(Modern) Jewish Studies in China

Posted on May 13, 2014 by zjb

kaifeng synagogue

Cousin Joseph Burman stumbled across my letter to Aaron Hughes in the Chronicle of Higher Education about the state of Jewish Studies. Since I think this is relevant to the place of Jewish Studies in the university, I want to mention that Joe is Director of Prospect Identification and Strategies in the office of Development, Marketing and Communications at the University of Michigan. Joe was kind enough to forward me this link here about Jewish Studies today in China. Appearing also in the Chronicle of Higher Education it was written in 2006 by Paul Mooney writing from Jinan, China.

As Jewish Studies scholars, hopefully with the help of sympathetic university administrators, continue to try to figure out how to project the field out into the world, China seems profoundly relevant. Mooney’s article focuses on Avrum Erhlich and Xu Xin at Nanjing University, where I’m told the interests are primarily historical and literary, and Fu Youde at Shandong University, where the interest in Jews, Judaism, and Jewish Studies is weighted more towards philosophy and thought. For what it’s worth, I know a number of colleagues have made it out to China of late, and there seems to be great excitement. Friend-colleague Greg Kaplan, who has worked and spent more time in China than anyone I know has met these guys and thinks very highly of them.

What I want to do here is pick through and organize Mooney’s article to try to get a sense of what’s going on, with Aaron’s argument very much in mind about the need to open up Jewish Studies to the world. This is as much about marketing as it is about intellectual content. I’m interested in two things. [1] Why Jews, Judaism, and Jewish Studies in China? [2] What might Jewish Studies in China teach us in the United States, Israel, and Europe about Jews, Judaism, and Jewish Studies?

The interest in Jews, Judaism, and Jewish Studies looks like it’s a mini micro-trend. But in China, the scale is as such that even something small, relatively to the larger population, can turn out to be something huge.

I’ll turn to the second question later, but as a stab at a partial answer to the first question, it seems that the interest in China regarding Jews, Judaism, and Jewish Studies has to do with China itself and its own place in the world. These interests include empire, modernity, America as mediated through things not unrelated to the Confucian tradition such as literature, religion, and philosophy.

Judaism

Mooney writes, “The enthusiasm for studying Judaism… reflects a growing interest in that religion elsewhere in China as well, both in academe and in popular culture. Along with Shandong, 10 other Chinese universities now offer courses in Jewish studies. Not answered by Mooney, but you can pull out a sense of what’s going on from his article.” As if to prove a point made by David Nirenberg in Anti-Judaism, it would seem that with philo-Judaism  as well, Judaism constitutes a concept with which to “figure” out or model one’s own sense of the world. Part of this has to do with new perspectival horizons. Mooney quotes Professor Xu, “My students are excited because they’ve never heard these things before…They never thought they could view life in this way.”  But that doesn’t answer the question as to Judaism. But again, why Judaism? I found this remark here by Professor Fu interesting, “Unlike Christianity, Judaism opposes to worshipping God as its foundation,” said Prof. Fu. “In fact, the Jews aren’t necessarily very religious individuals.” My guess is that more than Christianity, Judaism bears feature in common with Confucianism, and that what’s at stake here is an interest in religious culture.

Confucianism

Confucianism and the textual approach to a classical tradition are both key here. Mooney writes, “Pop into any of the classrooms in the building that houses the School of Philosophy and Social Studies on Shandong’s tree-shaded campus and you are likely to see students reading the Bible in Hebrew, conjugating Hebrew verbs, thumbing through the Talmud — a centuries-old collection of Jewish law and commentary — or debating the similarities between Judaism and Confucianism.”  Writing about Porfessor Xin, Mooney continues, “He also marveled at Jewish friends who regularly read the Talmud and the Torah ‘just for the love of learning,’ comparing them with Chinese colleagues, who, he says, learn just to pass exams or get better jobs. ‘How many Chinese scholars read Confucian classics every day?’ he asks.”

As for ProfessorFu from Shandong, Mooney explains that he “sees Confucianism, the social philosophy that shaped the thinking and behavior of Chinese for centuries, as playing a role similar to that which Judaism played for Jews. Although many Chinese do not deem Confucianism a religion, Mr. Fu argues that Chinese are thirsty for religion and a spiritual way of life, and that the country is a ‘hotbed for Confucianism to take root, sprout, and grow up.’Indeed, Confucianism has enjoyed a revival in China in recent years, with scholars dusting off the writings of the man once vilified by the Communists for his “feudal” thinking, and universities offering courses in what is known as guoxue, or national studies.

Modernity

More than Confucianism, what seems to matter more is this relation between religion, culture, and “national studies,” or modernity. About this, Mooney writes, “In the early 20th century, Chinese intellectuals, who were keen to see China modernize, looked to the Jewish experience for inspiration. In the 1920s, Yiddish literature provided an example for the development of vernacular Chinese. And Sun Yat-sen, father of the Chinese Republican revolution, praised the Zionist movement as a model for popular independence.

Literature and Philosophy

I’m willing to bet that for many scholars, inside and outside China, who don’t grown up in a text-heavy Jewish religious milieu, the gateway into Jewish Studies tends to be based on literature or philosophy. About Xu Xin, Mooney relates, “He was in high school when the Cultural Revolution began, and at the age of 18 was sent to the countryside to work for two years. He entered Nanjing University in 1973 as a worker-peasant-soldier and graduated three years later. As academic life returned to normal, Mr. Xu focused his attention on post-World War II American literature. He was particularly attracted to American Jewish writers. In other words, Professor Xu’s gateway into Jewish Studies was the postwar American scene after the calamity of the Cultural Revolution in China. American Jewish writers opened for him the world of Jewish culture and Judaism as a way perhaps to understand his own country.

