Page 171 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

REVIEWS 165

essentialized identities of Jew and Palestinian; however, in doing so, he also seeks
to escape from the antagonistic site altogether, like Lerner taking refuge in
historical relativism (what the Jews did in Palestine was no different from the
general European project of nation formation) and moral balancing (insofar as a
Palestinian critic like Edward Said is ‘caught up in the rhetoric of “organic
nationhood”,’ he is himself reproducing the Eurocentric ideology ‘that he would
certainly abhor in Zionist, let alone direct European great power imperialist,
contexts’ (p. 119)). Thus, Palestinian and Israeli claims can be placed, at least from
an overarching ‘historical’ standpoint, in a relation of moral equivalence, and the
critic can register his judgement and stake out a ‘negotiating’ position without
being obliged to explicitly take sides in the struggles actually being waged now.
This project of multiplying cultural identities so that historical antagonisms can
be dispersed and even dissipated conforms to Boyarin’s understanding of
contemporary global politics. He argues that Jews can be seen as paradigmatic of
the general diasporic condition of postmodernity. This new role for Jews within
the global division of labor, though, is predicated upon the separation of ‘cultural
identities’ from economic processes which bring various ‘others’ into
interdependent and unequal relations with one another. The ‘equitable distribution
of access to discourse’ (p. 115), or ‘cultural autonomy’, in this case, presupposes
economic heteronomy. Contrary to Boyarin’s assertions, then, the kind of
‘common purpose’ he suggests for Jews does strikingly resemble the role of
‘cultural and economic broker’ (p. 129) (middleman) that both Lerner and Boyarin
identify as historically linked to the oppression of Jews. In other words, Boyarin’s
proposals offer an identity for Jews insofar as they occupy that site which can
contribute to the blunting of antagonisms and the imaginary resolution of social
contradictions. Since this role of mediating and containing global contradictions
is that adopted by postmodern cultural studies (by displacing economic
contradictions on to negotiations between experientially differentiated cultural
identities), Boyarin’s formulation of the Jews as brokers among brokers as their
‘ticket of entrance’ into these practices is well founded. This role as ‘broker’,
moreover, is likely to become more attractive to those determining the structure
of Jewish discourse, especially if, as appears likely, we are witnessing a gradual
‘de-Zionization’ of Israel and a de-essentialization of Jewish discourse in general.
The function of advocate for this role is going to be especially attractive to those
academic intellectual Jews situated in relation to ‘advanced’ theoretical discourses
—who can enable other Jews to ‘catch up’ to the multiculturalization of the
mainstream—and who are themselves compelled to resituate themselves in
relation to ‘theory’ in the Humanities and Social Sciences. However, this simply
means that the positions of Jews will once again be determined by the competition
between the outmoded and emergent sections of the middle class, and the
antagonisms between the middle and working classes (management and labor).
Lerner’s and Boyarin’s responses to the crisis in the Jewish mainstream (a
refraction of the crisis of welfare state liberalism) involve attempts to occupy
spaces within the emergent (post) liberal pluralized mainstream constituted by