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Contempo- Varieties of Authenticity rary Jewish Identity in Contemporary Jewish • Identity Stuart Z. Charmé

Stuart Z. Charmé

uch discussion about religious pluralism among Orthodox and non-Orthodox Jews, about assimilation and Jewish conti- Mnuity, about Jewish life in Israel and in the Diaspora, and about a variety of other issues related to Jewish identity all invoke “authenticity” as the underlying ideal and as the ultimate legitimizer (or de-legitimizer) of various positions. In an address to the graduating class of Reconstructionist rabbis in 1983, Irving Howe encouraged the next generation of rabbis to “try for an atmosphere of authenticity, wherever you find yourselves.”1 An Orthodox rabbi in Philadelphia recently encouraged liberal Jews to share a Sabbath meal at an Orthodox home in order to see “how special an authentic Shabbas really is.”2 Israel, claimed Daniel Elazar, is “the only place in the world where an authentic Jewish culture can flourish (at least potentially). . . . Even the more peripheral of American Jews are touched by the Jewish authenticity of Israel, while the more committed find the power of Israel in this respect almost irresistible.”3 And in response to such typical Zionist authenticity claims, one of Philip Roth’s literary alter egos proposes that Europe, not Israel, is “the most authentic Jewish homeland there has ever been, the birthplace of rabbinic Judaism, Hasidic Judaism, Jewish secularism, socialism, on and on.”4 Authenticity has become the key term for postmodern reconstruc- tions and “renewals” of Jewish identity. As feminist, progressive, gay/ lesbian, environmentalist, secular, and many other kinds of Jews lay claim to parts of traditional Judaism that offer recognition and respect to the previously marginalized parts of their identities, they also seek elements that they consider to be “authentically Jewish.”5 Thus Tikkun editor Michael Lerner argues that authentic Jewish identity must be “more spiritual; moral; God-centered; politically committed to social [134] justice; pluralistic; democratic; nonsexist; joyful; full of intellectual ferment; and open to dissent”6 than is allowed by either Jewish secular- Jewish ism or unquestioned adherence to tradition. Alan Dershowitz pleads for Social more fluid understandings of Jewish authenticity that allow one to say Studies that Yiddish secularism was “an authentic Jewish culture,” that political Zionism is “an authentic Jewish civilization,” and that Dershowitz’s own secular Judaism is “equally authentic to that of the ultra-Orthodox.”7 Why has the term “authentic” become such an important qualifier of Jewish identity, tradition, culture, and religion? In what sense is it possible to describe a Jewish person, place, practice, or ideological position as valid, real, or authentic? This article will analyze some of the historical and cultural roots of the idea of authenticity in general and how different conceptions of authenticity are or might be applied to Jewish identity, culture, and tradition. References to authenticity constitute a hybrid discourse, one that makes descriptive claims about historical continuity with particular tradi- tions of the past as a source of authority for the present (e.g., “halakhic Judaism is more authentically Jewish than liberal [non-halakhic] Juda- ism”), prescriptive claims about the normative superiority of one form of Jewish life over another (e.g., “religiously observant Jews have more authenticity than assimilated, ethnic Jews,” or “Jewish life in Israel is more Jewishly authentic than Jewish life in the Diaspora”), and existential claims about one’s deepest values and sense of self.8 At times the pre- scriptive claim of authenticity presumes descriptive claims about the legitimate Jewish past. For example, the normative superiority of one form of Jewish practice may be defended by appeals to its historical authenticity. At other times, claims of Jewish authenticity require con- testing elements of the received tradition, as in many feminist quests for an authentic nonsexist or inclusive Judaism. The search for Jewish authenticity may be in the service of modern individualistic goals of searching for meaning and achieving some form of self-actualization, or authenticity may be linked to a collective agenda, such as when forms of Jewish identity that encourage or preserve group survival are regarded as more authentic than less durable individualistic or assimilationist forms of identity. It is clear that many of the various uses of the idea of authenticity are incompatible with each other. One of the first questions that arises in exploring the issue of “authentic Jewish identity” is whether the authen- ticity aimed at refers to the Jewish content of identity or to an existential quality in the structure of a Jewish person’s identity—that is, whether “authentic” modifies “Jewish” or whether it modifies “identity.” What is the relationship between “authentic” Jewish traditions and a Jew’s per- sonal sense of “authenticity”? British chief rabbi Jonathan Sacks con- [135] tends that authenticity in the modern existential sense of determining one’s own values out of a commitment to being true to oneself, rather Contempo- than accepting external authority, is “the archetypal biblical vice.” Thus rary Jewish Identity “from the perspective of the autonomous self, halachic existence is inauthentic because it flees from making personal choice the center of • Stuart Z. the universe. From the perspective of tradition, much of contemporary Charmé ethics is inauthentic precisely because it makes personal choice the measure of all things.” Sacks finds the incompatibility between Ortho- dox and liberal Judaism located in the shift in authenticity from being a characteristic of Judaism to a quality of the self.9 Although this change in the meaning of authenticity to Jews is critical, Sacks presents the two competing elements—tradition vs. the autonomous self—as individually far less problematic than each one really is.