For Professor Fu, the gateway into Jewish Studies was philosophy. Mooney prsents Fu relating “a similar tale of an accidental discovery and a rapid growth in interest and academic enterprise. Mr. Fu, who is China’s leading expert on George Berkeley, the 18th-century Irish philosopher, was invited to work on a project to translate the works of Baruch Spinoza, the 17th-century philosopher of Jewish background, into Chinese.”

What I would observe in both cases is the non-orthodox entry-point into the larger field of Jewish Studies.  It wasn’t Talmud or medievalism, and it wasn’t history per se. In these two particular stories, it was American Jewish fiction and the so-called heretic Baruch Spinoza who opened the door for these two scholar-colleagues into Jewish Studies, and, to consider it more broadly, Jewish modernity and the modern confluence of religion, culture, and secularism. Maybe that’s what makes sense in China. Maybe that’s how it looks. Why literature and why philosophy? Perhaps it has to do with scale. Images and concepts are more generalizable, more recognizable than the mass of empirical detail that defines historical study, and as such, they allow more ease of access into unfamiliar terrain.

Personal Ties and Patronage

I do not want to belabor this point, but nor would I underestimate the importance of personal ties and patronage in the development of academic disciplines. In his article, Mooney describes Professor Xu’s visits to the United States, his forging of personal ties with colleagues and members of the Jewish community. Xu set up the China Judaic Studies Association with the help of prominent American Jews, and the Glazer Center for Judaic Studies at Nanjing University was built with donations from American and British Jews. It’s too easy to forget that money and capital are fundamental aspects of the modern experience, and that nothing happens without these kinds of flows and currents. About this kind of cultural investment, there’s nothing to be apologetic.

Critique

I’m not sure what to make of this claim, but Mooney mentions it in his article, so I’ll mention it too. We saw this a lot with the postmodern romance with midrash in the 1980s and 1990s. It is suggested that one of the things that makes Judaism as a tradition appealing is the idea of open criticism. We see this idea at work in Mooney’s article as well. “’Chinese citizens can also benefit from adopting the Jewish notion of critical but constructive self-examination, says Mr. Ehrlich.’ Many Chinese are fascinated with the absence of censorship, the liberal criticism heaped on Jewish protagonists, the lack of uniformity in thinking and practice, and the high degree of innovation exuding from the Jewish experience,’ he argues. ‘They are curious about how the Jews can remain united without consensus, without obsession with land, and without homogeneity of any sort.’” What I would say is that this idea or idyll of tradition and criticism is an integral part of the modern Jewish experience, if not the classical Jewish tradition per se.

Reform Judaism and Market Economy

Students of Jewish Modernity and Jewish thought will immediately note that Mooney describes Professor Mr. Fu as “quick to draw similar connections. He argues that of all peoples, the Jews have been the most successful in dealing with the challenges of modernity.”  While I myself might be less sure about this point, I would note that the interest here has to do less with tradition per se and more with its reform, less to do with Judaism per se and more to do with Reform Judaism.

“The goal of Jewish reform … was to retain Jewish cultural identity by reserving Judaism while accepting modernity and merging into Western society,” he says. [Fu] sees the Reform movement in 19th-century Judaism as a model for China. The movement’s goal, he says, was to transform the Jew into a European, integrated into Western culture, who, at the same time, would remain faithful to his religion. ‘The Jews have modernized themselves materially,” he says, “living a modern life in Western countries on the one hand, and they have maintained their cultural identity — namely, their Jewishness — on the other.” As China has transformed its economy into a market system, Mr. Fu continues, Chinese people have grown perplexed about who they are.’ Most Chinese do not know what their cultural identity is and how to keep it,’ he says. ‘In short, they have lost their ‘Chineseness’ and are soulless.’”

Neo-Neo Confucianism

As for the image I selected, it’s not a copy or a photograph of “the real thing,” but rather a model at Beit Ha’tefutsot of the Kaifeng Synagogue. As a model, there’s a simulacral quality to its appearance. Maybe at play is not Confucianism and not medieval Neo-Confucianism, but a contemporary form of what one might call neo-neo Confucianism. At least in the case of Professor Fu, that seems to be very much in play as scholars and students in China begin to take a serious look at Jews, Judaism, and Jewish Studies, as shaped not by Jewish cultural perspectives and contexts, but from perspectives and contexts specific to contemporary China.

It may be that students of Jewish Studies have something, a little, or a lot to offer to students of China, particularly in relation to the modern experience. From my own perspective as an American Jew, I am just as interested to see and to figure out what Jews, Judaism, and Jewish Studies might take away in terms of changed perspectives and orientations, as we open the field to the shape-shifting alternative points of view generated by different historical and cultural connections and contexts. About this, more tomorrow.

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Landing (NYC) Bridges

Posted on May 12, 2014 by zjb

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It was fun taking these pictures and I like how they came out as a group, the sudden collapse of the distant horizon line, how the big city brings the horizon in close, and all the bridges as you fly down into New York, deep deeper into Plato’s Cave.

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Modern Jewish Philosophy (At the Margins)

Posted on May 12, 2014 by zjb

marginsIn one more response to the piece by Aaron Hughes about the place of Jewish Studies in the academy, I want to post a little bit more. Saying that I’m prepared to defend Jewish Studies to the hilt, as for Jewish philosophy, I won’t be apologetic. Without wanting to offend colleagues and friends, I would like to say, that from its own place at the margins, the field needs work.

