Edith Pick

Israel holds a complex role in diaspora Jewish life—offering meaning and unity, but also generating confusion and division. In recent decades, many young Jews are re-examining their relationship with Zionism and the Jewish homeland. Diaspora organizations are spaces where these relationships with ‘home’ as shaped: where identities and loyalties are shaped, nationalist narratives are reproduced or challenged, and belonging is negotiated. This talk explores diaspora-homeland dynamics within Jewish organizations in the UK, touching on themes of diversity and unity, nationhood, gender, militarism, and their relevance to the current Middle East crisis.

Attempting to grasp the elusive, contextual and contested nature of ‘diversity’, this chapter traces the discursive struggle over the term within UK Jewish organisations. While the business case and the social justice case advocate for economic and moral approaches to diversity – diaspora organisations reveal how diversity discourse can echo political rationales, and reproduce nationalistic ideas. By analysing official organisational statements, the chapter explores how the construction of diversity links to questions of unity, loyalty, and belonging; how diversity travels across geographies, identities, and organisational locations; who benefits and who is being marginalised by the shrinking and bending of diversity; and what room is left for equality and inclusion debates.

This paper deepens our understanding of the construction of ethno-racial diversity and difference in organizations, and the consequences of those discursive struggles on the lives of workers. Categories of difference are usually seen as building blocks of diversity management, however critical and postcolonial researchers have long pointed out the need to develop more flexible and context-sensitive epistemologies in studying racial inequality, beyond binary conceptions of blackness and whiteness. The Jewish context offers a unique opportunity to explore those discursive dynamics, due to the elusive nature of “Jewish difference”, taboos over the use of racial classifications, and possible conflicts between an anti-racist stance and a Zionist affiliation. Exploring the diversity discourse within UK Jewish nonprofit organizations reveals three main diversity frames: in the first, “Jews are white”, the construction the Jewish organization as a white space is explored, as well as DEI efforts to bridge the Jewish-black gap; the second, “Jews are non-white”, explores this re-emerging discourse in the context of DEI, and investigates its acceptance as an act of reclaiming a historically marginalized identity, and as an appropriation of racial difference; the third, “Jews are ethnically diverse” explores the manifestations of Ashkenazi-Sephardi relations in diaspora organizations, and the sidelining of race. Throughout those diversity discourses, the repercussions on the lives of workplace are critically examined.