"He Identified with the Ideal Object of Desire"

Interview with Bruce Robbins

Bruce Robbins is the Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. He is presently at work on a documentary about American-Jewish critics of Israel.

Daniel Miller: I wanted to speak to someone with a US perspective. Maybe I could ask you to describe your background...

Bruce Robbins: My grandparents were all born in Europe. Two of them were born in what is now Ukraine. One in Poland. And one in Lithuania. And... I sent my mother for her eightieth birthday–my brother and sister and I–sent my mother for her eightieth birthday on a heritage tour for aging Jews to go see the Europe which is no-longer there, but which was being commemorated... and she had a great time. And she even went back to the little Polish town where her mother left, when her mother was fourteen, discovering many Jewish graves in the graveyards, but no Jews alive, and no buildings... anyway, the graveyard was the only place that you could visit to see any signs of Jewish life. The other thing that might be interesting to you is that my brother is a married to a Polish-Jewish woman, who was born in Poland, to Polish-Jewish parents who survived. And they have their stories. And for her, the feeling is a little bit like that of Lanzman's Shoah, that is to say, post-war anti-semitism is as real as pre-war. Her father was imprisoned as a Jew, under the Soviet-style government, both of her parents went through very, very hard times, as Jews. And were driven out of the country.

Her father elected to stay, and was rehabilitated. But the family was basically broken-up as much by Polish anti-semitism as anything else, so that's... I know my sister in law's Polish mother who survived, and who speaks Polish with her daughter, and this is very alive in my family. The other thing I'll say is that my brother is a fundraiser for the IDF. He is a big-hearted person who has a very simple-minded idea of justice. And he thinks that there are good guys and there are bad guys in the world, and they are easy to identify, and Israel is the good guy, and the Arabs are the bad guys and it may be relevant that he is very sensitive to anti-semitism, when, being American, we probably wouldn't be, because anti-semitism really has played a very minimal part in his life or my life or the life of most American Jews. So it really has to be sustained either by a special kind of experience, or just through bad luck, or through mythology.

DM: There is a certain fetishism of Israel in America. What do you are think lies at root of this?

BR: I can tell you my brother's story. He went to stay on a kibbutz when he was eighteen. And he was made to feel like a very pampered, very middle class suburban kid whose life had been very very easy. He fell in love, of course, with a beautiful, tough Sabra, who...

DM: I know this story...

BR: Many people know this story. And he identified with the ideal object of desire. You should be tough, you should be strong, things that we had no reason to be growing up the way we grow up. And I think that was the definitive, that gave a definitive imprint to his views of things.

This interview was conducted in New York on April 19, 2012 at 4pm by Daniel Miller, and transcribed and edited by Daniel Miller.

"But I think everyone should stop patting themselves on the back and feeling so good about themselves..."

Interview with Nadia Latif

Nadia Latif is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Human Rights at Bard College. She has been conducting field research in Bourj al-Barajneh Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon since 2004.

Daniel Miller: You were involved researching refugee camps in Lebanon...

Nadia Latif: I was working primarily in Bourj al-Barajneh camp, which is located in the Southern part of Beirut. It was set-up in 1948, and it came into existence initially through the initiative of the refugees themselves.

DM: How exactly?

NL: Someone who is an important person in a village in the Galilee had some connection to some important families one from this area in Lebanon. And when they were forcibly displaced from the Galilee in 1948, this person used his previous business connection and ties of friendship to ask if some land could be provided for him and members of his village to maintain them for a little while until they could go back. And when people from neighboring villages heard that this village and this important person was there, they started moving there. So they started gathering there around 1948, and logistically it is always convenient for humanitarian organizations if there is one place where they can bring the food and the supplies, and all that good stuff. And so that's where, and how this camp began. And for the first two years it was the league of Red Cross and Red Crescent societies that was providing assistance to these refugees.

DM: What was your project?

NL: My project started out looking at how people, who have lived in this camp now for most of their lives, and have had children and grandchildren and great grandchildren there, and asking about their relationship to the camp, and to the places they were forcibly displaced from. Why do they continue to identify with those places, and why do their children, grandchildren and great grandchildren continue to identify with those places?

DM: What were the mechanisms of identification which you observed?

NL: If you asked people where they are from, they would say Palestine, and you would say, where in Palestine, and they would name the village. And they would do that even if they were members of the third and fourth generations, which had never seen that place. Also, there are religious associations in the camp, different religions have different resources, and former village members have different income levels. There are the ones that are wealthier, their association is able to do more, and many of them have a space which members of the village will use for funerals, weddings, engagements, bigger social functions. There is even now intermarriage between people from the same villages...

DM: People intermarry from the same villages?

NL: Yes.

DM: Deliberately. In order to retain...?

NL: No, I don't think it is that clear-cut, or as self-conscious as that. It is more, well, ''we know who the family is, from the village, who these people are, and so it makes more sense, you have a better sense of what you are getting into, if you already know who they are and what they are like. For some people, it can be a very strong preference that their children marry into this village rather than marry into another village, or someone from outside of the camp, or non-Palestinian...

DM: Why do you think these people are continuing to hold onto their identities?

NL: Because Lebanon made it completely clear from 1948 that they were unwanted and unwelcome. Furthermore, the first generation were agrarian, and this was organized through family ties, relationships within the village, and that's how people felt a sense of identity... both in terms of the community, but also how they related to the land. And that was something really terrible that was taken away from the when they were forcibly displaced. And I think that really marked the experience of the first generation, and it marked the experience of their children and grandchildren, somehow like Holocaust memory.

DM: So it was almost an unconscious transmission...

NL: Yes...

DM: What is the economy of these camps?

NL: In the 1950s and the 1960s, especially in the 1960s, the refugees were prohibited – and they remain prohibited – under Lebanese law from practicing any kind of profession. But they could work as unskilled labor. In the 1950s and the 1960s the Lebanese economy was booming, and so their labor was wanted, and they were able to make a living. Then in the 60s the men started to migrate as labor migrants to other Arab countries. Libya was one. In the seventies, the Gulf also became an important market for labor. In the seventies and the in eighties the Palestinian organizations moved their base of operations to Lebanon, and that was another important source of income. But that all went to pot once the PLO withdrew in 1980. And then they ceased to be a source of income. And then in the 1990s you had the Palestinians being expelled from Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, and after Oslo, from Libya... borders were closing.

DM: What about today?

NL: In the current economy women are better able to get professional jobs working for NGOS that provide services in the camps then the men. Men who are able to get jobs mostly work as unskilled labor. There is very high unemployment, and remittances from family members who were able to get asylum in other countries, European countries, Canada, Australia, that is also a very important source of income.

DM: Why did Lebanon deny rights to the Palestinian refugees...

NL: It was for different reasons than the other Arab countries. The other Arab countries claimed that the reason they denied civil rights to Palestinians was in order to support their right to self-determination and national independence. And the Lebanese state argued that because the majority of the refugees were Sunni Muslim, they would upset the balance of power, the sectarian balance of power that had been reached at the time of Lebanon's independence from France.

DM: They closed-off integration for political reasons.

NL: Yes, it was a different set of reasons than the other Arab countries, where the other Arab countries fought Israel. Iraq, for example, sent army officers, and Egypt as well, to fight the Haganah and the other Jewish militias. Lebanon never did, and never would, because that country has a very different history to the other ones. Jordan, the King of Jordan, King Abullah, had already been negotiating with the leaders of the Haganah about how to divide Palestine well before 1948. So they got they wanted, they got the West Bank, and then Egypt got control over Gaza.

DM: Why were you led to research in this area?

NL: I grew-up in the eighties in Pakistan. The Afghan war was taking place, and there were lot of refugees in Pakistan, many of my family members worked in various NGOS, they were involved in all kinds of organizations, and this was something that I grew up hearing quite a bit about... And then I went to boarding school in Hong Kong, and there was a Vietnamese detention camp, a ten minute walk from our school, and we could see them very clearly from our dorm windows... It was a horrible place. We had a voluntary community service program with them. And once every two weeks they would allow the children, below the age of ten to come to our campus, and we could play with them, and give them some food. And that was a very powerful experience for me. So I wanted to do some doctoral work on refugees and I ended-up working on Palestinians in Lebanon...

DM: Someone I interviewed compared the situation in Israel to the situation in Kashmir. Do you agree with the comparison?

NL: I don't think that's as good a comparison as the comparison between the United States and Israel. In both cases you have settler colonists that are coming there because they are fleeing persecution from their place of origin, and they feel very strongly, and for very valid reasons that they have been victims, but then that plays itself out with the people who are already there, who can then be displaced and killed because being persecuting can also teach you very well how to persecute. I think what would actually be even more interesting would be to look at Liberia. Because Liberia was established as a settler colony for freed slaves, and there were already people there, and they had the whole dynamic of conflict between ''civilization'' and the discourse of ''you are all uncivilized animals...'' that they somehow had internalized in their experiences being slaves. So, I think that comparison I find more valid. Plus, in the case of Kashmir, what you had happen in 1947 with the partition of the subcontinent, you had certain areas that were considered princely territories... but were puppets under British rule. And the ruler of Kashmir was himself Hindu, and he thought it would be a good idea for Kashmir to become a part of India rather than Pakistan, and the Pakistani government at various points in the history of Pakistan also made use of that conflict in order to deal with internal problems, just as they did with Afghanistan...

DM: And just as Arab countries have done with the Palestinians.

NL: Yes, absolutely. And this is especially the case with Egypt, I would argue.

DM: I saw an amazing film about Liberia, where it just looks like the most fucked-up country.

NL: Pakistan is quite close...

DM: I haven't asked you to comment very much on our repatriation plan.

NL: Well, I would like to hear more about it...

DM: It's become pretty difficult for me to talk about at this point.

NL: Why is it being proposed?

DM: I think it has a lot to do with the desires of the Polish to come to terms with...