Too stuck to the canon, there’s been little to no place in it for gender, bodies, materialities, singularities, sense and imagination, network-technologies, science, affect, and so on and so on. In other words, you won’t find in Jewish philosophy and its study the kinds of things that are out there in the larger worlds of thought represented at SPEP or at the “Theology and Religious Reflection Section” or the “Theology and Continental Philosophy Group” at the American Academy of Religion. That these groups have been dominated by Christians, Christianity, and cryptic Christian presumptions is nothing about which we can do except to try to mix things up a bit.

Even worse, the study of Jewish thought and philosophy seems very much at the margins Jewish Studies, as practiced at the Association for Jewish Studies. The work of Jewish philosophy seems at best closed in on itself and disconnected from the work of scholars in other sections of the AJS such as art, history, literature, Talmud,  Kabbalah, and Hasidut.

There are exceptions to the rule, among which I would include work by Norbert Samuelson, Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, Elliot Wolfson and by Aaron himself, i.e. by scholars who cut their teeth in medieval (!) source material. For the most part, however, modern Jewish philosophy has been dominated by too much ethics, and of late, a politics of sorts. But I don’t see how the conversation in the field has moved much past Levinas, or, even worse, Leo Strauss. Jewish philosophy is a ship whose sail has yet to reach America, or France. To mis-phrase Bruno Latour, “We have never been postmodern.”

Writing to J.H. Voss in 1805, Hegel commened the translator for making Homer speak German, just as Luther had done to the Bible, and just as he, Hegel, was doing to philosophy.  “For a people remains barbarian and does not view what is excellent within the range of its acquaintance as its own true property so long as it does not come to know it in its own language.”

Commenting on this letter, philosopher John Sallis  suggests, “Though moderation might prescribe virtual silence in this regard and in any case interminable hesitation, it would not be entirely inappropriate to teach philosophy to speak English… where one might pretend, even in speaking this language, to have left Europe behind. A fanciful image, no doubt. Not to say simply parochial” (Force of Imagination, p.35)

The same goes for Jewish philosophy. Maybe it needs to learn how to speak English, and to do so well, and better than it has done heretofore. But I won’t kid myself either. The kind of Jewish philosophy with which I would most like to see is itself at the margins of Jewish philosophy as currently practiced at the margins of a margin at a margin.

 

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Telling Stories — Obama & The Banality (of Fighting) Evil

Posted on May 11, 2014 by zjb

obama

Politically, maybe it’s true and there’s nothing the Unites States can do or wants to do in the world today. But the words used by President Obama and his spokespeople to save moral face don’t square with the desperate human need these words are supposed to address. Apparently, it can “seem” like there’s a lot of evil in the world, that words show determination to use force, and that instead of using American power, we save lives by telling stories.

Having already accepted a Nobel Peace Prize before not doing anything to advance peace, now President Obama has received an award from the University of Southern California’s Shoah Foundation.

You can read it here at the NYT:

It was an unusual confession for a president, and Mr. Obama made it at an event where he was receiving an award, presented by the director Steven Spielberg, for his efforts in fighting genocide around the world.

The use of American power — as some in Washington have insisted is called for in Nigeria and Syria — is not enough, and it is not the only option, Mr. Obama said. Instead, he said, “by keeping memories alive, by telling stories, by hearing those stories, we can do our part” to save lives.

“I think drop by drop by drop that we can erode and wear down these forces that are so destructive, that we can tell a different story,” the president said. The dinner was held… 

[…]

In a briefing with reporters in Los Angeles, Josh Earnest, the deputy White House press secretary, said the president’s words had shown his determination to use American power “as a force for good in the world.”

“I think the point that he is trying to make is that at times it can seem like there’s a lot of evil in the world, that there are a lot of bad things happening,” Mr. Earnest said, “and that every morning you’re waking up and there’s a new thing that’s coming across the television screen that seems shocking in a modern 21st-century world.”

Mr. Earnest said that did not mean that the United States should use military force in every global crisis.

“But what we can do is look for the ways that we can leverage the resources and expertise and experience that we have in this country to benefit the Nigerian government to track those girls down,” he said. “And just because he didn’t wake up the next morning and read in the newspapers that those girls have been found, it doesn’t mean that we should stop or give up.”

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The Left in the Lurch — Syria Palestine Israel

Posted on May 11, 2014 by zjb

yarmouk

Fairly regularly I used to enjoy reading Palestinian activist Ramzy Baroud at the Palestine Chronicle. But I stopped reading after awhile because the perspectives seemed to me to be one-sided, monotonous, and predictable. I read him now at Al-Arabiya English where the perspectives are, to my opinion, more varied. In this piece, Baroud confronts the fact that on the left there are limits to solidarity with Palestinians.

Writing about the death and destruction in the Yarmouk refugee camp in Syria, Baroud observes, “While on the left (not the establishment left of course) Palestine has brought many likeminded people together, Egypt has fragmented that unity, and Syria has crushed and pulverized it to bits. Those who cried over the victims of Israeli wars on Gaza, did not seem very concerned about Palestinians starving to death in the Yarmouk refugee camp on the outskirts of Damascus. Some squarely blamed the Syrian government for the siege that killed hundreds, while others blamed the rebels. Some writers even went further, blaming the residents of the camp. Somehow, the refugees were implicated in their own misery and needed to be collectively punished for showing sympathy to the Syrian opposition.

About Syria more generally, Baroud throws in a negative, critical light things about the left-left activist crowd that has always bothered me about the way they approach the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Baroud writes, “It also has turned out that some of those who pose as human rights activists are rarely compelled by ethical priorities, but rather dogmatic ideology that is so rigid it has no space for a sensible argument based on a serious investigation of facts… How is one to navigate the Syrian intellectual realm when both narratives are riddled with half-truths or outright lies, where each discourse is predicated on the complete dismissal of the other? How is one to navigate this territory when many intellectuals who also masquerade as ‘human rights activists’ turn out to be narrow-minded ideologues devoid of any humanism?”