Essentialistic Authenticity

At the descriptive level, authenticity is often invoked when referring to the Jewish content in a person’s life. In other words, to call someone an “authentic” Jew may be a statement about the depth of their Jewish knowledge, observance, or commitment. On this scale, contemporary Jews frequently regard Orthodox Judaism as the most authentic repre- sentation of the Jewish tradition of the past and Orthodox Jews as the most authentic embodiment of that tradition. When Adin Steinsaltz, an Orthodox rabbi in Israel, called secular Jews “empty sausages that only have the skin left,” he was asserting a view of the real essence or “meat” of authentic Jewish identity. Claims of authenticity are often used by some Orthodox Jews to invalidate or “de-authenticate” other forms of Jewishness. Of course, in the past decade, romanticization of Orthodoxy has been tempered by resentment at Orthodox triumphalist denigra- tion of non-Orthodox Jews. In a survey of American Jews in 1989, when debate in Israel on the “Who is a Jew?” question had thrown the authenticity of non-Orthodox Judaism into doubt, only 18 percent agreed that Orthodox Jews were “the most authentic Jews.”10 Still, a whole range of Jewish religious leaders promote the return to Jewish religious tradition as the only path—not just to Jewish continuity but also to Jewish authenticity. In its basic form, this model of associating authentic Jewish identity with the essence of Jewish tradition is rooted in the German romantic idea of volksgeist, or “spirit of a people,” which treats an ethnic, national, or religious group as a distinct species with its own unique cultural [136] outlook to which it tries to remain true. Each member of the group is simply an instance of the shared common body of cultural, religious, Jewish and national traditions. This perspective can be traced back to the Social eighteenth-century German philosopher J. G. Herder, who emphasized Studies the historical nature of reason: the idea that thought itself takes on different forms in different peoples as a result of their different cultures, geographies, and languages.11 Such essentialistic models of authenticity are attractive to all those who are troubled by the most difficult problem of identity: its fluid, shifting, overlapping, and intersecting boundaries. It is easier to see oneself as an expression of a group identity that pre-exists one’s birth and continues after one’s death. Anthropologists Richard Handler and Jocelyn Linnekin point out that “to imagine the collectivity as a species eliminates the problem of fuzzy boundaries: people can claim that any individual is or is not a member of the nation. . . . There are no ambigu- ous or divided affiliations, and the nation, as a collection of individuals, is as definitively bounded as a natural species.”12 Tradition is the collective expression of a group’s essence, or volksgeist. Accordingly, authenticity is often associated with loyalty to a primordial and largely homogeneous tradition. Located in some idealized past, this tradition offers a means to resist the alienating and corrupting effects of other cultures or modern civilization in general. The glorification of tradition has often reflected an anxiety that the present moment or wider culture is fake and artificial, corrupted and alienating. Romantic reactions to the Enlightenment’s universalism held up the common folk or peasantry as the guardians of a cultural authenticity that was being lost in urban bourgeois society. The folk “harbored a spiritual essence that higher social classes had buried or lost in excessive civilization.”13 Seek- ing the shelter of tradition is to some degree symptomatic of “the destabilizing flux of the post-contemporary world.”14 Anthropologists have observed that the search for authentic indigenous cultures and artifacts has utilized the concept of authenticity to construct a boundary between modern Western culture and a pre-modern, pre-contact past representing what modern civilization has lost.15 The attraction to essentialistic models of Jewish authenticity is not limited to the very religious. Even secular Jews have claimed a sense of difference from non-Jews rooted in the Jewish volksgeist. In his autobio- graphical essay on postwar Jewish identity in France, Alain Finkielkraut acknowledges a perspective that he once held: Jewishness coursed through my veins, was my inner truth, my flesh and blood. The culture of the ghettos and the scars of deportation still dwelled in the depths of my soul. My character had been molded by twenty centuries [137] of suffering: I was one of the earth’s living repositories of the Jewish spirit. I never would have thought of using the much maligned term race, and yet, Contempo- imbued with the sensibility of my people, an authentic part of a larger rary Jewish process, a link in the uninterrupted chain of being, I pledged implicit Identity allegiance to the determinism of racialist thought....I could therefore do 16 • without memory, for Jewishness thought and spoke through me. Stuart Z. Charmé Certainly, the dichotomy between the spontaneous and natural au- thenticity of the folk and the corrupting, alienating influence of wider culture has often been replayed in current discussions of Jewishness and how the relationship between Jewish culture and the surrounding Western culture is constructed. Premodern forms of Judaism, often symbolized by the traditional Jewish life of the East European shtetl, have been idealized and contrasted with artificial, eroded, inauthentic forms of assimilated, suburban American Jewish life. Assimilation comes to represent the unique corrupting impact of modernity and the de- structive “colonization” of Jewishness by American culture. It is for this reason that contemporary Hasidim, who appear to preserve the tradi- tional life and folkways of their shtetl forebears, are often seen by Amer- ican Jews as exemplary Jews, the most authentic expression of Judaism. Jack Kugelmass suggests that Hasidim function as icons of authentic prelapsarian Jewish existence, representing “the essential Jewish self uncorrupted by the compromises of the many” and “an authentic Jewish spirituality of which we are no longer capable.”17 Nostalgia about Yiddish or Klezmer music, and efforts to revive them, likewise may be rooted in the same idea, despite the culturally hybrid origins of these forms of Jewish expression. The generation of massive Jewish immigration to the United States has also been idealized as the fragile thread connecting American Jews to their authentic traditions. Continuity with future generations is seen to depend on continuity with past ones. This connection is constantly threatened by “spurious” adaptations to a new environment that intrude on the “authentic” traditions of the past. Sociologists have been quick to identify the more robust (i.e., authentic) ethnicity of the immigrant in contrast to the “symbolic” (i.e., diluted and inauthentic) ethnicity of subsequent generations. Much talk about Jewish identity today takes the form of a lament over the presumed demise of what is nostalgically referred to as Yiddishkeit (the Jewish volksgeist) in the course of the past century. The threat of assimilation is not merely demographic; many people see themselves engaged in a “spiritual” struggle to resuscitate an ailing Jewish volksgeist. When Howe told the graduating class of rabbis [138] to strive for authenticity, his prescription was to replace assimilated American Jewish life with what he called “the experience of living in a Jewish rich and coherent culture, one that possessed its own language, its own Social manners, styles, values.”18 Studies Many different claims of authenticity are involved in Israel’s central role in modern Jewish life. First, there is the historical authenticity of biblical locations and ancient Israelite religion, which are used to legitimize Jewish connection to certain land. In addition, the original Zionist pioneers are portrayed as uncontaminated folk, whose return to the land undoes the alienation of life in Europe. The authenticity of Jewish life in Israel has, since Herzl, been constructed and contrasted to the emptiness and falseness of Diaspora Jews.19 To a great extent, Zionism’s claim to Jewish authenticity employs the three essentialistic ingredients of European nationalism and cultural identity—land, lan- guage, and people. In Israel, Jews are said to enjoy the authenticity of people who can express their religion and culture without self-con- sciousness or disguise. Finally, the conspicuous presence of an ultra- religious community offers vicarious religious authenticity even to those who are not part of that community. In many of these cases, the authenticity of a Jew is identified with adherence to authentic Judaism, and authentic Judaism is ultimately defined by a particular understanding of the concept of “tradition” that is accepted as normative and authoritative. Authentic tradition, in these religious perspectives, invariably rests on accepting the authority of those who determine its authenticity. Indeed, it is this sense of authority that is the greatest appeal of traditional forms of authenticity. Thus, authentic Jewish life is anchored by the authority of God, sacred texts, religious elites, and/or communal religious traditions of the past. One’s goal is merely to bring oneself into conformity with this authority, not to contest it or posit competing authorities. Attractive as this idea sounds, current discussions of the development of Jewish culture and religion have challenged the idea of a continuous, linear tradition that is seamlessly linked to an original “authentic” Judaism or Jewish people. Rather, Jewish culture and identity take form in what Efraim Shmueli describes as “a complex struggle of historical situations.”20 He suggests that the question of Judaism’s essence, or “authentic” Judaism, regularly arises in periods when communal con- sensus is under attack and when borders between acceptable and un- acceptable practices have become unbearably fuzzy. The inevitable changes that occurred in the history of Jews and Judaism have always been couched in terms of a return to what is authentic and essential and a repudiation of other models as inauthentic. Although cultural, eth- nic, and religious identities continually recreate and redefine them- [139] selves, change is usually accompanied by the claim that innovators are merely rediscovering or returning to the true tradition.21 The innova- Contempo- tions of one period may become the “authentic” tradition for future rary Jewish Identity generations even though at the moment of innovation they may be rejected as inauthentic.22 • Stuart Z. The precise qualities and characteristics of a tradition are by no Charmé means easy to identify, moreover, since there is a continuous tension between whatever happened in the past and how the traditions attrib- uted to the past are perceived or articulated in the present. To designate some aspect of the past as the “authentic tradition” is therefore not a passive discovery of some characteristic of the past but a particular appropriation and legitimatization of the past by the present.23 Tradition is more accurately seen as a process or a project of dialectical inter- change of past and present. Folklorist Dell Hymes therefore prefers to talk about an active process of “traditionalizing” certain periods or perspectives on the past rather than a passive process of receiving a fixed or given tradition.24 In the past 25 years, scholars have demonstrated the ways in which culture and tradition are continually reconstructed, reinvented, and recreated.25 Hayim Soloveitchik offers an excellent example of this process in a brilliant analysis of ultra-Orthodox (haredi) claims of continuity with an immutable essence of Jewish tradition handed down from the past. As he demonstrates, this ultra-Orthodox worldview actually conceals a complex reconstruction of a text-centered form of Jewish tradition that represents an important shift in notions of Jewish authority, legitimacy, and authenticity.26 In the face of the challenges and changes of moder- nity, the text as the sole source of authenticity represents a new way of constructing Judaism. In the same way, the face-off between Orthodox and liberal forms of Judaism cannot be justified as one between real Judaism and diluted or inauthentic Judaism, but rather between competing models, values, and interpretations of historical authenticity that determine the relevant canon of facts and texts.27 Indeed, as a conceptual framework, Ortho- doxy itself emerges and has meaning only in relation to liberal Judaism. Orthodoxy, understood as a distinct and organized form of Jewish religion, represents a specific modern form of Judaism, despite its claims to be nothing more than the tradition.28 Jacob Neusner sees a new, unspoken element of choice now at work that changes everything: “Piety selected is by definition piety created.”29 When individuals become primarily expressions of their culture, cultural particularity devolves into a kind of static essence. For people [140] who see themselves as members of a racial, ethnic, or cultural “species,” authenticity becomes focused on expressing the qualities of that group Jewish by fully embracing and enacting the social roles legitimated by the Social group. The politics of authenticity merge with the politics of identity. For Studies marginalized groups like blacks, women, and colonized peoples, as well as for Jews, authenticity involves claiming the voice of a group identity for which the dominant social and political groups function as a negative foil.30

