On being a Jewish non-Jew, and what may be involved in what we must be against

I used to think I had some interest in being part of the Jewish world. That is because when I was young I knew some Jewish people whom I thought were interesting and committed to things I found I could believe in -- political things. Then I gradually learned how, horrifying to me, their world is just conservative. Often it seemed to me conservatism in its essence, and little or nothing more than that. I did not like this at all.

As I am curious person who likes to read and is interested in all kinds of things that I might learn from, among the things I read about was Judaism and Jewish history and thought. I did find some interesting things. My view is similar to Nietzsche's, which the Israeli philosopher Yirmiyahu Yovel has shown is actually not only not antisemitic but who called for a reconstruction of European thought partly on modern Jewish sources; that was a key part of Nietzsche's project. It would have meant a direction very different from Herzl’s Zionism, an expression of German-language nationalist thought that had developed in reaction to the French Revolution’s republican universalism, and was deepend by the biopolitical turn in European thought after Darwin (and the defeat of revolutionary worker’s movements in 1848 and 1871) that led also to the Third Reich.

I believe in philosophy. I believe in radical philosophy, in the tradition that is still largely European. This tradition, my own, is partly German-Jewish, and it must be said that modern Jewish thought in the German language, in literature, art and art criticism, and philosophy, is part of a larger German tradition where the Jewish/non-Jewish boundary is not a separation line. Therefore, it's not really possible to say that any of this constitutes a separable "Jewish" literary and theoretical canon. You could constitute such a canon as a critical project if you wanted. But the only people who believe in a separate Jewish intellectual world or canon are representatives or defenders of Judaism or Jewish particularism. I have trouble seeing the point of that, at least in the way it is now understood and defended.

And how is it now understood and defended? In the way of left-wing Jews who see themselves as part of some social, cultural, and political avant-garde? That used to exist. In America it quite definitely did. The old "left" was largely animated by that avant-garde particularism, a communitarianism of a sort, but one that understood itself not as closing onto a territory where Jews could live separated and surrounded only by their own community, but one that, opposite to that, opened out onto the larger society. That was its purpose, because it was a communitarianism that understood itself as an avant-garde, and really only as such.

Both ideas can be found in Jewish classical sources, but these two ideas, are not only potentially compatible, they are also at odds.

The current war places them at odds. This means that within the Jewish world in America it is time for a caesura, a break. It is sad if this must mean a break with Judaism. But Judaism in America today is almost entirely devoted to the closed particularism of a Jewish world that is not an avant-garde, that does not open onto the larger society, unless maybe it is as a 'light to the nations' to help 'save' the lesser people in the larger world. Judaism today is almost entirely Zionist. That is a problem. Many Jews have a problem with that, and they are right to.

I wonder if it is not necessary to find the source of the problem. Could that be the very idea of the Jews as a people or a nation that is separate? If not, because that idea immediately will be rejected as 'anti-semitism', could it not be that it is now vital to start rethinking some of these supposedly, and indeed, very fundamental things? Was the French revolution wrong when it was said that everything should be given to Jews as individuals, but nothing to them as a people or nation? The result of this was that in France ideas that have recognizable 'Jewish' roots have as much value and claim as any others. And that has resulted in vital thinking that is far-reaching. That is because France is a country that was founded on a revolution that went further than the American one, and that led to the French national state taking a very different direction from that in Germany, or Austria, and the United States, where the idea of a national group that is a distinct subset of the larger national state is entirely coherent, as in the French tradition it in fact is not. Austria was a continental empire that included different local national groups. The United States was founded by mostly protestant religious and ethnic groups that were dissident in their European country of origin, and the consequence today is that people are encouraged, in a way that is often passionate though also a bit artificial, a bit theatrical, to believe that their identity really belongs to a particular ethnic or religious community that has its own separate culture, and the nation as a whole must recognize that. This is one of the differences between the United States and France. We have similar particular communitarian identity notions in regard to all kinds of things, including more recently sexuality. This can be a way that forms of 'radicalism' are contained, because they are about identities that can be enjoyably performed, without challenging anything in the society as a whole, which in a way both does and does not have its own recognizably distinct culture. It is doubtless true that just trying to refuse or negate this particularity thing is itself likely to be used repressively and on behalf of a conservative majority or what takes itself for such. Which is the only reason I can think of to not say that we ought to refuse the communitarian identity thing and consider it part of the problem.

I believe in philosophy. The tradition I come out of is left-wing, modernist, partly Jewish, though it is political and not religious. Religion is conservative in comparison and as I see it is part of the problem. I think Reform Judaism is part of the problem. It never was very modern to begin with. Today, it is very disappointing indeed. Politically, to those of us on the left, like it or not, these are our adversaries.

They will of course say, and with a jerking of their knee, in a semi-automatic manner, that any such thinking is antisemitism. This has to be countered.

In New York where I live, there is a Jewish world of sorts. It is diverse, and people in it traditionally have argued with each other. Their leaders want people to close ranks. Around this war, which is one of ethnic cleansing.

The Palestinian problem that is the Zionist Jewish world's nemesis points to problems with Judaism and official thought about what it means to 'be Jewish' that need to be rethought. Attempts to do so will meet with massive resistance.

But what looks like the Jewish world defending the rightly presumed 'natural' essence, meaning, and truth of what it is for Jews to exist as such and to be Jewish -- behind this are conservative American interests, and maybe mostly or only that.