Emmanuel Levinas and the New Science of Judaism

This article addresses Emmanuel Levinas's re‐conceptualization of Jewish identity by examining his response to a question he himself poses: “In which sense do we need a Jewish science?” First, I attend to Levinas's critique of modern science of Judaism, particularly as it was understood in the critical approaches of the nineteenth‐century school of thought, Wissenschaft des Judentums. Next, I detail Levinas's own constructive proposal that would, in his words, “enlarge the science of Judaism.” He retrieved classical textual sources that modern Judaism had neglected, while at the same time he enlarged Judaism's relevance beyond a historical community by turning to phenomenology as a rigorous science. Finally, I conclude with some reflections on the broader implications of this new science of Judaism for Jewish ethics and identity in a post‐war period.     

ON THE TENACITY OF CHRISTIAN ANTI‐JUDAISM1

Joachim of Fiore's three ages of Father, Son and Spirit demonstrated that the supersessionist gambit Christianity had introduced against Judaism is a logic any successor can employ. Modernity (cf. modo, “now”) is constituted by a relentless supersessionist logic; the modern issue is less supersessionism than a conflict of supersessionisms. Christianity has repeatedly overspiritualized God's “bodily covenant” with Israel (Wyschogrod). This distortive tendency is intensified in modernity by Christianity's anxiety that it too will appear old/“Jewish” vis‐à‐vis a new New Testament of infinite spiritual freedom (cf. Romanticism.) One corrective would be for Christianity to return to a more Jewish understanding of election.     

DELEGITIMIZING JEWS AND ISRAEL IN IRAN'S INTERNATIONAL HOLOCAUST CARTOON CONTEST

In 2006, the Iranian government-aligned newspaper Hamshahri sponsored The International Holocaust Cartoon Contest. The stated aim of the contest was to denounce “Western hypocrisy on freedom of speech,” and to challenge “Western hegemony” in relation to Holocaust knowledge. This government-backed initiative was a clear attempt to export the Iranian regime's anti-Zionist agenda. Using qualitative thematic analysis and Social Representations Theory, this article provides an in-depth qualitative analysis of the cartoons submitted to the contest in order to identify emerging social representations of Jews and Israel. Three superordinate themes are outlined: (i) “Constructing the ‘Evil Jew’ and ‘Brutal Israel’ as a Universal Threat;” (ii) “Denying the Holocaust and Affirming Palestinian Suffering;” (iii) “Constructing International Subservience to ‘Nazi-Zionist’ Ideology.” Although the organizers of the International Holocaust Cartoon Contest claimed that their aims were anti-Zionist, this article elucidates the overtly anti-Semitic character of the contest and its cartoons. It is argued that the cartoons exhibit a distorted, one-sided version of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and of Jewish history, and may therefore shape viewers' beliefs concerning Jews and Israel in fundamentally negative ways, with negative outcomes for intergroup relations and social harmony.     

“Socialism of the soul:” Holocaust in Saul Bellow’s The Victim

Saul Bellow wrote his second novel The Victim at the Partisan Review group’s instance. In the aftermath of the Holocaust the PR group advocated the assimilation of the American Jews into mainstream American life for their future safety and prosperity. Keeping in view Bellow’s creative potentials and belief in Marxism/Trotskyism, the PR members asked him to educate the Jews in this matter through his fiction. Bellow treated the subject of Jewish assimilation in an allegorical vein, projecting the idea of universal brotherhood based on common human grounds. Here, a Jew, Asa Leventhal, behaves like a Gentile and a Gentile, Kirby Allbee, like a Jew as victim and victimizer of each other. Their repeated encounters mitigate their racial apprehensions and bring the two closer to each other. Both discover one into the other as his inescapable self, bound by a common human connection. Finally they make peace with each other, projecting Bellow’s allegory of inexorable cosmic kinship—“socialism of the soul”—despite their differences of blood, race and religion.     

