Negating Jewish Difference: Assimilation, Nationalism, and Westernization in Palestine/Israel and the Jewish Diaspora

• In Event: 30264 - Witnessing the Violences in and of Empire

Abstract

For much of modern history, Jews were among Europe’s preeminent, constitutive outsiders (Mosse 1996). Today, the Jewish State of Israel is world-renowned for its military toughness, while Jews globally enjoy various trappings of white masculine normalcy. Through an in-depth assessment of Jewish political trajectories in the late-modern West, I interrogate the circumstances that have allowed (some) Jews to so dramatically elevate their social standing without meaningfully disrupting broader systems of domination. Building on prior research (Shapiro 2022), I argue that the experience of Jewish liminality, a threshold position between abject exclusion and normative inclusion, fosters ambivalence toward Western hegemony that oscillates between the Arendtian ideal types of pariah and parvenu. Where pariahs take exclusion as a cause for rebellion, the parvenu responds by “not combatting his oppressors but identifying with them in several forms of mimetism” (Traverso 2016:64). In the aftermath of nineteenth-century Jewish emancipation, counter-hegemonic efforts at social transformation have gradually lost ground to more self-transformative approaches that fight off stigma through adherence to Western ideals. I attempt to illuminate this latter, parvenu-conformist tendency as it has manifested in three Jewish political movements across Europe, Israel, and the United States: the informal fin-de-siécle assimilationist movement (∼1800-1923), which sought full dissolution into Western culture; colonial Zionism (∼1896-present), advocating removal to a state in historic Palestine; and diaspora Zionism (∼1967-present), calling for Western integration while supporting a Jewish state from afar. Across these three currents, I illustrate how Jewish communities have sought to escape stigma, shame, and powerlessness by: conforming to normative standards of white Western colonial subjectivity; disidentifying with other Jews; and displacing historical trauma onto Palestinians, BIPOC, and other oppressed groups. I conclude by drawing upon histories of Jewish resistance to chart a path beyond cyclical violence toward solidarity with other marginalized people.

Author

• Andrew J. Shapiro, CUNY Graduate Center