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20 pages, 507 KiB

Open AccessArticle

The Sound of the Unsayable: Jewish Secular Culture in Arnold Schönberg and Aharon Appelfeld

by

Michal Ben-Horin

Religions 2019, 10(5), 334; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel10050334 - 19 May 2019

Cited by 3 | Viewed by 3252

Abstract

This article examines the use of central elements of the Jewish religious repertoire and transcendental realm, such as prophecy or revelation, within the aesthetic secular realm of musical avant-garde and modern Hebrew literature. By focusing on two case studies, I attempt to shed [...] Read more.

This article examines the use of central elements of the Jewish religious repertoire and transcendental realm, such as prophecy or revelation, within the aesthetic secular realm of musical avant-garde and modern Hebrew literature. By focusing on two case studies, I attempt to shed new light on the question of Jewish secular culture. Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951), an Austrian Jewish composer, was born into an assimilated Viennese family and converted to Protestantism before returning to Judaism in the 1930s while escaping to the United States. Aharon Appelfeld (1932–2018), an Israeli Jewish writer, was born in Czernowitz to assimilated German-speaking parents, survived the Holocaust and emigrated to Israel in 1946. My claim is that in their works both composer and author testify to traumatic experiences that avoid verbal representation by: (1) subverting and transgressing conventional aesthetic means and (2) alluding to sacred tropes and theological concepts. In exploring Schoenberg’s opera Moses und Aron and Appelfeld’s Journey into Winter among others, this article shows how the transcendent sphere returns within the musical and poetic avant-garde (musical prose, 12-tone composition, prose poem, non-semantic or semiotic fiction) as a “sound” of old traditions that can only be heard through the voices of a new Jewish culture. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Jewish Secular Culture)

15 pages, 700 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Secular Jewish Identity and Public Religious Participation within Australian Secular Multiculturalism

by

Jennifer Creese

Religions 2019, 10(2), 69; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel10020069 - 22 Jan 2019

Cited by 3 | Viewed by 5354

Abstract

Many Australian Jews label their Jewish identity as secular. However, public representations of Jewish culture within Australian multiculturalism frequently highlight the religious practices of Judaism as markers of Jewish cultural authenticity. This study explores how secular Jews sometimes perform and reference Jewish religious [...] Read more.

Many Australian Jews label their Jewish identity as secular. However, public representations of Jewish culture within Australian multiculturalism frequently highlight the religious practices of Judaism as markers of Jewish cultural authenticity. This study explores how secular Jews sometimes perform and reference Jewish religious practice when participating in communal events, and when identifying as Jewish to non-Jews in social interactions and in interactions with the state. Ethnographic participant observation and semi-structured in-depth interviews with nine self-identified secular Jews living in Queensland, Australia, were employed to gather data. These self-identified secular Jews within the community incorporate little religiosity in their private lives, yet in public they often identify with religious practice, and use a religious framework when describing and representing Jewishness to outsiders. This suggests that public Jewishness within Queensland multiculturalism might be considered a performative identity, where acts and statements of religious behavior construct and signify Jewish group cultural distinctiveness in mainstream society. These secular Jews, it is suggested, may participate in this performativity in order to partake in the social capital of communal religious institutions, and to maintain a space for Jewish identity in multicultural secular society, so that their individual cultural interpretations of Jewishness might be realised. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Jewish Secular Culture)

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17 pages, 251 KiB

Open AccessArticle

A Place of Pretense and Escapism: The Coffeehouse in Early 20th Century Budapest Jewish Literature

by

Mari Rethelyi

Religions 2018, 9(10), 320; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel9100320 - 18 Oct 2018

Cited by 3 | Viewed by 2472

Abstract

In Budapest, going to the coffeehouiennese Café and Fin-De-Siecle Cultuse was the quintessential urban habit. The coffeehouse, a Judaized urban space, although devoid of any religious overtones, was Jewish in that most of the owners and significant majority of the intellectual clientele were [...] Read more.

In Budapest, going to the coffeehouiennese Café and Fin-De-Siecle Cultuse was the quintessential urban habit. The coffeehouse, a Judaized urban space, although devoid of any religious overtones, was Jewish in that most of the owners and significant majority of the intellectual clientele were Jewish—secular and non-affiliated—but Jewish. The writers’ Jewishness was not a confessed faith or identity, but a lens on the experience of life that stemmed from their origins, whether they were affiliated with a Jewish institution or not, and whether they identified as Jews or not. The coffeehouse enabled Jews to create and participate in the culture that replaced traditional ethnic and religious affiliations. The new secular urban Jew needed a place to express and practice this new identity, and going to the coffeehouse was an important part of that identity. Hungarian Jewish literature centered in Budapest contains a significant amount of material on the coffeehouse. Literature provided a non-constrained and unfiltered venue for the secular Jewish urban intellectuals to voice freely and directly their opinions on Jewish life at the time. In the article I examine what the Jewish writers of the early 20th century wrote about Budapest’s coffeehouses and how their experience of them is connected to their being Jewish. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Jewish Secular Culture)

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