The “Jewish Knight” of Slobodka honor culture and the image of the body in an Ultra-Orthodox Jewish context

Scholarship on Ultra-Orthodox Jewish thought has traditionally assumed that the views of these communities derive from a struggle against the Jewish Enlightenment and Zionism, as well as against any values they identify as “modern.” This article challenges that assumption. Beginning with an examination of Ultra-Orthodox sources that present an image of the religious leader as the “ideal Jew,” the author then focuses on sources concerning the founder of the Slobodka Yeshiva in Lithuania. This rabbi intended his students to internalize “modern” norms found in the European honor culture of his time, while translating them into the language of Jewish Ultra-Orthodoxy. The author chooses to present his argument by tracing the image of the body in the Slobodka method, since it is precisely through the nexus of the body that Ultra-Orthodox Judaism was segregated from general European society and culture.     

Public Theologies of Love in the Civitas Dei and Civitas Terrena: Sexuality and the Transformation of Sydney,Australia 1960–2010

This article discusses the emergence of a public LGBTQI culture in Sydney that both challenged hetero-normative philosophies and praxes of love and sexuality, and engaged with Christian urban theologies to give voice to alternative, queer-affirming forms of eros, agape, and philia. This case study is situated in the context of the problematic relationship between Christianity and the urban throughout history; the ideal Civitas Dei negated the real Civitas Terrena, faithful Jerusalem triumphed over decadent Sodom. Public theologies, initially formulated by Christians, were hijacked to expose tensions resulting from notions of “proper” and “improper” love being mapped onto urban spaces. Churches and other “official” structures represented planning in the service of institutional religion and heterosexual married love (a Civitas Dei), and the clean, modern city as eschatological ideal (the heavenly Jerusalem). The existence of ruins and “undesirable” places, temporary heterotopias where “unnatural” acts of love and sex took place, challenged this order (a Civitas Terrena or Sodom). We argue that public theologies, mainstream and fringe, play a vital creative role in the planning, regulation, and lived experience of the modern city of Sydney.     

Outgrowing representationalism: Semantic remarks on Tracy Llanera's Richard Rorty: Outgrowing modern nihilism

This article provides a semantic reading of Tracy Llanera's brilliant book Richard Rorty: Outgrowing Modern Nihilism. Llanera is reframing the debate of how to react to the malaise of modern nihilism by proposing a change of metaphor: instead of trying to “overcome” nihilism, we should try to “outgrow” nihilism. This article invites Llanera to shed more light on her project with respect to the semantic categories of realism and representationalism, and with respect to the growing field of conceptual engineering. Can Llanera's project be fruitfully understood as engineering the concepts of “transcendence” and “redemption”? How much of the project hangs on the idea that language does not represent but is rather a tool that helps us fulfill our varying needs? How neat is the entanglement of semantic and existential meaning?     

When Joseph met Zuleika – the theo-political underpinning of Joseph in Shlonsky's early poetry and its critique of the halutz ethos

Rabbinic, kabbalist and hasidic traditions perceive Joseph as an emblem of righteousness, a guardian of the Covenant, a symbol of Sefirat Yesod and a divine representation of the earthly zaddik. In various sources, Joseph's struggle with Zuleika, Potiphar's wife, is elevated to a mythological struggle of the righteous with the forces of evil, manifested as a seductive, demonic woman. Zuleika casts her net to capture Joseph and break the divine union of God and “Knesset Israel.” Avraham Shlonsky's account of the charged relationships between Joseph and Zuleika is a metaphor and a prism for his critical view of the Zionist-halutz ideology and its concepts of body, masculinity and sexuality. Reading Shlonsky's early poetry collected in the book titled Bagalgal (In the Wheel, 1927) while applying hermeneutical methods taken from the field of Jewish thought brings the array of references and allusions to Jewish traditional texts to the surface. These references range from the Bible through the Talmud and Midrash to Hasidism. This method yields two important contributions; first, it highlights the unique contribution of Shlonsky's poetry. Second, the reconstruction of the theo-political elements of Shlonsky's early poetry deepens our understanding of the theological undercurrents of what is considered “secular Zionist culture” and demonstrates the unique role of the modern Hebrew poet as a secular prophet of the Jewish national revival.     

