ABSTRACT

In the previous part, mostly European Jewish understandings of Jewishness and chosenness, produced under the conditions following the aftermath of the Jewish Emancipation, were explored. One unexpected result of those conditions happened to be the transfer of the Jewish centre from Europe to America and Israel. Therefore, the aim of this final part will be to discuss mainly American Jewish and Israeli interpretations of Jewishness and chosenness in the aftermath of two very important events for the contemporary Jews, namely the extermination of European Jewry and the creation of the state of Israel. In this way, the dynamics of the Holocaust discourse and its effects on the formation of a new interpretation of chosenness will be examined here. As a matter of fact, this new version of Jewishness and chosenness as consummated in a unique sense of ‘victimhood’ and ‘survival’ did not become the dominant view in American Jewish theology but, certainly it was the most effective one on a public scale, from the late 1960s on, particularly throughout the 1970s and 1980s. The emphasis on the relation between the Holocaust and the state of Israel came to be emblematic of sacred suffering and redemption for American Jewry and created, what Jacob Neusner calls, ‘American Judaism of Holocaust and Redemption’.1