What then is one to do about Syria? “[H]ow do you navigate an impossible story? The answer: You side with the victim, no matter her colour, sect or creed. You remain committed to the truth, no matter how elusive. You drop every presupposition, abandon ideology, permanently discard dogma, and approach Syria with abundance of humanity and humility.” Yes, one must side with the victim. It’s a deep moral position steeped in sympathy that Baroud wants to stake out here. The last words to Baroud’s this thoughtful piece are to insist that “Syria belongs to its people. You either stand on their side, or the side of the oppressor.” But, I’m not sure what this means in practice. A moral statement, it’s not political. All that’s “left” is a slogan in the lurch.

 

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Staircase (Morningside Park)

Posted on May 10, 2014 by zjb

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At the border between Harlem and Morningside Heights, Morningside Park “came into existence as a cost-saving measure to avoid the expense of extending the street grid across difficult terrain” (wikipedia). Designed by Olmstead and Vaux, this heavy staircase at 116th St. twists and turns as it ascends on its way up. 

 

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Negev Desert Bloom (Fazal Sheikh)

Posted on May 9, 2014 by zjb

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I’ve seen single images of individual shots, but their power lies combined in the serial form presented here at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. As you can see here, so much of Fazal Sheikh’s other work is invested in the human portrait. But in this God’s eye view, the photographer looks down below towards a striated desert landscape that has been clearly marked by human hands, history, and development. On the other hand, the shift in scale make those marks not just illegible, but almost impossible to identify as human. It looks like something out of Deleuze.

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Too Jewish Studies (Response to Aaron Hughes)

Posted on May 8, 2014 by zjb

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Throwing down the gauntlet in the Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE), Aaron Hughes wants us all to consider the possibility that Jewish Studies is “too Jewish.” No doubt, the very articulation of the question in this precise formulation appearing in a public forum open to the entire university community might raise all kinds of specters relating to the history of Jewish and anti-Jewish polemics and apologetics. It has, of course, always been said that the Jews are a small and misanthropic people, a ghost-like and parochial people. As it emerged in Germany in the 19th century, Jewish Studies, or the Science of Judaism, as it was once called, has always combined academic inquiry and cultural polemics.

The point behind Jewish Studies in its first, nineteenth century iteration was to either give Judaism a decent burial or to defend it against its cultured despisers. Taking the dynamic one step further, it now appears that the problem isn’t the Judaism. The problem is Jewish Studies. The brilliance of Aaron’s essay and the larger critical project it represents is to underscore the fact that Jewish Studies has always been apologetic, has always been forced into this or that apologetic crouch. The argument forces scholars of Jewish Studies to “defend” not just the Jews or Judaism, but the practice of Jewish Studies as an academic discipline. As it turns out, Aaron thinks that Jewish Studies is itself  “too Jewish,”

“Too Jewish” might have once looked like an anti-Semitic a Jewish-culture fighting word, like “queer” or “dyke.” In the 1920s, Martin Buber edited his volume Der Jude in precisely the same un-apologetic spirit. Or consider how, in 1996, the Jewish Museum in New York showed Too Jewish? Challenging Traditional Identities. The very naming of the exhibition as “too Jewish” was meant to launch a pioneering exhibition of new Jewish art that bristled with overt and over-the-top Jewish content. To be sure, the question-mark was still in place. In the glory days of postmodernism, identity politics, and appropriation art, “too Jewish” was a question that Jews in the United States seemed ready to embrace.

Wanting to respond to Aaron’s essay, I sent to the CHE a shorter version of what appears below. In part I sent the shorter version because part of what I wanted to say was of a more narrow interest to scholars of Jewish philosophy, and because I didn’t think that the CHE was the right forum for this kind of insider baseball. My own sense remains that Jewish literature, Jewish thought and philosophy will never be anything but what Deleuze in his book on Kafka called a “minor literature.” It’s a minor literature that became invisible again in the fields of continental philosophy and continental philosophy of religion. Long past the post-structuralism of midrash and “the jews,” today Jewish things as such are left at the margins of the discourse, used as a negative foil, if even noticed in the first place.

Whose fault is it that Jewish thought and philosophy writ small and Jewish Studies writ large remain a minor literature if not, in parts great or small, our own? What I appreciate most about Aaron’s argument is its call to open doors to include new theoretical perspectives, as well as and especially scholar-colleagues with diverse methodological and political commitments. Most important, Aaron is right to argue that Jewish Studies can’t just be for Jews and by Jews for it to count as the academic discipline we want it to be and know that it is. It has to set aside litmus tests based on identity and politics and include Jews and non-Jews on equal footing. About this there is nothing with which to disagree and with which there is everything to concur.

Then maybe Jewish Studies and our own field of Jewish philosophy should look like the Jewish Museum. When it re-recreated itself in the 1960s, everyone and everything was welcome, Jews and non-Jews alike. There were no pre-scribed “Jewish” contents that an artist had to meet. Still committed to the preservation of Jewish cultural objects and artifacts, the museum stood out in the day as one of the first venues to show works by contemporary artists, most famously Jasper Johns, and to showcase contemporary movements like Minimalism and Conceptualism. Like the Jewish Museum, there’s no reason why Jewish Studies can’t stand out today as an open and exciting cultural place and intellectual hub.

