Part 1: The First Iteration: An Ambivalent Search for Home
In Jews and Feminism: The Ambivalent Search for Home, part of my efforts to reconfigure my home began with my need to reconsider especially my own American Jewish loyalties to liberalism. To denaturalize what had long been a kind of self-evident quality to my own attachments to liberalism, I historicized these ties by showing the links between liberalism and colonialism. This was my way of denaturalizing many of my assumptions about the emancipatory promises of liberalism for Jews. In the opening chapter I wrote:
Liberalism and colonialism share an ambivalent promise of emancipation and assimilation. In both, power is organized asymmetrically, and some people are necessarily excluded. Building on cultural critic Homi Bhabha’s critique of colonialism, I have come to see the liberal/colonial project in terms of promise and effacement, a kind of mimicry. Like colonialism, liberalism offers formerly subjected peoples a kind of partial emancipation. As Homi Bhabha explains, “By ‘partial’ I mean both ‘incomplete’ and ‘virtual.’ It is as if the very emergence of the colonial [liberal] is dependent for its representation upon some strategic limitation or prohibition within the authoritative discourse. The success of colonial appropriation depends on a proliferation of inappropriate objects that ensure its strategic failure, so that mimicry is at once resemblance and menace.” … No matter how hard the colonial subject tries, he or she will remain “a subject that is almost the same, but not quite.” 1
In other words, like Bhabha’s colonial subject, I argued that “others” within liberal nation-states are subject to a similar mechanism of exclusionary inclusion. Like Jews who have been granted citizenship, such persons nevertheless maintain their status as the other. They are almost but not quite proper liberal subjects, who remain marked by their difference from the norm. This difference is often manifested in an excessive desire to efface this variation, for those perceived as others to present themselves as normal. The excess, the trying too hard, ironically is itself a trace of the desire to fit in, as if they could control the way others see them or respond to them by trying harder.
As a result, the more those designated as others try to be normal or mainstream, the more overt are their differences. In the case of Jews, it is this excess that is at the heart of the joke that says that Jews are just like everyone else, only more so. Bhabha’s work helped me see these dynamics as a structural problem. Although the material effects of this exclusion for Jews and for women within liberal nation-states are radically different from the forms such dynamics took under colonization and continue to take in former colonies, I continue to take seriously these formal connections. They help us see many of the invisible links among and between liberal nation-states and colonization, between notions of the public and the private within these locations, as well as their lingering resonances in would-be emancipatory discourses that build on classical liberalism’s grand vision.
In Jews and Feminism I also explored how I myself had come to naturalize these desires and assumption. As I explained it then:
In the Jewish home I was raised in, Jewish values were liberal values. There was seemingly no difference. Liberalism was filled with promise. It was through liberal lenses that my parents taught me about justice, about fairness, and about liberation. Liberalism had promised my immigrant grandparents a safe home, hospitable soil, a place to grow and to prosper by entering into the American social contract. In my family, being a citizen of the United States was considered sacred. 2
I went on to argue that, like many American Jews, my own immigrant grandparents and extended family were deeply loyal to the United States. We had gained so much and felt so grateful. I still believe that such loyalty marks much of American Jewish politics, so that even those of us who are the grandchildren of the vast wave of Eastern European Jewish immigrants continue to find it difficult to challenge this most basic American discourse.
