This post is part of Marc H. Ellis’s “Exile and the Prophetic” feature for Mondoweiss. To read the entire series visit the archive page.
Speaking of Judith Butler – and a few days ago Shulamith Firestone – imagine two more similar yet different shooting stars of Jewish thought and action? Like Firestone, Butler is insistent, relentless. Unlike Firestone, Butler hasn’t flamed out.
Butler has been around for years and is growing stronger. After carving out a place in the feminist pantheon, Butler has written a masterpiece on Jewishness and Zionism that marks the end of the Jewish ethical tradition. Through her thought, it begins again.
I just finished her masterpiece, Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism. I’m not writing a book review here and, to be honest, her philosophical expertise and elucidations are way above my intellectual pay grade. Some of the thinkers Butler deals with, especially Martin Buber, Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin, I have been thinking about for years. Nonetheless, I learned a lot from her reflections.
Butler is a stratospheric thinker, a flowering of the Jewish tradition at the end of Jewish history. Isn’t it strange that at the end, the Jewish prophetic – which for years I thought would end – is exploding?
The prophetic always comes too late. By the time the prophets arrive, time is up. Even as the prophets call for repentance – ‘There is still time!’ – we know the people Israel are fated. The die has been cast.
Nonetheless, the prophet arrives right on time. When there was a chance for repentance, the people Israel and the world weren’t ready. Now the situation is beyond dire. More and more people are able to hear the prophetic word.
Reading Butler as President Obama toured Israel – and Palestine – is the ultimate disconnect. The President was happy as a lark to be in the (un)Holy Land. Butler is furious.
Butler spends her time musing on what Jewish life has become – aggressive, unfeeling, violent, crass, bellicose and expansionistic. Genocidal? She longs for a Jewishness without state violence. Thus as President Obama cuddles up to the worse aspects of contemporary Jewish life as a norm to be emulated – as he welcomes the Golden Age of Constantinian Judaism with a willing heart (all the while counseling Israeli youth to walk in borrowed and patronized Palestinian shoes) – Butler says ‘no.’
For Butler, Zionism isn’t Jewishness or if it has become so, it’s past time for Jews and Zionism to part ways. Unlike President Obama’s embrace of Zionism at its core by visiting Theodor Herzl’s gravesite and his acknowledgement of the Jewish claim to the land by viewing the Dead Sea Scrolls (that is, in their current expropriated Israeli museum without mentioning they were originally housed in Palestinian East Jerusalem) – Butler doesn’t go anywhere near either sensibility.
For Butler, distance from defined identities is part of being Jewish. Butler’s Jewishness is found in interaction with others, without a predefined destination or designated home. Butler is Diaspora all the way. 24/7.
On Israel’s violence, Butler’s language is strong. The Narrative washing that President Obama participated in, and which set back the gains of Jews of Conscience a decade or more, is absent from Butler. 1948 and the ongoing Nakba reverberate through her pages. Just when you think she’s had her say on the subject, she returns to the theme again.
If you have any doubt about the survival of the Progressive Jewish voice on Israel/Palestine, Butler seals its fate. At the end of Jewish history as we have known and inherited it – which is really the theme of Butler’s book – the Progressive Jewish center doesn’t hold. In the first pages of Parting Ways, you know that the self-involved narrative of Jewish pain and need for security, the patronizing attitude toward the ‘Arab world’ and Palestinians in particular – the essence of the Tikkun narrative – has lost its foundation.
It is difficult to exaggerate the difference between, on the one hand, Judith Butler and, on the other, Peace Now, Amos Oz and Michael Lerner.
Has anyone thought through what this means for Israel and Jewish life in general – indeed for the world – that the Progressive Jewish voice on Israel and other social and political issues involving the broader society – has lost its moorings? To my mind, the loss is incalculable.
I mourn this loss on a variety of levels. More, we should ask who is responsible. Simply put, when Israel conquered and occupied Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza, Progressive Jewishness was over. As with the Two-State solution, which was really over by the mid-1970s if not before, it has taken decades for us to come to grips with this loss. Butler drives the final nail in the Progressive Jewish coffin.
There will be no resurrection.
Where does Butler leave us? This is my quibble with her book. If indeed we do part ways with Zionism and Israel as a Jewish state and, more, with any definable ‘essential’ identity as Jewish, exile and the prophetic are endangered. Butler is quite specific on the topic of exile, at least as specific as world class philosophers can be and still be respected. For Butler, it seems, exile is a trope that keeps Jews hungering for an identity that is specific, special and privileged. It leads us into the wrong places like Zionism, Israel and state violence.
Though Butler is light on specific feminist references in Parting Ways, exile and the wholeness hunger that comes from it falls on the patriarchal side of her feminist equation. The prophet as the lone (male) wolf no doubt falls there, too. Butler wants to diminish Jewish aloneness in the world and specifically the part Jews play in that aloneness. In Butler’s view, the Jewish sense of isolation led to Zionism, the state of Israel, the dispossession of Palestinians and the Sparta-like stance that Jewish leadership in Israel and America savors.
