Haviv's Blog: The age of identity

We live in the age of identity. How people see themselves, and how they act on that vision, lies at the heart of the biggest trends on the planet. Globalization pulls us in one direction; our deepest senses of meaning, history and culture pull us in another. Tech-centered networks - Google, Wikipedia, Facebook - and universalizing superstructures - the European Union, the UN, Walmart - are increasingly important, but increasingly revealed to be empty of content that resonates with actual people.
 
In some ways we know more about the wide world than ever before. Data on sheep exports from Mongolia or China's space-travel ambitions is easily accessible. But has the immense flood of information created a world that cares more about that information? Genocides continue to take place undisturbed in the glaring daylight of modern media exposure.  At the same time, Wikipedia does not an education make. The tech-driven decline in ignorance, the ubiquity of information, has led to a cheapening of respect for real expertise.
 
In one way or another, these processes affect all humanity, and the Jews are among the most deeply influenced. For the Jews, the 21st century is beginning to take shape as the century of confusion. Wikipedia may sum up "Jewish identity" in 333 words, but the reality is a complex and conflicted Jewish world in which identities are diverging in deep and sometimes mutually exclusive ways.
 
Every study shows that Jews in Israel and America are growing farther apart each year. Each community comprises some 40% of the Jewish people, and together they form the bulk - and main division - of the Jewish world. Israeli youth, taught by an incompetent education system that, besides its financial and structural woes, is utterly unaware of the Diaspora's existence, know nothing about the Jewish communities of the world, and little about their own place in Jewish history. Across the Atlantic, the identity of American Jewish youth, in the words of Yeshiva University's Rabbi Jacob Schachter, is shifting away from being "Jews influenced by America," toward "the knowledge that they are America."
 
There are some clear definitions out there for Jewish affiliation, but no hard and fast rules about Jewish identity. The internal Israeli religious-secular culture war has created a spectrum of Jewish identification centered on how and why one ignores Israel's official chief rabbinate - the haredim in favor of their own "Torah masters" and, increasingly, the secular in favor of pop-Buddhism and unrecognized marriages. It is, if you will, a spectrum of identities centered on the question of institutional and political affiliation, not spiritual choice.
 
Meanwhile, American Jews are the quintessential Jews of choice, living in an America founded on the principle of individualistic spirituality. Many don't even accept that there can be objective criteria for Jewish identity.
 
This blog seeks to explore the space between these extremes. What is happening to Jewish identity? Can Jews speak to each other in a common language? If so, why do studies consistently show that they are not doing so?
 
We want to create a debate, to engage in discussion that will explore those elements of Jewish culture and identity that are transnational, and thus have the potential to build a Jewish world that is in some sense simply "Jewish," without adjectives or hyphens.
 
Opinions and responses are welcome.