Israel Has a Jewish Problem
Self-Determination as Self-Elimination
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Product details:
- Publisher OUP USA
- Date of Publication 6 December 2019
- ISBN 9780190680251
- Binding Hardback
- No. of pages250 pages
- Size 142x211x22 mm
- Weight 408 g
- Language English 18
Categories
Short description:
What does it mean to be Jewish in the modern state of Israel? Israel Has a Jewish Problem is Joyce Dalsheim's argument that self-determination becomes a form of self-elimination as it produces the ethnos for the nation, inevitably narrowing the possible forms of personal and cultural identity.
MoreLong description:
Examining the production and assimilation of Jews as "the nation" in the modern state of Israel, this book shows how identity is constrained through myriad struggles over the meanings and practices of being Jewish. Based on years of ethnographic engagement, the book employs Franz Kafka's writing as a theoretical lens in order to frame the seemingly bizarre and self-contradictory processes it describes. While other scholars have explained Jewish identity conflicts in Israel in terms of a dichotomy between the secular and the religious, this book suggests that such an analysis is inadequate. Instead, it traces these struggles to the definition of "religion" itself. It suggests that the problem lies in the way modern identity categories at once disarticulate "religion" from "nation" and at the same time conflate those categories in the figure of the Jew. The struggles over Jewishness that are part of the process of producing the ethnos for the ethno-national state call into question the notion that self-determination in the form of the nation-state is a liberating process. Modern democratic nation-states are meant to liberate citizens because they are understood to be ruled by "the people" and for "the people." But if "the people" exists for the state and its projects, then there is little liberating about the formula of sovereign citizenship. Instead, self-determination becomes a form of self-elimination, narrowing the possible forms of Jewishness. The case of Israel demonstrates that the classic "Jewish Question" in Europe has been transformed but not answered by political sovereignty.
In Dalsheim's trademark fashion, this book gets beyond facile dichotomies to juxtapose critical insights about the construction of Israel Jewish identity with ethnographic vignettes about people who, in various ways, are constrained or marginalized by that normative identity. It humanizes the people and historicizes the state, making it one of very few recent volumes to offer genuine new insight into a very old debate.
Table of Contents:
Notes on Terms
Introduction
1. Before the Law
2. On Goat Surveillance
3. The False Promises of Sovereignty
4. Self-Elimination
5. Is Israel a Christian State?
6. The Jewish Question Again
Bibliography
Notes
Index
