10 - Rethinking Jewishness in Networked Publics: The Case of Post-Communist Hungary

Summary

MANY SCHOLARS viewed the fall of communism in 1989 as a potential turning point for east European Jewish communities. They noted that political freedom promised new possibilities for organizing religious and secular Jewish life and for representing individual Jewish identities and communities (Gitelman and Kovács 2003; Gruber 2000; Papp 2004; Webber 1994). Could political change lead to a new flourishing of Jewish religion and culture, and if so, what form would it take? Hungary's Hungarian-born Jewish population in Budapest, estimated at between 80,000 and 150,000, constituting between 3 and 8 per cent of the residents of the capital, represents the largest such community in any central European city, and thus was thought to hold great potential for community building. Yet by the early twenty-first century, most observers had concluded that despite some experiments in alternative religious communities, a lasting religious revival was not likely to materialize in Hungary. As several scholars have noted, the greatest change was happening in the cultural field instead, where Jews were partaking in ‘new manifestations of cultural ethnicity such as an interest in Jewish history[,] culture [and] tradition’ (Kovács 1996–9; Mars 1999 and 2001). New forms of Jewish cultural expression notwithstanding, a redefinition of the Hungarian Jewish community would be difficult, if not impossible, due to the historical discourse, dating from the nineteenth century, of not treating Jews as a separate, ethnically defined group (Kovács 1996–9; Mars 1999; Papp 2004).

In this essay, I argue that while political change alone did not lead to a redefinition of the Hungarian Jewish community, cultural changes, specifically the technological and social effects of networked publics and their blurring of the boundaries between public and private, have led to changes in Hungarian public discourse on Jewishness. To show this, I examine the challenge of two socialnetworking sites, one a Facebook group called ‘The Holocaust and My Family’, and the other a blog called ‘Judapest’, both of which posed challenges to the way Jewishness was being discussed among Hungarians. Although there are other ‘Jewish’ blogs and ‘Jewish’ Facebook groups in Hungary, the ones I discuss here are the best-known and most successful examples in that they drew large readerships and were widely discussed in other media as well.