"The Meshugene Effect" is a multimedia research-creation project which explores personal narratives of people, who embark on a pursuit of Jewish identity following a hunch - a feeling, an intuition, an irrational conviction about their Jewish descent. Combining autoethnography with qualitative analysis of in-depth interviews and ethnographic observation, the project tries to make sense of the hunch experienced as a haunting, as a repressed memory or as a precognitive affect. The self-narratives, which – remarkably – belong primarily to women, speak to the experience of feeling oneself to be Jewish despite having been raised with no knowledge of Jewish ancestry. Among the interviewees are adults, who have since discovered or been able to prove that they do in fact have Jewish lineage, as well as those who have not been able to find evidence of their Jewish roots. The project offers an intimate look into some of the most fundamental cultural and discursive contingencies surrounding religion, grief, gender, and authenticity. Set against the backdrop of a troubled Polish-Jewish past and a new curious Polish-Jewish present, the narratives resonate across the Jewish world and contribute unique questions to the global Jewish identity debate. 

The title of the project contains a Yiddish word that translates to the no doubt fraught English word “crazy”. However, “meshugene” is used here as a direct quote and in a non-stigmatizing way within a contextualized frame of reference.