A Diaspora Journal
by Joshua Ellison · 11/01/06
EVERY ISSUE of Habitus will focus on a new city. Urban spaces are our laboratories because they are always works-in-progress, always partially formed. For Jews, especially, cities have been essential venues for expressing our cultural life. As the Hungarian author George Konrád observes in this volume, cities – rather than states or nations – have usually been the most natural home for Jews. Cities are porous, built to absorb and to assimilate. They are, almost by definition, pluralistic and polyglot. Cities are the products of improvisation and imagination; they are places where people go to break with tradition and invent themselves in the present and future tenses.
Jews–like cities–have always aroused the anxieties of those who cling to simple allegiances and identities. In many eras and places, Jews have played an important role in shaping the cosmopolitan ethic. Habitus hopes to extend that tradition.
Our first location is Budapest. Some of these writers now live in other places, some came to the city from somewhere else; for others it is the only place they have ever called home. Each contributor relates to it with a mix of intimacy and autonomy–constantly reevaluating his or her relationship to a place that is elusive and multifaceted.
Our hope is that readers will see something familiar in these pages, something that speaks to places and feelings they have known. Habitus is not just about cataloging distinctions. It’s a way of using the whole world as raw material for creating a more complete picture of ourselves.
Joshua Ellison
Jerusalem, 2006
