scholarly journals Imagining Exodus for Israel-Palestine: Reading the Secular and the Sacred, Diaspora and Homeland, in Edward Said and David Grossman

2005 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Hartnell
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Historical Materialism ◽  
Human Agency ◽  
Divine Providence ◽  
Edward Said ◽  
Cultural Affiliation ◽  
Promised Land ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Natural Target

This paper takes as its starting point Edward Said's distinction between 'religious' and 'secular' modes of cultural affiliation. As these simultaneously diverging and converging modes also trammel the particular grounds of thinking that have been Said's natural target of criticism - Zionism - his work speaks particularly powerfully to the debate surrounding the religious genealogy of Jewish identity. This paper argues that Said's interventions on Zionism highlight as problematic the position whereby the 'Ingathering of the Exiles' is promoted as coexisting with a 'diasporic consciousness' nurtured by Judaism during exile; messianic hopes of religious Jews cannot be reconciled with physical return to the Promised Land; identity circumscribed by ethnicity and place cannot stand in as exemplary for the exiled, unsettled and ultimately homeless identity trumpeted by discourses of the 'post', as many contemporary theorists would have it. And yet through an exploration of the writings of David Grossman, whose construction of Jewish identity is envisaged through the regulating, competing and collaborating tropes of Zionism and Diaspora, I argue that this position is crucial for the elaboration of Israeli identity. I also argue that in fact there is room within Said's thinking both for the anti-essentialist elaboration of 'homeless' identities as well as 'the permission to narrate' an identity politics, and that his own distinction between the 'secular' and the 'religious' begins to disassemble. I explore this blurring of the sacred and the secular through the prism of Exodus - as both concept and narrative. This paper suggests that it is precisely Said's achievement to embody these tensions between religion and its other, divine providence and human agency, historical materialism and postmodernism, alienation and its perennially tempting opposite: home.

Engels on women, the family, class and gender

2021 ◽  
pp. 194277862110000
Author(s):  
Sheila Margaret McGregor
Keyword(s):  
Historical Materialism ◽  
Human Society ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
True Nature ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Women's Oppression ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
Socialist Movement ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Way

This article looks at Engels’s writings to show that his ideas about the role of labour in the evolution of human beings in a dialectical relationship between human beings and nature is a crucial starting point for understanding human society and is correct in its essentials. It is important for understanding that we developed as a species on the basis of social cooperation. The way human beings produce and reproduce themselves, the method of historical materialism, provides the basis for understanding how class and women’s oppression arose and how that can explain LGBTQ oppression. Although Engels’s analysis was once widely accepted by the socialist movement, it has mainly been ignored or opposed by academic researchers and others, including geographers, and more recently by Marxist feminists. However, anthropological research from the 1960s and 1970s as well as more recent anthropological and archaeological research provide overwhelming evidence for the validity of Engels’s argument that there were egalitarian, pre-class societies without women’s oppression. However, much remains to be explained about the transition to class societies. Engels’s analysis of the impact of industrial capitalism on gender roles shows how society shapes our behaviour. Engels’s method needs to be constantly reasserted against those who would argue that we are a competitive, aggressive species who require rules to suppress our true nature, and that social development is driven by ideas, not by changes in the way we produce and reproduce ourselves.

Editorial: Refashioning stories for celebrity counterpublics

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-152 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sabrina Moro ◽  
Samita Nandy ◽  
Kiera Obbard ◽  
Andrew Zolides
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Public Intellectuals ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Social Significance ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Social ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Dominant Ideologies ◽  
Ted Talks

Using celebrity narratives as a starting point, this Special Issue explores the social significance of storytelling for social change. It builds on the 8th Centre for Media and Celebrity Studies conference, which brought together scholars and media practitioners to explore how narratives inspired by the lives of celebrities, public intellectuals, critics and activists offer useful rhetorical tools to better understand dominant ideologies. This editorial further problematizes what it means to be a popular ‘storyteller’ using the critical lens of celebrity activism and life-writing. Throughout the issue, contributors analyse the politics of representation at play within a wide range of glamourous narratives, including documentaries, memoirs, TED talks, stand-up performances and award acceptance speeches in Hollywood and beyond. The studies show how we can strategically use aesthetic communication to shape identity politics in public personas and bring urgent social change in an image-driven celebrity culture.

