Jewish identification and critical theory: The political significance of conceptual categories

This symposium examines how various discursive frameworks inform Jewish and non-Jewish interpretations of Jewishness. Although the specific characteristics of these frameworks are context-dependent, the underlying themes remain the same: Jewish identification entails identifying “difference,” and this process of drawing distinctions between Jews and non-Jews gets developed in discursive frameworks of temporality, “race thinking,” nationalism, and genetics, among others. In the broader contexts within which Jewish identification is formulated, these frameworks serve to: (i) delineate categories of people on the basis of socially salient qualities associated with human and other bodies; (ii) evaluate these categorical “types” in regard to their determined “desirable” and “undesirable” qualities; (iii) implement institutionally sanctioned measures that facilitate the privileging of the people who apparently embody desired qualities; and (iv) enforce structural constraints within which people may choose to contest, re-inscribe, re-appropriate, and/or attempt to transform components of the other three networks mentioned above. It also emphasizes the significance of who mobilizes these discourses, with what objectives in mind, and how both factors instantiate discursive and discursively informed concretized outcomes.

Duke Scholars

Author Irene Silverblatt Cultural Anthropology