Existential Authenticity

One of the major figures who used the category of authenticity to challenge essentialistic models of Jews and Jewishness was philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, whose 1940s essay translated as Anti-Semite and Jew remains one of the most provocative, maligned, and misunderstood analyses of modern Jewishness. Properly understood, Sartre’s work can be seen to anticipate many of the assumptions about cultural identity popularized by recent work in cultural studies.31 Sartre offered his model of existential authenticity to analyze the group identities of non-Jews and Jews and to offer an alternative to the traditional forms that have just been described. When Sartre wrote Anti-Semite and Jew in France in 1944, he was registering a protest against the explosion of European antisemitism that had culminated in the Holocaust. Sartre wanted to deconstruct the antisemites’ claim to cultural authenticity. Not only did he emphasize the fundamental inauthenticity of the antisemite’s identity, but he also insisted that Jews would need to confront the antisemitism of non-Jews if they were to deal honestly with their own identities. Sartre understand- ably wanted to address the question of how oppressed groups such as the Jews might respond to their situation. In this particular time and place, Sartre believed that the condemning look of the antisemite overshad- owed any other Jewish religious, cultural, or ethnic factors. In the face of this hostile reality, Sartre encouraged resistance rather than efforts to disguise, deny, or otherwise flee from the inescapable fact of being Jewish, a fact that was being determined by the antisemites in any event. Authenticity was associated with moral courage and proud defiance toward one’s persecutors. As Emile Fackenheim subsequently echoed, the Holocaust raised to center stage a different form of authenticity and inauthenticity for Jews, supplanting other tensions such as that between religious and secular forms of Jewishness.32 Jews had to decide whether to accept their Jewishness or to flee from it before they could even begin to address any other questions. Fackenheim’s insistence on asserting one’s Jewishness [141] to prevent the “posthumous victory” of Hitler was a logical development of Sartre’s belief that authenticity for members of oppressed groups Contempo- required defiance of the forces of oppression and commitment to rary Jewish Identity survival as a member of the group. In light of Europe’s experience with Nazi racism, Sartre was legitimately suspicious that cultural and ethnic • Stuart Z. identities, including Jewish identity, might become either a refuge for Charmé those who refused to take individual responsibility for their lives or a legitimization for the domination of other ethnic groups. He feared that some Jews sought to defuse the power of the antisemite by creating an alternative Jewish essence or “Jewish immanence.”33 Although Sartre challenged Jews to accept the social stigma to which the antisemite condemned them, his model of existential authenticity emphasized the ability to transcend assigned social identities. In this sense, existential authenticity develops out of the focus on individual identity in late-eighteenth-century Enlightenment thought. The French Enlightenment granted people the freedom to leave their assigned social positions. A new idea of authenticity emerged that emphasized the ability to detach oneself from social roles and status. Jean-Jacques Rousseau thus identified conformity to external social pressure as the greatest danger to individual authenticity. This sense of authenticity is in tension with the essentialistic authenticity of the group and the collective roles the group seeks to enforce. It is easy to see how this Enlightenment tradition of authenticity led to the contemporary focus on self-fulfillment and self-realization as important components of auth- enticity.34 When Sartre raised the question of “existential authenticity” in the discussion of Jewish identity, he highlighted the critical new ingredient in the identity of the post-emancipation, post-Enlightenment, post- halakhic Jew: the enormous freedom to decide the content and mean- ing of being Jewish. A recent study of Jewish identity in America concludes with just such an affirmation of the priority of existential authenticity in the search for a meaningful identity:

