Heine’s Law and Jewish Foreign Policies

Author(s):  
Michael N. Barnett

This chapter offers a manual for understanding the foreign policies of the American Jews, exploring how their beliefs were an outgrowth of, primarily, the American experience, and, secondarily, the world. It begins by situating American Jews in historical context, contrasting their history with that of the Jews of Western and Eastern Europe, and highlighting how the American experience explains American Jewry's affinity for liberalism and non-Orthodox Jewry. These commitments explain the rise and endurance of the political theology of Prophetic Judaism, which, in turn, explains American Jews' cosmopolitan sensibility when addressing the Jewish Problem and the Jewish Question. The chapter ends with a discussion of the foreign policy of a transnational people and considers how the foreign policy process is informed by the linking of identity, interests, and institutions.

Author(s):  
Michael N. Barnett

How do American Jews envision their role in the world? Are they tribal—a people whose obligations extend solely to their own? Or are they prophetic—a light unto nations, working to repair the world? This book is an interpretation of the effects of these worldviews on the foreign policy beliefs of American Jews since the nineteenth century. The book argues that it all begins with the political identity of American Jews. As Jews, they are committed to their people's survival. As Americans, they identify with, and believe their survival depends on, the American principles of liberalism, religious freedom, and pluralism. This identity and search for inclusion form a political theology of prophetic Judaism that emphasizes the historic mission of Jews to help create a world of peace and justice. The political theology of prophetic Judaism accounts for two enduring features of the foreign policy beliefs of American Jews. They exhibit a cosmopolitan sensibility, advocating on behalf of human rights, humanitarianism, and international law and organizations. They also are suspicious of nationalism—including their own. Contrary to the conventional wisdom that American Jews are natural-born Jewish nationalists, the book charts a long history of ambivalence; this ambivalence connects their early rejection of Zionism with the current debate regarding their attachment to Israel. And, the book contends, this growing ambivalence also explains the rising popularity of humanitarian and social justice movements among American Jews.


Author(s):  
Michael N. Barnett

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book immerses itself in the history of American Jews and traces how the American experience shaped the identity of American Jews; how this identity is intertwined with the political theology of Prophetic Judaism; how the political theology accounts for an outward orientation that is more cosmopolitan than tribal; and how this foreign policy orientation shaped American Jews' responses to the Jewish Problem and the Jewish Question. As a work of history, this book is deeply informed by the historical record and draws from memoirs, archives, secondary research, and interviews. As a work of interpretation it is informed by what the social sciences and humanities tell us about the relationships between various kinds of political communities and their relations with others.


2021 ◽  
pp. 240-256
Author(s):  
Alex Dubilet

This essay turns to Marx’s “On the Jewish Question” in order to diagnose the collusive interplay between mediation and sovereignty as modes of transcendence that, together, prevent real immanence from irrupting. It does so by recovering the logic of “the general secular contradiction”—the division between the state and civil society that materializes and secularizes the structure of diremption originally articulated in theological form, as the opposition between heaven and earth. In this analysis, the logic of Christianity is shown to be imbricated with the political form of secular modernity itself. Moreover, this account reveals that the modern secular state does not inaugurate the political theology of immanence, but constitutes, rather, a mechanism of transcendent mediation. The exception that mediates across the two realms renders transcendence livable, but also reproduces the dirempted life, establishing it as the unsurpassable horizon and foreclosing all operations of dissolution that could collapse the structure of civil society and the state that governs “the order of the world.” Although immediate transcendence (sovereignty) may be positioned, as it is in the Schmittian paradigm, as radically distinct from its mediational counterpart, in relation to real immanence the two operate as a collusive ensemble.


Author(s):  
Emma Simone

Virginia Woolf and Being-in-the-world: A Heideggerian Study explores Woolf’s treatment of the relationship between self and world from a phenomenological-existential perspective. This study presents a timely and compelling interpretation of Virginia Woolf’s textual treatment of the relationship between self and world from the perspective of the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. Drawing on Woolf’s novels, essays, reviews, letters, diary entries, short stories, and memoirs, the book explores the political and the ontological, as the individual’s connection to the world comes to be defined by an involvement and engagement that is always already situated within a particular physical, societal, and historical context. Emma Simone argues that at the heart of what it means to be an individual making his or her way in the world, the perspectives of Woolf and Heidegger are founded upon certain shared concerns, including the sustained critique of Cartesian dualism, particularly the resultant binary oppositions of subject and object, and self and Other; the understanding that the individual is a temporal being; an emphasis upon intersubjective relations insofar as Being-in-the-world is defined by Being-with-Others; and a consistent emphasis upon average everydayness as both determinative and representative of the individual’s relationship to and with the world.


