A Genesis of Jewishness: Collective Memory, Identity Work, and Ethnic Boundary Making among Jews in Toronto
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Recent decades have seen exceptional growth in research investigating the social, political, and cultural lives of Jews in Canada, and for good reason. The Jewish experience in Canada is one that is often characterized as achieving the goals of multiculturalism, that is, retaining a rich and meaningful ethnic and cultural identity while integrating into the political and economic mainstream. Yet, absent from much of the work done on Jewish life in Canada is research into how Jews make sense of their Jewishness in a multicultural context. In this dissertation, I examine the group-making projects of Jews in Toronto by analyzing how collective memory informs what it means to be Jewish and how it is mobilized in the production and maintenance of ethnic boundaries. This dissertation is comprised of three interrelated studies that explore significant aspects of contemporary Jewish life in Canada, namely organizational participation, residential patterns, and the boundaries of Jewish otherness. Data come from qualitative interviews with Jews living in Toronto and the Greater Toronto Area who approximate the diversity of Toronto’s Jewish population and identify with a range of Jewish denominations, including no affiliation at all, and express their commitment to Jewish principles and practices in various ways. In the first study, I consider overnight Jewish summer camps as an important site for the production of ethnic boundaries in the Jewish community and explore the boundary work of camp participants. In the second study, I examine Jewish residential patterns in Toronto and identify four collective memory schemas which serve as prominent scripts that shape the Jewish residential landscape in Toronto. In the third study, I attend directly to the issue of Jewish otherness and examine how a fragmented collective memory around the Holocaust and State of Israel delineate boundaries of inclusion and separateness.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.029 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".