In modern culture, where identity is open, affirmations of the given and traditional are as much dependent on choice as more dramatic creations of new identifications and commitments. ...[W]hile particular choice is open to revision, the principles of choice and authenticity are not—even if one decides to enter a pre-modern world of fundamentalist belief, which is also a choice. . . . Identity, formerly objective and imposed, has become con- structed and chosen—Jewish identity, like all others. There can be no return from this disposition to choose. The future of American Jews will continue to be determined by the place that individualism, modernity, and choice afford to Judaism—not the other way around.35 [142] The pluralism of American Judaism is an implicit testimony to the idea Jewish of multiple forms of authentic Jewishness. Social Although existentialist philosophy is often assumed to encourage Studies deracinating, humanistic individualism, Sartre emphasized the cultural, historical, political, economic, and physical limits that circumscribe human freedom. Any critical sense of authenticity must simultaneously hold in balance two interconnected facts: the life of every human being is situated in a specific history and culture that shapes his or her thought and identity, and the ultimate meaning and character of that history and culture is determined in slightly different ways by each person.36 Every person, wrote Sartre,

forms a synthetic whole with his situation—biological, economic, political, cultural, etc. He cannot be distinguished from his situation, for it forms him and decides his possibilities; but inversely, it is he who gives it meaning by making his choices within it and by it. To be in a situation, as we see it, is to choose oneself in a situation, and men differ from one another in their situations and also in the choices they themselves make of themselves.37

From this point of view, a person’s understanding of his or her identity is inauthentic when the person either denies the historical, cultural, and political contexts of that identity or denies the variety of possible ways of assuming it on an individual level. An inauthentic person, one who lives in “bad faith,” either denies the context of identities by focusing only on the generic humanity of all individuals or tries to find a transcendent essence of group identity that determines who he or she is. In the latter case, such a person refuses to “consider that essence as being historically constituted and as implying my action”; that is, whatever essence one embraces is a product of historical factors and one’s own reaction to them.38 A critical or self-reflexive authenticity requires recognizing both sides of this process. Sartre’s description of the process of developing an authentic Jewish identity includes a variety of terms such as “true and lucid consciousness of the situation” of being a Jew, “assuming,” “accepting,” “realizing,” “making,” and “choosing” oneself as a Jew.39 Jews are not limited to the negative identity offered by the antisemite, but neither can they ignore it.40 They may define their Jewish situation to include positive Jewish meanings derived from cultural elements of Jewish history, since to “realize” oneself as a Jew is both to “recognize” and to “make real” certain Jewish realities. It includes both internalizing and resisting the attitudes of others, those who are friendly and those who are hostile, members of one’s family and community as well as the community of one’s oppres- sors, those who claim authority and those who have been excluded from [143] authority. Although Sartre encouraged Jews to embrace their cultural specificity, Contempo- he also realized that many of the Jews he knew could not, without bad rary Jewish Identity faith, continue the Jewish path of their traditional ancestors or even the later reforms of their descendants.41 For better or worse, modern Jews • Stuart Z. live at a time when the traditional Jewish worldview and lifestyle have Charmé been permanently fragmented and challenged. It was not Sartre’s pur- pose to discourage religion as an expression of Jewish authenticity so much as he sought to redefine Jewish authenticity for those who had already abandoned religious practice.42 Psychoanalyst Paul Marcus compares the process of arriving at an authentic Jewish identity to psychotherapeutic “working through,” wherein every Jewish person must integrate his or her individual experi- ence as a Jew and the collective experience of the Jewish people into his or her identity—even recalcitrant and traumatic elements (like the Holocaust).43 For Sartre, the process by which we surpass our situation and make it our own is neither something passively experienced nor just a single decisive act of will; it is the ongoing work or project of a life:

[E]ach moment of this work is at once the surpassing and, to the extent that it is posited for itself, the pure and simple subsistence of these deviations at a given level of integration. For this reason life develops in spirals: it passes again and again by the same points but at different levels of integration and complexity.44