NL: With what they did?

DM: Or with what happened...

NL: But why just Poland? Why not the Netherlands? Or France? Why not the United States? Anti-semitism in this country was institutionalized. But everybody just deflects the blame on the Nazis and the crackpot Germans, or these horrible Poles, or these uncivilized Eastern Europeans, and pat themselves on the back and acts self-congratulatory, I think that's why you have the problems that you do today. So why not demand that they recognize the part they played in the long history of antisemitism here as well, and in Britain, and in France..

DM: In France they emancipated actors and Jews...

NL: And the reason why they did it was because the question came up: ''What do we do with the non-Catholics? If you extend to the Protestants the Rights of Man, then how can you keep out the Jews?

DM: These Jews are gone...

NL: Yeah, they were all killed... and forced to leave. I don't know. I don't know what they should do. But I think that everybody else should stop patting themselves on the back and feeling so good about themselves...

This interview was conducted in New York on April 20, 2012 by Daniel Miller, and transcribed and edited by Daniel Miller.

"There were no Arabs and Jews..."

Interview with Salim Tamari

Salim Tamari is the director of the Institute of Palestine Studies and an adjunct professor at the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University.

DM: Perhaps we could start with the case of the lepers...

ST: The story comes from a man named Tawfiq Anan, who was a dermatologist and an ethnographer at the same time. He was the head of the leper house in Bakr, West Jerusalem. So... in the War of 1948 when the Haganah occupied the southern part of Jerusalem, they separated the Arabs from the Jews, and that included nurses, doctors and the patients. And they sent the Arabs towards the Eastern Side, which was controlled by the Jordanians, and they kept the Jewish lepers and the Jewish staff on the Western side. And that's how the leper house was separated. It is a very minor incident, but to me it is emblematic of the issue of how nationalism became dominant, and a city which was multiethnic and multinational became divided...

DM: This occurred in the aftermath of mass Zionist immigration to Palestine...

ST: Yes, it's a consequence of the waves of the immigration which eventually through the Zionist movement established the Jewish state...

DM: Was the fate of Jerusalem inevitable, or did it occur incidentally?

SL: I wouldn't use either term. In this particular case, Zionism actually was on the way to decline, because the earlier waves did not solidify themselves properly. There was an economic crisis. The Jewish immigrants from Poland and Russia were having a hard time getting involved in agriculture, the country was too hot. So many of them had begun going back, or to America. But then Nazism came, and the immigration of the Jews to the United States was blocked by Act of Congress. And they also limited Jewish immigration in Canada, and in Western Australia, where most people had wanted to go. Nazi movement. So the only place left to escape to was Palestine. Because of that the dwindling number of Jews was rejuvenated, and that fueled the Zionist movement. Because the Zionist movement kept saying, there is nowhere to go, you have to come here, and this is your country. And although many people came because they had no other plans, it did become their country, and they became cannon fodder for the Zionist movement...

DM: I know you have researched Ottoman identity, and the conception of Palestine as it existed under the Ottomans. What was the impact of Zionism on this?

The Ottoman identity did not change because of Zionism. It changed because the State collapsed. Zionism and the Ottomans were involved in the sense that Zionists and Jewish Nationalists kept petitioning the Sultan to give land to the Movement, but they were not very cooperative. The Ottomans were not very sympathetic to the Zionists so they did not comply. They welcomed Jews as immigrants but they were not cooperative with the idea of a separate Jewish homeland. They were afraid of secessionists. Because the Bulgarians, and the Greeks and the Armenians were trying to have their autonomy, and separate. And they treated the Zionists in the same manner as they treated the Greeks and the Bulgarians – as secessionists. So that's why they were not very cooperative with them.

DM: But then the state collapsed...

ST: In 1914, the Ottomans entered into the war on the side of the Austro-Hungarians and the Germans, against the combined enemy of Russia, Britain, France and Italy... and the rest of the world. And because of that the front collapsed in Gaza, in Southern Iraq, and on the Russian front, and then the final front was at Gallipoli. So the State collapsed, and had to withdraw its presence from the Arab countries, including Palestine. The British Mandate came, and with the Mandate came the Balfour Declaration, which legalized the concept of a Jewish state in Palestine.

DM: Was Jewish nationalism in Palestine inevitable?

ST: You are preoccupied with the question of predetermination?

DM: I am trying to think about the implications of highly politicized nationalist movements...

ST: Remember that also in our case there is the spectacular point that if the Ottomans had not entered the war on the side of the Germans, and the Austrians, but on the side of the British and the French, which was very possible, because many of the leaders were actually very Francophile, and they wanted to align themselves with France, then ... the Ottoman state would not have disintegrated, Palestine would be an Arab province together with Syria in the Ottoman State. And there would be no Balfour declaration, and the Jews would come as immigrants, and their numbers would be much more limited because of that. And so there would be no Jewish state today. And this could have easily happened... The other point... you keep talking about millions. There were no millions involved. They became millions. But the highest number that came were in the tens of thousands. The only million that came were from Russia, and that was under the Reagan administration, when Reagan pressed the Soviets to allow the Jews to leave Russia, and half of the million was made of Christians, and half of them was made of Jews, but they all went to Israel... So that's the million. That is the only million...

DM: The Zionist Movement was obviously a European Movement. Do you think it can be seen as  introducing European principles of politics into the Middle Eastern region?

ST: Yes, but it wasn't ideas that they introduced. Obviously they had ideas, but ideas about nationalism, social democracy, socialism, all had existed in the Middle East when the Zionists were coming. What they inserted was a settler colonialism. The French had introduced it in Algeria. And the Zionists then introduced it the Middle East.

DM: What is settler colonialism?

ST: Settler Colonialism was a particular form of nationalism which the Zionists introduced into Palestine and that created a major issue for the Jews, because initially most Jews did not like the idea of being separated from the natives. Because they were themselves natives. And many were Arabic speakers. The point I am trying to make is that there were no Arabs and Jews. There were Christians, Muslims and Jews. And the majority of them were natives. And then Zionists came, and said, let's make a Jewish state, and that irritated many of the Sephardic leaders. Because they thought, here we are, Ottoman citizens, trying to fight for full citizenship, integration, assimilation, and certain communal rights as a Jewish community – and this was something that the revolution of 1908 was very sympathetic to, to give communal rights, religious freedoms and so on. And then these European come, and say, no, we are a separate nation. We should separate from the Syrians and the Palestinians and the Lebanese. And they brought a large number of people who were speaking a foreign language, Yiddish, and that is what the introduced. This idea of ''seperatedness'' and exclusivity. That is what they introduced.

DM: There were also alternative conceptions of Zionism. People like Judah Magnes and Martin Buber and Hannah Arendt had a different conceptions of what a Jewish homeland in Palestine could mean, and it didn't mean a Jewish State. It meant something less exclusive, and less seperatist. Why didn't that happen?

ST: Well, both Magnes and the Beit Shalom group, which believed in a confederacy, were rather vague about what they wanted. They wanted a joint state which would have Jews and Arabs in it. The form of that state was defined as a confederacy, it would be called today binationalism. Why did it not happen? For a very simple reason. The Zionist movement was not only in control of the Jewish population, but had a mandate from the British to establish a Jewish national home which was translated by the Peak Commission as a separate state. And a confederacy would mean independence for Palestine from Britain, and immediately the Jews would be a minority, and the idea of a Jewish state would be abolished. So it did not happen because the principle of one man, one vote would have sabotaged the Zionist movement, and would have undermined the Balfour declaration on that basis. So both the British and the Zionists would much rather go to war. And the Arabs would of course go to war to prevent the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. And the Zionists at that time would not allow a binational state... because that would have sabotaged the idea of a Jewish state. But eventually, of course, that is what we have today, we have a binational community, we don't have a binational state, we have a binational community today... that's what happened.

ST: Yes, so the state is definitely not binational, but the country is made-up of two national communities...

DM: Do you think that Palestinian nationalism was created as a reaction formation to Zionism and to the nationalist Jewish project in Palestine...

ST: To some extent this was the case. Previously, in the Syrian provinces you had a larger Syrian nationalism which was contending with Turkish nationalism within the Ottoman Empire, and there was a regional identity, a kind of Lebanese identity related to Mount Lebanon, and a Palestinian identity in the Holy Land. These existed in the eighteenth century, and they were formalized after the Egyptian campaign of 1830 when a separate Palestinian administrative entity was created under the control of Muhammed Ali, the viceroy of Egypt. In other words, there was already a strong Palestinian self-consciousness in the Holy Land as Syrians, as Arabs, and as Palestinians. But the coming of the Jews to separate Palestine from Syria was a very important element in making this identity much more pronounced and much more assertive...

DM: How do you think that Zionism, and the community of Jews which now exist in Palestine, has changed as a result of their presence in the area...

ST: That is a very broad subject. You can schematize it by saying that a Hebrew identity was created that did not exist before. Previously, the Jews had a Yiddish... East European, North African, Iraqi, series of sort of disparate ethnic groupings, that were molded by Hebraic nationalism. The army and the schooling system were instruments of that. Second, you have the decline of Social Democracy as an ideology in Israel, and the triumph of the Revisionists under Begin. That has created a nationalist state which is hostile to social democracy. Which affirms a very rabid form of capitalism, and hatred of social democracy, and has dismantled all the instruments the labor party had established.

DM: And then you have the Russians:

ST: And then you had the Russians, who injected the state with a new Jewish identity full of non-Jews. Who were welcomed to Israel because they were not Arabs. The idea was to dilute the number of Arabs by bringing in a large number of people who identified with the Jewish state, but they don't have to be Jews. So tomorrow if ten million Chinese or Indians claim to have some kinship relation with the Jews, I think they probably would welcome them to Israel. Perhaps not ten million, but certainly two or three million. Because the Israelis are obsessed with demography, and with the fear that they would be overtaken by the high Arab birthright. So that is a very significant development since the 1980s. And it has created a new Israeli culture which is Slavic, and distant from its North African component, the Misrahi community. And this division in the cultural identity of Israel between a North African Arab Jewish culture, and it's Slavic, East European modernist culture continues to be a dividing line throughout the six decades of Israel's existence, and it continues to today. It has been highly contested, but somehow the Ashkenazim always had the upper hand in defining what is Israeli, what is Israeli culture, how you pronounce the Hebrew language, the standard dress code, what kind of education and so on.

