Wrestling with Labour: Community labour practices in Jewish Melbourne

Abstract

Jewish culture is significantly defined by a textual tradition of reading and communal debate. At the same time, Jewish communities devote great attention to questions of how to actively practice their identity beyond literary engagement. The subsequent questions around what it means to 'do Jewishly' are answered in the various forms of labour undertaken in community organisations. This ethnography considers the professional and volunteer practices that take place in Melbourne's Jewish communities to understand the social and cultural meaning of this labour. The category of 'labour' is important in Jewish social imaginaries, and by tracing this local meaning in regular community activities the social function of labour can be more readily understood. Within this framework, labour functions as a praxis of situated social-symbolic meaning that reproduces a shared intersubjective setting. Such a symbolic account of Jewish labour practices in Melbourne brings to the foreground the processes of pragmatic subject formation which are entailed in these activities. Through these daily forms of community participation, Jewish labourers produce the community's institutional landscape and generatively refine what 'doing Jewish subjectivity' should practically mean in contemporary Melbourne, Australia. I advance this account of social praxis and labour by considering three examples of work that are central to the communal institutions of Melbourne's Jewish community. These are the ritual, pedagogical, and administrative labour undertaken by 'the Musician', 'the Teacher', and 'the Community Organiser' respectively. By classifying 'genres' of labour in this manner, common social functions of community labour practices are clear. This classification then enables my examination of what distinguishes these labour forms from one another, and as distinctly Jewish forms of work. However, when these 'genres' are considered alongside one another, the common generative functions of 'doing Jewishly' becomes clear.