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Identity as Process: An Interview with Nancy Abelmann, Ph.D.
Introduction:
From its inception in 1999, the Jewish Public Forum was to be a different kind of Jewish
institution. Seeking to generate fresh thinking about the social, political and cultural
trends affecting ethnic and religious identity and community, it is an unprecedented
effort to broaden the conversation about the Jewish future by engaging leading figures in
the worlds of academia, business, the arts and public policy, most of whom have not been
involved in organized Jewish life.
CLAL’s connection to Nancy Abelmann, an associate professor at the University of
Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where she teaches anthropology, East Asian languages and
cultures, and women's studies, came through the process of network building which is so
important to the Jewish Public Forum. Her name was suggested by another participant and
she then became active in the Forum’s work, serving as an informal advisor to the
project. She was a panelist at the Forum’s June 2000 conference, “The Virtual,
the Real and the Not-Yet-Imagined: Meaning, Identity and Community in a Networked
World.”
From the moment she came to the Jewish Public Forum, Nancy was struck by the parallels
between the Korean-American community and the Jewish community. In the conversation that
follows she expands on this and other themes.
She is the author of Echoes of the Past, Epics of Dissent: A South Korean Social
Movement (University of California Press, 1996) and Blue Dreams: Korean Americans
and the Los Angeles Riots (with John Lie) (Harvard University Press, 1995). She is
currently finishing The Melodrama of Mobility: Women, Class, and Talk in Contemporary
South Korea. She will be on leave in spring and fall 2001 to write a book on Korean
Americans in public higher education in Illinois.
CLAL: You have made comparisons between the Korean American community that you study and
the Jewish community. What are some of the most striking ones? What can the two
communities learn from one another?
NA: When I was first invited to the CLAL table through the Jewish Public Forum, I would
have never imagined that I would have referred publicly to my own research on and
connection with Korean America. It happened because I couldn't stop myself -- the issues
were too parallel for silence. And CLAL for its part, or rather the people who are CLAL go
out of their way to welcome just that sort of association -- to make you feel that what
you do and know in the "rest" of your life is likely an important resource for
thinking about things Jewish. And, taken a step further, the CLAL table is one -- has been
designed to be one -- where the boundaries between "Jewishness" and the
"rest" become fuzzy.
To Korean America then. What struck me most in my initial CLAL encounter, and continues to
do so, are parallels in the thinking about Jewish authenticity: what counts, what should
count, who are the arbiters of what counts, who should be, and -- in the best of all
possible worlds -- what all of this should look like. Broadly speaking, these are matters
of boundaries and their border patrol.
Similarly, there is little Korean American consensus as to what Koreanness is or ought to
be. For almost every heartfelt conviction (and there are many), there are equally weighty
counter-convictions asserting that this or that is not the essence of Koreanness and,
regardless, that it certainly shouldn't be.
These struggles over Koreanness are ones waged within Korean American families (across
generations and other divides), in Korean American churches (and this is an overwhelmingly
church, Christian, attending population), and across numerous divides in the community (of
class, gender, regional origin, immigration history and so on). These struggles -- over
that right to claim something as your own with confidence (which, I think, is what
authenticity is about) -- are ones that I have encountered in the classroom and in my
research. In the classroom, I am often in the interesting situation of introducing
contemporary Korean society to large numbers of Korean American undergraduates (there are
some 1000 Korean American undergraduates at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
where I teach). And I find these struggles in the research I have been conducting for the
last few years on Korean Americans in higher educational institutions in Illinois.
Furthermore, I should note that these struggles of identification, over rightful
belonging, are not only struggles in Korea's émigré communities, but are "at
home" as well in South Korea. What is for some Koreans and Korean Americans the very
essence of Koreanness is the very practice or tradition against which other Koreans and
Korean Americans want to define their "Korean" identity.
Although I take these sorts of contests over cultural practice and identity to be the
stuff of life more generally, for the particular case of Koreans and Korean Americans,
chapters in their contemporary history -- especially colonization by Japan (1910-1945) and
the (ongoing) division of the Koreas -- have made the matter of "what is ours"
all the more charged. The parallel to issues of Jewish identification is clear here.
Let me return then to why conversations at the CLAL table brought all of this to mind --
lest you think I have forgotten the Jewish connection. At CLAL, I found discussions about
the ways in which contemporary Judaism, in its myriad of institutional and
non-institutional forms and practices, has cast its net -- and in turn about who has felt
included or, importantly, cast aside. As an anthropologist generally, I couldn't help but
be interested in the ideas of culture and belonging that were in question, and as someone
who has been interested in Korea and its émigré community, I couldn't help but notice
parallel struggles.