DM: You have also seen the development of a much more religious element in the state...

ST: True... you put your finger on a very important development which I did not mention, the rise of a dormant element which is the fundamentalist religious groups, Haredim and others, and their equivalent in the North African communities, which have different kind of fundamentalisms, much more... lighter kind of... like Budweiser Light, you know. It's an important development. It used to be that religious groups were not nationalistic: Shas began as a movement of rather peaceful leadership which called for territorial compromise. This is not the case anymore. Most of the religious groups, with a few exceptions, now tend to be rabid nationalists, and they are upping the ante with the radical nationalists on not giving up territory, or agreeing to a territorial compromise...

DM: There has been a rise in religious extremism across the whole of Palestine...

ST: Of course. The rise of the Islamic Republic of Iran also gave a huge boost to fundamentalist Muslims all over the area, in Syria, in Lebanon, in Palestine, in Jordan, and especially in Egypt, and throughout the Arab world. And they feed each other. The religious revivalists feed each other on both sides. Because they speak the same language, but they don't talk to each other. They actually hate each other. So you are right, it is a very important development, and one that will be with us for some time...

DM: So we are now in this situation: You have an Israeli state which is increasingly defined as non-Arab. Which has an increasing religious component to it, and which is anti-social democratic in political ideologically. If you take these three elements and you put them together, the picture doesn't look very hopeful.

ST:  There are many ways of looking at the Israeli state. But you can say that it is moving in a manner in which one third of the population is religious, one third is secular, and sort of liberal, and one third Arab. So maybe the solution is to have three states instead of two states. You give the Galilee to the Arabs, you give Tel Aviv and the coast to the Jewish secular, and you give the center to the fundamentalists. The other way of dividing it, is now, within the historic country, there is 48% Arab population, and 52% non-Arab, because not all the Russians are Jews. So there is almost 45-44% Jews, 8% Russians, and 48% Arabs. So you can also divide it into Russian State, Arab State, and Jewish State... But of course that will not happen. I am just playing with numbers here.

DM: What about a pan-Arabism which could include Israel within it?

ST: Yes, that is possible.

DM: Do you think so?

ST: Well, you could say that we create an economic union in the Middle East in which Israel is a component, it would be like the European Union. Turkey is fighting for that, and sometimes they use Neo-Ottoman language. They say: We ruled this region for five hundred years, until 1917, and we have historical roots, and we created this system, which was like the Roman system, multiethnic, multinational, and it worked. But today it is archaic, we have to revive it in a different form. But if you put it that way, it may work. It would allow the Israelis to eat their cake and keep it at the same time. They would be part of a large unit, they will keep their own Jewish national identity, but it will remove, or at least make the borders very soft, so people would have the freedom to go back to their homes, to live in peace with their neighbors and so on... So it's a very interesting idea, and I support it. You and I will be the proposer of that union...

This interview was conducted over Skpe between New York and Georgetown on April 16, 2012 by Daniel Miller, and transcribed and edited by Daniel Miller.

"On that point I can agree..."

Interview with Sergey Lagodinsky

Sergey Lagodinsky runs the Europe desk for the Heinrich Boll Stiftung.

Daniel Miller: You are an expert in the sociology of immigration?

Sergey Lagodinsky: It is more my practical side. My field of expertise is in applied politics of diversity and foreign policy, and constitutional law and international law.

DM: As you know, our project is to return 3.3m Jews to Poland...

SL: I don't see the point. Why?

DM: We want to explore the relationship between Europe and Jews. What is the status of this relation in Germany?

SG: Politicians talk a lot about the renaissance of Jewish life here. It is a message, which is primarily addressed to Germans, concerned with the ritual of rehabilitation, and the project to become a ''normal'' culture and ''normal'' nation. It's not a project of the Jewish people. It is a more a German thing. Which I understand. And think is nice. That we're doing something good for our host society, and for their feelings. But I don't see this as our project...

DM: What do you mean by normality?

SL: I am doing a project about this at the moment. The question is: Is there still, in our world, a normality, or normalcy that we want to be part of, and can be part of?

DM: Would you say Germany thirsts for normality?

SL: I am not a psychoanalyst. But it doesn't take a psychoanalyst to figure out that the German history is a huge part of German identity. I think it is an illusion that you can construct a positive identity, keep the best things, and make an optimistic identity, without losing the bad things, and losing yourself. If we try to forget part of ourselves which are occupying us or bothering us, then we are changing. The question is... do we want it enough, and if we do, what are the consequences? Is Germany ready to change into something else? Do we have enough power within us, and enough discipline, enough vision...

DM: Enough will?

SL: I'm not sure it's a question of will... it's a question of restraint, self-restraint, not to do become something that we don't want to become, if we part ways with this part of us which is bothering us...

DM: You mean the ''criminal'' identity created in the aftermath of the Second World War?

SL: I wouldn't call it criminal...

DM: I am thinking of the denazification project that started after 1945. A reunification project then began after 1989. Perhaps this project has not yet been completed...

SL: Of course not...

DM: Because it is not only political, but spiritual...

SL: A historical change of this magnitude is a chance for a nation to reinvent itself. Germany is strong. It has a strong economy, it is strong politically. But it is not about strength, it is about how you apply it. I think that humility is something which made the FDR strong....

DM: There is also an arrogance in Germany...

SL: Yes... in terms of, we learned our lesson. We have gone through a process and reworked the past... it made us morally better, and by that we have a moral right to tell others how things should be run. We can go out, and we can teach other nations how best to do transformative justice. It's true. We have a rule of law, and an obedience to legal concepts, and we want there to be an international legal order, which would basically be like the Federal German Court, but on the international level, and everybody would have to obey. And this is a way of seeing the world, and the complexity of the world through the prism of our German glasses... again. And I think part of it is thinking that we've been there, we've dealt with it, and now we are... pure.

DM: Let's try and think more about German identity and Jewish identity. One dimension is the people were who killed, and who are ghosts, and whose function is to serve as sacrificial victims... But perhaps there is a another level...

SL: For the past twenty years, Germany has a program of bringing former Soviet Jews to Germany. It was a program that they took over from the GDR, which started the program, for Soviet refugees, as they called them, who wanted to stay here. The Jewish community which exists here is a result of this program...

DM: Could you come as a Moroccan Jew?

SL: No, you had to be from the former Soviet Union. You need to appreciate the historical context. In the late eighties you had this situation where was this massive influx of Soviet Jews to East Berlin who were escaping from the situation in the crumbling USSR. Because you could really take a train, and come. So the DDR was suddenly confronted by the fact that there were hundreds of Soviet Jews who are in Berlin, who don't have a status, and nobody knows how to deal with them. So they institutionalized a program for these people to give them a status. When it came to reunification there were lobbies and requests to continue this program. The alternative was not to broaden it to all Jews in the world. They alternative was to stop this, or continue it. So they continued it...

Judyta Nekanda-Trepka: But it is ironic that these are the Soviet Jews who were not affected by the holocaust...

SL: Well... this is not true. Perhaps it is true on the level of individual self-understanding; there are Jews who identify more with the victims, and there are Jews for whom the experience of fighting with the Red Army, and actively contributing to defeating Nazism is more important. But it is not true if you try to translate this into historical fact. Soviet Jews, just as much as German Jews, were affected by the holocaust. They were differently affected. They were largely not brought to ghettos, or to concentration camps... they were just shot dead at the outskirts of every town that the Germans took over, at Baba Yar... So it's wrong to say that the Soviet Jews were not affected, and it is a bad interpretation of history which plays into the hands of the German-speaking power elites who somehow desire to participate in this holocaust debate on the old terms, while those who came later are seen as not legitimately a partner. And this is a narrative that is being cultivated within the Jewish community here in Germany.

DM: Do you think that there is now a possibility of engaging in a new discussion?

SL: With the Jewish emigration to Germany we have a chance for a German/Jewish dialogue, and a chance to reframe it. We should not be victimizing ourselves all the time. We should not stay as the objects of this dialogue, and should become the actors, subjects. And this comes from the understanding that we were also actors in the holocaust context, as fighters, which is the understanding that comes from Russian Jews, from Soviet Jews, and their grandparents. With this I can agree. Rather than rewriting the history, and saying that these Jews coming from the former Soviet Union were not part of the tragedy, and are not as legitimate...

DM: To what extent is Jewish/German dialogue still about the Holocaust?

SL: It's not about the holocaust, but it is against the background of the holocaust. You cannot ignore that we are debating in a void. From a societal perspective, it is basically like lonely people running back and forth between these empty rooms, like in the Jewish Museum, in the gaps and the voids created by the holocaust. And we cannot fill this void. And this is why I don't like this idea about returning... or continuity of Jewish life. These are totally different Jews, this is a totally different generation, and you cannot substitute the old people with new people... If you kill a whole generation or expel a whole generation, or a whole generation is wiped out from your population, you cannot expect a natural continuation. These are not Einsteins, or Trotskys. Maybe Mandelstams, maybe...

DM: There is no continuation... but who said that?

SL: There is a lot of talk... an expectation about Jewish life here. And there is a lot of expectation pressure on the people who arrive here. And if they don't fit the bill... if the people who come look more Russian then they expect Jews to look like...

DM: The Germans are imagining an ideal Jew?