Author(s):  
Michael P. DeJonge

This chapter continues the examination of Bonhoeffer’s first phase of resistance through an exposition of “The Church and the Jewish Question,” turning now to the modes of resistance proper to the church’s preaching office. Because such resistance involves the church speaking against the state, it appears to stand in contradiction with Bonhoeffer’s suggestion earlier in the essay that the church should not speak out against the state. This is in fact not a contradiction but rather the coherent expression of the political vision as outlined in the first several chapters of this book, which requires that the church criticize the state under certain circumstances but not others. The specific form of word examined here is the indirectly political word (type 3 resistance) by which the church reminds the messianic state of its mandate to preserve the world with neither “too little” nor “too much” order.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Murk Lakhair ◽  
Ishrat Afshan Abbasi

The research explores the emergence of republic of turkey and its way of gaining the position from the central power to the emerging world power. Turkey in reality initiated to get the dominant position over region and influence over world after president Erdogan came into power whose pro-Islamic based policies brought many reforms in domestic and foreign policies.. In the war torn region president Erdogan policies has balanced the position of country in the region. The objectives of this research are to explore the facts about the Turkey’s way to the Neo-Ottoman Empire and its influence over international powers. This research also unfolds the changes in the global politics after Turkey’s position as a symbolic challenge for the world super and major powers. The research concerns with three main questions that are, how Turkey got significant position after many domestic and regional challenges? How president Erdogan would accomplish his future ambitions of Neo-Ottoman Empire and the last question refers to the post-Lausanne scenario in global politics. The research also provides the analysis over the Turkey’s pre-preparations for her dominancy over region and the political and economic benefits to the Turkey after revival of Neo-Ottoman Empire.The research explores the emergence of republic of turkey and its way of gaining the position from the central power to the emerging world power. Turkey in reality initiated to get the dominant position over region and influence over world after president Erdogan came into power whose pro-Islamic based policies brought many reforms in domestic and foreign policies.. In the war torn region president Erdogan policies has balanced the position of country in the region. The objectives of this research are to explore the facts about the Turkey’s way to the Neo-Ottoman Empire and its influence over international powers. This research also unfolds the changes in the global politics after Turkey’s position as a symbolic challenge for the world super and major powers. The research concerns with three main questions that are, how Turkey got significant position after many domestic and regional challenges? How president Erdogan would accomplish his future ambitions of Neo-Ottoman Empire and the last question refers to the post-Lausanne scenario in global politics. The research also provides the analysis over the Turkey’s pre-preparations for her dominancy over region and the political and economic benefits to the Turkey after revival of Neo-Ottoman Empire.


Staging for the first time in extant scholarship a rigorous encounter between German thought from Kant to Marx and new forms of political theology, this ground-breaking volume puts forward a distinct and powerful framework for understanding the continuing relevance of political theology today as well as the conceptual and genealogical importance of German Idealism for its present and future. Against traditional approaches that view German Idealism as essentially a secularizing movement, this volume approaches it as the first speculative articulation of the political-theological problematic in the aftermath of the Enlightenment and the advent of secularity. Via a set of innovative readings and critiques, the volume investigates anew such concepts as immanence, utopia, sovereignty, mediation, indifference, the earth, the absolute, or the world, bringing German Idealism and Romanticism into dialogue with contemporary investigations of the (Christian-)modern forms of transcendence, domination, exclusion, and world-justification. Over the course of the volume, post-Kantian German thought emerges as a crucial phase in the genealogy of political theology and an important point of reference for the ongoing reassessment of modernity and secularity. As a result, this volume not only rethinks the philosophical trajectory of German Idealism and its aftermath from a political-theological perspective, but also demonstrates what can be done with (or against) German Idealism using the conceptual resources of political theology today.


Author(s):  
James L. Newell

Political scientists have conventionally distinguished between advanced liberal democracies; communist and post-communist states, and so-called third-world countries. Though used less frequently than was once the case, the groups or ones like them are distinguished because drawing general conclusions about the nature of political life requires being able to categorise in order to compare countries; and because, broadly speaking, the groups mark broad distinctions tending to correlate with a range of variables including political corruption. Placing, then, the liberal democracies of Western Europe in one category and the former communist countries of Europe, plus Russia, in another reveals that corruption is a larger problem in the latter part of the world than it is in the former. Against this background, the chapter looks at the historical context of corruption during the communist era. It then provides an overview of the extent of corruption in the post-communist era and of the variations in its extent between the states concerned –before explaining the distinctive reasons for the development of these levels of corruption, assessing their impact and looking at what is being done and needs to be done to reduce levels of corruption.


Author(s):  
Simon Duke ◽  
Sophie Vanhoonacker

This chapter focuses on the European Union as a subsystem of international relations. It examines the following questions, taking into account the historical context in which EU foreign policy has developed as well as the theoretical pluralism that has characterized its study. First, how has the EU dealt with its own international relations internally? Second, what are the ideas and principles underlying EU foreign policy? Third, what is the EU's collective action capacity in relation to the rest of the world? The chapter illustrates interstate dynamics as a result of European integration by focusing on the cases of France, Germany, and Benelux (Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg). It also considers the EU's international identity and its role as a collective actor.


Author(s):  
Melissa Feinberg

This chapter analyzes the political function of show trials in Eastern Europe. It argues that while show trials told lies, their primary purpose was to reveal new truths about the Cold War world to their East European audiences. Show trials described a world where the peace-loving socialist East was continually menaced by the imperialist West, which sent spies and saboteurs to wreck its economic development and plotted to destroy it in a nuclear war. These political plays told East Europeans how they should see the world and clarified the consequences of non-compliance. This chapter also examines how people around the region were required to voice their condemnation of the traitors on trial and dedicate themselves to the search for hidden enemies.


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