While Jewish Studies is an academic field more defined by an ethnic-religious-national identity, and more defined, as such, by particular group of contents, Aaron is right. There should be every interest to open from the inside the field of Jewish Studies to new things and to new people. But I think Jewish Studies will always run up against walls about which there’s not a lot one can do. In his author’s reply to the letter to the editor that I sent to the CHE, Aaron continues to insist, “Other disciplines must take Jewish material more seriously. Unlike Braiterman, I believe that Jewish studies should be of more than parochial interest.” But this is a normative statement, not a descriptive one, more a wish than a fact, and not to mention, an unfair dig. It’s not clear to me why other disciplines “must” take Jewish material seriously. In some cases, I can see how this might be true, and in other cases not. About this I think there’s nothing to do but to continue to work hard at the margins, to do interesting things, and to wait for a miracle.

Parts of what I cite below you’ll find in my letter to the editor, but I’m including the longer version of what I wanted to say than what appeared in the CHE:

In his own recent remarks in The Chronicle of Higher Education, my friend and colleague Aaron Hughes has addressed in a bold and provocative way the marginal place of Jewish Studies in the American academy. Who’s marginalizing Jewish Studies? Is it Jewish Studies professors, as Aaron seems to think, or is it the case that in a Christian-post-Christian majority culture, Jewish Studies will always be a marginal thing indeed. Unlike Aaron, I’m more willing to conclude that there’s just not a lot of interest in either Jews or Judaism out there. Is it really the case as Aaron asks that “only Jews are interested in studying Judaism.” I think it’s sad to say that the answer is, yes, for the most part that’s true. But who’s “fault” is that?

Years ago already Daniel Boyarin quipped at a session at the American Academy of Religion that when he’d come to talk about Talmud and rabbis he’d pull a small crowd of some thirty people, as opposed to the three hundred colleagues in the study of Religion who’d fill a room when he came to speak about Paul. The answer he thought was very simple. There are simply more of “them” than “us.” Is that really it then? So many years after the emergence of Jewish Studies in U.S. universities, it comes back down to Christians and Jews?

In our own area of specialization in Jewish philosophy, I regret with Aaron the lack of broader philosophical and methodological interests. It’s also true that after the heyday of Jewish postmodernism, the larger intellectual environment has cooled. I can think of no continental philosopher of note who today takes a genuine interest in Jewish philosophy or textual traditions. You can blame Jewish philosophy or Jewish Studies, but I don’t think Jews were the ones who built the gates to the ghetto. Among colleagues in the continental philosophy of religion, there is practically zero interest in Jews, Judaism, or Jewish philosophy, except perhaps as a negative foil for the near systemic disavowal of their own Christian or post-Christian perspectives.   

What’s different is that Jewish Studies always has to name itself as Jewish, a burden from which colleagues at work in philosophy or religion are usually relieved.  We don’t name Kant or Hegel, Nietzsche or Heidegger, James or Dewey as Christian because they can present themselves as normative and universal. The same reason we don’t have Gentile Studies but we have Jewish Studies is the same reason we don’t have White Studies, but we have Afro American Studies, not Men’s Studies, but Women’s Studies. For their part, I don’t think scholars of Augustine have ever needed justify their interest the way Aaron in his channeling of Jacob Neusner insists that scholars of Judaism must do.

Aaron regrets “the imbrication of scholarship into culture and politics,” but I think there’s nothing wrong with it per se. As I see it, the problem identified by Aaron is rather the other way around. What bothers me more is the imbrication of politics into scholarship. I think there’s a substantive point to this formal inversion. As for the question of money, that Jewish Studies has to depend upon Jewish donors should be no surprise. One could say the same about the study of religion, writ small, or the study of the humanities, writ large at places like Harvard, or Princeton, or Stanford, not to mention Notre Dame or Georgetown that the study of Christian religion depended and depends, historically, on Protestant or Catholic civic largesse.

Historically, what Aaron notes about the origins of Jewish Studies in the 1960s reflect not just the ethnocentrism observed by him but rather American Jewish society coming into its own on the larger U.S. scene. This would have included the pushing back of all kinds of glass ceilings in society, including the entry of Jews into the bastion of an American academy that until those years was not unfree from combinations of anti-Semitic and class prejudice that kept both Jews and Jewish Studies outside the university gate. We should certainly want to “check our privilege,” but about this there is no reason to be “apologetic.”

I don’t think any of our colleagues in Jewish Studies feel that we are in the interest of making Jewish students feel good about themselves. Nor do I know any of us interested in defending Israel, and especially not Israeli policy in the West Bank. A good many of our students turn out to be not Jewish, and they often outperform their Jewish peers. Let’s also not forget that most of us are critical of the occupation and are beginning to open our eyes to the fact that the two state solution to the conflict might be past life-support. As a class of professors, the only thing we are guilty of is trying to make Jewish things, as the subjects of our study, interesting, no less than scholars of French literature, analytic philosophy, or cell biology.

While I purposefully choose the images for this blog post tongue in cheek, I know that Aaron had nothing to with the unfortunate cover image for his article at the Chronicle. That said, I would note the picture of a guy wearing a black suit and an orange kippah in an enclosed Jewish space with his back turned away from his students and the larger American society they represent. By turning the figure back from the viewer, the cover artist relieved himself of the obligation to imagine an actual human face reflecting upon the predicaments that most of us do a decent enough of a job handling in the classroom. The image of the Jewish Studies professor in this picture or in Aaron’s article resembles in no way today’s Jewish Studies professoriate, which is largely secular and increasingly if not already predominately female in many if not most sections in the AJS. If that’s not the case in medieval or modern Jewish philosophy, well, that’s too bad of us who work in Jewish thought; it’s something we need to fix.