SL: I wouldn't talk about the Germans... I would say, there is this expectation... and this expectation comes, of course, from a lack of continuous everyday experience with Jews. If you learn about the Jews at school, mostly through history and historical images, then you construct a certain image of the Jew. And so when you are confronted by this reality, by Russian Jews who look, not are, but look, more Russian than Jewish, then your initial reaction is: ''What the hell?''

DM: Who are these Russians?

SL: Who are these Russians? They are not Jewish! There is the situation of an expectation mismatch. But what is ironic is I never called myself Russian in Russia. My nationality was Jewish. It said this in my passport, whereas for the ethnically Russian, it said they were Russian. So I would never say in Russia: ''Ja Ruskie.'' There is a certain different way of staying it... I am a Russioner... But Ruskie, I am not. And it took some time, when we came to Germany, to become Russians, to be able to say: ''Ich bin Russer.'' And this is something now I say. And people think that I am Russian. And it hard to explain to them something you used to believe, and actually has in some truth in it... that you are not Russian. Not in terms of your roots, or in terms of your cultural background, or in terms of your herkunft. People say: ''You are a Slavic person.'' But I am not a Slavic person! Look at me! Do I look Slavic to you? And then people say, well, I don't know what Slavs look like...

JNT: But you were invited here as a Jew...

SL: I came to Germany as Jewish, yes. But I don't understand... what is that you think that we Russian Jews get here?

JNT: I have only heard stories...

SL: The only privilege that Russian Jews had here, as compared to other groups is the access to Germany, the right to come here. Because Germany is not an immigration country. But once you are here in Germany, you are treated like any other refugee. Obviously, in some cities, the Jewish communities were more active then in other cities, but I never experienced any better treatment then Yugoslav refugees who came here, or Turkish, or whatever....

DM: But you have a German passport, whereas many of them don't...

SL: After six years... I applied, and I had to go through this process like anyone else. I think maybe it is a little bit shorter... one year shorter...

DM: If you are Jewish, you can get a passport one year earlier?!?

SL: I... am not completely sure. But there are different levels of discussion here. From a formal perspective. Soviet Jews were allowed to come here, as recognized refugees. From the informal perspectives, there are people who tell me stories that they were treated in the Welfare Offices much worse once people found out they were Jewish. And of course there are stories of other situations which were nicer.  I know that when we came, the welfare officer, was much more forthcoming to the Russian Germans who came then she was to the Jews. And she admitted this openly. When we asked her for blankets and pillows, she said, well, you go to a store and you buy them.  Of course, we didn't have money. But the assumption was – and she said this to a person we know – don't worry about the Jewish immigrants, they will take care of themselves. Take care of the Russian Germans. She was from Poland, by the way.

DM: Are Jews required by Germans for some kind of ritual purpose?

SL: Rituals are part of society. This is normal. The problem is when you basically brush aside the reality of the people whom you at the same time sanctify as victims. You talk about Jews, and you elevate the dialogue with Jews to a very high level of political symbolism, but at the same time you don't even know who these Jews are living around the corner...

DM: And you don't care...

SL: And this is one of the things that I've been fighting for years. I was the head of the Integration Committee of the Jewish Parliament in Berlin. So I've really spent some time dealing with all of these crying people who, you know, they were professors, or were they doctors, or engineers, in the Soviet Union. And of course they can not expect to be at the same level here... but it is a problem. Because they are not pensioners, they are welfare beggars, and this is something that is not being thought about. The fact is that very little was done for the individual Jews that came here. There was very little understanding of the specific problems of this specific group. There is massive poverty among older Jewish immigrants, and one reason why is that this is a very old immigration compared to most other immigrations. But nobody took care of this, or looked at it. And these are holocaust survivors. Most of the people, seventy and older, are recognized as holocaust survivors... Nazi-victims. And they live from social welfare, they are being treated by social welfare offices, often not in a nice way, and nobody really gives a damn. Everybody goes out on November 9. Everybody celebrates together, side by side, and then the politicians go into their black cars, and our older people go to the Sozialamt. That's the reality that nobody knows. And nobody wants to know, because it doesn't fulfill these ritual purposes, and it doesn't relieve you from whatever feeling you want to get rid of it.

DM: What do you make of it?

SL: It's understandable. In politics you always have symbolic roles and parts. But what I find problematic when these symbolic gestures or ritual gestures are not accompanied by a real sincere or humanistic interest towards individuals. Apart from having this symbolic dimension, you also have to pay attention to the human dimension, and the people who were, and are affected. You cannot raise expectations and let them fall through the holes. You bring Jews to this country, and you celebrate Jewish life here, but this does not bring dignity to the Jews that you bring. If you invite a community of immigrants, then you have to think through the composition of that community, and the condition of their life-stories, and not forget this, and brush it off, just because you are so focussed on the political message that you are sending...

DM: What does the existence of this Jewish population say, or means, for the identity of Germany, in the context of the German Reunification Project?

SL: It's definitely... a kind of missing part of becoming normal. And that's why I think it's probably the same in Poland. A desire in cultivating Jewish customs or institutions a Jewish way of life. To show we are a normal country. It is something to do with having Jews around means becoming normal again...

DM: But Jews aren't normal.

SL: On that point I can agree.

DM: They are the living proof that things aren't normal.

SL: And that is why you don't want them too close.

This interview was conducted on March 17, 2012 by Daniel Miller and Judyta Nekanda-Trepka, and transcribed and edited by Daniel Miller.

"I Refuse to Be A Symbol"

Interview with Konstanty Gebert

Konstanty Gebert runs the Warsaw Office of the European Council on Foreign Relations.

Daniel Miller: Maybe I could ask you to introduce yourself.

Konstanty Gebert: I am a journalist, currently running the Warsaw office of the European Council on Foreign Relations. I am someone who is active in Jewish issues. I have written some books on the subject.

DM: And you are yourself a Polish Jew...

KG: Yes.

DM: How many Polish Jews are there?

KG: In the previous census, the census of 2001, the number of people who gave their ethnicity as Jewish, ethnicity, was 1,231. The results of last year's census are still being elaborated, if I understand correctly...

DM: 1,231

KG: Yes. Having said that, the census inspectors were instructed to ask the question as follows: Is your ethnicity Polish? Only if you said no, did you have the option to state another ethnicity. So these 1,231 people are people who chose to insist they were Jewish, not Polish. Also, 50,000 people in the same census gave their ethnicity as Ukrainians. Other sources suggest that there are around half a million Ukrainians living in Poland. So if the ration of one to ten obtains also in the case of the Jews, then we could say that there's 12,000 Jews in the country.

DM: Did the same survey also ask for religion?

KG: No... that time the survey didn't ask for religion. In the last census, the one which they conducted in 2010, they asked for religion, but didn't ask for ethnicity.

DM: So somewhere between 1,200 and 12,000. It's really a symbolic population.

KG: Yes...

DM: But a symbol of what?

KG: Uh... well, I assumed you were using symbolic in the colloquial sense, that is, meaning very small. But I refuse to be a symbol. I'm not a symbol. I just happen to live. But I am not making a statement. I reject the concept that we are symbolic in any other but the colloquial sense...

DM: Still, it is a decision on some level, to live here, rather than... there. And I know that Marek Edelman, who died last year, was very affirmative in his statements about why he was in Poland.

KG: Marek said that he didn't want to trade his Polish identity for another identity. But you can make of that what you want. The basic assumption is that people have the right to live where they are born, or on the other side of the world, and it's nobody's business...

DM: I interviewed Cilly Kugelman at the Jewish Museum in Berlin. And she talked a lot about the difference between diaspora identity, perspectives or consciousness, and the Israeli consciousness of Jewishness

KG: Yes... fair enough. But by deciding to live in the diaspora, or deciding to live in Israel, one does not necessarily make a statement. I very much mistrust the idea that just by living we becomes symbols, or statements... I think that's ridiculous. Having said that, if you would rephrase the question, and speak about what is the meaning of living in Poland or Europe, then yes, it does have a meaning.

DM: Do you think there is a fundamental difference in being Jewish in Israel, or outside of Israel?

KG: Each time I'm in Israel, I have this completely schizophrenic double perception. There is this very nasty gloating ''Okay, this is me, this is us'' feeling. It's not the kind of feeling I would like to think of myself as having. But I feel it very strongly, I can not deny it. And simultaneously, I can very easily identify with Israeli Arabs. Because my experience is living in a state where the national mythology is not my national mythology, the national banner is not my national banner, the story that the national anthem says is... somewhat possibly my story, but I really have to bend and twist. So you have this entire schizophrenia, and it doesn't get resolved. It just stays with you, both ends.

DM: How important do you think that sense of being alienated from national mythologies, from a country or a state, is to Judaism as we know it...

KG: Obviously that was the diaspora experience... the defining element was that you don't belong to the national state. And this produces two different drives, one of which is making non-belonging your flag... ultimately, Groucho Marxism, too proud to belong to a club that would have me. And at the other end, you have a desperate longing for belonging, and finally being the majority...

DM: But is a longing to belong, and a longing to be part of the majority the same...

KG: One interesting thing... if you think about the iconography of the diaspora... it's Jews in crowds. Which almost seems to be the opposite of what we think of, when we think of Jews as individualists. But it's crowds of Jews. It is crowds of Hasidim, or crowds of Bundists demonstrating on May 1st, crowds of Zionists marching up and down the main avenue...

DM: The key distinction is if you belong to the crowd, or if the crowd is a mob which is coming to get you..

KG: Yes... and because the Jewish experience with majorities is generally that they are a crowd coming to get you, that was one of the reason why the Jews desperately wanted to be a crowd.

DM: And a state and an army...

KG: Of course. And all of this, getting an orgasm seeing a Jewish policeman... a Jewish policeman being someone who will not beat you up, but will actually beat up the guys who are beating you up... right?

DM: He could still beat you up...

KG: I am willing to pay that price. If he is going to beat up the other guys, and then he beats me up now and then, okay, I can live with that...

