Jewish Identities in the New Europe

With concern being expressed throughout Europe for the future social and political direction of the continent after the upheavals since 1989, this book addresses the question of identity in the context of Europe’s oldest and most established minority community: the Jews. How do the Jews of today’s Europe - East and West - regard themselves, 50 years after the Holocaust? Are they members of their respective nation states, or members of a new, European minority? The text looks at Jews and Jewish life today in all the various countries that have a large proportion of Europe’s Jews and which attempts to portray how Jews see themselves and what they perceive as the problems challenging their identity. Among the problems considered in this text are: what the future holds for the Jews of Europe; what it means to be Jewish in the countries of Eastern Europe (Russia, Poland and Hungaary are considered in detail by local experts); hopes and uncertainties in religious trends; and the likely development of interfaith relations, as seen by both Jews and Christians. An afterword identifies the points of convergence, the contradicitons and the myths implicit in the different analyses, and teases out the main conclusions and implications. This collection of articles should be of interest to anyone who wants to know about the contemporary position of the Jews of Europe.