Thus we always appropriate the past from the vantage of the present with a vision of the future. There is a thickness and depth to the meaning we give to our lives and the elements in it that is neither a matter of discovery nor creation out of nothing. The process of positioning ourselves within particular personal, family, cultural, historical narratives inevitably se- lects, condenses, and possibly even distorts the meaning of the situation we are born into. It is always a creative process yet also an unsettling one, since the stories we tell are open to revision and change.45 The result is that identity is expressed in narratives that position us in relation to the past, but these narratives are open to change.46 This is true on both collective and individual levels. Narratives constructed in different his- torical periods differ, as do narratives at different moments in an individual’s life. An authentic identity, therefore, is never an entity or substance that we possess47 but rather a project situated in time and space. Being born into a particular Jewish situation determines many possibilities, but those possibilities are historically influenced, and new possibilities are influenced in turn by our own actions. Recent research [144] has begun to emphasize the variety of changes in the meaning and construction of Jewish identity over the course of a person’s life. 48 Jewish Such authenticity, which takes into account a person’s full and con- Social crete background of race, class, religion, nationality, and culture, inevi- Studies tably looks different in each Jew, hence the multiplicity of authentic Jewish identities. Unlike the traditional essentialistic model of authentic- ity, the purpose of this concept of authenticity is not to exclude particu- lar forms of Jewish identity as inauthentic but rather to identify certain ways of construing identity in general as false and dangerous, and to offer a critique of the use of authenticity. In a sense, authenticity lies in disavowing the possibility of authenticity as it has traditionally been used. As Jonathan Webber notes, “It is not just the notion of ‘authentic Judaism’ that can be seen as a construct in response to circumstances; Jewish identities in general are largely to be understood as constructs in response to the circumstances.”49 The result is that “there are multiple authentic Judaisms”50 that have constructed multiple understandings of the Jewish situation. People are therefore not passive products of their cultures but active agents who express their culture in ways that contrib- ute to the further development of their cultures and identities. It is misleading to speak of a singular, uncomplicated thing called Jewish history or culture rather than the many ways of living one’s Jewishness in a variety of different situations. This is a decentered, deconstructed, pluralistic view of authenticity, not a dualistic, essentialistic one. Interpreters of cultural identity like Stuart Hall have emphasized the obvious implication of Sartre’s premise that human existence precedes any alleged essence. In this existential sense “cultural identity . . . is a matter of ‘becoming’ as well as ‘being.’ It belongs to the future as much as to the past. It is not something that already exists, transcending place, time, history, culture. Cultural iden- tities come from somewhere, have histories. But like everything which is historical, they undergo constant transformation.”51 In other words, Jewish existence precedes Jewish essence.

The Commoditization of Jewish Identity

Although Sartre tried to present a general model of authenticity for groups like the Jews of France, his actual analysis was necessarily linked to the specific historical situation of Europe in the 1940s. Against the background of the Holocaust, Sartre tended to overemphasize this element of resistance to the oppressive cultural identities of the non- Jews as the critical element of authentic Jewish identity. He counseled self-reliance and defiance in the face of antisemitism as the only authen- [145] tic response. But is the defining gaze of the antisemite an everlasting part of the situation of being a Jew? What happens when the power of the Contempo- antisemite disappears and the Jews’ level of social acceptance changes? rary Jewish Identity By Sartre’s own theory, the manifestation of authentic Jewish identity will inevitably be different for Jews in other historical or cultural situations. • Stuart Z. To the extent that the historical, cultural, and political situation of Jews Charmé today is considerably different from how it was 60 years ago, the choices of how to authentically realize one’s Jewishness may have also changed. This is the question that Finkielkraut’s intriguing book, The Imaginary Jew, takes up. Published in 1980, the year of Sartre’s death, it is both an homage to Sartre’s analysis of the structure of human identity and a critique of how Sartre’s advice to the Jews of his generation became misused by Jews in a later generation—whose situation as Jews had changed dramatically from that of their parents and grandparents. A child of Holocaust survivors, Finkielkraut portrays himself as some- one who followed Sartre’s advice to reject the essentialism of religion and the universalism of assimilation. Like many Jews of his generation, Finkielkraut celebrated his Jewishness as the crucial degree of difference that separates him from the non-Jews around him. His Jewish peers’ identification with the victims of the Holocaust enabled them to enjoy a form of vicarious authenticity. But much had changed from the time of Sartre’s writings to Finkielkraut’s. French Jews of Finkielkraut’s genera- tion no longer had to fear being “outed” by the accusatory finger of an antisemite shouting “Jew.” Jews were now so well assimilated into French culture that to claim and assert any essential Jewish difference was to some extent a figment of their imagination. How could authenticity lie in accepting or reconstructing Jewish difference when Jewish difference no longer exists? The idea of Jewishness as a traumatized, wounded identity, in response to which the choice is simply denial or proud acceptance, is obsolete, according to Finkielkraut. He complained that the Jewishness of these “imaginary Jews” was no more authentic than that of the invisible Jews of Sartre’s time who tried to pass as Gentiles.52 They had become “moochers of the Jewish condition” who claimed the persecution of their parents’ generation as their own. In other words, they were responding to someone else’s “situation.” Finkielkraut describes the ironic reversal in the way he saw Jewish identity being expressed. In the past, the guiding assimilationist prin- ciple was for the Jew to be “a man in the street and a Jew at home.” The suggestion was that the universalistic “man in the street” was a necessary social role that could be learned and mastered, but that in the privacy of his home the Jew’s true self could be revealed. Humanistic equality was [146] a fiction in contrast to the inner truth of group identity. In this situation, Jewishness was his authentic core of identity, hemmed in by inauthentic Jewish social roles. Jewishness offered the measure of difference that prevented Social the Jews from being totally absorbed by the dominant cultural identity, Studies an antidote to emancipation. Sartre had exhorted the Jews to stop pretending to be something they were not or not to be something they were. Who they are at home—in private—should be who they are in their public presentation. By the 1960s and 1970s, however, Jewishness was no longer the private authentic core of identity but rather a public role, a kind of masquerade to be paraded and displayed in public like a costume. The dark secret that Finkielkraut’s Jews keep private was that “at home,” in private, they were just like everyone else. Thus Jewishness had become an inauthentic role that they play at being. The dilemma of these “imaginary Jews” was not that they, like the Jews in Sartre’s day, were victims of antisemitism who dreamed about what it would be like to be non-Jews, but rather that their social identity as Jews had become empty. When Jews become culturally homogenized by mass culture, they appear indistinguishable from non-Jews in most respects. Playing the role of the Jew in public can be a game to help them hide from the insubstantiality of their identities. Such “imaginary” Jewishness might claim a pedigree of Sartrean authen- ticity, but actually it was an exercise in bad faith, an attempt to grasp something real in a world of fakes and copies. In this sense, Finkielkraut describes the quest for Jewish authenticity as a symptom of postindustrial society where identities, like other commodities, are mass-produced. The language of authenticity is held out as a remedy in a world where everyone is impersonating identities without real substance.53 Finkielkraut’s analysis is ultimately less a critique of Sartre’s model of the qualities of authentic Jewish or other identity than it is an account of how the axis of authenticity in one period can shift, congeal, and pro- duce the opposite of its intended effect in another period. But this does not mean that the goal of authenticity is now untenable. Indeed, Sartre would likewise have been disappointed at the way in which his exhorta- tion to authenticity was transformed into its opposite. Although Finkielkraut clearly exaggerates the attitudes of the “imagi- nary Jew” for rhetorical effect, his central point echoes the central tension of Sartre’s own autobiography, The Words. Looking back on his childhood and youth, Sartre condemned the heroic image of the writer that he had adopted as a way to set himself apart from the banality of his everyday life. Later, as a mature writer, Sartre developed the ideal of “committed literature” as an attempt to escape from the inauthenticity of his childhood poses. His description of the goal of the committed (authentic) writer’s work included the same elements as an authentic [147] cultural identity: Contempo- [A] synthesis of Negativity, ...a power of uprooting from the given, and a rary Jewish Identity Project, . . . an outline of a future order . . . constant renewal of frame- works, and the continuous overthrowing of order once it tends to congeal. • In short, Literature is, in essence, the subjectivity of a society in permanent Stuart Z. revolution.54 Charmé

