“When identity can be merely symbolic and momentary, identity becomes a poor substitute for lived experience”

Author Date

[I]n the post-modern world, when identity can be merely symbolic and momentary, identity becomes a poor substitute for lived experience, for practice. Measuring people’s feelings might have been an important corrective for sociologists whose survey instruments measured identity purely in relation to ritual practices and friendship patterns. But people’s feelings do not get us very far. The vast majority of North American Jews have positive feelings about their Jewishness. But that does not mean that Jewishness plays an important or even meaningful role in their lives.

Jonathan Krasner, “The Persistence of ‘Identity'”, eJewishPhilanthropy (6 June 2014) [http://ejewishphilanthropy.com/the-persistence-of-identity]

Related posts:

  1. “If “remembering the Holocaust” is an essential part of what it means to be Jewish, then it follows that a substantial core of Jewish identity is primarily defined by heinous acts committed by Nazis upon Jews”
  2. The “concept of ‘Jewish identity’ seems to have entered the Jewish communal vocabulary sometime after World War II”