…and Good Shabbas,” he said, as he hit the “Enter” key with his right pinky finger.
Seidman, Naomi. “Fag-Hags and Bu-Jews: Toward a (Jewish) Politics of Vicarious Identity” in Insider / Outsider: American Jews and Multiculturalism ed. David Biale, Michael Galchinsky, and Susannah Heschel. 1998. Berkley, CA: University of California Press.
“In contemporary Jewish-American culture Arendt’s “hidden tradition” has not so much ended (as has been said of modernism) both dominant and dead. And as this hidden tradition increasingly becomes an open secret, its dialetical continuation is driven further underground. There are many routes out of this dissonance, but one of them has certainly been to retain in some form the legacy of Jewish marginality while seeking its “truer” expression in particularist, non-Jewish models. The price has been, for some, the awkwardness of championing particularisms while avoiding one’s own, or alternatively, to feel one’s self-identification as a Jew as somehow in bad faith.
“However untidily American-Jewish experience fits the multicultural paradigm, the problematics of Jewish participation is at the very heart of its development. If the founding moment of American multiculturalism is in the shift from the liberalism of the civil rights movement to the identity politics of Black Power in the mid- to late 1960s, then multiculturalism, from the beginning, signaled the expulsion of Jews from a comfortable home on the left. More than that, African American experience, as Michael Rogin points out, indirectly provided both the Jewish blackface vaudevillian and the [Jewish] civil rights worker with a path toward integration, a way to be white in a society where African Americans, not Jews, were the dominant Other. No wonder multiculturalism and the Jews has so often turned out to be a traumatic conjunction. For the Jews, particularism began not in a return to ethnic celebration but in a radical dislocation of what had become a not-so-hidden tradition of Jewish universalist secularism….
“To compound the Jewish/multicultural problem, what prevented the widespread Jewish adoption of Jewish ethnic particularism was, in a way, Jewishness itself, in the form of the tradition of universalism that came closest to account for the prevalence of American Jews in Western Buddhist circles, has suggested a similar etiology for Jewish rejection of Jewish practice. Kamenetz addresses the tendency of secular Jews to be more open to other religions thatn their own, acknowledging that “the Hasidim represented everything [Allen] Ginsberg’s family had run screaming from for two generations.” But Kamenetz’s most powerful insight is his recognition that the rejection of one kind of Jewish tradition is also, from another perspective, another kind of Jewish tradition: “I began to suspect that Jewish identity, as it has evolved in the West today, could be a real barrier to encountering the depths of Judaism. In other words, being Jewish could keep you from being a Jew.” Kamentez’s analysis is directed to secular Jewish interest in non-Jewish religious traditions, but the same could be said for the rejection of the politics of Jewish particularism by a certain portion of this group. In the absence of a particularist Jewish political affiliation that could also satisfy the progressive universalist agenda with which Jewish politics ahs been historically linked, adopting the particularist position of another group paradoxically becomes a distinctively Jewish act….
“Ther is something, even for unaffiliated Jews, in multiculturalism’s demand for the identification of one’s position as a subject; tactfully bracketing one’s Jewish identity in the presence of “real” marginality can lead, as it does in Sedgwick, to an unconsciousness of how even this bracketed Jewishness shapes who we are.
“But there is no easy way out of Jewish political drag either. The straight road of Jewish self-identification in the multiculutre is only apparently so….”
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