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Insider\/Outsider: American Jews and Multiculturalism<\/a>,<\/em> edited by David Biale, Michael Galchinsky, and Susannah Heschel, has been on my shelf since I bought it in the late 1990s\u2014the book was published in 1998\u2014but I only started reading it last month. I wish I\u2019d read it sooner. It is filled with really interesting and\u00a0provocative takes on\u00a0contemporary questions of Jewish identity as they relate to multiculturalism, intersectionality, canonicity, diaspora studies and more.\u00a0This is a paragraph from\u00a0Amy\u00a0Newman\u2019s (no relation) \u201cThe Idea of Judaism in Feminism and Afrocentrism:\u201d<\/p>\nThe specific content of\u2026negative images of Judaism\u2026is remarkably malleable. During the eighteenth century, when European scholars were infatuated with pure reason, Judaism\u00a0was criticized as an irrational faith. Now that\u00a0<\/em>rationalist ideology has come to be viewed with suspicion, hwoever, Judaism is more often conceived as the source of sterile rationality. When the hallmark of rational religion was its universalism, Judaism was criticized for its particularism; now that universalism has given way to an emphasis on difference, some assert that Judaism is the original source of universalistic thinking. In nineteenth-century German revolutionary thought, scientific method was viewed as a good thing and the\u00a0Jewish tradition was accordingly conceived as hostile to a modern scientific worldview. In contemporary social criticism, scientific method has come under suspicion, and now we learn that the desire to dominate the world often\u00a0equated with the scientific worldview originated in the Hebrew tradition. In modern German theories of race, Jews were often categorized as\u00a0\u201cblack\u201d because their ancestors had intermingled with Africans; in some recent Afrocentric scholarship, Jews are portrayed as the original\u00a0\u201cwhite\u201d racists. (174)<\/i><\/p>\n Newman\u2019s article is a long and complex critique of the way some feminist and Afrocentric scholars locate Jews and Judaism as the source of their partricular oppressions (patriarchy\u00a0and\/or\u00a0racism), and is not something I can do justice to here. This paragraph made me think, however, about how even a cursory glance at the intellectual history of antisemitism demonstrates what a profoundly\u00a0flexible a hatred it has been and continues to be, being easily molded to fit the purposes\u2014ideological and otherwise\u2014of whichever party needed it, on the left, on the right, or anywhere in between.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Insider\/Outsider: American Jews and Multiculturalism, edited by David Biale, Michael Galchinsky, and Susannah Heschel, has been on my shelf since I bought it in the late 1990s\u2014the book was published in 1998\u2014but I only started reading it last month. I … Continue reading