Radical Jews: Refashioning London's Jewish Identity at the Margins

This project develops a participant-based ethnography of the Hasidic Jewish community in Stamford Hill, London, examining its relationship to Zionism, traditionalism, and the city. Although the literature on the Jewish Diaspora is extensive, the academic literature on Ultra-Orthodox Jews, and Hasidic Jews within that, has been limited, those accounts that do exist focus largely on the communities in North America and Israel/Palestine. While often excluded from mainstream media discourse on Judaism, Hasidic Jews constitute the fastest-growing sector of Judaism demographically, with estimates suggesting that they may soon constitute one fifth of the Jewish population in the world.

At the same time, this community is largely excluded from the discourse on Judaism worldwide, which is largely dominated by modern Zionist Jews in the United States and the politics of the State of Israel. Where media accounts do exist of Hasidic communities, they focus on the community's radical traditionalism and strictly pious way of life through a one-dimensional lens. What other accounts exist attempts to quantify their political views through the lens of western liberal politics. However, the community's stances on Zionism, religion, and cultural identity are highly nuanced and seldom understood both inside and outside the Jewish world. This is largely a result of three key factors:
- Hasidic Jews exist outside of the lens of the secular-nationalist Zionist project.
- Hasidic Jews are largely outside of the liberal and Modern Orthodox establishment of diaspora Jewish life worldwide.
- Hasidic Jews are both central to and removed from the multicultural economy and society of day-to-day life in London.

Consequently, the aim of this study will be to conduct an in-depth ethnography of Stamford Hill's Hasidic community to evaluate both leaders and community members' stance on Zionism, tradition, and the city. The three objectives of the study are as follows:

1. To establish what the stated positions are in relation to Zionism, traditionalism, and the city are among community leaders
2. To frame these positions and practices within wider diasporic politics in the Jewish world as well as within the context of multicultural London.
3. To examine the manifestation of these tensions in individual members' behaviors and everyday urban life.

The pursuit of these three objectives will help develop a thorough understanding of the community's political stance within the wider polics of the Jewish and non-Jewish worlds. At a time of heightened global tension over the Jewish diaspora's role and complicity in the ongoing situation in Palestine/Israel, this community offers an alternative vision for what Jewish life looks like, a juxtaposition of theocratic Jewish life in the multicultural urban sphere. It is a valuable case study not only for understanding Judaism and Zionist ideology, but also for understanding multiculturalism, London, and the global city more broadly.