Ashkenormativity to Zion: What's the word?
Read and listen before the podcast returns
Ashkenormativity: Phoebe Maltz Bovy dives into how a decade of waves engulfed a Jewish word for ‘Whiteness’
What does “Jewish” look like? To even ask this question is to know the desired answer: there’s no such thing as looking Jewish, one is meant to say, admonishing an imagined interlocutor. What you thought you could tell someone’s Jewishness-or-not just by looking at them?…
What do we mean by ‘Zion’? Avi Finegold explores multiple ideas of homeland
In the weeks and months since Oct. 7, debates about Zionism and its role within Judaism have become both more prominent and more pointed. Religious Zionists are firmly convinced that God gave the Jewish people the Land of Israel and that to be a Zionist is the most Jewish thing possible. Secular Zionists (which, notably, describes the majority of the Jewish-Israeli population) believe just as vehemently in Jewish rights to the land, though they argue these exist for historical rather than theological reasons. These two groups are often at odds with each other—and both are at odds with anti-Zionists, who argue either that Judaism does not entail any particular relationship to a particular patch of land, or that other Jewish values (such as our relationships with and obligations to others, including Palestinians), are more important in determining our relationship to that land than any ancestral or religious claim…
Please tell a friend about Bonjour Chai as the podcast covering Jewish culture wars. Plenty on the agenda this fall! But if you have a topic idea, write bonjour@thecjn.ca.