[BLOG-LIKE POSTING] Arrival Day 2005
Sep. 8th, 2005 03:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldI was stuck for a theme for this year's Arrival Day posting until I reread my posting last year for Arrival Day about the history and future of Canada's vibrant Jewish community, and note that the theme of this year's Arrival Day (as announced at the Head Heeb) was the study of the connections of American Jews to larger wholes.
Canadian writer Marq de Villiers reported in his Into Africa about a visit to Cameroon, a country officially bilingual in English and French with a restive Anglophone minority inclined towards separatism. de Villiers reported meeting the Bamileke people, a group of two million people whose homeland straddles the colonial English-French language frontier. Despite their common ethnicity and similar vernacular languages, the Bamileke appeared--to de Villiers--to be divided by the colonial language divide, internalizing the divide to such a degree that Francophone Bamiléké and Anglophone Bamileke were starting to distrust each other. Ethnic solidarity was trumped by politics, it seems, and a community divided.
Canadian identity--more precisely, English Canadian identity--was created, or at least enhanced, by a well-established policy of constructing a group identity for the Anglophones of once-British North America that was distinct from the group identity shared by the Anglophones of the United States of America. This frontier began as an artificial frontier, yes, but so what? No one credible is seriously arguing that the Walloons are really French, or that the Latvians should throw their lot in with the Lithuanians. For diasporic populations like Jews, which consider themselves united bodies despite political frontiers, the US-Canadian frontier poses a serious questions. What sort of relationship will Canada's small but growing Jewish population build with the Untied States' large but stable Jewish population? What sort of relationship can be built? Jews on both sides of the 49th clearly do share many common cultural elements--shared use of the English language, similar histories of immigration and assimilation, and so on--but Canadian Jews also maintain their own, national, communal institutions separatedfrom their American counterparts.
Fortunately, the question of what separates Americans from Canadians isn't politicized. It's very unlikely that anyone, Jewish or otherwise, will be put in the uncomfortable position of Mira Furlan in 1991, who was cruelly attacked for not taking note of the differences separating Croatia from Serbia during Yugoslavia's dissolution. The US-Canadian frontier just doesn't matter that much--Canadians certainly aren't in the same position as Croatians! There's still the potential for much mutual misunderstanding, though, in keeping with past patterns of Canadian defensiveness and American obliviousness in US-Canadian relations. Will this be repeated in the 21st century on a smaller scale? Stay tuned.
Canadian writer Marq de Villiers reported in his Into Africa about a visit to Cameroon, a country officially bilingual in English and French with a restive Anglophone minority inclined towards separatism. de Villiers reported meeting the Bamileke people, a group of two million people whose homeland straddles the colonial English-French language frontier. Despite their common ethnicity and similar vernacular languages, the Bamileke appeared--to de Villiers--to be divided by the colonial language divide, internalizing the divide to such a degree that Francophone Bamiléké and Anglophone Bamileke were starting to distrust each other. Ethnic solidarity was trumped by politics, it seems, and a community divided.
Canadian identity--more precisely, English Canadian identity--was created, or at least enhanced, by a well-established policy of constructing a group identity for the Anglophones of once-British North America that was distinct from the group identity shared by the Anglophones of the United States of America. This frontier began as an artificial frontier, yes, but so what? No one credible is seriously arguing that the Walloons are really French, or that the Latvians should throw their lot in with the Lithuanians. For diasporic populations like Jews, which consider themselves united bodies despite political frontiers, the US-Canadian frontier poses a serious questions. What sort of relationship will Canada's small but growing Jewish population build with the Untied States' large but stable Jewish population? What sort of relationship can be built? Jews on both sides of the 49th clearly do share many common cultural elements--shared use of the English language, similar histories of immigration and assimilation, and so on--but Canadian Jews also maintain their own, national, communal institutions separatedfrom their American counterparts.
Fortunately, the question of what separates Americans from Canadians isn't politicized. It's very unlikely that anyone, Jewish or otherwise, will be put in the uncomfortable position of Mira Furlan in 1991, who was cruelly attacked for not taking note of the differences separating Croatia from Serbia during Yugoslavia's dissolution. The US-Canadian frontier just doesn't matter that much--Canadians certainly aren't in the same position as Croatians! There's still the potential for much mutual misunderstanding, though, in keeping with past patterns of Canadian defensiveness and American obliviousness in US-Canadian relations. Will this be repeated in the 21st century on a smaller scale? Stay tuned.
