Shedding Liberalism, All Over Again
Change, however, is not a simple escape from constraint
to liberation. There is no shedding the literal fear and figurative law
of the father, and no reaching a final realm of freedom. There is no new
place, no new home.[1]
In their now classic reading of feminist poet Minnie Bruce Pratt's
essay "Identity: Skin Blood Heart," Chandra Mohanty and Biddy Martin
remind us that change is never
simple.[2] Even for Pratt, a brave and
powerful writer and activist, letting go of our deepest fears and
abiding commitments is a process. We shed and then we shed again. The
layers are sedimented, and letting go takes time and diligence—and, even
with all of that, there is no new place, no new home. We live with the
traces of our various pasts even as we move on, even as we try to break
away. This was the central argument of my first book, Jews and
Feminism: The Ambivalent Search for Home, where I described in some
detail my traumatic experience of reconstituting my literal home after I
had been raped. In the process, I came to a profound realization that
many of the various traditions, communities, and narratives that had
once offered me comfort and security were no longer available to me in
the ways that I had once thought they
were.[3] Jews and Feminism
was about my attempts to engage with the traces of those various
legacies in more partial and less absolute terms as I remade my home.
In the present, I return to these feminist texts and my reading of
them from a different angle, to reframe my own efforts to escape the
full embrace of one of these profoundly disappointing legacies. I return
to classical liberalism because, in many ways, it has operated as a
central organizing discourse in my life. As such, it remains the legacy
I continue to mourn, as a Jew and as a woman. I return to this loss to
reconsider my disappointment alongside liberalism's promises of
liberation and freedom. Truth be told, I have spent most of my career
trying, in different ways, to let go, not only of my own liberalism but
to challenge what I understand to be a far more pervasive American
Jewish, as well as feminist, loyalty to classical liberalism. Like
Pratt, what I am shedding is intimately a part of who I am. My critique
has been shaped by my deep sense of both the promise and disappointments
at the heart of classic liberalism and its vision of social inclusion. I
carry the weight of this disappointment in my body. After all, the State
was not able to protect me; after I was raped, it never did find the man
who assaulted me. It is now over twenty years later, and there is still
no resolution. Yet I find myself holding onto the hope that this need
not be the case. Even these many years later, I am struck by the
tenacity of my own lingering loyalties to this promise of justice. This
has not gone away. As much as I know that there is no new home, no new
place, I still find myself caught in liberalism's promises.
In all kinds of ways, my efforts to critique liberalism are informed
by this persistence. As such, I have taken seriously the ways that the classical liberal
vision opened up space in modern nation-states for Jews and
for women. It allowed Jews to become citizens and enter into the
so-called "secular" public sphere. Later, it did the same thing for
women. In the United States these promises were extended to my own
immigrant grandparents at the beginning of the last century. It was in
this country that my family first understood that these promises were to
be extended to Jewish women as well as to Jewish men, to my grandmothers
and my mother and eventually to me. This, however, is not the entire
story. Even our inclusion remains partial and incomplete. This is not
because we did not get it right, but rather because there are
limitations built into the very terms of the liberal social contract and
its promises.
Despite its seemingly universal vision of inclusion, liberalism has
not actually provided full access to its social contract for all kinds
of "others." Social inclusion for the various others living within
liberal nation-states, much less for those residing within these
countries' colonies and former colonies, has not been and cannot be
fully realized on liberalism's terms. These promises remain partial and
incomplete for all of us. As I have argued in my various works, this
includes all those constructed and configured as minorities
residing within these nation-states: people like me (women, Jews, Jewish women).
In other words, the mechanisms of liberal inclusion, the very
discourses that those of us especially in the United States have come to
believe are normal and natural and, in some sense, act as the common
sense of social inclusion, are fundamentally flawed. They do not work in
the ways that we have come to believe they do or should.
Liberalism sets up a public expectation
and indeed a veneer of openness to its invitation even as it
simultaneously makes impossible the very promise it offers. Despite,
perhaps, its best intentions, liberalism excludes all over again in the
very name of inclusion.[4]
Part of what I am suggesting is that these promises be
understood as much more partial and incomplete. That even as we may
aspire to some kind of a universal, we make explicit the limits of
current discourse in accommodating the promise of inclusion. This might
help us begin to search more fully and earnestly for better ways of
realizing greater inclusion.
Recalling Pratt's labors to undo or redo her own inheritances, I see
this essay as an exercise in shedding—my way of remembering that change
is a process. It is my hope that iteration with a difference can help us
more fully appreciate the problems posed by liberalism. In this
instance, I hope to show, in a somewhat more nuanced fashion, how a
certain Jewish (and feminist) loyalty to liberalism limits our ability
to find other discourses, other ways of imagining social inclusion.
With this in mind, I present this essay in three parts. In part one,
I return to my own ambivalent search for home to confront this problem
in relation to what it means to claim an American Jewish feminist
position. In part two, I offer a glimpse at two more recent efforts to
get at these issues. On the one hand, I ask what the difficulties of
claiming a secular Jewish position in the United States tells us about
the terms of Jewish entry into the liberal nation-state's ostensibly
secular public sphere. On the other hand, I suggest how a
reconsideration of the place of the Hebrew Bible—known by Jews as the
Tanakh—in American culture can help us better see the limitations
of religious pluralism. In the third section I engage with a different
conversation partner, drawing connections between my critique of
American Jewish liberalism and anthropologist Saba Mahmood's recent work
on Muslims, social tolerance, and secularization, drawing attention to a
few key points of connection between our positions. In my conclusion I
suggest that perhaps not only shedding, but also mourning, might be a
way out of this otherwise melancholic enactment of letting go of
liberalism.
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