Mostly, what Aaron seems to obscure in this cri de coeur is how Jewish Studies continues to re-invent itself with each passing decade, and how much his own work in medieval and modern Jewish philosophy not to mention interventions such as this one and others into the state of Jewish Studies, Islamic Studies, and the Study of Religion contribute to the very renaissance about which Aaron has so many doubts and complaints. My own sense is that Jewish Studies was far more open and far more self-critical when I left graduate school in 1995 than it was when I entered in 1988, and that it is far more interesting today than it was in 1995. I too wish with Aaron that there was more methodological suppleness in our own areas of specialization and perhaps, yes, in Jewish Studies as a whole, the situation is nowhere near as dire as Aaron presents it. I would like to consider that our own work in what is and what will always be a small field is part of a more general, ongoing and emergent formations in the academy writ large.

By blaming the victim for her own marginalization, I fear that Aaron’s article published in The Chronicle of Higher Education will provide colleagues across the university additional impetus to marginalize an always already marginalized field of human interest.

For your consideration, I’m posting below a pdf of Aaron’s original piece, as well as a link to two letters to the editors, the one from me, the other from Abraham Socher and Allan Arkush representing the Jewish Review of Books. Instead of “confining their remarks to the cheap shots,” I would have liked to see the editors of the JRB respond to the substance of Aaron’s essay. Instead they respond in an ad hominem way to Aaron’s ad hominem attack on the JRB. This was to be expected. Aaron’s larger argument may be “objectionable,” if only in part, but there’s nothing “spurious” about it.

I don’t know what the feeling is in other Jewish Studies disciplines outside my own field of modern Jewish philosophy, where I would agree that the problem is particularly pronounced. As Jewish Studies pulls, continues to pull, or tries to pull itself out from the margins, it might be useful to keep in mind that there’s always room for good apologetic thinking. I don’t think that groups at the margin are always or necessarily responsible for their position there. And that try as hard as they can to get out of the margin, they may still continue to find themselves there –as a simple and brute social fact.

Alas, though, these two responses, both mine and the one from the editors of the JRB will only go to prove Aaron’s argument that too much of Jewish Studies is too much inside baseball. Alas, they will support as well my own contention that not many people other than Jews might actually want to pay attention to things like Jewish Studies, Jewish philosophy, the Jewish Review of Books, and the cultural politics that are most particular to them. About people like us, a small people like us, there will always be something “narrow.” One can hope from us at least something “deep.” Interesting things can happen in small places, one would like to hope.

[[Here’s the pdf of the original piece in the CHE  (Hughes), and a link to the letters to the editor of the CHE from me and the editors at the Jewish Review of Books is here. Aaron’s original article is itself an excerpt from his recently published The Study of Judaism: Identity, Authenticity, Scholarship]]

 

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Assi Dayan (Before God, One Father With One Eye)

Posted on May 7, 2014 by zjb

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Marking the passage of time marked by the death of Assi Dayan, movie actor and son of the iconic Moshe Dayan, Isabel Kershner quotes in the NYT this searing remark. On the big screen of the collective imaginary, taking stock, a symbol of the nation and its youthful promise, this is what’s left. Narrating the story of his life, Mr. Dayan began: “My name is Assi, Assi Dayan. At 65 I am making another movie. My body is collapsing from all the cigarettes, chemicals and material fatigue.” He continued: “I think I’ve lived enough for several people. It’s time to summarize, to take stock. So here it is: There are 80 movies I’ve acted in, 16 I’ve written and directed, nine Oscars” — a reference to the Israeli Oscar — “three lifetime achievement awards, and besides that, thousands of newspaper articles, one novel, three books of poetry, three and a half years in psychiatric wards, three suicide attempts, two arrests, three wars, four weddings, four children, but before everything, and before God, one father, with one eye.”

assi dayan

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Fact Sensitive Christian Legislative Prayer Opportunity (TOWN OF GREECE v. GALLOWAY)

Posted on May 7, 2014 by zjb

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I’m sharing a link to the recent Supreme Court ruling permitting the practice of sectarian prayer to solemnize town hall meetings in Greece, New York. You can read the whole thing here. The majority opinion is to my mind full of contradictions relating to the tension between the particular in relation to the universal, or rather the tension between sectarian expression in relation to non-sectarian purpose and function. Together with the minority argument, the entire ruling touches in a systematic way on the nature, character, and functions of prayer, ceremonial ritual, religion, politics, society, law, history, tradition, expression, idiom, affect, citizenship, and last but not least, belief and doctrine. What goes unsaid is the peculiar character of Christianity or Protestant Christianity as an evangelizing form of religion or religious culture, especially in contemporary times. Undergirding the discussion of religion and the public sphere is the specific notion of a “prayer opportunity,” the precise formulation of which I assume is a Protestant one of relatively recent invention (as was the very idea to institute legislative prayer in the town of Greece, NY).

Understood as a “fact-sensitive case,” the basic facts are these, as read from Justice Kennedy’s majority ruling: Greece, a town with a population of 94,000, is in upstate New York. For some years, it began its monthly town board meetings with a moment of silence. In 1999, the newly elected town supervisor, John Auberger, decided to replicate the prayer practice he had found meaningful while serving in the county legislature. Following the roll call and recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance, Auberger would invite a local clergyman to the front of the room to deliver an invocation…The town followed an informal method for selecting prayer givers, all of whom were unpaid volunteers. A town employee would call the congregations listed in a local directory until she found a minister available for that month’s meeting. The town eventually compiled a list of willing “board chaplains” who had accepted invitations and agreed to return in the future.

