Page 165 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

The Jewish Question and the limits of (post)modern inclusionism
Adam Katz
■ Ammiel Alcalay, After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993) 288pp. ISBN 0-8166-2154-1,
$16.95 Pbk■ Jonathan Boyarin, Storm from Paradise: The Politics of Jewish
Memory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992) 192pp. ISBN
0-8166-2094-4, $14.95 Pbk ■ Marc H.Ellis, Beyond Innocence and Redemption:
Confronting the Holocaust and Israeli Power (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1990)
214pp. ISBN 0-06-062215-6, $21.95 Hbk ■ Michael Learner, The Socialism of
Fools: Anti-Semitism on the Left (Oakland: Tikkun Books, 1992) 147pp. ISBN
0-935933-05-0, $10.00 Hbk
Just as Marx’s ‘On the Jewish Question’ addressed the question of Jewish demands
for civil rights in terms of the contradictions of political emancipation within
bourgeois civil society in order to place the question of social emancipation on the
agenda, it is similarly necessary today to address the Jewish demand for entrance
into the new (post)liberal middle-class political practices of identity politics, post-
modernism and cultural studies as a way of advancing a critique of the present-
day status of civil society and social emancipation. Postmodern cultural theory
invariably formulates the question of civil society in terms of a conflict between a
monolithic technocratic mass-mediated public sphere and a series of marginalized
identities or counter-publics struggling to pluralize the public sphere and transform
it into a site where differences can be articulated and negotiated (see Fraser, 1990).
However, this blocks the needed intervention into the global reconstruction of
capitalist hegemony, which is currently enabled by precisely such a pluralization
of the mainstream and the opening up of new sub-discourses and identities. That
is, the ruling class now allows for a degree of cultural autonomy which stands in
direct proportion to the amount of economic autonomy it expropriates from
exploited classes. This in turn compels the middle class or new petit-bourgeoisie
to compete for the available positions in this new mode of social reproduction.
When Michael Lerner, in his The Socialism of Fools: Anti-Semitism on the
Left, argues that Jews have been prominent in demanding that ‘cultural and
intellectual institutions open their doors to reflect the diversity of intellectual and
cultural traditions that had previously been ignored’ (p. 122), but have ‘rarely
demanded that Jewish culture and Jewish history be included in the newly
emerging diversity’ (p. 122), he is pointing to a contradiction in liberal and left
Jewish practices between a ‘modern’ support for universalist goals (anti-racism,
intellectual choice, etc.) and the modes of particularism through which such
demands are currently articulated and which depend upon a rejection of this
modern modality. He is, that is, advancing a demand for the ‘emancipation’ of
Jewish intellectuals and progressives from outmoded liberal/modern positions
which hinder their ability to participate in the new postmodern power/knowledge
regime of the West. It is precisely the contradictory character of such a demand
for inclusion which can allow for a critique of the politics of inclusion itself.