Jewish Revival Inside Out

Daniel Monterescu is associate professor of urban anthropology and food studies at the Central European University, Vienna. He is the author of Jaffa Shared and Shattered: Contrived Coexistence in Israel/Palestine (finalist of the 2016 Association for Jewish Studies Jordan Schnitzer Book Awards), coauthor of Twilight Nationalism: Politics of Existence at Life's Edge and coeditor of Food and settler Colonialism.

Against the gloomy forecast of The Vanishing Diaspora, the end of the second millennium saw the global emergence of a dazzling array of Jewish cultural initiatives, institutional modalities, and individual practices. These Jewish Revival and Jewish Renewal projects are led by Jewish NGOs and philanthropic organizations, the Orthodox Teshuva (return to the fold) movement and its well-known emissary Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidism, and alternative cultural initiatives that promote what can be termed lifestyle Judaism. This range between institutionalized revival movements and ephemeral event-driven projects circumscribes a diverse space of creative agency, which calls for a bottom-up empirical analysis of cultural creativity and the re-invention of Jewish tradition worldwide. Indeed, the trope of a Jewish Renaissance has become both a descriptive category of an increasingly popular and scholarly discourse across the globe, and a prescriptive model for social action. This volume explores the global transformations of contemporary Jewishness, which give renewed meaning to identity, tradition, and politics in our post secular world.