Cultural identity can likewise be characterized as a continual “uproot- ing” from one’s roots, projecting toward the future, renewing assump- tions and foundations, and rejecting any ossification of the self—that is, the subjectivity of a people in permanent revolution. Despite his critique of Shoah-centric Jewish identity as a parody of Sartrean authenticity, Finkielkraut reinscribes a Sartrean model of au- thenticity when he talks about his Jewishness as “the acute consciousness of a lack, of a continuous absence: my exile from a civilization which, ‘for my own good,’ my parents didn’t wish me to keep in trust.”55 At some level, the cultural identity of pre-Holocaust Jews is untenable, not just because it had been destroyed by the Nazis but because of its essentialistic qualities. It is not simply a matter of his parents failing to teach him about Jewish culture; it is the impossibility of total adhesion to any cultural identity. Jewishness for Finkielkraut is an existential enigma, an unfinished work that refuses to be “encompassed by a stable and recog- nized concept.”56 An authentic Jewish identity cannot be built around either the lost culture of Europe’s slaughtered Jews or a preoccupation with that loss. Like Sartre, Finkielkraut refused to give Jewishness any “unequivocal and precise content”57 or to advocate a return to religious or nationalistic forms of identity. Finkielkraut says,

To nationalize Judaism, or better yet, to make it a church, is to arrest it, in the sense of freezing a changing process or interrogating a smuggler who makes cross-border runs. It is thus to make Judaism subject, under the pretext of bringing our life and discourse into harmony, to the police state and its regime. Restrict the word Jew to a single truth and there we are: suddenly capable of judging, categorizing, classifying and finally diminish- ing those who don’t conform to our idea of our common bond. . . . There are no phony Jews: there are only authentic inquisitors.58

The Jews who claim to be authentic Jews have too often taken an oppressive role toward those Jews who define themselves otherwise. Who are these “authentic inquisitors” who call others “phony Jews”? Perhaps, it is they who are inauthentic Jews. But here Finkielkraut is [148] caught in the paradox of assuming the Jewish identity of a Jew who can only realize a Jewish identity by disclaiming it. The result is an endless Jewish deferral of identity as a goal. Jewishness is not fullness but emptiness. Social “Jewishness is what I miss, not what defines me, the base burning of an Studies absence, not any triumphant, plentiful instinct.”59 The contrast Finkiel- kraut makes is laced with nostalgia for the past, but he also invokes Sartre’s contrast between the fullness and instinct that characterize essentialistic models of culture, and the anxiety associated with freedom and transcendence of such models. What Finkielkraut is trying to express is the same relativity of cultural identity that Sartre argued for. Handler and Linnekin describe the same paradox in evaluating cultural traditions:

Traditions are neither genuine nor spurious, for if genuine tradition refers to the pristine and immutable heritage of the past, then all genuine traditions are spurious. But if, as we have argued, tradition is always defined in the present, then all spurious traditions are genuine.60

It is not that all claims of authenticity are necessarily suspect, just that one must use authenticity in a particular way that preserves the dynamic instability of identity. Finkielkraut returns to a Sartrean perspective when he concludes,

Judaism’s very lack of definition is precious: it shows that political categories of class or of nation have only a relative truth, and stands as a sign of their inability to encompass the world in its totality. The Jewish people don’t know who they are, only that they exist, and that their disconcerting existence blurs the boundary, inaugurated by modern reason, between the public and the private.61

So Finkielkraut, like any authentic Jew, both is a Jew and is not a Jew. “The word Jew is no longer a mirror in which I seek my self-portrait, but where I look for everything I’m not, everything I’ll never be able to glimpse by taking myself as a point of reference.”62 In the postmodern situation, it is impossible to “be Jewish” in a simple way. Jewishness transcends and exceeds me, but I likewise transcend and exceed it. The question Finkielkraut raises is what authenticity will look like in a world not of antisemitism but of assimilation, a world where the homogenization of culture and identities has made the distinctive qualities of Jewish culture/identity harder to discern.63 How can Jewish culture survive when individual Jews are increasingly consumers rather than preservers of their cultural tradition? “Instead of appreciating cultures as cultures, in their entirety, they prefer to look at bits and pieces they can try on for while, taste, enjoy, and then throw away.”64 [149] In this way, Finkielkraut still abides by Sartre’s model of identity as a dynamic process that includes both continuity and discontinuity with Contempo- the past. It is summed up in Sartre’s philosophically puzzling claim that rary Jewish Identity identity is in fact nonidentical with itself and that every human life “is what it is not, and is not what it is.”65 By this, Sartre meant to call attention • Stuart Z. to the idea that any statement about identity is merely tentative and Charmé already outdated, since we are always moving beyond that statement about what we are, transcending who we were a moment earlier. Because we are always more than what we have been up until this moment, it can be said that we are not what we are. This power of uprooting ourselves from the given moment as we reinterpret it and reintegrate it in new ways also means that we are always in a process of becoming: who we are is really what we are not (yet).