Joseph Heller's Jewish War Novel Catch-22

Joseph Heller's Catch-22 (1961) is considered one of the most important American novels of the twentieth century. It was a massive bestseller that sold over 10 million copies, and it introduced a new phrase into the English language for an unsolvable conundrum or paradox. Catch-22 was groundbreaking because it was the first broadly successful American novel that offered a post-modern, satirical take on the Second World War. Ostensibly the novel had nothing whatsoever Jewish about it beyond the ethnicity of its author. Instead it was about the Assyrian/Armenian protagonist, Yossarian, a USAAF bombardier in the European theatre. As I will argue, while outwardly the novel aims to represent the war and the protagonist, Yossarian, as American rather than Jewish, the work is, in fact, packed with signs that it is about a Jewish airman confronting the Holocaust. Heller's attempt to hide this was part of a tradition established by Jewish authors in the post-war years who sought to distance themselves from their ethnicity in order to speak to “universal” themes of rebellion. However, to overlook the “Jewish” semiotics of Catch-22 is to miss many of its major themes. I am thus offering a reading of the novel that will delineate what it tells us about the post-war Jewish life in America.     

THE RETURN OF THE DEAD SOULS: THE GERMAN STUDENTS' MOVEMENT AND THE GHOSTS OF AUSCHWITZ

The intellectual history determined by the 1968 students' revolt sometimes appears as a ghost scene, emerging from the strong identification of the radical students with Jews and Judaism. This essay wishes to demonstrate the inner connection between the messianic political theology of the movement and the psychological effects of this over-identification, leading to a leftist anti-Semitism. While the revolutionary students saw themselves as the true successors of Jewish revolutionary messianism, they accused the real Jew, the one who settled in Israel, of being an imperialist traitor. The essay reconstructs the metamorphosis of these ghosts in a “phenomenology of the spirits” as a “Geistergeschichte” behind the official “Geistesgeschichte.” Against this pathological path the essay presents Jürgen Habermas's reflections on the ethics of memory as its best therapy.     

Queer Jewish memory: André Aciman’s Call Me By Your Name

ABSTRACT

This essay brings together seminal texts evaluating Jewish memory to meet queer theory’s concern with futurity and temporality. Following a brief introduction on Yerushalmi, Hirsch, Friedlander, Améry, and Edelman, then allusion to the “postmemorial” works of Mendelsohn (on the Holocaust, the Odyssey, family secrets and gay identity), the television series “Transparent” (on Jewish and queer legacies of inherited memory) and others, the essay focuses on André Aciman’s 2007 novel Call Me By Your Name. Aciman is a Proust scholar and author of a number of works of nonfiction and fiction about memory. His story concerns a summer romance between two young Jewish men in Italy, an older and a younger, deploying an interior lens and with backdrops of ancient Mediterranean thought and family systems. Aciman brings Jewish identity to the paradigm of desire found in Plato’s Symposium to describe same-sex love and the imperative to patriarchal generation, art versus procreativity. He challenges the modern historicization of homosexual essentialism as articulated in the late nineteenth century. Leaving the reader with an anti-essentialist approach to time and transience, Aciman gestures towards continuity in his later novel Enigma Variations (2017, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux) even as he consistently returns to classicism, using examples such as Virgil’s Aeneid.     

THE ACHIEVEMENT OF MICHAEL WYSCHOGROD

Michael Wyschogrod is the most important Jewish thinker in the Modern Orthodox tradition since Joseph Soloveitchik. The key to Wyschogrod's significance consists in the point where he differs from Soloveitchik most dramatically. Whereas Soloveitchik held that “the religious or theological logos should not be employed as the medium of communication between two [different] faith communities”, Wyschogrod regards such communication as a Jewish imperative. The essay explores Wyschogrod's use of “the theological logos as the medium of communication” with reference to his understanding of the relation of faith and reason as illustrated by the story of Franz Redner, a Holocaust survivor.     

