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.

1. Chandra Talpade Mohanty and Biddy Martin, “Feminist Politics: What’s Home Got to Do with It,” in Feminist Studies/Critical Studies, Teresa de Lauretis, ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986): 202. [↩]
2. Ibid. [↩]
3. Laura Levitt, Jews and Feminism: The Ambivalent Search for Home (New York: Routledge, 1997). [↩]
4. Aamir R. Mufti, Enlightenment in the Colony: The Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). [↩]