In the past, the field of Jewish studies has often eschewed postcolonial studies for its dominant position on the Israeli state; disagreements around the role and definition of Zionism—especially in the context of the Holocaust— have led to deep divisions between scholars, fields, communities, and even universities. While scholars like Edward Sayeed, Ella Shohat, Eyal Weizman, Ammiel Alcalay, Albert Memmi, Judith Butler, Rebecca Stein, and Santiago Slabodsky have addressed the intersections of Jewish and postcolonial studies from different perspectives, scholarship on this topic remains sidelined in much of Jewish studies. This panel insists on the importance of postcolonial and decolonial frameworks along with the rhetorics of mutual vulnerability as a way forward in the field of Jewish studies.
Benjamin Schreier in “Decolonization Begins at ‘Home’” suggests that the possibilities of postcoloniality and decoloniality in Jewish literary study needs to proceed on two tracks: first, as a practical endeavor to elaborate specific literary traditions that evade the establishmentarian privilege of Jewish literature in its largely “Western,” and presumptively white main currents. Second, the project needs to proceed as a theoretical endeavor to contest the privilege-structures of Jewish studies to the extent that it centripetally repeats the centering that Zionist ideology promotes (and embodies). Ultimately, Schreier argues that any program to open up, discover, and/or elaborate postcolonial and decolonial potential in Jewish literary studies must confront the ways in which Jewish literary studies participates in a fundamental Zionism which the interdisciplinary project of Jewish studies is always already in danger of reproducing.
In “Split Struggles, Segregated Realities, and the Prospect of Mizrahi Solidarity with Palestinian Liberation,” Shirly Bahar examines documentary films by and about Palestinians and Mizrahim that were released in the first decade of the 2000s. In these films she argues that the tropes of relationality in the representation of oppression and pain of Palestinians and Mizrahim[1]-- whose realities in Palestine/Israel are different and unequal— are inexorably interconnected. Bahar writes on this topic as a Mizrahi Turkish-Israeli scholar, driven to enhance Mizrahi solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for liberation and return. Bahar argues after Edward Said and Ella Shohat, that Palestinians’ and Mizrahim’s experiences of pain should be theorized together precisely because Zionism and Israel have been rendering the “Arab/Muslim” identification as essentially opposite and in perpetual animosity to the “Jewish” one to have us believe that a perpetual animosity has always defined the two peoples.
Finally, Michael Bernard-Donals considers the way Jewish rhetorics have moved centripetally around three related concepts – justice, vulnerability, and belonging. He argues that by tracing the movements of Jewish rhetoric over the last century, that early discussions of Jewish history, culture, and politics gave way, after the Holocaust, to more urgent questions of justice, vulnerability and belonging. Bernard-Donals brings these three central terms together to discuss the rhetorical implications of an ethics of the stranger: what does it mean to be vulnerable, and to see that vulnerability not as a weakness but as the defining characteristic of the foundations for a Jewish rhetoric? In his concluding movement, he argues that we are left with a (Jewish) rhetoric that leaves room for the stranger – “for once we were slaves in Mitzrayim” – but that also requires us to recognize our potential to do violence to the stranger, even from a deterritorialized position of our own.
Each of these panelists will have 15-minutes to present, after which Alfred Lopez a postcolonial scholar from the CLCS Global South forum will give a short response. We will hold open at least 25 minutes for a robust discussion about intersections of postcolonial and Jewish studies and especially about the future pathways we see as viable in this historic moment.
[1] Mizrahim is the Hebrew word for eastern Jews, or Jews that are largely from North African and Middle Eastern countries.