Muslim Voices Festival Raises Questions for Jewish Culture
From June 5-14, 2009 the Asia Society, Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), and New York University Center for Dialogues presented Muslim Voices: Arts & Ideas — the largest, multi-venue celebration of Islamic cultures ever presented in the United States.
Starting from the belief that the arts and cultural exchange programs have the unique power to create new connections between people locally and globally, Muslim Voices: Arts & Ideas was designed to share and celebrate the arts and culture of Muslim societies. According to festival literature:
“Islam is the world’s second-largest religion, with an estimated one billion-plus members—approximately 600,000 in New York City, with nearly 100,000 in Brooklyn alone—but many non-Muslim Americans have had only limited exposure to the faith, its civilization, diverse cultures, and traditions. Arts and culture play a vital role in helping us learn more about each other by providing new perspectives and fostering the mutual respect that leads to peaceful co-existence among people.”
By all accounts this was an extraordinary festival showcasing world-class arts and culture ranging from the contemporary to the traditional. I encourage you to visit their website and learn more about it.
The fact that major secular arts and culture organizations embarked on this enormous undertaking to create understanding and dialogue with the Muslim world should raise important and pressing questions for those involved in Jewish culture. For instance – why does it seem so unlikely that a secular institution would spend significant resources to explore Jewish culture, arts & ideas? And if they were to do so, what would that festival look like? Would it continue to reinforce a narrow vision of Jewish identity or would it reflect the global, diverse, complicated and multifaceted tapestry that is World Jewry?
This is the dilemma we, as North American Jews, face. Constantly confronted with an identity based on the existential threat of persecution and the concomitant impulse to erase difference, we are caught between otherness and assimilation. But what would a Jewish culture look like that celebrates our otherness? What would it mean to really look deep into Jewish history and tradition and be proud of our difference, rather than what makes us the same? What if we celebrated our Jewishness not as an act of existential defiance but as a celebration of over 5000 years of rich cultural history?
Our challenge is to push ourselves beyond who we think we are and embrace a more global, contemporary vision of Jewish culture. It is not about choosing between Israel and the Diaspora, it is about acknowledging that the Jewish people exist as both a stateless and a landed people, that our hybrid culture is both an inheritance and a responsiblity. We must seek the essentially Jewish while acknowledging that this essential strain has incorporated countless other cultural strands and influences. Non-Jews and Jews alike frequently assume they know what Jewish is – and all too often both are wrong. The idea of ONE legitimate Jewish expression is belied by the facts on the ground. Jewish thought and culture is an extraordinarily flexible and adaptable meme. How can we own our difference in a celebratory way? In a sense we need to re-otherize ourselves from a place of pride, not shame.
As important as it is to maintain Jewish identity in the present, it is equally important to envision the Jewish future in a multicultural, global, networked world, to move into the future looking forwards at what could be, rather than backwards at what has been. Just as the Muslim Voices festival helped to create a compelling cultural exchange that enlightened and educated a general population on the Muslim world, we should be thinking about Jewish culture exchange that tells more stories than just the Ashkenazic narrative, Israel and the Shoah. We should feel inspired to uncover a broader, wider, more encompassing and life-affirming narrative of Jewish culture, one we can share with the rest of the world as proud inheritors of a fantastic history, not merely survivors of persecution and oppression.
Look into the future and tell me what you want to see.
- Andy, Director of Strategic Parnerships at the Foundation for Jewish Culture
Thank you for a very insightful article.
It may have been simply an oversight, but there is no mention of the author. Can you add the author’s name to the post?
Thanks.
Joel
http://religionandstateinisrael.blogspot.com/
Thanks so much for your comment! This post was written by Andy, the Director of Strategic Partnerships here at the Foundation for Jewish Culture. Though he is listed as the post’s author, the current format of the blog doesn’t display that – so I’ve appended his name at the bottom. We’ll be sure to add this in the future.
Hi Andy, I do not get the idea that an exhibition of Moslem culture should have any relevance to Jewish culture.
Living in Israel, I have become intimately aware that the cultural divide musically is more a matter of elitist perceptions than facts on the ground.
Arab and Jewish musicians mix and impact each other daily.
As for the Plastic arts you have raised some interesting issues, in your hope that Jewish culture can somehow cease to fixate on our oppressed history.
To feel pride one has to have something to be proud of which is Jewish. Which means that the Jewish artist should not be ignorant of our history and customs.
To call oneself Jewish, as if it were the name of a your favourite team is facile and shallow. It is like considering oneself Buddhist because Buddha seems cool.
In the last three decades Israeli culture has experienced a very interesting mix of secular and relgious spiritualism. Rather “new-age” in its sensibilities, it adopts many of our historical and ritual customs, as well as the importance of believing in God. To seperate God from the Jews is silly.
I myself am not religious, but I have come to believe and enjoy our customs, they are no longer provincial to me.
I have come to respect those who have encompassed all the laws, without being fundamentalist nor annoying, but have found the roots of our goodness and our never ending search for understanding and intelligence.
Sorry this letter is rather scattered. I as an artist have adopted and synthesized our history into my themes. As a Jew who had wandered, I find that our history, our experiencing of most of the world’s cultures, as insiders and victims of xneophobia bring me close to the cultures and philosophies of much of the world’s nations.
Whether it be the Ukaraine or India, our people have woken to the sunrise over varied mountains, valleys, seas and urban scapes for centuries. We have shared in the weather, the food, the music and the women of where we have lived.
Yet we came from somewhere, from a certain part of the world. Our calendar mirrors the climate, our festivities the seasons, our customs the culture of Israel.
Jewish culture is multifaceted, which brings us to the question I asked in an essay I wrote in university back in the 70′s. “What is Jewish Art?” Is it the obvious or is it simply any work done by an artist born to a Jewish woman?
There is much to do, good luck Andy