Despite having been the most influential Jewish population in the world, seventy-eight years after the Shoah Jewish life in the Netherlands remains ambiguous. For Dutch Jews who don’t practice Judaism as part of a religious community, a post-war memorialisation of genocide overwhelmingly determines what it means to be Jewish today. Moreover, the backdrop of intergenerational stories/emotions that tie them to a traumatic past, complicated relationality to Israel, and deeply integrated antisemitism in Dutch society obscure more intimate and joyful Dutch Jewish experiences.
Yet, an (inter)generational search for ways to reclaim, rethink, and make space for contemporary Dutch Jewish identity and life persists, and new generations move forward. This film project is an expression of such a search where I, a millennial Dutch Jew from Amsterdam who grew up in a non- religious but Jewish household, embark on a search for Jewish identity and community with family and peers to learn about and beyond our families’ pasts through a collective film effort.
Bio
Eden Goldberg is a visual anthropologist, multimodal storyteller, documentary researcher and director. She is a rational empath with a passion for unlearning and challenging hegemonic narratives. In her practice, she is committed to reconciling art and academics as she deems the emotional and intellectual equally valuable in her quest for understanding the human experience. Embodied experience, questions of (not) belonging, (post)coloniality and racism play a central part in her anthropology. Over the past years, her research efforts have focused on contemporary Dutch Jewish identity issues. A focus ignited by her experience of uprootedness due to the inaccessibility and mystery of her Dutch, Jewish and Israeli heritage. During her master’s degree in visual ethnography, she devised a research project to explore the complexities of contemporary Dutch Jewishness while looking for future-facing Jewish perspectives.