Among the discussions I have been part of at CLAL, I was particularly interested in a
tension between, on the one hand, a desire to relax the boundaries of Jewish life and
practice -- such that more Jews can more often recognize themselves and their lives in and
in relation to Judaism -- and, on the other hand, an interest in rekindling passion for
Jewish spirituality and, dare I add, "culture" and "tradition."
Clearly, Koreanness is not a spiritual practice, but that more basic tension between
revealing and exploring something Korean (be it "culture," "history,"
or "tradition") and an ecumenical spirit that welcomes a very lack of consensus
as "Korean" seems quite parallel.
Another interesting concern for comparison is race: undergirding many CLAL discussions was
the understanding that with the global wane of anti-Semitism (and in the United States
with the rise of White racial identification among Jews), old paradigms of Jewish
identification (e.g., narratives of rescue) are rendered anachronistic. For Korean
Americans, and Asian Americans more generally, the racial realities of the contemporary
United States are at the heart of much émigré identification and activism. This reality
is not, however, without controversy. Some ask whether the racial lens erases critical
historical differences in the immigration histories of a very heterogeneous Asian America.
The very boundaries of Asian America are contested. Certainly these discussions are
meaningful for any Jewish American dialogue, necessarily a dialogue across many vectors of
historical, cultural, and religious difference. It struck me that these sorts of
conversations about race and identity in the United States would be very interesting ones
for American Jews to listen in on. Here we can imagine a living interrogation of Jewish
"whiteness," parallel to the living interrogation of Korean or Asian American
non-whiteness. Such conversations are all the more interesting in the light of rich and
difficult conversations about the particularity of the ways in which Asian Americans are
racialized vis-a-vis White, Black, and Latino/a Americans. Particularly provocative in the
context of Jewish American history are discussions of the White identification (by Asian
Americans themselves and non-Asians) of Asian America.
Finally, because my Korean American research has taken me into student Christian
evangelicalism, I also found interesting points for comparison at the crossroads of belief
and ethnicity. Korean American Christians articulate their Koreanness via Christianity in
ways that are quite complex, attesting for me to the wonderfully creative processes of
identification; identities are processes in motion, not things to classify or describe.
Particularly interesting for comparison would be questions of religion and politics. The
predominantly Protestant Korean American church is largely socially, culturally, and
politically conservative. Furthermore, many have charged that the church is insular --
worried about evangelism and service in its own ethnic community, and rather engaged with
the concerns and politics of U.S. racialized minorities generally.
CLAL: What would it be like for the two communities to talk about these things?
NA: Were members of these two "communities" (Korean America/Jewish America) to
talk, I think that they would discover very interesting parallels in their respective
relationships to Americans of color. In the context of Asian American diversity, Korean
Americans are relatively highly educated post-1965, voluntary migrants with middle class
backgrounds. In short, Korean Americans stand in sharp contrast to other Asian American
communities whose immigration to the United States came out of greater hardship and
dislocation. Also important is the fact that prevailing Korean American identities deflect
attention from considerable wealth and status disparities within Korean America. These are
tense issues for Korean America, as I think they are -- and should be -- for Jewish
America. In this sense, I think that through such dialogues across émigré (and other
communities of difference) communities, people would see themselves and their communities
anew -- juxtapositions demand this. Some of the connections would be made via very
grounded realities, such as the historical parallels between Korean and Jewish American
overrepresentation in urban small entrepreneurship (and parallels in the racial geography
of entrepreneurship in the American city). There would be further connections through
typical American depictions of Jewish and Asian America, among them the matter of
education and text-based traditions. I could go on, but suffice it to say that I am
entirely convinced that such conversations would be rich, complicated, and productive.
CLAL: Do you see your own work as having any connection to your Jewish identity?
NA: First of all, let me say that my Jewish identity -- and I know increasingly that I am
not alone here -- has been forever confused. Much of the confusion of my Jewish identity
was quite literally not knowing where my family fit in the Jewish "world." In
the home lives of more religious Conservative Jews of my childhood friends, I saw shadows
(ones that appealed to me) of shtetl Judaism. While being Jewish was certainly at the
center of my parents' identities, it seemed as much a deep-seated rejection of all of that
as anything else. I didn't really understand what "it" was to my parents, other
than that it was somehow important, and that both of my parents had known worlds -- in the
United States for my mother and in Germany for my father -- where being Jewish was the
organizing principle of their social lives (entirely removed from any religious practice).
Given what I have said, it would be very hard to give a clear answer about the
relationship of my "work" (also forever in flux) to my confused and changing
Jewish identity. Those caveats aside, on work, on Jewish identity, let me think on it a
bit….
Loosely, I would say that my career as an anthropologist and Asianist, and in recent years
as an Asian Americanist, is founded in broad interests in cultural differences near and
far. That is, I have long been interested in cultural margins at home, and in rethinking
what “home” means through the lens of cultural differences far away from home.