THE FOUR JAZZ SINGERS: MAPPING THE JEWISH ASSIMILATION NARRATIVE

The 1927 movie The Jazz Singer, starring Al Jolson—famously ad-libbing synch dialogue, infamously appearing in blackface—has spawned three remakes: a 1952 and a 1980 movie starring Danny Thomas and Neil Diamond, respectively; and a 1959 television drama starring Jerry Lewis.1 The 1927 Jazz Singer was directed by Alan Crosland, the 1952 version by Michael Curtiz, the 1959 version by Ralph Nelson, and the 1980 version by Richard Fleischer. View all notes While none of the remakes can possibly match the singular importance of the original, arguably the cinematic ur-text of the Jewish assimilation narrative (not to mention of the American sound film), taken together the four films function as a compelling “metaphor for Jewish modernization.”2 Hoberman, “Deracinatin' Rhythm,” 1, 3–31. My “ur-text” designation for the 1927 Jazz Singer is based on its unrivaled sociocultural impact rather than on its chronological priority. Several other popular works dealing with Jewish assimilation preceded the Jolson-starring film. British playwright Israel Zangwill's The Melting Pot (1908) “first articulated the ideology upon which America's grand assimilation narrative of assimilation was built” (Brook, Something Ain't Kosher Here, 22). Noted novels on the subject include Mary Antin's The Promised Land (1912), Abraham Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky (1917), Fanny Hurst's Humoresque (1919), and Anzia Yezierska's Hungry Hearts (1920). The latter two of these were adapted for the screen in the early 1920s, as, in the late 1920s, was Ann Nichol's 1924 play Abie's Irish Rose. Samuel Raphaelson's short story Day of Atonement, (1925) and his stage play The Jazz Singer (1926) provided the source material for the 1927 film version. View all notes Beyond the ethnically specific insights the films provide, their variations on the theme of an aspiring Jewish pop singer's conflict with his sternly religious father have much to say, individually and collectively, about continuity and change in American culture and society during the four films' six-decade span. Through social-historical and textual analysis, this essay further examines how identity issues raised by the four Jazz Singers continue to resonate among a Jewish people beset, perhaps more than ever, by the double bind of difference.     

“Where are the Gothic Jewish women? On the non-iconography of the Jewess in the Cantigas de Santa Maria”

No distinctive symbol, costume, or physiognomy was devised for Jewish women in high medieval art, in sharp contrast to Jewish men, who from the late eleventh century were endowed with increasingly graphic—and virulent—marks of identity. This article attempts to explain this fact by comparing the outward appearance, narrative role, and ideological import of Jewish men and women in the Escorial Cantigas de Santa Maria. It argues that the caricatured male Jew epitomizes crucial aspects of Jewish “testimony” as articulated by high medieval theologians: its rigid obsolescence, its blind literalism, the severity and intractability of its law: qualities that female flesh was considered ill-suited to convey. To recognize the inability of the Jewish woman to embody Jewish ritual, exegesis, and law is not, however, to assert that this figure has nothing to say about Judaism. The other component of the doctrine of “Jewish witness”, which served to justify the continued presence of Jews within Christendom, insisted on protecting Jews who respected Christian primacy, and held out hope that they might ultimately turn to Christ. These are notions effectively embodied in the sign of the Jewish woman, whose face and body encode receptivity to dominance and potential for change. By mapping select aspects of Jewishness onto hyper-gendered images, the illuminations of the Cantigas model the ideal—punishment and conversion—while implicitly acknowledging the imperfect real, the necessary compromises of mundane co-existence, reflecting Alfonso?el?Sabio’s meticulously modulated Jewish policy*.     

