Impostors of themselves: performing Jewishness and revitalizing Jewish life among Russian-Jewish immigrants in contemporary Germany

In the early 1990s, Germany officially opened its gates to the immigration of Russian Jews as part of the politics of repentance and restitution for the Holocaust. The immigration of Russian Jews seemed to offer an opportunity to strengthen and revitalize Jewish life in the country, even to restore it to its pre-war scale and condition. For the Russian-Jewish immigrants, that task has proven a difficult challenge. Tracking the stumbling blocks and difficulties of the project of revitalization and recreation of Jewish life, this article moves through different arenas of the immigrants' performance of Jewishness – artistic, ritual, and mundane, individual as well as communal. It examines the situation in which role-playing or ‘passing’ as Jews fails to be perceived as credible and is interpreted as ‘imposture.’