Page 172 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

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cultural identities engaged in negotiations (over the distribution of available
institutional places). In at least one regard, Marc Ellis’s Beyond Innocence and
Redemption: Confronting the Holocaust and Israeli Power is a very different kind
of book from both Boyarin’s and Lerner’s. It is much more unequivocal in
advocating a progressive political position for Jews, eschewing the historical
relativism, theoretical eclecticism and questionable moral bookkeeping so
prominent in Lerner’s and Boyarin’s arguments. Ellis’s book, which develops in
substantial ways arguments he had already outlined in Toward a Jewish Liberation
Theology, is especially refreshing insofar as in it Ellis responds to the Palestinian
intifada by radicalizing his earlier positions, rather than by expressing
‘discomfort’. Ellis’s book accomplishes three things. First, it offers a sustained
critique of what Ellis calls ‘Holocaust theology’, which is predicated upon the
epochal significance of the Holocaust and the foundation of the state of Israel for
contemporary Jewish life and thought. As Ellis explains, Holocaust theology, as
developed by figures such as Rabbi Irving Greenberg, Emil Fackenheim, and Elie
Wiesel, articulates a seamless and essentialist historical narrative linking the
Holocaust (the Jews as powerless victim—the ‘innocence’ of Ellis’s title) and the
formation of the Jewish state (reflecting the empowerment, or ‘redemption’ of
Jews) in a quasi-teleological manner so as to legitimate the increasingly (neo)
conservative and pragmatist accommodation to existing power relations on the part
of representatives of the Jewish community. Second, it draws upon Christian
liberation theology’s own response to the Holocaust, which has argued that the
only viable place for Christians in the post-Holocaust era is with the victims of
Auschwitz. Ellis advances a persuasive argument that in the era of Jewish
empowerment, the place for Jews is with the victims of that empowerment (the
Palestinians). Third, Ellis identifies a powerful and yet suppressed tradition of
Jewish dissent (both from dominant trends within Judaism and within the culture
as a whole), represented by figures such as Martin Buber and Hannah Arendt, and
advocates the recovery and resumption of this position (which Ellis, following
Arendt, terms the ‘conscious pariah’) as a model for a progressive Jewish politics
today.
However, while Ellis, unlike Lerner and Boyarin, is willing to state
unequivocally that ‘[W]hat Jews have done to the Palestinians since the
establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 is wrong’ and that ‘[i]t is only in the
confrontation with state power in Israel that Jews can move beyond being victim
or oppressor’ (p. xv), he is still careful to qualify these remarks with the assertion
that the ‘task of Jewish theology is to establish a new relationship to the State of
Israel rather than to challenge its legitimacy’ (p. xv). The contradiction inherent
in a ‘confrontation with state power’ that defers from ‘challenging its legitimacy’
follows from the paucity, in Ellis’s argument, of any materialist theorization of the
conditions of possibility of transformation, either in Israel or among American
Jews. So, his call for introducing a critical ‘boundary position’ (p. 174) into
contemporary discursive and political exchanges between peoples and between the
religious and the secular, seems restricted to the end of creating a greater range of