Freud's Ironically Jewish Science: Commentary on Paper by Jill Salberg

In his commentary on Jill Salberg's integrative and contextualizing article, “Hidden in Plain Sight: Freud's Jewish Identity Revisited,” Aron examines several ideas related to Freud's ironically “Jewish science.” First, this commentary takes up the question of what it has meant to speak of a “Jewish science” historically, and what it might mean today. Shockingly, Aron shows that the rise and fall of psychoanalysis has been traced to Jewish influence. He then expands on Salberg's article by reviewing the relationship between circumcision and castration and considers the impact of Freud's Jewish identity and his anxiety about anti-Semitism on the structure of the psychoanalytic method and specifically on Freud's discovery of the “royal road.”     

A CONTRAST IN EUROPEAN AND US APPROACHES TO THE JEWISH CULINARY HERITAGE: CLAUDIA RODEN'S AND JOAN NATHAN'S JEWISH COOKBOOKS

Claudia Roden's The Book of Jewish Food and Joan Nathan's Jewish Cooking in America arise from markedly different sensibilities and cultural backgrounds. Roden is from Egypt and Europe, old diasporic territories marked by tragedies and traumas for their Jewish populations. Nathan lives in the United States, “a good Diaspora” where Jews have enjoyed unprecedented freedoms and possibilities. My paper argues that these different cultural backgrounds have profoundly coloured the approach that each author takes to the Jewish culinary heritage. In making this argument, I examine and compare the books' covers, formal structure, images/photographs, content and narrative, graphic design, publishing histories, and approaches to traditional and innovative recipes.     

FORWARD,TO THE EAST: NAPTHALI HERZ IMBER'S PERCEPTION OF KABBALAH

Naphtali Herz Imber is famous as the author of the Jewish national anthem, “Hatikvah” (“The Hope”). He is also quite well known for his non-conformism, vagabond lifestyle, and excessive drinking. However, his interest in the occult and Kabbalah are much less known. Imber wrote several articles on Jewish mysticism, translated some kabbalistic texts, and published the first journal on Kabbalah—Uriel: A Monthly Magazine Devoted to Cabbalistic Science (of which only one issue appeared). Although much scholarly literature has been devoted to Imber and his famous poem, his interest in the occult and Jewish mysticism has not been investigated. This article will discuss Imber's encounter with late-nineteenth-century esotericism, specifically the doctrines of Laurence and Alice Oliphant and the Theosophical Society. It presents Imber's notions concerning Jewish mysticism and examines the impact that the Theosophical Society and the Oliphants' principles had on his perception of Kabbalah. Finally, it discusses the connection between Imber's Zionism and his interest in Kabbalah and shows that his perception of Jewish mysticism, which was greatly influenced by Western esoteric ideas, was shaped in the framework of fin de siècle Orientalism and Jewish nationalism. Imber's positive evaluation of Jewish mysticism and its nationalistic interpretation anticipates the position of later Zionist scholars of Jewish mysticism, whose vision of Kabbalah and Hasidism largely shaped the way Jewish mysticism is perceived and studied today.     

IS JOHN ZIZIOULAS AN EXISTENTIALIST IN DISGUISE? RESPONSE TO LUCIAN TURCESCU

This essay responds to Lucian Turcescu's article, “ ‘Person’ versus ‘Individual’, and Other Modern Misreadings of Gregory of Nyssa”, Modern Theology Vol. 18 no. 4 (October, 2002) in which he argues that John Zizioulas's relational ontology of trinitarian personhood is indebted more to modern personalism and existentialism than to the Cappadocian Fathers. Turcescu's focus on Gregory of Nyssa does not warrant the claim that a relational ontology of personhood cannot be found within the thought of the Cappadocian Fathers. More substantively, Turcescu never addresses Zizioulas's interpretation of the Cappadocian affirmation of the monarchy of the Father, which, I argue, is central to Zizioulas's relational ontology insofar as such an ontology attempts to express the realism of divine‐human communion.