Settling the Boundaries

ne Je'ren t(w)eschen twee Jrense

This essay is a purely brainstorming essay used to critic Seth Schwartz, Marilyn Montgomery and Ervin Briones’ The Role of Identity in Acculturation and Assimilation of Immigrant People.  As such, this is neither a scholarly essay nor submitted for classwork, discussion or publication, rather just some amateur theoretical doodling mosty intended to help process and develop other concepts for further development, review or rejection.  Danke. 

    As part of the assumptions set into their thesis, Schwartz, Montgomery and Briones (collecting ‘The Authors), review prominent Modern and Postmodern definitions of their key terms (excluding ‘immigrant’ which seems to be relatively accepted):  Acculturation, cultural identity, culture, Personal identity and Social identity.  They seemingly desire a more technocratic or applied theoretical tone rather than a theory building perspective and preference for stability and structure in these definitions, desiring that it be “possible to define acculturation and identity in terms precise enough to support specific theoretical propositions, calls for empirical research, and rationales for interventions to promote identity development in acculturating individuals.” (p 2). 

    A short criticism is apparent immediately in their assumptions that acculturating is a positive goal and that they, as members of the dominant recipient culture, are in a position to and morally empowered to intervene.  Postmodernists should be leaping up from chairs and rattling glasses in alarm.

    While they slough off liability to theoretical criticism against Postmodernism supplied by M. J. Chandler, and R. Brubaker and F. Cooper in a manner that would make an American Congressperson blush, they do have a point – but one that I think we can help mitigate.

Rural Jews, Urban Mennonites and Diaspora Identities

Actor Rob Morrow as Dr. Joel Fleischman

Northern Exposure, ep 3.13 

Things Become Extinct 

(20 Jan 1992, No. 77513)

Dr. Joel Fleischman: I'm not a vanishing breed.
Ed Chigliak: Well, you're Jewish. That's pretty rare.

"This is not homesickness.  This is more than homesickness.  I'm facing serious personality meltdown.  Joel Fleischman, the Jewish doctor from New York.  You take that away and who am I?  What am I?"
"Well, Fleischman, just forgetting a few subway stops..."
"This is just the tip of the iceberg.  Don't you understand?  It's like 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers.'  I'm being replaced by some insidious replicant, a Joel Fleischman look-alike that talks about crop rotation and carburators.  I've got to stop it before it's too late." (sic)
        - Joel to Maggie

"You had me do a two hour turn around to Anchorage to pick up *bagels*? They were supposed to be medical supplies!"  - Maggie, to Joel

“You know, I tried.  I really did.  I gave it my best shot.  It just didn’t work.  Scratch the plum pudding, there’s a matzo ball underneath.  I’m a Jew.  That’s all there is to it.”  Joel to Maggie after dismantling his first, and unsuccessful, Christmas Tree and re-establishing it in Maggie’s front yard.

   As a Postmodern prairie dweller, I was raised on episodes of the Beachcombers, Ann of Avonlea and Little House on the Prairie with a few reruns of Grizzly Adams.  In college, it was reruns of Northern Exposure that fired my imagination and appreciation for the world I left behind – and when I had to return to that country for to bury the dead, it was Northern Exposure that enabled me to laugh painfully at the rapid, if semi-consensual change from downtown Chicago to the mountains of Montana’s Yellowstone.  Where Fleischman missed his bagels, I longed for my bitter Starbucks coffee.  Fleischman longed for his lost Bordeaux, I missed my Art Institute – Fleischman’s golf course was my softball fields.  All in all, a little bit different, yet very much the same.

   Apart from humor, Northern Exposure exemplified numerous socio-ethnic situations and struggles for identity as individuals, as communities and as historic ethnic groups assimilating into something new – both an inclusive new and an often exclusive new.  Ed Chigliak’s statement Fleischman about being a vanishing breed was both a statement as to Fleischman’s personal Jewish identity and Fleischman’s need to adapt to new realities and to establish himself as something new – not exclusive of his Jewish New Yorker past, but rather inclusive of the new person Fleischman was becoming outside of the social and cultural reinforcements of the ethnic Jewish diaspora.  Tellingly, much of Fleishman’s humor stemmed from his travails to adapt to the Postmodern reality as an individual while longing for the communal support of the Modern New York Jewish community.

Preserving the Diaspora

Jewish Expulsion by Titus 70 C

     I have to admit a fair amount of annoyance with the definition creep of the term diaspora to include every single instance of international ethnic community or multinational identity.  Mainly, my sense of annoyance comes from the lack of a replacement term that refers to the traditional (pre-2004) use of the term when it was seemingly expanded to refer to any international ethnic group that transcends international boundaries such as a migratory, refugee or international immigrant communities.  Disturbingly, the definition is seemingly again being modified further to refer to these international immigrant communities who retain their relations to an established, existing “homeland” or country of origin – completely redefining the most historic usage of the term.