Shedding Liberalism, All Over Again

As I explained then, liberalism offered “American Jews a new vision of home, [it] opened up both a conceptual and a political terrain within which Jews could participate in American culture.” ¹ Given this depth of feeling, my desire to look more closely at this promise demanded that I explore some of the gaps in this almost sacred narrative. I did this not simply to tear liberalism apart, but to find other resources—roads not taken that could help me imagine other ways of figuring social inclusion. I looked back at American history to draw connections between liberalism and colonialism. This helped me in my efforts to use postcolonial theory to challenge American liberalism: “Even as the history of the American Revolution makes clear, this liberal emancipatory project was never just a way of constructing political, social, or cultural relationships in the West …. [L]iberalism and colonialism are intertwined.” ² We cannot look at one without the other, especially in the American context.

To sum up, from the perspective of Jews in the United States, in that first book I tried to reconsider the cultural legacy of liberalism for Jews and for women, and for Jewish women in particular, as a way of getting at these problems:

1. I considered the relationship between liberalism and colonialism, using Homi Bhabha’s notion of the colonial subject as almost but not quite European. I showed the similarities between this dynamic at the heart of colonialism as a dynamic at work within Europe,, as well as within the American liberal nation-state and its relationship to various others living within its borders. I looked at women and Jews as well as Jewish women. ³
2. I then explored the ways that liberal marriage was itself a part of the negotiation for Jewish emancipation, which first occurred in France. I discussed this by looking at the role of marriage in Napoleon’s questions to the Jewish Notables as he offered them citizenship. I argued that fidelity was itself a crucial part of the bargain, complicating the role of women in these negotiations, while also clarifying that emancipation itself was contingent upon Jews giving up various customs and social institutions, including traditional rules about marriage, in order to show their loyalty to liberal nation-states. I also clarified that this fidelity came with the promise of state protection for Jews, including Jewish women, another unfulfilled promise.
3. I used the relationship between the sexual contract and the liberal social contract to show how marriage is a sui generis contract. As feminist political theorist Carole Pateman has argued, marriage produces and reproduces an asymmetrical relationship of power that again does not redress the absence of women within the original social contract and, in fact, exacerbates the sexual asymmetry in even normative heterosexuality through the institution of marriage. ⁴
4. I then looked at how even liberal Jewish and Jewish feminist theologies have understood the covenantal relationship between God and the Jewish people as a kind of marital model. This model reproduces precisely these asymmetrical power relationships, again making it difficult to imagine Jewish women as empowered actors in both metaphorical and material relationships. This was again a way of unraveling the power dynamics that haunted my project.
5. Finally, as I considered the normative heterosexual contract, in each instance I also asked questions about its opposite, the case of rape. I asked how promises of protection were linked to notions of fidelity. At the same time, I also raised questions time and time again about how vulnerable women remain in this system. I challenged the way that sexual assault continues to be addressed in this nexus of state-sanctioned heterosexual relations and false promises of protection.

1. Levitt, 5.[↑]
2. Levitt, 5-6.[↑]
3. Here my position is and remains in sharp contrast to Wendy Brown on Jews and women. As much as I admire what Brown has to say, in her efforts to connect the Jewish and the woman questions, she ends up not being able to fully address the issue of Jewish women. This aspect of the problem is lost in her essay, where the Jews become men and the women are Christian. See: Wendy Brown, “Tolerance as Supplement: The ‘Jewish Question’ and the ‘Woman Question,'” in Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006): 48-77.[↑]
4. C. Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988).[↑]