GALUT: Jewish Identity in America

Photographs by
Mark Berghash

Inspired by the need to "touch base" with himself and other American Jews, the photographer Mark Berghash in November 1994 began creating a series of portraits of his coreligionists and countrymen. Over the next three years, Berghash contacted Jews from throughout the United States, photographing and interviewing 128 Jewish women and men from all walks of life.

Ultra-religious, modern religious, secular, Zionist, cultural -- the Jews Berghash met defined themselves with dizzying complexity.

As the project unfolded, inclusiveness and the desire to celebrate diversity became major goals: "I show our community magnificently diverse in the way we look, act, play, work and practice religion. Another aim is to effect a reintroduction of one type of Jew to another, a means of encouraging unity through a life-sized view of each other."

GALUT Jewish Identity in America presents 30 portraits from Berghash's larger quest. These portraits tell us that in the galut -- the Hebrew word for diaspora, used to refer to all Jews living outside of Israel -- Jewish identity has myriad meanings. The series reminds us as well that the bonds of community are knit when we see one another truly, face to face.