In Europe, a vibrant Jewish life tinged with apprehension
Given the fact that I’ve been involved in German and 
Austrian studies for the duration of my academic life, as well as in Jewish studies, it’s a bit unexpected that I am now residing in London for six months during a sabbatical leave from Kean University. But this is where the Freud Museum is located. And this is where Sigmund Freud himself lived at the end of his life.
He described these two years as a period of exile; indeed, the Nazis had escorted him from Vienna, where he had lived most of his life, after demolishing the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. That condition, and his frame of mind, is something I want to explore.
I will also be delivering a talk, on anti-Semitism and modernity, at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies as part of the David Patterson lecture series. The late Dr. Patterson established the center in 1972 to fill a disquieting void created by the Holocaust. “By the end of the Second World War in 1945, Jewish studies in Europe had ceased to exist,” he wrote. “The great chain of Jewish and traditional learning, as well as the flowering of modern Jewish studies in the 19th century and early 20th centuries, had utterly vanished.”
Jewish life in London today appears vibrant — a least from this side of the Atlantic. There are centers of Jewish learning, including one where I will be at work as a research fellow — the Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies (Europe’s largest) at the University College London. The Jewish arts are active. Religious life is prospering; I look forward to attending services at the New North London Synagogue, a Masorti shul near our temporary home in Hampstead Garden Suburb. An energetic Jewish life appears to have filled the void that existed just a few short decades ago.
If this is true, it may well be that the era of accommodation that governed most of Jewish life since its emancipation has vanished. Accommodationism — in this case, meaning an attempt by Jews to “accommodate” the behaviors and appearances of the dominant culture, not the other way around — was the great strategic mistake. Though extremist nationalists, epitomized by the Nazis, rejected all “foreigners,” they excoriated Jews above all because Jews presented the greatest threat: They appeared to constitute one group of “foreigners” who managed to enter the social mainstream. The hallmark of the past 60 years, by contrast, and especially the past 40 years, has been the emergence of a self-confident, self-expressive Jewish world. Patterson’s vision — what The Times of London once called “a distinguished centre of Jewish studies rising from the ashes of the Holocaust…[at] an institution so traditional and averse to change as Oxford University” — suggests one important example.
But there are always caveats in these turgid waters. Some observers of ethnic London make note of an uneasy undercurrent in the relations between the state or mainstream society and its “minorities.” In the Nov. 21 issue of The New Yorker, Jane Kramer wrote about the flawed approaches to multicultural society in the United Kingdom and in France. Their approach to multiculturalism differs in this respect: In the U.K. the dominant view is “You will never be us”; in France it’s “You will be us.”
Kramer was commenting on Muslim unrest in both countries, but she could have been reflecting on Jewish life as well: Last May the British Association of University Teachers voted to bar faculty from two Israeli universities from participating in academic conferences and collaborative research with their British colleagues. Though the AUT eventually defeated the boycott campaign, another boycott, sponsored by National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education, the largest trade union of higher education teachers in the U.K., has been long-standing.
Is multiculturalism really working? Muslims in the U.K. and the rest of Europe seem determined for the most part to reject the countries they live in. The relationship between Jews and their European countries is more complicated, but it is still fraught with apprehension. Today we hear a lot about the new world order — the new economy or the need for a new contract between the state and its workers. I believe it is time to reconsider the social contract, one that not only replaces the implicit accommodationism that was ascendant in the two centuries that ended with World War II but also repairs the current tenuous, if not broken, multicultural paradigm. London’s Jews are hardly in exile, but are they really at home?