The Search for a Critical, Decentered Authenticity

In a postmodern world, Jewish identity is authentic—truthful about its own nature—only when it assumes the instability of all identities. Phi- losopher Joseph Margolis’s observations about his own dislocated or decentered Jewish identity represents a succinct statement of the inner contradictions within authentic Jewish identity: “I am pleased to be a Jew because I am not one; and I am not one because I really am one.”66 He is suggesting that one can be a Jew only by realizing that one cannot be a Jew in an essentialistic sense. And he sees himself as authentically (“really”) Jewish because he is not willing to accept such assumptions that may lie behind traditional views of Jewishness. Part of authentic Jewish identity is to assume the role of an identity problematizer. But what is the identity of the identity problematizer? Maria Damon explains the way authentic Jewish identity problematizes the ordinary assump- tions about identity:

Because I have had to construct my own Jewishness in the world, and continue to have to do so, I also constantly have to deconstruct my Jewishness. The kind of Jew I am is the kind who isn’t sure what kind of Jew she is. . . . This doesn’t mean dwelling in permanent inadequacy, perfor- mance anxiety, and self-erasure, though these can be useful if uncomfort- able temporary positions. Rather, by looking for the clues, the words, I move, not toward a whole picture, but further into the complexities of “becoming Jewish.”67 Sartre, like many other thinkers, regarded the difficulty in pinning down the exact nature of Jewishness as a characteristic of human iden- [150] tity in general. Early on, Sartre described the fundamental structure of human consciousness and the self as having a parallel in Jewish reality. Jewish He used the term “diasporatic” to describe the structure of human Social consciousness itself. He explained that “the profound cohesion and Studies dispersion of the Jewish people,”68 who mysteriously hold together without a land or fixed location, provides a useful image for a theory of consciousness as lacking any firm or fixed foundation of its own. It is no wonder, in turn, that Sartre balked at giving any concrete sense to the meaning of Jewishness. He considered it to be, like consciousness itself, a paradoxical unity without permanent substance but with the power to negate and transcend. As such, Jewishness is an example and a reminder of the problematic nature of all identities and identity boundaries. Because of the misuses and problematic aspects of the concept of authenticity, one possible response is simply to put it on a terminological and conceptual blacklist. Thus Regina Bendix suggests that “removing authenticity and its allied vocabulary is one useful step toward conceptu- alizing the study of culture in the age of transculturation.”69 Miriam Peskowitz argues for the freedom to develop “temporary traditions” without laying claim to “Jewish authority and authenticity.”70 This posi- tion makes sense if authenticity were limited to separating genuine from fake, legitimate from illegitimate. The goal in retaining the idea of authenticity must not be to adjudicate competing claims of authenticity but to reposition the idea of authenticity completely, to consider what it might mean in a time when cross-cultural hybridity is as much if not more of a reality than monocultural homogeneity. Unlike many cultural critics, I do not believe that unveiling or deconstructing the mistaken claims of essentialistic forms of authentic- ity means that we must abandon authenticity altogether, to live post- authentically. Not only can a rehabilitated ideal of authenticity offer a position from which to critique cultural essentialism, but a critical, self- reflexive authenticity can also focus awareness on our identities’ un- stable process of becoming. This is not an oxymoronic idea. Rather, authenticity is not about finding one’s “true self” or the “real tradition” but about maintaining an honest view of the process by which we construct the identities and traditions we need to survive. It requires lucidity about the lack of essence or permanent foundation of all identities, and vigilance against the idea that it can be realized. A position can be authentically Jewish only by realizing its own potential inauthenticity: that it is historical, may be given different meanings at different moments in history, and becomes fixed or congealed only at the price of bad faith. Authenticity is surely not present when it is claimed to have been located, fixed, or acquired. But it may be glimpsed in moments of self-awareness of the inevitable process of deconstructing [151] and reconstructing all cultural identities. Contempo- rary Jewish Identity Notes • Stuart Z. Charmé 1 Irving Howe, “The Problem of describe a new authenticity that Jewish Self-Definition,” abandons traditional authority of Reconstructionist (Oct. 1983), 7 Judaism and replaces it with the (my emphasis). “integrity of the search” for new 2 Rabbi Jay Spero, “Yes, the spiritual responses (A Sense of Orthodox Do Care About Other Belonging: Dilemmas of British Jews,” Jewish Exponent, Nov. 27, Jewish Identity [London, 1991], 1997 (my emphasis). 162). 3 Daniel Elazar quoted in Sara 6 Michael Lerner, Jewish Renewal: A Bershtel and Allen Graubard, Path to Healing and Transformation Saving Remnants: Feeling Jewish in (New York, 1994), 14. While America (Berkeley, Calif., 1992), Lerner acknowledges that his is 124 (my emphasis). not the only Jewish vision, he 4 Philip Roth, Operation Shylock justifies its distance from (New York, 1993), 32. See also traditional Judaism by invoking Roth’s critique of the presumed essentialistic authenticity. The authenticity of Israel in contrast focus of Jewish renewal on to the “real Jews” he encounters “tikkun olam,” healing and outside of it (125–26). For a transforming the world, is the more serious treatment of the “essence” of Judaism. He is trying authenticity of Diaspora to isolate the “central insights Jewishness, see Régine Azria, and primary ideals” of Judaism “The Diaspora-Community- that he is sure are on the side of Tradition Paradigms of Jewish healing and transformation, not Identity: A Reappraisal,” in Jewish sexism and oppression. Survival: The Identity Problem at the 7 Alan Dershowitz, The Vanishing Close of the 20th Century, Ernest American Jew: In Search of Jewish Krausz and Gitta Tulea, eds. Identity for the Next Century (New Brunswick, N.J., 1998), 22– (Boston, 1997), 17, 57, 324. 26. 