Semites: Race, Religion, Literature

Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 2016

This paper explores the relevance of the Jewish Question in the Twenty-First Century. The Jewish Question, what political space exists for the Jews in the modern world, was seemingly answered by two historic events in 1948. The first of these was the creation of the State of Israel on May 14, 1948. The second was the adoption by the United Nations General Assembly on December 10, 1948 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The first of these meant that Jews could live as Jews in their own state as a majority, in control of their own political destiny. The second of these paved the way for the age of minority rights that developed in the 1960s. This development meant that Jews could live a life as Jews in the Diaspora, thereby significantly altering the terms under which assimilation could be understood. Assimilation became integration. Consequently, it would appear that the Jewish Question has been answered and is no longer of significance in contemporary Jewish thought. However, if that is the case, why is it that the Jewish Question is serving a central role in important contemporary Jewish novels? The Question has served as a key plot element in the novels of two award-winning Jewish novelists, Howard Jacobson and Michael Chabon. Why is the Jewish Question featuring so strongly in the works of leading Jewish authors in the Twenty-First Century? Because it has not been answered. Using a combination of Jewish literature and a political sociological framing of contemporary debates regarding Diaspora/Israel relations, this paper explores how the Jewish Question was not answered, and suggests that part of the reason why the Question has not been answered is because we were never clear about what the Question was in the first place.

Comparative Literaure

The Journal of Religion, 2018

Common Knowledge, 2012

mounted Zionist arguments of a sort that we now regard as poststructuralist or postmodern. 1 Connections between postmodern thinkers and various Jewish sources are by now well established. In his book Wittgenstein and Judaism, for example, Ranjit Chatterjee describes the Jewish background of Ludwig Wittgenstein, his ties to the characteristic hermeneutics of Judaism, his interest in Jewish texts, and his own prophetic experiences. 2 In particular, Chatterjee argues that the Jewish origin of Wittgenstein's thought left its mark on the concluding sentence of the Tractatus, "whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." 3 Chatterjee understands this idea to be a defining feature also of the Philosophical Investigations (thus Chatterjee dismisses the conventional notion of a gap between Wittgenstein's early and later thinking). 4 His Jewishness is said to be evident as well in his opposition to Augustine in particular and the dualist Christian narrative in general-and Chatterjee interprets Wittgenstein's writings overall as waging an unyielding war, in the spirit of Maimonides, against idolatry. 5 The writings of Jacques Derrida are treated in a similar manner by John D. Caputo, Harold 1. This article relies in part on Avinoam Rosenak, "Milhamah ve-shalom be-hagut yehudit modernit nokhah 'ha-aheir' " ("War and Peace in Modern Jewish Thought Regarding 'the Other' "), Da'at 62 (2007): 99-125. Here I focus on the postmodern context of the question, which is not expressly treated in my article in Da'at. Except as otherwise noted, translations here of quotations from Hebrew sources are by Joel Linsider.

2016

"Modernity," Charles Baudelaire wrote in 1859, "is the transitory, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable." 1 As one side of art, modernity is also one side of history, and thus one side of Jewish history. In all these cases, modernity connotes a state of mind more than it indicates a historical period or structural condition. As a catalyst for latenineteenth-century critical thinking, modernity takes up the promises, limitations, and failures of the Enlightenment as they reconstitute themselves in a postrevolutionary, bourgeois age. Thinking about modernity involves a complex relation to time, in which the past appears as both distant and relevant, the future at once promising and vague. Makers of Jewish Modernity offers original portraits of thinkers, writers, artists, and leaders who founded, formed, and transformed the twentieth century and laid down intellectual, cultural, and political foundations for the world ahead of us. These forty-three portraits understand intellectual and political biographies in the context of the life-worlds of their protagonists-in other words, in terms of the mutualities of texts and contexts, space and time, thought and action, inheritance and transformation. Modern Jewish experience forms a dimension of our post-Enlightenment world. The term "Judaism" is, in English, immediately problematic as a noun alongside of which "Jewish" is the adjective. "Judaism" often connotes religion and religious texts and laws rather than a more fluid category of general cultural and intellectual inheritance. A bagel, as the saying goes, is not the Talmud. The more general category of Jewish culture in relation to the world at large is often referred to by the awkward word "Jewishness." There is no simple replacement for the powerful and polysemic German term Judentum, which strikes the tone and meaning we would engage here. Moreover, it should escape no one that the word Judentum, and its implicit claim of a strong religious as well as secular cultural world, came from the nation that subsequently sought to destroy precisely the powerful hybrid that it had nurtured. Introduction t h i n k i n g j e w i s h m o d e r n i t y