As many of the justices note, the case is more “fact-sensitive” than one based on principle. None of the justices opposed sectarian prayer in town halls and other institutional bodies such as Congress. At issue is whether the members of the town council in Greece actually committed themselves to a best practice that would require a good faith effort in opening the opportunity to non-Christians. The decision was 5-4 cutting down ideological lines. I’m have organized the material and have highlighted in italic those parts of the majority opinion and the dissent that I think frame basic points relating to the question of citizenship and religion, and also regarding the very nature of prayer.

 

Expressive Ceremonial Prayer

The first point that struck me is the sociological-functionalist understanding of prayer, as opposed to a liturgical, confessional, or spiritual one. Prayer is expressive, but what does it express? The purpose of prayer in this particular kind of public, legislative setting is not to worship God or to promote a faith, but to solemnize a proceeding by lending it a special mood marked by gravity. As conceived by the Court, the direct object of this kind of prayer is society, not deity. Prayer is understood here to be an almost purely ceremonial form, whose doctrinal content is seen to be irrelevant. For the purpose of this particular type of instance, [1] sectarian prayer is presented in terms of historical “expressive idiom” whose purpose, in this type of setting, is [2] non-sectarian and universal, even secular. This is actually a very complex if not contradictory thought which “reasonable observers” are presumed by the Court to understand naturally or intuitively. The ruling presumes on the part of a citizen a basic and common facility with the idiomatic tradition of the country.

[Kennedy:]Prayer that reflects beliefs specific to only some creeds can still serve to solemnize the occasion, so long as the practice over time is not “exploited to proselytize or advance any one, or to disparage any other, faith or belief.” Marsh, 463 U. S., at 794–795. It is thus possible to discern in the prayers offered to Congress a commonality of theme and tone. While these prayers vary in their degree of religiosity, they often seek peace for the Nation, wisdom for its lawmakers, and justice for its people, values that count as universal and that are embodied not only in religious traditions, but in our founding documents and laws.

[…]

[Kennedy:] The prayer opportunity in this case must be evaluated against the backdrop of historical practice. As a practice that has long endured, legislative prayer has become part of our heritage and tradition, part of our expressive idiom, similar to the Pledge of Allegiance, inaugural prayer, or the recitation of “God save the United States and this honorable Court” at the opening of this Court’s sessions. See Lynch, 465 U. S., at 693 (O’Connor, J., concurring). It is presumed that the reasonable observer is acquainted with this tradition and understands that its purposes are to lend gravity to public proceedings and to acknowledge the place religion holds in the lives of many private citizens, not to afford government an opportunity to proselytize or force truant constituents into the pews.

No Generic Prayer

The nub of a deeper contradiction in the Court ruling lies in the claim that [1] expressive sectarian prayer [2] can serve a non-sectarian public function or purpose, while also [3] claiming that prayer is not and cannot be generic. This part of the argument about prayer presumes that there is no universal baseline to prayer, but that the universal baseline to prayer is itself always sectarian. The part of the argument goes beyond the formal-functional conception of prayer to make what is in fact a theological point. In direct contradiction to the point that “reasonable observers” will understand the idiomatic peculiarity of sectarian prayer, the further claim is then made that there is no single doctrinal standard or language upon which “reasonable observers” can agree as the United States becomes more and more diverse. That being now the case, the default setting of public-legislative prayer opportunities is set back to a sectarian baseline.

There is doubt, in any event, that consensus might be reached as to what qualifies as generic or nonsectarian.  Honorifics like “Lord of Lords” or “King of Kings” might strike a Christian audience as ecumenical, yet these titles may have no place in the vocabulary of other faith traditions. The difficulty, indeed the futility, of sifting sectarian from nonsectarian speech is illustrated by a letter that a lawyer for the respondents sent the town in the early stages of this litigation. The letter opined that references to “Father, God, Lord God, and the Almighty” would be acceptable in public prayer, but that references to “Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Trinity” would not. App. 21a. Perhaps the writer believed the former grouping would be acceptable to monotheists. Yet even seemingly general references to God or the Father might alienate nonbelievers or polytheists.

[Alito: concurring opinion] Not only is there no historical support for the proposition that only generic prayer is allowed, but as our country has become more diverse, composing a prayer that is acceptable to all members of the community who hold religious beliefs has become harder and harder. It was one thing to compose a prayer that is acceptable to both Christians and Jews; it is much harder to compose a prayer that is also acceptable to followers of Eastern religions that are now well represented in this country. Many local clergy may find the project daunting, if not impossible, and some may feel that they cannot in good faith deliver such a vague prayer

To complete the contradiction, the doctrinal content of ceremonial prayer is imagined by the Court to be generic, relating as it does to belief in a broadly conceived “higher power.” It’s that generic and non-sectarian quality, the possibility of which the Court denies, that gives prayer in this case a “permissible ceremonial purpose. In other words, the Court denies the possibility of generic prayer in order to justify the introduction of sectarian prayer into a public ceremonial setting. But it can only justify that introduction on the basis of the very generic default which the Court seeks to deny.

Ceremonial prayer is but a recognition that, since this Nation was founded and until the present day, many Americans deem that their own existence must be under­stood by precepts far beyond the authority of government to alter or define and that willing participation in civic affairs can be consistent with a brief acknowledgment of their belief in a higher power, always with due respect for those who adhere to other beliefs. The prayer in this case has a permissible ceremonial purpose.

Rotating Prayer

The Court comes back to idiom. Both the majority and minority opinion agree that, ideally, sectarian prayer should rotate. Each faith community and even atheists get a turn at the dais, to speak the language of their own expressive idiom. While an ideal solution, such arrangements are harder to arrange in particular cases, which are always “fact sensitive.”

The decidedly Christian nature of these prayers must not be dismissed as the relic of a time when our Nation was less pluralistic than it is today. Congress continues to permit its appointed and visiting chaplains to express themselves in a religious idiom. It acknowledges our growing diversity not by proscribing sectarian content but by welcoming ministers of many creeds.

