Framing Jewish Peoplehood through historical/conceptual phases, while not an exact science, can be helpful in our attempts to better understand and address current challenges. Each of the periods defined below brought about dramatic changes that required paradigmatic shifts in constructing a meaningful purpose, ethos and practical focus for the Jewish collective enterprise. It is time…
In this video talk Dr Noam Pianko, Director of the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Washington, looks back at the origins of the term "Jewish Peoplehood". Finding it in the 1930s and 40s he then asks whether it is still a useful concept for the 21st Century and offers a new…
In this collection, 20 short articles grapple with the following questions: “What does Peoplehood mean? Why is it important? How do we nurture it?” It is interesting to note that the younger the age of the contributors the stronger the shift from the content of Peoplehood to the nature of the relations it entails. While…
This (12th) volume of the Peoplehood Papers "grapples with the tension between sustaining the Jewish People and contributing to Universal goals. Finding new ways of contributing to the world has become part of the search for a new meaning for being Jewish. The Jewish people are seeking meaningful answers to the question, "why Jewish" or…
At a time when Jewish communities have become increasingly anxious about weakening Jewish identity, one response strategy is to engage with the concept of Jewish peoplehood as a social phenomenon, in its varied contexts and processes. This volume offers an in-depth effort to address the concept of Jewish peoplehood since the initial attempts of early-20th-century…
The author compares different ways that scholars, writers and activists understand the concept of Jewish peoplehood and provides an analytic framing of the concept. Overall, he sees peoplehood as a concept invented by American Jewry and discusses what happens when it is imported into the Israeli context. He believes that peoplehood has the potential to…
The word “Israel” has multiple meanings and associations. The author discusses the intentional ambiguity of three terms associated with Israel – am (people), eretz (land), and le’om (nation) – signifying a rootedness in a particular geographic locale and the aspiration that all Jews are part of the Jewish collective regardless of where they live. She…
At the ninth annual Herzliya Conference in February 2009, the concept of "Jewish peoplehood" emerged as an important concept, and the author discusses some of the proposed definitions of the concept and arguments raised by Jewish scholars and thinkers in previous volumes of the Peoplehood Papers. While many questions about the concept still remain, the…
