Seth D. Kunin, Vice Chancellor and Head of Faculty for Britain's Durham University, will speak on his new book, Juggling Identities: Identity and Authenticity Among the Crypto-Jews in the New Mexico History Museum Auditorium. For the past 13 years, Dr. Kunin has done ethnographic research among the crypto-Jews of New Mexico. He has published a number of books on aspects of biblical and Jewish culture from an anthropological and structuralist perspective and has written about the development of theories of religion in such works as Themes and Issues in Judaism and Religion: The Modern Theories.
Critiquing scholars who challenge the authenticity of these individuals, Seth D. Kunin builds a solid link between the crypto-Jews of New Mexico and their Spanish ancestors, offering the strongest evidence yet of their ethnic and religious origins.
Kunin adopts a unique approach to the lives of modern crypto-Jews, concentrating primarily on their understanding of Jewish tradition and the meaning they ascribe to ritual. He illuminates the complexity of this community, in which individuals and groups perform the same practice in diverse ways. Kunin supplements his ethnographic research with broader theories concerning the nature of identity and memory, which is especially applicable to crypto-Jews, whose culture resides mainly in memory. Kunin's work has wider implications, not only for other forms of crypto-Judaism (such as those found in the former Soviet Union) but also for the study of Judaism's fluid nature, which helps adherents adapt to new circumstance and knowledge. Finally, Kunin compares crypto-Judaism's intricate ancestry with that of other ethnic communities living in the United States.
