Paper short abstract:

This paper explores what learning about one's Jewish descent by young people in their teenage years does to their self-perception and the way they relate to others, and examines how acquiring such knowledge and discovering Jewishness is negotiated in post-socialist Slovakia.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores how young Jews, growing up after the Velvet Revolution in 1989, discovered their Jewish descent only during their teenage-years and, making sense of their 'non-Jewish' upbringing, perceive and negotiate their Jewishness in the light of their familial memories and experiences of the Holocaust, persecutions of the secularising Socialist regime, and the choices their grand/parents made to hide their Jewishness.

Many young Slovak Jews learned about their Jewishness only later in life when outer triggers - whether a classmate or history lessons about the Holocaust - raised questions that young people brought home where they were confronted with surprising information. Based on fieldwork in Bratislava, this paper examines what learning about one's Jewishness does to young people's self-perception and ways they relate to others, while demonstrating how acquiring such knowledge shapes their perceptions of not only the present, but also the past and the imagined future.

Following the process of young Jews' 'self-making', contrasting their familial upbringing, this paper shows that this knowledge is not merely informative but in its essence also 'constitutive', because of its kinship but also political character. Highlighting the relation between knowledge, belonging, personhood and visibility, this paper demonstrates how young people handle such powerful information and make sense of the rupture it creates, and how it influences their lives and relationships in light of their perceptions of their ancestor's memories and experiences affecting their later decisions and choices. Thus shedding light on how kinship and politics are intertwined.