Shedding Liberalism, All Over Again

Part 2: Reiterations: Secular Jews, Hebrew Bibles

Since I wrote that book, I have continued to work at undoing these connections and denaturalizing the assumptions that make them still seem so powerful. ¹ I have tried to consider the linkages between classical liberalism and secularism in order to reconsider the seemingly neutral secular public sphere as the critical site for social inclusion. I have argued that this is not as inclusive a space as one might hope. More specifically, I have challenged how in the United States, at least for Jewish others, acceptance into the secular public sphere came with the ironic expectation that Jews should relinquish their own self-proclaimed secular forms of Jewish identification to become Americans. This is especially evident in the experience of Eastern European Jews who came to the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. ² Thus to be accepted in the secular and presumably neutral public sphere, those Jews who identified as secular had to refashion themselves into socially acceptable “religious” Jews. In other words, to enter this seemingly unmarked social space, many secular Yiddishists had to perform their Jewishness in religious terms. This acceptability makes explicit the rules of what Janet Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini, in their edited volume Secularisms, have called the Protestant secular culture of the United States. ³

The idea that Jewish difference must be defined in religious terms, as a matter of private faith, challenges the promise of liberal inclusion by helping us see the connections between liberalism, secularization, and the lingering power of the Protestant imaginary in shaping this peculiar version of American secular culture. These secular forms of social acceptance ended up denying the explicitly secular forms of Jewish identification favored by large numbers of immigrant Jews because it construed religious pluralism as the relevant form for containing and expressing Jewish difference. By producing a religious designation for Jews in the twentieth century, secular American culture rejected the possibility of secular forms of Jewishness. Here again we see how liberal inclusion is strangely partial.

The sedimentation of these commitments to liberal inclusion and the ways they have become seemingly natural or normal makes even the idea of “secular” Jews seem oxymoronic. This too is part of the legacy of liberal inclusion and its problems. For me, by denaturalizing some of these aspects of liberal inclusion, I want to open up space for alternative forms of Jewish expression, including feminist and secular forms of Jewish identification that clearly do not neatly fit into this normative model.

In addition to considering the incompatibility of secular forms of Jewish identification in the United States and its presumptively secular public sphere, I have also tried to consider the strange legacy of the so-called Judeo-Christian tradition as a container for American religious pluralism. I did this by asking questions about the Hebrew Bible. ⁴ I use the 1985 Jewish Publication Society’s then new translation of the Tanakh and the fact of this decidedly Jewish naming of the text as a way of reconsidering the degree to which it is possible for Jews to name and claim this clearly religious text as specifically and decidedly Jewish, rather than as a part of the so-called Judeo-Christian Bible, a presumably singular universal tradition. ⁵ I challenge the notion that the Hebrew Bible is a shared sacred text. I do this to further complicate the notion of religious pluralism in the Protestant United States. In other words, this time I challenge the theological vision of liberal inclusion, the so-called “Judeo-Christian” tradition, for not allowing religious Jewish differences.

Although it might seem that the Jewish Publication Society’s naming of the translation signified a new openness to how Jews read and engage with the Hebrew Bible in terms that are specifically Jewish and not shared with their Christian neighbors, this is not necessarily the case. The text is still not commonly recognized as a version of the Hebrew Bible. Likewise, the notion that Jews read this text in a different order and through their own post-biblical exegetical traditions remains not fully appreciated, even now over 25 years after its publication. ⁶

For me this example offers another way of complicating what is often still taken for granted—a kind of seamless account of the shared legacy of Christians and Jews in the American context, a shared Bible—when in fact these communities have very different relationships to and readings of this text. Even among various Christians and Jews, there is a much fuller and more complicated set of overlapping and contradictory engagements with the Hebrew Bible. All of this makes relationships across these divides less simple and more contentious. For me this recognition of the fault lines enables American Jews an opening to begin to connect to other communities, especially Christian and increasingly Muslim communities, on new terms. We need not posit a “shared” tradition to engage with each other regarding our quite different reading of what is presumptively the same text.

In addition to these essays, I also have tried to raise some of these challenges to liberalism within the context of those who are very much committed to liberal theological discourse, where some of these tensions and problems continue to be glossed over in the name of a kind of ecumenicalism that does not acknowledge its own Christian and indeed Protestant history and ongoing commitments. ⁷ These forms of interreligious engagements often demand that others—Jews, Muslims, Buddhists—conform to its norms in order to engage in dialogue in the first place. In all of these efforts, what I find most astonishing is the tenacity of these liberal commitments. They seem to remain more firmly in place than ever. I suspect this is because we fear that there may not be other alternatives to working across our differences. I believe there are other ways of making connections that do not insist on sameness as a starting point. Rather, I want to address differences more fully as an opportunity to explore new kinds of relationships.

1. Laura Levitt, “Letting Go of Liberalism,” in Postcolonialism, Feminism and Religious Discourse, Kwok Pui-lan and Laura Donaldson, eds. (New York: Routledge, 2002): 161-179.[↑]
2. Laura Levitt, “Impossible Assimilations, American Liberalism, and Jewish Difference: Revisiting Jewish Secularism,” American Quarterly 59:3 (2007): 281-306; Levitt, “Other Moderns, Other Jews,” in Secularisms, Janet Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini, eds. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008): 107-138.[↑]
3. Janet Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini, eds., “Introduction: Times Like These,” in Secularisms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008).[↑]
4. Laura Levitt, “Beyond a Shared Inheritance: American Jews Reclaim the Hebrew Bible,” and a response to the editorial introduction in The Calling of the Nations: Exegesis, Ethnography, and Empire in a Biblical Historic Present, M. Vessey, S. Betcher, R. Daum, and H. Maier, eds. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011): 83-101.[↑]
5. The name Tanakh is derived from the Hebrew acronym for the book’s three sections in their Jewish order: Torah or the first five books; Nevi’im, the books of the prophets; and Kethuvim, writings.[↑]
6. On this point see Stephen Prothero’s notion of religious literacy, which is very much about knowing what the Christian Bible says. Although he notes briefly that the Jews call this text the Tanakh, he does not consider the differences between these two versions and presumes that religious literacy is about knowing dominant Christian readings of these texts. Moreover, he cites the King James version unless otherwise specified throughout. I write about this text in my response to the editor’s introduction to the section of The Calling of the Nations that includes my essay. See: Stephen Prothero, Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know and Doesn’t (New York: HarperCollins, 2007).[↑]
7. In 2008, I was a part of a panel entitled “Liberalism and its Analogues in Global Religions,” sponsored by the liberal theologies group at the American Academy of Religion annual meeting in Chicago. See also Mahmood’s account of the origins of secularism as an ecumenical and intra-Christian process, as cited later in this essay. See: Saba Mahmood, “Secularism, Hermeneutics, and Empire: The Politics of Islamic Reformation,” Public Culture 18:2 (2006): 323-347.[↑]