ABSTRACT
Young Jews are creating their own version of Jewish cultural life in cafés in ‘Judah-Pest’, appropriating for themselves the name Viennese antisemites gave to Budapest a century ago; seriously committed young French adults are seeking to reform from within the very institutions of France’s large and powerful Jewish community, with one priority: how to integrate non-Jewish spouses; 13-year-olds are given Bar Mitzvahs à la carte, with Zorro as hero; Israeli artists are imagining the return of 3 million Jews to Poland at the invitation of Polish leaders; and throughout the continent Jewish literature, cinema, videos, theatre, and local initiatives are blossoming. Jewish identities in the early twenty-first century are becoming ever more variegated, post-modern, eclectic, and endowed with a new ‘lightness of being’ that few could have foretold when as little as a decade ago the Holocaust and Israel still defined the underpinnings of a European Jewish identity.
