Remembering Zion: Jewish diasporic identity on a Canadian university campus
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This research begins with a question: How are diasporic feelings of connection and belonging created and maintained in people with no traceable ancestry to a distant country that is identified as a homeland? My thesis answers this question by developing the notion of placement practices---the positioning of Israel as a central feature of Jewish diasporic identity through the material and discursive placement of diasporic Jews into narratives of belonging with Israel. While the connection to the Land of Israel is a foundational aspect of Jewish existence, feelings of diasporic attachment and belonging are constantly recreated and maintained through a very specific set of practices that emphasize the centrality of Zionism for Jewish identity. I employ the concept of placement practices to explore the Zionification of Jewish diasporic identity; the process whereby political identification with Israel has become a central pillar of Jewish identity, and feelings of attachment to Israel have become a primary means of Jewish diasporic ethnic identification. Using Hillels of Greater Toronto as a case study, I argue that Israel has been instrumentalized by the organized Jewish community (OJC) largely to fight the perceived threat of assimilation, and my focus is on the specific set of practices involved in Zionist activism on the university campus. To develop this thesis, I examine the historical developments that positioned Hillel and Israel as central to the promotion of Jewish identity, provide ethnographic analyses of how this process is experienced in the campus setting, and theorize how these practices impact the relationship between Jewish identity and Zionism.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.035 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".