The Revival of Jewish Ethnic Consciousness – Identity Strategy in the New Educational Contexts

Abstract

The article presents the results of biographical research, the subject of which are two generations of Jewish young people (the so-called “found generation”, born 1972–1984, and the first generation of graduates of the Jewish school of the R. Lauder Foundation, born 1988–1992). It focuses on the methods of constructing the socio-cultural identity: components of the modern Jewish identity, attitudes to being a Polish citizen, and criteria of Israeli nationality. The article analyses also the role of a new identity-forming factor: the formal education in the Lauder-Morash school in Warsaw: an institution which has an ethnic character and which significantly facilitates acquiring Jewish cultural competences, but which, being multi-cultural in practice, at the same time promotes and open and two-cultural identity.