Yet in a strange way, Butler and Jews of Conscience in general are dependent on the very things we criticize. Butler hasn’t – nor have we – experienced Jewishness without this sense of isolation, without the Holocaust and Israel looming large, without a defined sense of Jewish identity, no matter how truncated, violent and privileged it has become. We don’t know what it means to be Jewish without them.
If truth be told, it is this very world that Butler criticizes which makes her voice so important, consistent and electrifying. Her Diaspora integrative option is intriguing precisely because it comes up against the Jewish (Zionist, state) Wall of Separation. Is Judith Butler possible without Israel as a Jewish state? Would others be interested in Judith Butler on Jewishness if the Holocaust and Israel were not so defining? Would Judith Butler be interested in Judith Butler on Jewishness if her understandings of Jewish life came to pass?
From my perspective, there is no way to understand Judith Butler on Jewishness without a sense that Jewishness is distinctive and somehow privileged in her life. And that as a woman and a Jew, she experiences exile in a specific Jewish way.
If I might venture further into controversial waters, there is no way to understand Judith Butler on feminism without a sense that Jewishness is distinctive and somehow privileged in her life.
Without exile and the prophetic there is no way to understand Judith Butler. She wouldn’t make sense without either, even to herself.
Nonetheless, Butler’s vision of Jewishness without state violence is haunting. Once it was taken for granted. Today, it’s almost inconceivable.
An example of Zionism as practiced in France.
French railway company SNCF accused of banning black and Asian employees during visit of Israeli President Shimon Peres
Alistair Dawber
Tuesday 16 April 2013
A race row has broken out in France over claims that the state railway company, SNCF, made effort to ensure that Israeli President Shimon Peres did not meet black or Asian employees in case they were Muslims.
Mr Peres visited Paris last month for a meeting with his French counterpart Francois Hollande. The SUD-Rail union claims that SNCF’s baggage handling subsidiary, Itiremia, had insisted – on the grounds of security – that only certain members of staff met Mr Peres as he arrived at Paris’s Gard du Nord station from Brussels.
SNCF has denied the claims and has insisted that the Israeli embassy in the French capital did not ask for assistance.
The company’s management had insisted that, “no Muslim must greet the Israeli head of state,” the union has claimed. The claims have outraged SNCF staff.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/french-railway-company-sncf-accused-of-banning-black-and-asian-employees-during-visit-of-israeli-president-shimon-peres-8575245.html
by Marc H. Ellis on April 16, 2013 1
“Speaking of Judith Butler ”
judith butler wrote this one
The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.
well what can i say-myself being one of limited stuff upstairs can barely grasp what this women is trying to say but since i like to use altered templates to paint new canvases lets give this one a go
The move from a (personal belief) account in which (relegion) is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of (priesthood power) in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.
power corrupts the very system and brings about a new painted canvas using altered templates that give birth to a higher power so power is neccesary as a catalyst and only a means to an end as real power as that which exists in personal belief and derived from belief in G-d endures
survival comes first and relegion provides the will and intent
(my theory of altered templates has yet to be published)
right now in israel and in judaism we are in the grip of an altered template and rebirth is imminent
and that judith butler is a good thing-i wish you well with your “parting of ways”
there are 3 sides to a coin -heads tails and edge.the edge the hand of G-d both seen and unseen
Was there really a Jewish ethical tradition rather than contributions by Jeeish people to the common ethical tradition? Were there – are there – important moral principles that non-Jewish thinkers tend to reject?
Just like we cannot really understand how an African-American feels racism in multiple ways, an outsider can’t experience the intense “aloneness” of the Jew post-Holocaust, in particular. As far as the state of Israel experience, we strongly part company; ditto for the prophetic stuff. You two are philosophers, not prophets-you know what the Talmud says about people who think they’re prophets after prophecy was long over, in the early Second Temple period. Dr. Ellis, I feel all of you are missing the boat. The Jewish people will surive; numerically, who knows? The state of Israel is a stage in our lives; the ultimate comes with the (classical Jewish belief) redemption. This chaotic world, of which Israel is but a small bit part, cannot continue indefinitely. Really, why don’t you two ever really delve into classic Jewish texts; who knows, you might just get some inspiration. Isn’t that what kind of happened to Franz Rosenzweig; he became an Orthodox Jew late in life. It could be a lot worse than that.
RE: “By the time the prophets arrive, time is up. Even as the prophets call for repentance – ‘There is still time!’ – we know the people Israel are fated. The die has been cast.” ~ Marc Ellis
MY SUSPICION: “Dead
mannation-state (as currently configured) walking!”SOURCE – http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112818/trivia?tab=qt&ref_=tt_trv_qu