Moral contestation and ways of seeing social crisis, self and other, and civil obligations: a study of Jewish boundary making processes


Elliot Fonarev, University of Toronto

Since the ongoing crisis in Israel-Palestine recaptured Western political and media attention in October 2023, a proliferation of frames and discourses have presented Jewish people residing outside of the State of Israel with seemingly competing epistemic and moral paradigms through which to interpret global and local events, their identities, and relationships. What do people reach towards to find comfort at a time of community pressure, and what cultural pathways are opened or closed in the process? Alexander (2023) uses the concept of societalization to suggest that we perceive a social dispute as antisemitism when we see it as something more than a routine social problem that affects particular victims, and rather as something that has reached a crisis level of moral concern for the civil sphere. Jewish entry into an unpolluted position in the civil sphere in the second half of the twentieth century in turn involved a "bargain of assimilation", one contigent on among other things incomplete societalization (Alexander 2023, p. 255). However, Grobgeld and Bursell (2021, p. 185) argue that "the feeling of ethnic pride and alienation that results from anti-Semitic persecution often itself motivates Jews to seek out 'Jewish culture' which they previously had no knowledge of" and thereby informs ethnic solidary in people. Further, collective memory (Zerubavel 1996) and productions of the past in the present (Valocchi 2012) shapes constructions of peoplehood and diasporic identity. Diasporazation has been traditionally thought to mobilize groups through collective and self-definition related to feeling of attachment or connection to a 'back home' place (Fron and Voytiv 2021, p. 211), though exogenous geopolitical events can siphon attention to other places and reshape diasporic identity formations in response to both exogenous and endogenous factors (Shams 2020). Thus long variable migration histories among Jewish communities has resulted in multi-layered diasporic identities and constructions of self and belonging in connection to place, while sustaining a sense of collectivity. Moreover, social stratification shapes the sense of belonging. Some sociologists studying belonging have drawn on Bourdieu's "sense of place" (Bourdieu 1977) to emphasize belonging in terms of relations to place and materiality that "makes us feel good about our being and our being- in-the-world; a relation that is fitting, right or correct" (Miller 2003, p. 218). What happens to these feelings of fit and formations when public attention is split across seemingly competing moral and epistemic narratives that engage questions about place and identity? This paper examines preliminary results and next steps in a qualitative study that attempts to make sense of how Jewish people in Toronto are reconfiguring and re-examining their views of identity, peoplehood, community structure, and future. I will first present preliminary data of online discourse from digital media content producers, showing how these cultural interlocutors take on and circulate competing epistemic positions, frames, and symbols about Jewish identity and experience while providing interpretive commentary on the politics of and events in Israel-Palestine that affect Jewish communities. Thinking with and about these competing discourses, I consider the extent and limits of the civil sphere in helping to make sense of distinct cultural, moral, and spatiotemporal repertoires about identity, diasporic origins, belonging, and recognition, and ask how these might inform different (and often presented as mutually exclusive) ways of seeing social crisis, self and other, and moral obligations for demonstrating social solidarities. I then consider methodological questions about how to link cultural repertoires with schemas and self-definitions in further empirical examination of boundary making processes in Jewish communities.

This paper will be presented at the following session: