Secular Jewish Identity and Public Religious Participation within Australian Secular Multiculturalism

Abstract

Many Australian Jews label their Jewish identity as secular. However, public representations of Jewish culture within Australian multiculturalism frequently highlight the religious practices of Judaism as markers of Jewish cultural authenticity. This study explores how secular Jews sometimes perform and reference Jewish religious practice when participating in communal events, and when identifying as Jewish to non-Jews in social interactions and in interactions with the state. Ethnographic participant observation and semi-structured in-depth interviews with nine self-identified secular Jews living in Queensland, Australia, were employed to gather data. These self-identified secular Jews within the community incorporate little religiosity in their private lives, yet in public they often identify with religious practice, and use a religious framework when describing and representing Jewishness to outsiders. This suggests that public Jewishness within Queensland multiculturalism might be considered a performative identity, where acts and statements of religious behavior construct and signify Jewish group cultural distinctiveness in mainstream society. These secular Jews, it is suggested, may participate in this performativity in order to partake in the social capital of communal religious institutions, and to maintain a space for Jewish identity in multicultural secular society, so that their individual cultural interpretations of Jewishness might be realised.

“How Do I See Myself? It’s Complicated”: Qualitatively Eliciting, Analyzing and Understanding Individuals’ Self-Attitudes towards Identity in an Australian Jewish Community

“…On the other hand, the multi-faith movement has long been a strong influence in Australian society and politics, and increasingly so since 11 September 2001 and the Australian Muslim community's increased activity in cosmopolitan peacebuilding [57]. In order to participate in these socio-political frameworks, Australian Jewish communities have made Jewish religion and its performance the centerpiece of Jewish public identity, regardless of Jewish individuals' own faith and practice [58].…”

“…Much of Jewish life in Australia still revolves around religious institutions and affiliations, particularly synagogues. This means that even Jews who are not individually deeply religious or spiritual people are often involved in Jewish religious institutions, in order to connect to the Jewish community [58]. Likewise, the fact that the least common way of conceptualizing Jewishness among participants was in terms of culture reflects this same religion-centeredness in communal activity, and a lack of "culturally Jewish" infrastructure in this community, like social and culinary opportunities, which are much more common in larger Jewish communities interstate and overseas [64].…”

Pilgrimage and Purpose: Ancestor Research as Sacred Practice in a Secular Age

“…Many who no longer observe a particular religion still search for a way to regularly integrate this kind of ritualistic gathering into their lives, but without the prerequisite of belief in any god. Some research on secular Jews, for example, has demonstrated that families often still gather for Passover and Hanukah (Creese 2019;Reingold 2021). Frame (2009) comments on the tendency for secular societies to borrow religious customs in situations where they might give comfort.…”