Rupture, empathy, peripheries and multitudes: splinters of Jewish identities and music

Abstract

In the middle of the 1980s, deep in the slumber of my professional life in American academia, an article reached me from my native land. The interviews that served as the basis for the argument did not shock me the least, but the sociological premises of the analyses touched on raw nerves. The article “How did I discover that I am jewish?” recounted the stories of Jewish and half‐Jewish children who were born after the Holocaust and whose Jewishness was never revealed to them by their parents and relatives and, who as a consequence, were deprived of their identity which they discovered later, through curious and shocking circumstances. My first reaction to the article was a sigh of relief: I was not among them; I did not have to ‘discover’ that I was Jewish. Yet the article also provoked a resistance in me toward the definition of ‘identity,’ a resistance that gradually began to take concrete shape.