Page 173 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

REVIEWS 167

sympathies, and even that among theologically defined communities. Also, critical
thought is seen as emerging through a ‘dialogue with our former enemies, Western
Christians, and our present “enemies”, Palestinians’, and as ‘provid[ing] an avenue
for healing and repentance so crucial to the emergence of critical thought’ (p. 177),
rather than as a result of material contradictions. Finally, critical thought is given
an autonomous—independent, that is, of its connections with social conflicts and
collective agencies—capacity to produce material effects: for example, it ‘may
push the state of Israel to do what states are loath to do—act beyond their perceived
and often enshrined interests’ (p. 188). In other words, Ellis’s often quite radical
proposals always remain on the level of discursive transformations, moral
discourse, and theological thought. As in postmodern cultural studies, the
negotiations Ellis proposes remain within the (post)disciplinary community of
identities (in this case, liberation theology) engaged in up-dating mainstream
academic discourses: the connection to broader material interests and possibilities
is never made.
This is of crucial importance even for Ellis’s project of reviving the ‘hidden
tradition’ of dissent he finds so useful, since one aspect of the thought of, at least,
Hannah Arendt, and an earlier figure like Bernard Lazare, that has been most
systematically suppressed by the hegemony of Holocaust theology is the inquiry
into the complex and often contradictory interests which situate Jews in relation
to other classes and peoples. Ellis’s notion of ‘empowerment’, of course, does hint
at the dra- matic transformation in ‘Jewish interests’ following the Second World
War and the transformation of Jews into a predominantly middle-class population
in the US and a settler colonial population in Israel. However, Ellis never examines
this transformation too closely, or asks whether it contains any difficulties for the
confrontation of ‘empowerment’ with critical thought that he urges. Thus, rather
than developing a radical Jewish politics out of a theoretical analysis of these
conditions, he develops a critique of empowerment which ultimately addresses
some of its uses and abuses, and the discourses which protect it, rather than its
structural social and economic supports.
This also accounts for the almost complete absence, in Ellis’s argument, of the
questions of nationality and ethnicity which have been so central to Jewish
discourses since the Enlightenment. Ellis does argue that

[t]he reality is that Jews are connected together, though in ways different
than the command of state loyalty in the name of religion. That part of the
literature of dissent that argues the sense of peoplehood as false, stressing
primary loyalty to the state the Jew lives in—for example the classic Reform
dissent of Elmer Berger—is ultimately superficial as a way of opposing
Zionism.
(p. 162)

Ellis is here suggesting that the Jews constitute some kind of ‘people’, or
community, who have common interests and ends even when living within