As I write this, it makes sense to me to assert that these interests and the
identifications they entail are inextricable from my Judaism, and from my Jewish
confusion.
I will spare you details, but into adulthood, and perhaps via anthropology and my own
persistent anthropological interests in history, memory, and identity, I have, like all
adults, engaged in a bit of family archaeology. Wonderfully serendipitous for me was the
hire of an anthropologist of Jewish culture and community in my department of
anthropology. This rather unprecedented hire (for a U.S. anthropology department) brought
to Urbana-Champaign, Illinois (of all places!) a Vienna-born and raised anthropologist
who, within a year of his arrival, taught a joint history and anthropology seminar on the
ethno-history of the German Jewry: on my history. Convergences abound. That class, which
placed my family's Judaism in historical perspective, explained so much to me. Quite
literally, it gave me the tools to begin locating my family's Judaism. It was when I was
auditing Professor Matti Bunzl's course that I met CLAL.
In my own identity work in that class -- on my family's secularism, on the passions and
identities of my parents, and so on -- I saw again and again the very questions and
inquiries that have enlivened my own research on East Asia and Asian America. (I take
identity work seriously, and recognize that it is much of what has brought students to my
courses on Korea.) Now, can I assert that those unspoken Jewish questions and interests
were there all along, guiding my Asian and Asian American research? Let me beg that
question and simply say that my work and my Jewish identity are thankfully still very much
in progress and that they are increasingly unfolding through dialogues (spoken and
unspoken) that, until some years ago, I could have never imagined. For the
unpredictability, for the serendipity, and perhaps even for the hidden logics of it all, I
am so grateful.
CLAL: You were invited to take part in CLAL's Jewish Public Forum as one of the so-called
"outsiders" -- a Jewish academic with few, if any, organizational affiliations.
Why did you agree to take part? Has your understanding of your Jewishness been affected by
your involvement with CLAL? If so, how?
NA: It certainly was different to be invited to CLAL precisely for my lack of Jewish
institutional connection. Of course, it was a bit disarming; I certainly couldn't counter
that I wasn't "qualified" to be there. Of course, as I think back to that
strange (and that it was) invitation, and to conversations with others I have met through
CLAL who received the same one, I realize that we are all interested outsiders --
interested enough to want to sit at the CLAL table, while at once not quite being able to
imagine a seat for ourselves there. So I think I agreed to take part because I had long
wanted to take part in Judaism, but had never quite known how. I should also add that in
the months before the CLAL invitation, I had also been exploring Judaism through a very
informal Torah reading group in my town -- a group that also extended an invitation to
those of us who felt somehow on the outside.
I went to my first CLAL meeting with considerable trepidation: What right did I have to
participate? I wasn't convinced that I had any coherent knowledge beyond Judaism that
could be of any service to the issues at hand (Jewish leadership). (And furthermore, I
couldn't even keep track of the acronyms of the Jewish organizations that were reviewed in
the preparatory materials that we had been sent.) And then there were the more banal
worries: I had dropped out of Sunday schools, I don't know a word of Hebrew, I am not a
member of the local temple and so on. I was, though, intrigued: I was being invited to
join where I had long seen no clear place for myself.
So, three CLAL gatherings later, am I changed? Is my Jewishness changed? Yes. It has
seemed to me that CLAL proceeds from the understanding that a complex constellation of
historical processes have conspired to make the Jewish table one at which many nonetheless
self-identified Jews have felt uneasy: Where would I sit? Who would I talk to? What if
they found out how little I know? And so on. CLAL is -- and this is how I put it in my own
words -- keenly interested in thinking anew about belonging, in thinking differently about
how to both recognize and foster Jewish life. CLAL is -- again, my spin -- deeply
concerned with changing the places and practices through which people find (and signify)
Judaism. I feel all-the-time less shy about my own Jewishness: it’s there, it takes a
bit of archeology (personal, familial, socio-historical) to get at it, and it’s OK.
And it’s valid and viable and need not be a blueprint of anything, but can be a point
of departure for whatever sort of Jewish life and collectivity I want to pursue and
participate in. I feel less timid about it, less apologetic for all that I long thought my
and my family's Judaism wasn't.
And there is another relevant aside. My meeting with CLAL, perhaps not coincidentally,
came just as my twin daughters were becoming a bit more sentient at two years old. The
family crucible, this time my own, is of course so important in the life cycle of
identifications. CLAL, the people I have met there, the discussions we have had, and the
ways it has colored my work are now part of that family-making fabric, something that we
seem to be cobbling together, improvising, one day at a time. I suppose, and I hope, that
through and beyond CLAL, my Jewishness will keep surprising me.
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