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Essay on Language and Culture in a Jewish Immigrant Society
Modern Jewish identity in Canada is more than simply a religious or ethnic identification. The question of identity is a problematic issue for contemporary communities as it has ethnic, cultural, and religious dimensions. Shapiro considers the question of identity as more of an issue for Jews than for any other American subgroup, and this is likely the case in Canada as well. Jewish identity is complex and difficult to define with terms such as "religion" or "ethnic group," and there is no consensus amongst academics on what constitutes Jewish identity.
The complexity in Canadian Jewish identity is illustrated by recent Canadian Censuses where there have been significantly large discrepancies between the number of Canadians reporting Jewish as their religion as compared to those reporting Jewish as their ethnic origin. As Davids notes upon analyzing the 1991 and 2001 Canadian Census, ethnic Jewishness in Canada is fading while Canadian Judaism has persisted. The traditional notions of Jewish identity are a multi-layered and complex issue. Religion, culture, and ethnicity are inexplicably tied together to create a unique sense of self To see Jewish identity as primarily only religious, ethnic, or cultural fails to encompass large portions of what it means to be Jewish.
Buckser views this approach as problematic because of the enormous variability within and between Jewish communities and argues that it is necessary to include the notion of community "symbolic space" that allows for individual constructions of self and group that bind together religious and ethnic dimensions in various ways. In this vein we adopt the conceptual framework of "'ethnie'" in order to empirically measure Jewish identity and the meaning of community in a medium-size city in Canada.Research on Canadian Jewish identity in the 1990s reflected the research in other areas of ethnicity with deconstructed findings of differentiation, dilemmas, fragmentation, and contradictions......