DM: Can you?

KG: Me, no. But I am trying to reconstruct myself a hundred years ago.

DM: With regards to something you were saying earlier, my feeling is that Jewishness does not cease to be an issue in Israel – quite the reverse.

KG: It's a different kind of issue. The issues of Jewishness in Israel are secondary to the issues of being a political majority... Jewishness is irrelevant in the Jew/Arab issue in Israel.

DM: You have these people who believe that it's God's demand to create a greater Israel...

KG: But that demand is not necessarily religious, and religiosity does not necessarily entail this demand. The main fact is that you are part of a majority, and therefore are responsible for what is happening. What kind of part of the majority you are is secondary. In this sense, Jewishness in Israel is like Polishness in Poland. What my son meant by his statement was that he had no problem with his Jewishness when it was a civic thing. But he doesn't want people to have attitudes towards him because he is a Jew.

DM: People will always judge you based on groups you belong to that you didn't choose...

KG: Well, yes, to the extent it always happens. You will be always reacted to because you are a man, for example. Yes... that cannot be changed. But Jews are much more reacted to for being Jews then Latvians are for being Latvians, or Lutherans for being Lutherans...

DM: It isn't only a reaction, but also a possible... activity.

KG: I know. But that's exactly what he didn't want. He was just tired of it. It wasn't that he wasn't interested... he is. He's just sick and tired of it being a public issue...

DM: So if we think a bit more about the project to return Jews to Poland...

KG: I... am very disappointed with the way the project went. I thought that beginning was such a brilliant provocation. And then it started, heaven forbid, to treat itself seriously. Look, it's a waste of anybody's time to discuss the possibility of the return of millions of Jews to Europe. I am not going to waste my time on thinking about things that are not going to happen. And on top of that, I really resent the fact that something that I loved, that was provocative and subverting and challenging transformed itself into a part of the very reality it was about to subvert. So...

DM: Which reality?

KG: This entire, ambiguous reaction that Jews have with Europe, with Poland specifically, but with Europe on the general level.

DM: I see the films as promoting a vision of a new diaspora culture in Europe, connecting the experience of European Jews and European Muslims...

KG: But it's not a connection really. The Jews were a small minority that had to function in a Europe that was sure it was the best thing that God had ever invented. Today we have a Europe that no-longer possesses this belief in itself, and is rather hysterically either pulling in or shoving out other influences, in an attempt to make sense of itself. And the Muslim diaspora is big enough to survive, in this Europe, without assimilating, or by barely assimilating. There might be an analogy between the Muslim diaspora and modern Europe, and the Jewish minority in old Poland, except the difference is that the Jews were natives. Whereas the Muslim minority is immigrant...

DM: Less and less...

KG: Yes... with the passage of time, yes. So ask me again in a hundred years and in heaven forbid the analogy applies then we are all in deep shit. The problem is that Europe is not really a continent in which you want to trust civil society. And this is the paradox into which the Muslims have fallen. It makes very good sense to have limited trust, when you are in Europe, and you are not a White Christian Male. But if you have too much mistrust, it of course becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, because your mistrust becomes a contributing factor. Now, how to skate between those two...  I really don't know. Jews had to do that, but I think that it was almost easier for us, because we had no alternative... We had to find out what is the way of existing within Europe, that Europeans will be willing to tolerate and respect. But there is an alternative for the Muslim community, and that is to say, let's lock ourselves in the ghetto...

DM: I don't know if that is really an alternative...

KG: Nothing is an alternative in the long term. But in the short term there is the feeling that you can be self-sufficient. You learn a smattering of the language, so you know how to do your shopping, and what to tell the cop, but basically you're not interested in becoming part of that society, and you create your own.

DM: But Europe has not welcomed Muslims into mainstream society

KG: No... but it's actually very interesting, because one would think... where is this backlash? Where is the natural European behavior which is essentially, load them all on ships, and send them to the other end of the world. Why isn't it happening? Technically, it would be feasible. I think the reason why it is not happening is that we no-longer are willing to pay the price.

DM: Which states would be capable of such an operation?

KG: Any European state would be technically capable. But we are not willing to accept our States becoming States that would be politically capable of doing this. And this is why we haven't done it. Not because we've changed, and become more welcoming. But because we don't want to pay the price ourselves. And this is new. This really is one of the legacies of World War Two and the Shoah.

DM: Do you think the Israeli State is more similar to the kind of pre-World War Two state?

Certainly. But I think that it could not become a state that could expel it's Arab citizens because of the visceral reaction people would have. Apart from that, well, this is how Israel was created. Israel was created by pre-World War Two European Nationalists with all the myths and the imagination of nationalism. That is why, in the thirties, when the Polish government turned very right-wing and very tolerant of anti-semitism in Poland, they engaged in a covert program of shipping guns to the Irgun. They identified with them as brothers: they looked at them and said, the Jews are trying to do to the Arabs what we did to the Russians. Break free! This is us! This is our freedom struggle!

DM: Do you think that there is a worldwide obsession or identification with Israel and Palestine.

KG: Look at Kashmir! The matrix of conflict is almost identical. You have this democratic country which is occupying a Muslim territory that didn't want to be part of that country, settling it's own people to change the demographics, fighting a war against terrorism, which is supported by a pretty nasty dictatorship across the border. In the last phase of this conflict, the last quarter century, there have been 66,000 dead. Of those, 3400 ''disappeared'' at the hands of the Indian military intelligence services. If we were to have 3400 Palestinians ''disappeared'' by Shabak! The interesting thing is not even, why is there no international outcry about Kashmir. But why isn't there any interest? I once had a student do a comparative study of the The New York Times, The Times of London, and Le Monde, comparing coverage of Israel and Palestine and Kashmir. The proportion of dead relative to the coverage of the conflict was I believe 58:1, that is, it takes 58 dead people in Kashmir to generate the same amount of media interest that one dead in Israel or Palestine generates.

DM: Are the sources of obsession European?

KG: Europe really goes both ways. On the one hand, it holds Israel responsible for European sins. You Israelis are as bad as we are. But at the same time, Europe winks at Israel, and says, you know, that we Whites know that sometimes that's the only way of dealing with the natives. And since this is happening at the same time, and sometimes from the same people, it is difficult to understand.

DM: Maybe one way of thinking about this project is in terms of understanding this complex relationship between Israel, Palestine and Europe...

KG: What I find more interesting is text. For example., I would love to see somebody do a good comparative study of the self-descriptions of Hamas and Shas...

DM: But what if your aim was not only to study, but also to somehow intervene?

KG: I don't know... I'm not an artist. I am a disappointed fan. I thought that the success of the film was in challenging things that we have in our heads. But even treating half-seriously the idea of returning to Poland is a failure, because it gives us answers and not questions. You look at European history. There are no good answers. So that's where my disappointment comes from...

DM: All answers are disappointments to you?

KG: Yeah... I mean, there might be a hierarchy, there are bigger or smaller disappointments, occasional glimmer of hope. But I am not really very much interested in answers. I am interested in questions.

DM: So let's focus on the question...

It is the European Question... what are identities, and what can we do them? In fact, there was another Jewish answer to the question then the one that Yael Bartana presents in her film, and that was the Jewish intellectual cultural movement in late Hapsburg Austria just before World War I. You had this incredible appearance of all these different characters the Wittgensteins, the Mahlers and the Freuds...

DM: Krauss...

KG: For all their vast differences, they had this one thing in common, they still had one leg, one way or the other, in their Jewish background, and another leg, one way or another, in the gentile background they had moved into, which was mainly German speaking, but could also Czech Hungarian, Ukrainian or Polish. They were in fact Europeans avant-la-lettre. And this was the previous Jewish answer to the issue of identity. It was only after it failed with bloody murder, or it started to fail, that Jews started moving away with other answers. And in that sense this continues to be the European question. Whether you are supposed to assume the identity we carry in our genes. Or whether we just screw the genes and pursue our interests, our imaginations, and our freedom.

DM: Let's talk some more about this marvelous vanished culture...

KG: It is gradually emerging in Europe a second time, but this time not by people who are fleeing an oppressive identity, but because an entire sphere has opened out and people are entering it, and finding their own ways out. It is going to be confused for another generation or so, but unless something unimaginable happens, we eventually will start having Europeans, because people will become too tired to try apportion different elements of their identity, to say, well, this comes from here, and this comes from there... it will get too ridiculous.

DM: There will be Europeans, and meanwhile the Jews will turn into Middle Easterners...

KG: They are... and probably this is the only way out. And Israel is changing. It's the music you hear. It's the rappers on the street. It's the general sense of... things slightly crumbling. And as Israel becomes more Levantine, it becomes more acceptable. Remember the first Arab violence in the Mandate was when those Communist girls in shorts started parading from Tel Aviv to Yafo, in what was it, 21? 22?

DM: It must have been terrible

KG: It must have! Imagine! Imagine! But the less European and the more Levantine that Israel becomes, the more acceptable it becomes. Look, I am going to say a very good word about Avigdor Liberman. He could be foreign minister of any Arab country. This language... ''Well, if the Egyptians don't like, we'll bomb the Aswan dam.'' He finally sounds credible! Liberman is credible. He speaks the local language, the local idiom.

DM: This was his campaign slogan. Only Liberman understands Arabic

KG: Yes, and this... is... acculturation. There is this kind of smirk you see on the faces of most Arab leaders, and leaders around the region. He's got it. He looks the role. And it's very clear that he probably hates you and me only slightly less than he hates the Arabs. If there is even any difference at all. And this makes him credible.

DM: So... you think Liberman is... a good sign?

KG: In a way, yes. Because it shows acculturation is possible. Let us hope that acculturation doesn't only bring Libermans...

DM: So from your perspective the Jews should stay in the Middle East..

