The Jew is omnipresent in a multicultural world, and by being so, his sense of place becomes tenuous, said Professor Sander Gilman in a lecture on Saturday.
Gilman's lecture, entitled "Is Multiculturalism Good for Jews?" was part of a conference on German colonialism held this weekend to honor the work of Professor Susanne Zantop. Professor Zantop originally planned a workshop that would be the source of the conference.
Gilman, a colleague of Zantop's and a professor at the University of Chicago, was one of two keynote speakers.
Throughout most of his lecture, Gilman referenced the presence, function and identity of Jews through Jewish characters in multicultural and post-colonial literature.
"Jews ... represent the worst failure of the twentieth century, the Holocaust, and the most successful minority in the world," he said. Yet despite their presence in most parts of the western world, they have become overlooked as an integral part of multicultural societies.
"The Jews are the ultimate diaspora people," he said in response to a question regarding the Jew as Israeli. Their cultural identity does not have a defined place in a multicultural society, and yet they are accepted as belonging more than new immigrants in countries such as the United Kingdom and Germany.
Such a position in the middle ground creates a tenuous place in a multicultural world where "primacy is now put on what used to be the margin," as Gilman stated early in his lecture.
"Where's the Jew in multiculturalism?" he asked, relating the question to a menu at a New York hotel, where bagels and lox, what he considered to be a Jewish meal, was listed as "Japanese Breakfast."
Gilman spoke on the point of language being the most important factor in identification of nationality, both at a personal and political level. "Categories of language and language control define identity. But language is the most malleable of categories," he said.
According to Gilman, people use language above all to define their identity, using the example of 1960s street battles in Belgium between speakers of Flemish and of French. When a police officer separated the mob by the category of language, a man asked, "Where do we Belgians go?
The Immigration Restriction Act of 1992 in South Africa's Cape Colony limited immigration to people of European heritage. The act defined Europeans as people speaking a language written in a Roman script. This presented a crisis of identity for Lithuanian Jews wishing to become South Africans, since Yiddish is written in Hebrew script.
"They went from being [classified as] white to colored because of the alphabet," said Gilman. In 1993 Yiddish was once again declared to be a European language.
Gilman remarked on the hybridization of culture resulting from marriages between people from different religious and national backgrounds and about how much of recently popular literature has been about multicultural families, "children with first and last names on a direct collision course."
The lecture was held in 28 Silsby and was sponsored by the Fannie and Alan Leslie Center for the Humanities.
