Page 169 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

REVIEWS 163

than vigilante groups defending Jewish property against the most dispossessed
elements of the black proletariat.
In Lerner’s proposal for a Jewish identity politics, then, the petit-bourgeois
character of identity politics in general emerges in particularly sharp relief. This
is because, with regard to the identity politics articulated by feminists and
representatives of people of color, there is at least a substantial working class (those
who are oppressed within the economic) that one can presuppose as a ‘background’
to one’s cultural negotiations. This is impossible for a Jewish identity politics, since
no significant Jewish working class exists outside of the state of Israel (whose
struggles against Israeli and international capitalist exploitation would,
significantly, have to take on a completely different form from that of the assertion
of a Jewish identity, since it would involve a radical split within the Jewish state).
This is why Lerner, in Tikkun, argues for a politics of meaning that transcends
classes, that is, that can be based upon a moral critique of contemporary American
society. In other words, postmodern civil society cannot exclude the Jews—it has
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no basis for denying the legitimacy of Jewish identity as a negotiating position on
the postmodern exchange—but in including them, it necessarily exposes itself as
a fundamentally petit-bourgeois politics, interested in the terms of inheritance of
the cultural capital ‘freed’ by the cultural reorganizations of the post-1960s period
and therefore directly interested in suppressing a global class theoretics.
Jonathan Boyarin, in his Storm from Paradise: The Politics of Jewish
Memory, sues for entrance not, as Lerner does (by way of a cultural essentialism),
into activist politics and multiculturalism; rather, Boyarin advances a Jewish ‘post’
identity (i.e., discursively constructed, and therefore fluid and unstable) more
appropriate for the academic regime of postmodern theory. Boyarin, an
ethnographer, argues for the significance of the intersection of ‘Jewish
practices’ (p. xi) and postmodernism and cultural studies. On the one hand, Boyarin
argues against the ‘exclusion’ of Jewish voices from these discourses:

[M]ost generally, what I find ‘unacceptable’ in cultural studies is the
suppression of an autonomous Jewish voice, no matter where that
suppression may come from. That suppression should be a concern not only
to Jews, for it leaves larger blind spots—some of which I hope to expose in
these pages—in the articulation of theory and history, thus pointing as well
to some unexpected ‘possibilities of saying and doing otherwise’.
(p. xix)

Thus, both Jews and cultural studies have an interest in extending the chain of
‘inclusion’ to Jews. This further requires that Boyarin assert his ‘living Jewish
voice’ against the allegorization and abstraction of ‘the Jew’ in postmodern
theoretical writing, as well as maintain the properly postmodern character of his
own writing: ‘to help guard me against an objectivized arrogation of the female or
postcolonial other in my theory building’ (p. xiv). Boyarin, then, identifies his
writing as an amalgam of ‘theory’ and ‘experience’: ‘[A]s in much feminist