Demography

Fact-sensitive, the practical decision about whose idiom will rotate more often comes down to demography. In areas of the country with an overwhelming Christian majority, the sectarian idiom will be overwhelmingly Christian. Sectarian prayer in legislative and other public settings is thus allowed by the Court to enshrine or sanctify on a quantitative basis majoritarian privilege in society, or in segments of society, meaning that society is no longer seen as uniform or homogenous in quality.

[Alito concurring opinion] Apparently, all the houses of worship listed in the local Community Guide were Christian churches. Id., at 198– 200, 203. That is unsurprising given the small number of non-Christians in the area. Although statistics for the town of Greece alone do not seem to be available, statistics have been compiled for Monroe County, which includes both the town of Greece and the city of Rochester. According to these statistics, of the county residents who have a religious affiliation, about 3% are Jewish, and for other non-Christian faiths, the percentages are smaller.1

Exclusive Prayer

In her dissenting opinion Justice Kagan observed the power of exclusion that characterizes sectarian prayer and the social effect that violates the bond of a citizen with her country as represented by its government. Rather than unify the social fabric and body politic, brings religious difference to the forefront. Central to Justice Kagan’s argument is the distinction between sectarian legislative prayer before actual legislators or council members who are going about the business of their day versus sectarian legislative prayer in a town hall setting where the public at large comes to petition the council. What matters more in this case is not the work of the legislator, but rather the right of the citizen who “stands before her government” on an unequal footing.

[Kagan, dissenting opinion]  For centuries now, people have come to this country from every corner of the world to share in the blessing of religious freedom. Our Constitution promises that they may worship in their own way, without fear of penalty or danger, and that in itself is a momentous offering. Yet our Constitution makes a commitment still more remarkable— that however those individuals worship, they will count as full and equal American citizens. A Christian, a Jew, a Muslim (and so forth)—each stands in the same relationship with her country, with her state and local communities, and with every level and body of government. So that when each person performs the duties or seeks the benefits of citizenship, she does so not as an adherent to one or another religion, but simply as an American. 

[…]

And so a civic function of some kind brings religious differences to the fore: That public proceeding becomes (whether intentionally or not) an instrument for dividing her from adherents to the community’s majority religion, and for altering the very nature of her relationship with her government. That is not the country we are, because that is not what our Constitution permits. Here, when a citizen stands before her government, whether to perform a service or request a benefit, her religious beliefs do not enter into the picture.

[…] 

Still more, the prayers betray no understanding that the American community is today, as it long has been, a rich mosaic of religious faiths. See Braunfeld v. Brown, 366 U. S. 599, 606 (1961) (plurality opinion) (recognizing even half a century ago that “we are a cosmopolitan nation made up of people of almost every conceivable religious preference”). The monthly chaplains appear almost always to assume that everyone in the room is Christian (and of a kind who has no objection to government­sponsored worship4). The Town itself has never urged its chaplains to reach out to members of other faiths, or even to recall that they might be present. And accordingly, few chaplains have made any effort to be inclusive; none has thought even to assure attending members of the public that they need not participate in the prayer session.

 

A Different Kind of Citizen

The nub of the dissenting opinion is that sectarian prayer in these kinds of public setting create different and unequal kinds of citizen. The argument between the majority and minority opinion is thus brought back to the social function of religion and prayer. The different kind of citizen is set by sectarian prayer at a “remove” from her fellow citizens and elected representatives.

[Kagan dissenting opinion] Let’s say that a Muslim citizen of Greece goes before the Board to share her views on policy or request some permit…But just before she gets to say her piece, a minister deputized by the Town asks her to pray “in the name of God’s only son Jesus Christ.” She must think—it is hardly paranoia, but only the  truth—that Christian worship has become entwined with local governance. And now she faces a choice—to pray  alongside the majority as one of that group or somehow to  register her deeply felt difference. She is a strong person, but that is no easy call—especially given that the room is small and her every action (or inaction) will be noticed.  She does not wish to be rude to her neighbors, nor does she wish to aggravate the Board members whom she will soon be trying to persuade. And yet she does not want to acknowledge Christ’s divinity, any more than many of her  neighbors would want to deny that tenet. So assume she  declines to participate with the others in the first act of the meeting—or even, as the majority proposes, that she stands up and leaves the room altogether, see ante, at 21. At the least, she becomes a different kind of citizen, one who will not join in the religious practice that the Town  Board has chosen as reflecting its own and the community’s most cherished beliefs. And she thus stands at a remove, based solely on religion, from her fellow citizens and her elected representatives.

 

Prayer Content (Belief)

The phenomenon of public, legislative prayer cannot simply about ceremonial form and idiom. Rather, ceremonial form and idiom matter doctrinally. As much as scholars of religion today want to set aside the phenomenon of “belief” in order to focus on “expression,” at the end of the argument as Justice Kagan understands it, the content of sectarian prayer cannot be as conveniently set aside as the majority seems to want. Beliefs are always embedded into or out of “expression.”

[Kagan dissenting view] The content of Greece’s prayers is a big deal, to Christians and non-Christians alike. A person’s response to the doctrine, language, and imagery contained in those invocations reveals a core aspect of identity—who that person is and how she faces the world. And the responses of different individuals, in Greece and across this country, of course vary. Contrary to the majority’s apparent view, such sectarian prayers are not “part of our expressive idiom” or “part of our heritage and tradition,” assuming the word “our” refers to all Americans. Ante, at 19. They express beliefs that are fundamental to some, foreign to others—and because that is so they carry the ever-present potential to both exclude and divide.

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