KG: I would never say a sentence that starts with ''The Jews should...'' There are a few sentences that I could say that would start with “I wish the Jews would...” On a personal level I feel an involvement in the Jewish presence in the Middle East. On a material level, it's half of the Jewish people. Even if half of the Jewish people is wrong...

DM: It's more than likely...

KG: But... I think it's important that we are back where we came from...

DM: So perhaps we could find a conclusion...

KG: But there is no conclusion, that is the point. It doesn't end. It doesn't even end when the Messiah comes. It's just the terms of the game get changed. But the game continues. It is about Tikun Olam. This might sound slightly heretical, but if you think consistently, there is a point at which all of the Tikun has been done. So what is the point? We just return to Square One. Unless... we break it as we are repairing it, there will come a point at which it becomes pointless.

This interview was conducted in Warsaw on March 9 2012 at 3pm, and transcribed and edited by Daniel Miller.

"Atatürk! Yes! A friend sent it to me, and..."

Interview with Cilly Kugelman

Cilly Kugelman is the Program Director of the Jewish Museum.

Daniel Miller: How did you come to your position at the Museum?

Cilly Kugelman: I was in a very different field – in psychiatry. But I became interested in my private time in the post-war history of Jews in Germany. I didn't really want to deal with the history of the holocaust. I was more interested in the history of survival. So I started working on this topic and I wrote some essays. And when the Jewish Museum in Frankfurt was established they asked me to participate in the post-war part of the exhibition ...

DM: They asked you to participate as a curator?

CK: Yes. My expertise was in the period of displaced persons, Jewish refugees and displaced persons camps, and the encounter between German Jews, Eastern European Jews and the German and Allied authorities mainly in the American Zone of Occupation. The German population at that time regarded Jews as aliens, and didn't know how to confront them. They hesitated to use the term ‘‘Jew’’ not being sure whether it was politically correct or not. The period in question embraced the time from the end of the war until the State of Israel was declared in 1948 and the Federal Republic of Germany was founded in 1949, when most of the displaced persons had left Germany.

DM: How would you define the current period?

CK: We are now in the middle of big changes. The generation of Holocaust survivors and perpetrators is dying and new generations have assumed... responsibilities. The breakdown of the Soviet Union 1990 provoked an influx of former Soviet Union Jews, who came to Germany on a Jewish ticket, with a completely different view on Judaism. During the past 60 years German society also changed; there is now a growing desire to not be reduced to descendants of perpetrators. During sports events and other big public events, people decorate their cars, balconies and themselves with the national flags and similar items. In our last exhibition “Heimatkunde” we interpreted this behavior as a kind of branding, similar to Coca Cola.

DM: Do you think Germany is becoming more nationalistic?

CK: A recent report on Anti-Semitism in Germany stated that 20% of the German population has anti-Jewish resentments, slightly more than western countries like Italy, the Netherlands or France and less than Poland, Hungary or Portugal. To me, that is nothing to worry about it. In every society, about 20% of people will be racists and xenophobes. In fact, I would be surprised if it wasn't the case, because we are confronted with serious political and economical problems...

DM: How do you see these problems?

CK: Germany now is confronting the fact that it is not a homogenous society. Citizenship and belonging build on the idea of jus sanguinis, the right to nationality based on parentage, is no longer valid. Germany today has more than four million Muslim inhabitants, mainly from Turkey. It is now very obvious that these immigrants will stay and won’t leave, and return “home” as many initially thought after the first influx of foreign workers in the late 1950es. People are beginning to realize that Islam has become a part of Germany, although historically it isn't anchored here. In the big cities, there's a growing openness for coexistence. On the other hand, cities are confronted with schools that have to deal with a majority of students who don't speak German, and this causes many problems.

DM: Last time we met you compared the situation of the German Muslim population in Germany to the situation of the Jewish population in the nineteenth century.

CK: One of the key comparable experiences is the conflict between traditionalism and the challenges of an modern society that contradicts habitual attitudes, customary family values and religious laws. The example 19th century Judaism provides an interesting case study...

DM: I notice you have a picture of Atatürk on your bookshelf.

CK: Atatürk! Yes! A friend sent it to me, and... I think he's an interesting politician. Who certainly applied a quite brutal system to transform the traditional Ottoman society and bring it into the 20th century. But with the recent rise of religious fundamentalism, he stands out as a secular voice, and which this I can identify.

Alice Buschmeier: Do you think that Judaism could be an alternative to nationalistic ideas?

CK: Absolutely not... Judaism has an ethnic and a religious component, a particularistic, tribal side and a universalistic perspective. Throughout history, sometimes one was stronger, and sometimes the other. But in the moment Israel became the national state of Jews, the universalistic component almost vanished. This actually belong to the tradition of Diaspora.

DM: Do you think that Zionism was a Messianic project?

CK: There were Messianic dimensions in Zionism. But what is left of this Messianism apart from the national anthem called Hatikvah? The state exists; it is confronted with apparently unsolvable problems... Messianism in Israel seems to me to have vanished. Unless you would count the nationalistic settlers who act on these grounds.

DM: What do you mean by the idea of diaspora?

CK: If you type the word ''Diaspora'' into Google, you get a lot of sites from Africa. Almost nobody relates the term to Judaism today, when for me, it is very strongly related to Judaism.

DM: What does diaspora mean to you?

CK: It means to somehow be uprooted, having left an ancestral home to live among strangers. To me a seat between the two apocryphal chairs is the most convenient place, a perfect location to observe one's environment.

DM: Does the Jewish Museum seek to strengthen diaspora consciousness?

CK: Jewish history in Germany, the topic of our museum, deals with a diaspora identity that was very creative and rich in many areas of life. This strong and impressive European Jewish Diaspora came to an end with the Second World War. The numbers of Jews in France and Britain are diminishing, and though the German Jewish community grew in the past 20 years, this growth has also now come to an end. There's no real intellectual, artistic or economic power left anymore. The European Jewry which exists today is basically the remainder of a former bright and radiant Diaspora. The two centers of Jewish life are now Israel and the United States...

DM: There is now a Palestinian diaspora...

CK: You can see modern Palestinian identity as a repetition of the Zionist dream, fighting for a national home in the Middle East. The foundation of Israel turned Muslim and Christian Arabs living between Lebanon, Syria and Jordan into an uprooted people, defined as Palestinians, a collective nation who longs to get back to its ancestral territories. They don’t have the long tradition of “uprootedness” that Jews can look back on.

DM: How do you see this tradition?

CK: In our museum work, we try to look at “uprootedness” as something definitely positive. We are at the moment in the process of creating a diaspora garden. The initial idea by the architect was to create a Biblical garden, but our experts from the Botanical garden crashed that dream because of the wrong climate conditions for Middle East plants in Germany. We then turned the idea of a Biblical Garden to a Garden of Diaspora, looking at plants that are used for Jewish holiday rituals in Germany, fruits that substitute biblical offerings and even plants that were given anti-Semitic names like tradescantia fluminensis, called “Wandering Jew” because it quickly covers the ground.

DM: Do you believe that returning 3.3m Jews to Europe is a plausible or desirable project?

CK: Oh no...

DM: It cannot be done...

CK: People act because they wish to act, or because they have to act. If they feel at home and at peace, why should they move... well... why would an American Jew leave the United States? What for? He can make a living, he has a good life, he has a house, and he has friends, why should he emigrate? Some people leave their native country out of desperation, some as adventurers. Younger people go abroad for different reasons, for work or to study, most of them return home, some fall in love, marry and stay, but this type of emigration is are not a mass phenomena.

DM: What if the situation in Middle East dramatically worsened?

CK: Then it might look different.

DM: Do you think that the Europe would welcome the return of the Jews?

CK: European countries, as we know, will not welcome mass immigration.

DM: Does Europe miss the Jews?

CK: I think Jews may miss Europe, but Europe doesn't miss Jews. A minority is never missed by a majority. Human beings usually don't welcome strangers and foreigners; they never did, and probably never will. States and societies sometimes are forced to create and secure conditions that will allow for integration of migrants, but it is nothing people like to do...

This interview was conducted in Berlin on February 21, 2012 by Daniel Miller and Alice Buschmeier, and transcribed and edited by Daniel Miller.

''As you know, the Jews were there before the Christians. And this has left a deep narcissistic... how do you say it? A deep narcissistic wound in Christianity.''

Interview with Christina Von Braun

Christina von Braun is the Director of the Institute for Jewish Studies.

Daniel Miller: You are the director of the Institute for Jewish Studies.

Christina von Braun: It's only just starting. So far I've just been very involving in funding and writing grant applications.

DM: Who is supporting this institute?

CVB: The institute will be supported, most likely, by the Ministry of Education. I'm saying most likely, because we do not have final consent yet. It's going to be a new institution, but basically it is only coordinating what is there already. And which has been there for a long time.

DM: What are the interests of the Bundesrepublik in supporting this project?

CVB: The initial idea was actually to get into Islam studies.

DM: Islam studies?

CVB: Yes, because Islam studies is actually non-theological. It's like Jewish studies, it goes into many fields. So the initial idea was to open this up to the education of Imams. Once it was decided that German universities were not only for Christian theology, but also for other theologies, to the extent they wanted academic training, the discipline became a bit more secular. So, not to do with the education of Imams, but something that would be compatible with the education of an Imam on the academic level. So, for example, you have the religious sciences – religionswissenschaft – you have cultural studies, sociology and sociological research, all of this could link up with a professional education and provide part of an academic education at the same time...

DM: Imams are being trained in German universities?

CVB: They're getting additional education from German universities...

DM: So you can become a doctor of...

CVB: Exactly... while having your religious education at the same time, you can have an academic training which is compatible.

DM: How many Imams have been trained in this way?

CVB: I don't know... This was only a program that was started a year ago... of course it takes time to install... It will take years to see results...

DM: But this is an extremely specific ideological project...

CVB: Well, obviously the idea was to help get conflicts... unenflamed. And avoid conflicts, in fact...

