Page 174 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

168 CULTURAL STUDIES

different national states. However, he doesn’t get beyond a theological answer to
this question, that draws upon the ‘hidden tradition’ to argue for a concept of Jewish
particularity as witness in history. But this conclusion neglects the need to address
one of the central supports of Holocaust theology and the politics it represents: the
obsessive concern with assimilation (as a question of ‘survival’—i.e., the
protection of concrete material interests), expressed, in both Israel and the US, by
the equally obsessive fixation upon demographics as the definitive sign of the
Jewish people’s well-being and future prospects. (In Israel, the obsession is with
Arab birth rates; in the US, with ‘intermarriage’ rates). This obsession, I would
argue, represents what Lenin (1974) called the ‘reverential awe of the rear aspect’
of Jewry, which ‘clamors against assimilation’ (p. 110) and produces the insertion
of Jews into the middle-class/caste positions described by Lerner: that is, by
protecting their own specificity, Jews simultaneously are compelled to protect the
entire regime of specificity (private property) from irreconcilable conflicts and
contradictions.
Ammiel Alcalay’s After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture explicitly
situates the ‘Jewish Question’ within the framework of (post)colonial theory,
extending Edward Said’s critique of Orientalism, and of Zionism as a particularly
urgent instance of ‘practical Orientalism’, though an inquiry into the cultural
articulations produced by the confrontation between Orientalism and its others.
Alcalay, by advancing a critique of the Orientalism of dominant (Western) Jewish
discourses, places on the agenda the question of racism practiced by Ashkenazi
Jews against Middle Eastern Jews, which Lerner, Boyarin and Ellis completely
neglect. This question problematizes the entire attempt at arriving at even a de-
stabilized Jewish identity, because it foregrounds the contradictions between what
hegemonic discourses in both Israel and the US consider ‘Jewish identity’ and the
position of those Israeli Jews who have historically been oppressed with the aid of
precisely that identity (which requires, among other things, that they no longer see
themselves as ‘Arab’, i.e., as intimately connected to the cultures they have
participated in for the past millennium (p. 51)).
Alcalay addresses the conditions of possibility of a post-Zionist Israeli culture
in relation, in particular, to the cultural status of Israel’s ‘Arab Jews’ and the
profound links between Middle Eastern Arab and Jewish cultures. He argues that
a description and recovery of the cultural linkages, that, in Arabic culture, have
made ‘Jew’ and ‘Arab’ non-exclusive terms, is a useful way of combating what he
refers to as the ‘neomodern’ (p. 232) Israeli culture which is predicated upon their
mutual exclusion and essential antagonism. This leads to some extremely
provocative analyses of alternative political directions that were available to the
Zionist movement in Palestine and useful analyses of the direction taken by Israeli
politics and culture in recent years, for example, the emerging challenge by
‘Sephardic’ intellectuals to the cultural center. Alcalay advances what could be
described as a dialectical analysis of the geo-problematics of the ‘Middle East’
insofar as he sees the very processes which result from the realization and