”לשנה הבאה בירושלים“ Post-Shoah reflections upon religion, Eretz, Ashkenaz, and Galut

The following dissertation is an interdisciplinary study of specific aspects of contemporary Diaspora Jewish thought. Taking as our main object of study autobiographical, essay, and philosophical works of Jewish intellectuals and Shoah survivors, we will discuss the convoluted and ambivalent dynamics of post-Shoah life. We will tackle the religious experience of the scholar; that which transcends the observer-observed dialectic and through which ritual is understood as mediation and foundation of a particular aesthetic formation. We will furthermore discuss these authors’ reorientation of religious aspirations and the use of a conversion rhetoric which constitutes different types of secularized sacredness. In order to come to a holistic view of these authors’ experience, we have consciously proceeded with a reading which aims to understand these authors’ intertextual references as possibly belonging to diverse national backgrounds and their experiences not as paradigmatic of their home or host countries’ Essences, but rather paradigmatic of Europe’s Other par excellence. This consciousness of Otherness is what we have established as these authors’ even pinah: that which shapes all of their experiences and provides a core identity, a shaping prism, a unique locus from which to develop a Weltanschauung. We will bear in mind these conflicting identities, these ambivalences, and the tensions of post-Shoah Jewish life. We will discuss the lack of a strict adherence to essentialist categorizations of Jewishness while keeping in mind an understanding of the Jewish aesthetic formation as a constitutive national identity and, thus, the rejection of considering Israel an ontological mistake. We will further tackle these authors’ understanding of Jewish nationalism as a conatus towards self-affirmation during the Shoah and in the aftermath of it; establishing Israel as a physical place as well as a metaphysical and psychological one: a “place” which, nonetheless, provides the breeding ground for a life-long Sehnsucht.