‘Rootless cosmopolitan yeshivas’ – subverting mainstream Jewishness
JMy book, Judaism, Education and Social Justice, is coming out in paperback in May. If you like the sound of a challenging, academic, philosophical read about faith, education and progressive politics, this is the book for you. It’s available here with a 20% discount if you pre-order – use code GLR AT5.
Here’s today’s extract. If it whets your appetite, please be in touch (I’d love to discuss!) and share with friends and colleagues.
Joe*, a radical Jewish social justice activist, frames his commitment to difference and subversion within the Jewish community in even more provocative terms. His organisation runs events that exemplify this idea and which are purposefully challenging of many of the accepted norms within the established Jewish community. For example,
Our first event was called Punk Purim. It happened in a squat in Whitechapel [in East London]. It was in association with Heeb magazine and it had a klezmer band. It was like rammed, absolutely rammed party with a klezmer band. A room of radical Torah talks, where power cuts kept happening. …
[Another] event [‘Protocols of the Elephants of Zion’] was looking at a sideways take on Anglo-Jewish history, so it was celebrating 350 years since the re-admission to England of Jews under Cromwell. But we were trying to look at the dark side; the kind of criminals, the gangsters, like the non-establishment side of it. And we had DAM, a Palestinian hip-hop band performing at that, which is also controversial.
We then also had a couple of events called ‘Rootless Cosmopolitan Yeshivas’ which were basically quite serious events which tried to have a yeshivah type atmosphere in which ten different teachers talked in a very loud room, and you had to gather round them. But all the subjects were radical, Jewish, quite oft en non-Zionist or anti-Zionist … gay and lesbian, feminist. So a broad sweep of kind of non-mainstream Jewishness, and that happened a couple of times and very successfully.
We’ve had a Jewish tent at Glastonbury when I did mass conversions, taught Talmud to non-Jews. They thought I was a rabbi and I didn’t decide to correct them.