and this one next to my beloved Jewish bookstore, in the same building as the synagogue in the Joachimstalerstrasse. That the shop was open on the Sabbath did not surprise me, since it was probably owned by gentiles. As I was having my lox and bagel, I thought, “Yes, it’s just like America” (even in its German incarnation with Käse [cheese], Tomaten [tomatoes], und Zwiebeln [onions]), confirming the owners’ proud claim that comes with a smile. Somehow I had never thought that I would ever be asking for this Eastern European delicacy, so common in Ashkenazi-dominated America , here in Yekkeland (Yiddish for country of German Jews). I sat at the window, devoured my second bagel and lox, and watched the worshipers, mostly Russian Jews, leave Saturday morning services under the watchful eye of the security policeman who stands permanent guard at the synagogue , as is the case for all Jewish institutions in Germany. I pondered the juxtapositions—the Jewish American and the German, the ostjüdisch (Eastern European Jewish) and deutsch (German), weekend peace and potential violence, and finally, the sacred and the profane. I was 1 A N e w J e w i s h L i f e i n G e r m a n y F R O M “ W H Y ” T O “ H O W ” prompted to question the meaning of these contrasting images, trivial in and of themselves, yet powerfully significant in their relationship to each other in this particular context at this particular moment. This is especially true when they represent the cultural slippage that often takes place in Germany today when Jewish life is being represented, even more than fifty years after the Holocaust. The overwhelming popularity of “Jewish restaurants ,” serving Jewish American or Israeli cuisine, and Eastern European Klezmer music presented as a German specialty testify to both the confusion and fascination with anything that seems “Jewish.” In her recent book Virtually Jewish: Reinventing Jewish Culture in Europe (2002), Ruth Gruber chafes, in fact, at what appears to her as an almost exclusively imaginary Jewish life in Europe, where so-called Jewish institutions and activities are directed and performed by non-Jews.1 In this present study I am interested rather in lived Jewish experience of Germany’s resurgent community that makes even the notion of the “virtual ” more complicated. The experiences I relate that might seem to con- firm the virtuality of Jewish life in Germany, according to Gruber, might be interpreted, in fact, quite differently when seen from my present in 2004, almost ten years later, where the particularities of Jewish life in Germany are rapidly changing. While the term “virtual Jewry” implies for me, as I describe in my final chapter, a Jewish community created in cyberspace , more importantly, it also points to a central thesis of my book, namely that I welcome a notion of the virtual that makes room for “Jewish ” discourses, images, and institutions even if they are not produced exclusively by “real Jews.” And just as debates rage within culture and technology circles as to the authenticity or “reality” of virtual experience leading to provocative questions such as: Is Internet sex adultery? I cite here, perhaps equally controversial for traditional Jews, media studies scholar Mark Poster’s question: “Can a CyberJew exist?” Although the Jewish community and Jewish identity are in flux—from the virtual to the real—there is no question that the presence of diverse ways of being Jewish contributes to the dynamic, if not sometimes problematic, status of the community. This question of lived experience, both “virtual” and “real,” is one of the major thrusts of my approach and its discussion is more than a question of semantics. In other words, the perennial question of Who is a Jew? made...