From MySpace to MyJewishSpace: The role of the internet in the self-definition of ‘New Jews’ in Austria and Germany

Together with a significant proportion of the population, especially in the developed world, Jewish writers nowadays use the internet to present themselves, advertise their work and their interests, or share pictures of their family albums. With millions of others they thus negotiate big chunks of their private lives in a public space.

In my paper I will argue that Jews, by seemingly doing the same as everybody else, are actually marking themselves out as different. Jewish writers, who are now in their forties and fifties – i.e. members of the generation of children of Holocaust survivors – use the internet not only to define themselves as authors but also to position themselves as Jews both within a Jewish and a non-Jewish discourse.

Their need to do this arises from the fact that their early 21st-century identities are contested, with ethnic and religious identity markers less readily available for most of them. Moreover, the destruction of European Jewry in the Holocaust has also destroyed their historical communities. The virtual communities created by the internet therefore offer them a space where they can define themselves as Jews and via shared interests engage with both Jews and non-Jews. The inclusiveness of these virtual communities and the lack of distances from those with whom they engage electronically allow Jews to belong and at the same time affirm their individuality.

My argument will be theoretically underpinned by the notion of diaspora as a space of dispersal that has been transformed through the use of new technologies, those of communication as well as transportation. As Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1994) has argued, the collapsing of ‘spaces of dispersal by abbreviating the time it takes to get from here to there’ (342) has necessitated the ‘transvaluation of diaspora’. This I would like to combine with an understanding of the internet as public arena where identities are negotiated. The internet as a public arena therefore constitutes an exemplary space where Jewish culture and identities are ‘co-constructed’ (Biale 1994,  Aschheim 2001).

In my paper I will argue that via such journals as Ashkenas or the tri-lingual Golem the internet has opened for Jews in Europe that ‘Jewish’ space that the intellectual historian Diana Pinto (1999) has been calling for. Furthermore, I will explore how the Jewish author is constructed and constructs himself through internet sites such as MySpace and YouTube. I will do so by drawing on examples from Jewish writers such as Robert Menasse and Maxim Biller. And I hope to demonstrate how Jews like them are turning MySpace into (a gendered?) MyJewishSpace.

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• Andrea Reiter