Ilinka, Russia, 1990

Showada, Ethiopia, 1983

Yemen, 1983

Haidan, Yemen, 1983

Rehovot, Israel, 1993

Belmonte, Portugal, 1989

Salonika, Greece, 1991

Calcutta, India, 1986

Mea Sharim, Jerusalem, 1980

Kirovka, Azerbaijan, 1990

Bukhara, Uzbekistan, USSR, 1988

Birobidzhan, USSR, 1989

Krasnaia Sloboda, Azebaijan, 1990

Barbershop, Leninabad, Tajikistan, 1989

Manaus, Brazil, 1991

Los Angeles, USA, 1994

Château Raba, Bordeaux, France

Capitolium, Rome, Italy, 1992

Ellis Island, New York, USA, 1996

Billings, Montana, USA, 1994

Johannesburg, South Africa, 2001

China, 1999

Hong Kong, China, 1998

Diaspora: Homelands in Exile | 1978 - 2003

From Rome to New York, India to Yemen, Buenos Aires to Bukhara, Morocco to Ethiopia, Krakow to Jerusalem, Diaspora, Homelands in Exile is a chronicle of the Jewish Diaspora at the end of the twentieth century, a portrait woven over 25 years and in more than 40 countries.

Everywhere I went, I marveled at the prodigious memory of Jews. Many of the communities I visited were barely surviving – almost fossils, yet still living – and the remnant that did survive brought to light countless forms of acculturation. Each community transformed and was simultaneously transformed by the larger society in which it lived. How is it possible to take on so many identities, adopt so many roles, become others, and yet remain oneself?

When I started out, my project was almost ethnographic in nature, if not in intent. But the more I progressed, the more I was forced to abandon the myth of “one people.” I was searching for what I believed in, continuity. I found only discontinuity. Looking for oneness, I only found disparity and otherness. And the more Jews I met, the less I understood what a Jew looks like.

I felt I traveled not only across the globe but also through the entire spectrum of time, from antique to post-modern, passing through tribal, medieval and industrial, exploring how Jews survived with a portable identity.

Initially intending to record vanishing Jewish communities before they disappeared, the project became a probing pursuit of the multiplicity of dissonant identities of individual Jews and of the Jewish people among the nations.