DM: But how does this relate to Jewish studies?

CVB: Once you start thinking in these terms about Islam, it becomes very obvious to you do the same thing for Jewish studies. It is a belated reaction, in fact, since this was the development that the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries had refused to consider, when these very great scholars of the nineteenth century Jewish liberal community tried to create Jewish studies at German academic institutions, but were refused. They did not want Jewish studies at the universities. Die Wissenschaft der Judentum had to go outside of the German academic world, even though Jews were already very important in German philosophy.

DM: So the Institute will also offer further education to Rabbis?

CVB: Yes... in Potsdam there's the Abraham Geiger College which is already offering education for Rabbis, and this is going to be an important part of the institute...

DM: What is the project of the Institute?

CVB: The institute will be an academic institute, and so what will be done there won't necessarily be trying to define Judaism, but doing academic work, historical work. One dimension is obviously the whole migration business in Berlin and Brandenburg. The whole story of Jews emigrating here, going through all of these cultural changes, and creating new identities. It happened in the nineteenth century, and then in the nineteen twenties, and it's happening again after 1989: Jewish Russian emigrants coming in and changing the Jewish community, but also changing themselves into a new identity. Another field will be memory culture, obviously closely linked to the holocaust, but not only. A third would be the trialogue between the three monotheistic religions: Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. Not only on a religious level, but also on a cultural level. Because for all three religions, people define themselves as being culturally a Jew, or a Muslim, or a Christian, but they don't necessarily go to the temple, or the synagogue, or the mosque...

DM: How would you define the Jewish experience in Germany?

CVB: I would say that Jewish experience represents one of the earliest examples of transcultural experience, in the sense you leave, and you go to another cultural field, you pick up some of that, and leave traces of your own. Germany is full of cultural traditions which came out of Judaism and became part of German culture. As well as the other way around. Jewish culture in Germany was very strongly impregnated by non-Jewish, Christian traditions. And more or less the whole world is going through these kinds of experiences now, and probably for the next two hundred years. So from Jewish history you can see how ideas of identity change, and how flexible they are...For example, at the beginning of the nineteenth century you already started having something which you didn't have before, which is a practice defining itself as Orthodox Judaism. At the same time, you begin having liberal Judaism, which represented quite a different definition...

DM: When does the Jewish Question emerge in Europe?

CVB: As soon the Christian Church established itself as a state church, which it did around most European countries around 600AD. From then on you begin to have anti-Jewish pamphlets and anti-Jewish writings. But the first pogroms started when the Crusaders went off to reconquer Jerusalem for Christianity. They didn't only fight the Muslims, they also fought the Jews who were living in Europe. So from 1100 onwards you had these violent movements which would appear time and again.

DM: And then Zionism starts appearing around the time of Dreyfus...

CVB: Even a bit before that. It came out of the secular ideas within Judaism; the idea that you did not to have to wait for another life to have a Jewish... place. Especially in Eastern Europe, where many pogroms continued, this idea was already developed a bit before Dreyfus. Things like general education played a role...

DM: How so?

CVB: Because from the beginning of the nineteenth century, you start to have educational obligations. Everyone starts goes to school, Jews included. And so all of a sudden you have infiltration of secular ideas into Jewish communities. Often through girls, by the way because the boys would continue to go to religious schools. But the girls went to secular schools, and so they brought these secular ideas in, and part of what became Zionism came out of these secular ideas, and brought a political Judaism into play.

DM: Are you Jewish yourself?

CVB: No. I was baptized a Christian.

DM: How did you enter this field?

CVB: I was very interested in the history of anti-semitism. And obviously when you start thinking about anti-semitism, you get very interested in Judaism and Christianity, and the structural differences, why was there such violence... against Jews. And so you start reflecting on the structures...

DM: Do you see parallels between anti-semitism and Islamophobia?

CVB: Many of the symptoms you find in anti-Islamic polemics, texts and movements here have a lot in common with nineteenth century texts and polemics against Jews. But I'm not talking about genocide. It's not genocidal, this Islamophobia, but a lot of the symptoms are very similar.

DM: It is interesting that anti-Islamic populist parties in Europe aggressively assert support for Israel...

CVB: They call themselves call themselves pro-Israel. But if you look closer, you see their basic position is anti-Islamic...

DM: European Jewish identity was constructed in a situation of diaspora. Aspects of this situation also correspond to the Turkish population in Germany. Could you describe them as Jews?

CVB: There is quite a basic difference, because Turks have a country. Another point is that when a Turk starts looking like a Western person, when his wife doesn't wear a scarf anymore, loses their accent, assimilates into normal, Western life, non-Turkish life, people will accept them. The bias against them diminishes. With the Jews, it was just the contrary. When the Jews became very assimilated, hate and racism became stronger... and that's a very big difference between the two...

DM: How would you explain this difference?

CVB: As you know, the Jews were there before the Christians. And this has left a deep narcissistic... how do you say it? A deep narcissistic wound in Christianity. They have the Bible. But they interpret it completely differently. Whereas the Muslims, they have the Koran, and anyway, they came later, so...

DM: You think it is a question of religious... epistemology?

CVB: I think the basis is religion, yes, transformed into culture. Because the secular world was not only constructed from religion, of course, but still is penetrated by all these different traces of tradition. The collective unconscious is filled with religion; religious imagery, and symbols... But what is your own field?

DM: I am a kind of journalist...

CVB: Uh-huh

DM: I want to to ask you defines a Jew.

CVB: There are many different ideas about the concepts of what Judaism is. People go to the synagogue, but if they go to the synagogue, they go different synagogues, and different rituals and some don't call go to the synagogue at all, and still call themselves Jews...

DM: There is a joke about a group of Jews who wash up on a desert island, and the first thing that they do is build two separate synagogues. Many years later, they are rescued, and the rescuer asks: ''Why did you build two synagogues,'' and they explained, ''We go to this synagogue... and this is the synagogue that we don't go to...''

CVB: Hahaha... funny. But I couldn't say what Jewish identity is in Germany now...

DM: Someone told me that Germany is currently receiving more Jewish immigration at the moment then any other country in the world, including Israel.

CVB; I think so... or at least it did in the eighties and the nineties... after 89.. I'm not sure now. There are people from the United States, and Israel... there is a big Israeli community here...

DM: This puts Germany in a position of competition with Israel, and the Israeli project is to collect all the Jews in the world...

CVB: But is Israel the project of all the Jews?

DM: No – this is the problem.

CVB: I think that Jews who come to live in Germany don't come here in search of a Jewish identity. But to live freely, whether they have a strong Jewish identity or not...

DM: I have a theory that the Israelis are not really Jews... because the terms on which Israeli identity is founded are so different to the historical Jewish experience...

CVB: Absolutely... it is the reverse. In Europe, the Jews were not allowed to have land or hold property, or to bear weapons. Today, the Israelis have become very strong soldiers. It's funny that a lot of these things that Jews were not allowed to do are things which Israel is compensating for today...

DM: Every nation builds the core of its identity around mythic images, and Israel, for some reason, has defined itself as a Jewish state...

CVB: All the European states defined themselves as Christian states until very very recently and some of them still do. The idea is still very strong, for example, in Poland. It is connected to the way these nation states were born, out of the ideas of Christian religion. It is in their structure. So it's not surprising that Zionism, or Jewish nationalism would link itself up with religion... this is what happened with the European states...

DM: Christianity was somehow the ultimate myth, the way it was imported from the Middle East and became a European religion...

CVB: It was defined in Rome and Byzance, of course. And for the first three hundred years, it was sects. It was not a religion yet. All the dogmas were defined from 300AD onwards. It was then only around 600 that it became a national religion, an Imperial or state religion. And that is already when these states started being Christian states, and defining themselves around Christian terms. It's really very interesting, how the concept of ''kingdom'' was defined, in the terms of Christ's body...

DM: Is the lens through which you're looking at this primarily religious or historical?

CVB: If you are talking about nations, you can't get around these question of religion, because religion was the precursor that created all the nation states. So I think it's not surprising, that Jewish nationalism has connected itself to the idea of the Jewish religion. It's exactly what Europe did.

DM: Messianic Judaism is another element in the equation. The return to Israel is connected to the appearance of the Messiah.

CVB: Yes – that was the religious idea. Zionism turned it into a secular idea. And this was exactly what happened in Europe. The whole idea of the Christian state became the national-secular state. It's no coincidence that Zionism was born within European boundaries...

DM: You said you will be examining the trialogue between the different religions. How will you examine it?

CVB: You start by considering the structural differences. I myself am very interested in the alphabets. All three religions are based on alphabets, but different alphabets. The semitic alphabet, in which the Hebrew Bible was written, was the first one; it was fully developed around 1000BCE. Then two hundred years later you have the Greek alphabet, out of which came the Latin alphabet... and that's the writing system of Christianity. And then finally you have Arabic, which is the most recent, which was existed at first in a very rudimentary way, and only was formalized about two hundred years after Muhammed. So how did these different writing systems create these different  religious structures... You have three alphabets, and three religions, and three holy scriptures, and there is a lot held in common, and a lot which diverges...

DM: It's interesting me that you, as the director of this institute, are yourself not Jewish, but rather a specialist working on Jewish culture...

CVB: I was very interested in gender studies. It is a field that I was working in a lot. And there are a lot of links between gender studies, and anti-Judaism, and anti-semitism. Anti-semitic discourse, for instance, is full of sexual images. Also, I think the German culture in which I live is so has gained such a richness from Judaism. So for me, for that reason, it is interesting to work on this field... You understand much more about the culture in which you've been brought up in if you look at it from the perspective of another culture. You want, at all costs, that I have a personal reason? I have it... of course. But this not what our interview is about...

This interview was conducted in Berlin on the 10th October 2011 at 1pm by Daniel Miller, and transcribed and edited by Daniel Miller.