The End of Exile: Jewish Identity and Its Diasporic Poetics

PMLA ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 113 (2) ◽  
pp. 273-287 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maeera Y. Shreiber
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Postcolonial Theory ◽  
Edward Said ◽  
Collective Identities ◽  
American Experience ◽  
Inclusive Language ◽  
English Bilingual

What is the location of Jewish identity? Cultural studies has provoked reexaminations of many long-standing tropes of ethnic and religious identity, including that of exile. Such inquiries have potentially explosive consequences for the already vexed notion of Jewish identity, especially in the context of an American experience. This essay means to trouble the relation between Jewish identity and the problematic marker of exile, within the contexts of cultural and postcolonial theory, drawing on the work of Jewish and non-Jewish thinkers, including Alain Finkielkraut, Daniel Boyarín, and Edward Said. This analysis allows for a sustained consideration of a diasporic poetics—an alternative aesthetic model for imagining community and the attendant terms of belonging. The experimental Yiddish-English bilingual verse of the contemporary poet Irena Klepfisz serves as a paradigmatic example of such a vision that challenges the familiar opposition between home and exile. Yiddish, a notoriously inclusive language and a by-product of the Diaspora, is central to her inquiries into the relation between individual and collective identities and into the role gender plays in the construction of such entities.

scholarly journals Feminist Scholarship and Its Relevance for Political Engagement: The Test Case of Abortion in the US

2011 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 18-43
Author(s):  
Margaret D. Kamitsuka
Keyword(s):  
Identity Politics ◽  
Political Engagement ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
Test Case ◽  
Theoretical Perspectives ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Ethical Thinking ◽  
Societal Dynamics

This essay explores how gender studies in academe, including in religious studies, might remain relevant to ongoing feminist political engagement. I explore some specific dynamics of this challenge, using as my test case the issue of abortion in the US. After discussing how three formative feminist principles (women’s experience as feminism’s starting point, the personal is political, and identity politics) have shaped approaches to the abortion issue for feminist scholars in religion, I argue that ongoing critique, new theoretical perspectives, and attentiveness to subaltern voices are necessary for these foundational feminist principles to keep pace with fast-changing and complex societal dynamics relevant to women’s struggles for reproductive health and justice. The essay concludes by proposing natality as a helpful concept for future feminist theological and ethical thinking on the subject.

scholarly journals A White, Jewish, Rap-Infused Desire for Blackness: David Burd's Lil Dicky

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 80-88
Author(s):  
Ethan Sabourin
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Rap Music ◽  
White Male ◽  
Black Body ◽  
Jewish American ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Identity Markers

Known by his moniker Lil' Dicky, David Burd has been making rap music with an exceedingly Jewish twist for several years. This paper examines the Jewish and racial implications, and especially the intersections between the two, in Burd's lyrics and videos. Using James Baldwin's commentary on the Jewish-American condition in "On Being 'White' and Other Lies" as a starting point, I consider how Burd utilizes Jewish identity markers as a stand-in for Blackness in order to give his rap a unique ethnic position. Through three of his songs, I analyze the ways that Burd's relationship with race has evolved, culminating in his 2018 single "Freaky Friday" where Lil' Dicky and Chris Brown 'switch bodies'. In this song Dicky is able to say the N-word by having been placed by Burd into a Black body. Burd's music reflects a piece of contemporary, White, Male, Jewish consciousness and has implications for those who see themselves reflected in it.

The Revolting American Elites: Christopher Lasch and his Enemies

1997 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-114 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. J. HEALE
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Human Agency ◽  
The United States ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Dark Night ◽  
American Life ◽  
Christopher Lasch ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Human Condition

Christopher Lasch completed this book under “trying circumstances,” which presumably included the knowledge that he was dying from leukemia. Its final sardonic section is entitled “The Dark Night of the Soul,” and contemplates the pitiable plight of modern and secularized man, who denies himself the discipline of religion and is compelled to seek security in the easier and probably falser gods of science or therapy or identity politics. Lasch's last, racking examination of the human condition as it is displayed in the United States is not exactly despairing, because the human agency means that there is always hope, but his subjects are unfulfilled beings in a dysfunctional society. In short, Lasch has not used his farewell address to reprieve his fellow intellectuals of the charges he has previously levelled against them; rather, the indictment has been intensified. In many ways this a perfect Parthian shaft, gathering together and synthesising into one compelling critique the many misgivings that Lasch had long been developing about American life.

Jewish New Age and the Middle Class: Jewish Identity Politics in Israel under Neoliberalism

Sociology ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 575-591 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dana Kaplan ◽  
Rachel Werczberger
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Religious Pluralism ◽  
New Age ◽  
Identity Based ◽  
Class Reproduction

This article asks why middle-class Israeli seculars have recently begun to engage with Jewish religiosity. We use the case of the Jewish New Age (JNA) as an example of the middle class’s turn from a nationalised to a spiritualised version of Judaism. We show, by bringing together the sociology of religion’s interest in emerging spiritualities and cultural sociology’s interest in social class, how after Judaism was deemed socially significant in identity-based struggles for recognition, Israeli New Agers started culturalising and individualising Jewish religiosity by constructing it in a spiritual, eclectic, emotional and experiential manner. We thus propose that what may be seen as cultural and religious pluralism is, in fact, part of a broader system of class reproduction.

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