''Not Assimilating is a Choice''

Interview with Susan Neiman

Susan Neiman is the Director of the Einstein Forum.

Susan Neiman: Can I start by asking you couple of question? Just to have some sense of who I'm talking to. Because, you know, sometimes people come and they want to talk about Jews in Germany, and they really start from zero... But you have been here for how long?

Daniel Miller: I've lived in Berlin for three years, and I lived in Israel for one year.

SN: You went to Israel looking for a home in the world?

DM: No! No!

SN: I know many people wouldn't want to admit it. But that is one reason why people do go there. Do you come from a Jewish family?

DM: I have a Jewish father and a Polish Catholic mother. But you know, I think the Israelis are not actually Jewish... that the real Jews in Israel are the African and Vietnamese foreign workers who live in the New Barcelona neighbourhood near the Tel Aviv bus station.

SN: I have three children, who went through five years in Tel Aviv. By the end, they were completely assimilated. When we came here one of my daughters started going to an American-German school, and I remember that one time she was asked by her teacher if she could explain Hanukkah to the class. And she looked at him, and without batting an eyelid, or realizing that she was saying something funny, and said: “But you have to understand, I'm not Jewish, I'm Israeli.'' So you are absolutely right, at least in terms of the impressions that the kids get...

DM: Do many people come and ask you about Jews in Germany?

SN: Sure... I guess because of some of the books I wrote, and because of the Einstein Forum, I now count as one of the Jewish intellectuals in Germany. So yeah, I get asked questions, and it really does depend on who you're talking to, what you can say... But what is it exactly that you want?

DM: Did you see the films?

SN: Yes... I liked them very much. Zamech was so powerful that I thought it was a documentary, and I cried during the speech of the wife...

DM: So you are sympathetic to our cause?

SN: When I came to Berlin in 1982, I was the only Jew that most Germans had ever met in their lives. I remember other Jews asking me: ''What are you doing? How can you justify going there?'' And I think that this decision, and then deciding to stay was somehow itself an act of faith in the Jewish Renaissance in Europe. Because I really didn't start identifying as a Jew until I came to Berlin. Both my parents were Jewish, but I was really raised more as a child of the civil rights movement. I saw myself as someone with a sense of solidarity with other oppressed peoples, with some kind of mildly serious Jewish cultural thing in the background. But then I came here, and being Jewish became something I wanted to take more seriously. So I thought a lot in the eighties, and then also later, about being part of doing things toward reconstituting a Jewish community.

DM: What kind of things did you think about being part of?

SN: I remember that Diana Pinto, who is this very fine political scientist in Paris, tried very hard for a number of years to put together a pan-European group of progressively-oriented Jews. We met several times and we had some nice meetings. The last one was six or seven years ago. I think that she felt afterwards there is not a critical mass of European Jewish intellectuals anymore, left-leaning Jewish politically-interested intellectuals, people who were Jewish-identified and played some kind of role in their countries, but who were not part of the official Jewish community. Her feeling was there was not enough of a critical mass...

DM: And you lived in Tel Aviv for five years between 1995 and 2000?

SN: Yeah. And when I came back to Berlin, I can remember Israelis being really angry with me, and calling me a traitor to my face for leaving Israel to go back to Berlin. My kids got a lot of shit for it in school at the time. Now, eleven years later, their friends are so jealous, and are desperately trying to figure out ways to come to Berlin. That has a lot to do, of course, with the situation in the state of Israel, which is horrible...

DM: Please continue...

SN: These are high crisis times. There's just no way you can get around it. Israel is putting everything it has into making international politics focus on the Jewish question, and that has to be addressed. You can't still say: ''Look, I'm a Jew, maybe I spent some time in Israel, maybe I am an Israeli living abroad, because like, so many Israelis, I cannot stand the place anymore, and I'd just like to revive the great marvellous European Jewish culture that did so much until 1939...'' You cannot do it without taking a stand towards  Israel.

DM: The problem is the angle of critique. But I want to return to your point about numbers. Because if you include within the set of all the Jews, not only Jews defined according to traditional definitions, but anyone prepared to affirm some kind of diaspora identity, than you have quite a large....

SN: There's a member of my staff, a brilliant young man, whose parents were born in the Soviet Union, whose father was Jewish, but who wasn't raised with any sense of a Jewish identity. But if you are a Jew, or even just someone whose spent a lot of time in New York, you can tell in a minute he's just got certain kinds of Jewish intellectual gestures. He won't identify himself as a Jew, because he is completely fluent in four different languages, he's lived and worked in four different countries, he's 34, and he rather considers himself to be part of a generation which is multinational. There are lots and lots of people like that now. Do you want to call them Jews?

DM: Yes.

SN: Why? Because they feel rootless? I think that this is a mistake. There are so many people now whose homeland has vanished. There are so many refugees... and not even refugees, just people who have been uprooted in an age in which it's no big deal to travel. They grew up in one country, and studied in a second country, and then got a job in a third country, that is so common! Perhaps the Jews were the forerunners of the diaspora experience. But there is an Indian diaspora, a Chinese diaspora, a Vietnamese diaspora... Do I want to call these people Jewish? Just because of this one fact about their lives, this sense of rootlessness? No!

DM: I agree there is a tension. But there are also historical reasons for making this move. You can see there is a new far-right in Europe organized around a Muslim Question....

SN: But have you noticed all of those parties, or nearly all of them, claim to be very pro-Israel and pro-Jewish in order to be anti-Muslim...

DM: Yes! And that's why it's important to state solidarity, from a Jewish position, and a historical position, with the European Muslims...

SN: In my own life, I grew up in a kind of universalist position, than maybe a ''Bundist'' position... where you are fundamentally international, but you've got to preserve Jewish culture, and that's were your heart is. I guess at this point in my life, and I believe am not confusing my life with history, I think that internationalism is the way to go. Yes, I have particular roots, as a Jew, and I have some Jewish traits, and there are even certain things that I feel much more comfortable talking about with only Jews. But I wonder if a Jewish Renaissance is the way to go, especially since you're not really tying it to Jewishness. You need to think about what you are doing when you are using this signifier. And particularly what you are doing in Europe. Because what this word means to people who haven't spent a serious amount of time thinking about it, is either victim, which is what it means in Germany and I suspect in other parts of Europe as well. Or it means Israel, and it means, as many people are starting to feel but it is not yet socially acceptable to say in Germany unless you are a Jew, and I am, and so I'll say it, it means that state of Israel has abused its victim status...

DM: This bipolar definition is exactly what should change. And this is our proposition. Perhaps the Jew can be better defined in the context of this global diaspora...

SN: I don't think so. I think ''Jew'' means something way more specific.... But just suppose it was the other way around.... The Indian diaspora is much larger in terms of numbers than the Jewish diaspora. Supposing an Indian said to you: ''I value certain things about the diaspora, and it doesn't have to be the Indian diaspora, I value Jewish, African and Chinese diasporas too, but I'm going to call it the Indian Renaissance.'' Would you feel offended? I would...

DM: Really?

SN: Yeah! I would say: ''Guys, nothing against Indians but you're submerging my specific culture! Either you just call it Diaspora, and this means everybody who wanders around living in multiple cultures, or, you are submerging my culture in yours, which is way larger than mine... We are talking about a billion people here! There have never been a billion Jews in the world. You have this very long and rich Indian tradition, with holy scriptures  and a serious scholarly tradition and art, and so where is my tradition in that?''

DM: But why would you say submerge? Why not overlap?

SN: Because as long as it called Indian, that's got the top priority. It's what the Germans call leitkultur. Unless it's just called Diaspora, in which case I can look at the Bhagavad Gita and Mid'rash or whatever. I've got nothing against movements that take this sort of ''Bundist'' position: ''We are not saying our culture is the best one, we are simply saying that we are value particular traditions and we want to keep them alive, while also valuing and being interested in other cultures.'' I also have nothing against, at least theoretically, a purely internationalist position, although when that goes too far against individual traditions, as we've seen, there are problems. But I'm not sure what your describing is intellectually coherent. Or emotionally coherent.

DM: But you cannot  intervene in the Israel discourse without being Jewish, and without a conception of Jewish identity which is as militant as Zionism. But what is this conception? It is the diaspora conception...

SN: It seems to me that you have to say, either, we're into an idea of diaspora, this is the twenty-first century, and a huge proportion of people, some highly educated, and some highly uneducated are moving around the world, and they take it for granted that their life will not be confined to one country, and that's a phenomena we need to be looking at, and perhaps the Jews, or the history of the Jews can provide interesting lessons. And you become the Diaspora Renaissance. Or you remain the Jewish Renaissance, and you say, yes, we are interested in other diasporas, but fundamentally we are a Jewish organization which is open to anybody who has a Jewish background or converts, through any form of conversion, and who wants to identify as a Jew. We welcome other people, and want to bond with other groups within their own diasporas, because we are not nationalists in that sense. But you need to place more weight on the Jewish aspect, if you want to play the role that, I agree, needs to be played.

DM: You could say the Jewish aspect of the movement has more to do with the Jewish question, and issues of  identity and difference and immigration and integration, and assimilation, and conformity, then with Jewish identity as such. What is the status today of this question? What is the meaning of assimilation, for example, in this world of diasporic movements?

SN: You know, I have cousins where both of the parents were Jewish. They were, for reasons that nobody could quite figure out, less interested in Jewish identity. The kids had no Jewish education whatsoever. And you look at them now, and particularity their children, you would have no idea that their children were Jewish. In three generations, here are children who don't know anything about Judaism, who don't care anything about Judaism, who don't care about Israel, either for or against it. It is easy to assimilate. It can't be done in one generation, but can be easily be done in three. So, not assimilating is a choice.

Susan Neiman is the Director of the Einstein Forum.

This interview was conducted in Potsdam on September 21, 2011 by Daniel Miller, and transcribed and edited by Daniel Miller.