8 The philosophical weakness of 5 Jonathan Webber, “Modern grounding prescriptive claims of Jewish Identities,” in Jewish authenticity in descriptive claims Identities in the New Europe, about the “authentic” beliefs or Jonathan Webber, ed. (London, practices of the past is discussed 1994), 74–85. Howard Cooper in Jonathan Cohen, “‘If Rabbi and Paul Morrison similarly Akiba Were Alive Today . . .’ or the Authenticity Argument,” American Jewry (Ithaca, N.Y., Judaism 37, no. 2 (Spring 1988): 1988), 12. [152] 136–42. 18 Howe, “The Problem of Jewish 9 Jonathan Sacks, One People? Self-Definition,” 6. Jewish Tradition, Modernity and Jewish 19 Geoffrey Wheatcroft, The Unity (London, 1993), 157–58. Controversy of Zion: Jewish National- Social 10 Steven M. Cohen, Content or ism, the Jewish State, and the Studies Continuity? Alternative Bases for Unresolved Jewish Dilemma (New Commitment (The 1989 National York, 1996), 72. Survey of American Jews) (New 20 Efraim Shmueli, Seven Jewish York, 1991), 30–31, 71. Cultures: A Reinterpretation of Jewish 11 Alain Finkielkraut, The Defeat of History and Thought (Cambridge, the Mind (New York, 1995), 7. Engl., 1980), 2. 12 Richard Handler and Jocelyn 21 Jacob Neusner, Death and Rebirth Linnekin, “Tradition, Genuine or of Judaism: The Impact of Christian- Spurious,” Journal of American ity, Secularism, and the Holocaust on Folklore 97, no. 385 (1984): 278. Jewish Faith (New York, 1987), 19– 13 Regina Bendix, The Search for 20. Authenticity: The Formation of 22 Lerner, Jewish Renewal, xix. Folklore Studies (Madison, Wisc., 23 Handler and Linnekin, “Tradi- 1997), 97. tion, Genuine or Spurious,” 282. 14 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: 24 Dell Hymes, “Folklore’s Nature Modernity and Double Consciousness and the Sun’s Myth,” Journal of (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), 101. American Folklore 88 (1975): 345– 15 Marvin Cohodas, “Elizabeth 69. Hickox and Karuk Basketry: A 25 Roy Wagner, The Invention of Case Study in Debates on Culture (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., Innovation and Paradigms of 1975); Jocelyn Linnekin, Authenticity,” in Unpacking “Cultural Invention and the Culture: Art and Commodity in Dilemma of Authenticity,” Colonial and Post-Colonial Worlds, American Anthropologist 93 (1991): Ruth Phillips and Christopher 446–50; Jocelyn Linnekin, Steiner, eds. (Berkeley, Calif., “Defining Tradition: Variations 1999), 143–61. on the Hawaiian Identity,” 16 Alain Finkielkraut, The Imaginary American Ethnologist 10 (1983): Jew (Minneapolis, 1994), 36. 241–52. 17 Jack Kugelmass, “Jewish Icons: 26 Hayim Soloveitchik, “Rupture Envisioning the Self in Images of and Reconstruction: The the Other,” in Jews and Other Transformation of Contemporary Differences: The New Jewish Cultural Orthodoxy,” Tradition 28, no. 4 Studies, Jonathan Boyarin and (Summer 1994): 85–87. Daniel Boyarin, eds. (Minneapo- 27 See Jacob Neusner, Between Time lis, 1997), 41; Kugelmass, ed., and Eternity: The Essentials of “Introduction,” in Between Two Judaism (Encino, Calif., 1975), Worlds: Ethnographic Essays on 141. 28 Neusner, Death and Birth of relations, and which gradually Judaism, 115–47. becomes inscribed in the same 29 Ibid., 145. set.” Note that in this case Sartre [153] 30 Anthropologists have criticized includes the category “religious the idea of authenticity as an idea relations” as part of the situation Contempo- that continues to define indig- to which a person must respond. rary Jewish enous and aboriginal peoples by 39 Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, 90, Identity constructing their identities with 136–37. • the categories of colonial 40 In January 1940, he wrote to Stuart Z. cultures. “Authentic aboriginality Simone de Beauvoir that Jews Charmé is everything ‘we’ are not and might struggle against anti- vice versa” (Patrick Wolf, Settler semitism not only because of Colonialism and the Transformation their generic human rights but of Anthropology [London, 1999], also because they recognize “a 179–80). cultural and religious value in 31 Much of the theoretical work of Judaism” (Quiet Moments in a War: Stuart Hall, for example, is The Letters of Jean-Paul Sartre to surprisingly similar to Sartre’s Simone de Beauvoir, 1940–1963, ed. analysis of human identities. Simone de Beauvoir [New York, 32 Emile Fackenheim, Encounters 1993], 32). Around this time, Between Judaism and Modern Sartre also told a Catholic priest Philosophy (New York, 1973), 203– he had befriended in a German 10. prisoner-of-war camp that, for 33 Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jews who maintained religious Jew (New York, 1965), 97, 102. beliefs, it would be a mistake to 34 Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism: abandon them for the sake of Examining the Politics of Recogni- assimilation. He offered his own tion, ed. Amy Guttmann (Prince- image of a multicultural society: ton, N.J., 1994), 28–32. “If we were making our republic, 35 Berstel and Graubard, Saving we would have inspired ourselves Remnants, 299–300. with the Bolsheviks’ primitive 36 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and idea: a special statue for each Nothingness: An Essay on Phenom- ‘nationality’ which permits him enological Ontology (New York, not to be ashamed of his history, 1956), 489. his language, and his culture” 37 Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, 59–60. (Marius Perrin, Avec Sartre Au 38 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 42. Stalag 12D [Paris, 1980], 70). Sartre described human life as “a 41 Sartre’s disciple Robert Misrahi particular adventure, whose wrote of a “new Jew” who has point of departure is a set of rejected Jewish religion and socioeconomic, cultural, moral, tradition but who wishes to religious and other relations, remain Jewish in an authentic which proceeds with whatever way characterized less by means are to hand, that is to say intellectual content than by within the limits of these existential content, a “coura- geous will to be Jewish” and a him, both in ignoring their own consciousness of Jewish history oppression and in accepting [154] (“Assimilation and Jewish illegitimate authority for it. For Authenticity,” in Judaism, Crisis, Jewish women, authenticity Jewish Survival, Ann Rose, ed. [Paris, requires recognizing their 1966], 74–77). More recently, situation within Judaism and Social Garry Brodsky described the resisting the oppressive elements Studies postmodern Jew as the authentic of that situation through new Jew today, one who feels a deep alternative forms. attachment to Jewishness as a 43 Paul Marcus, “Jewish Conscious- central part of his or her identity, ness After the Holocaust,” in despite being atheistic and Psychoanalytic Reflections on the religiously nonobservant (“A Way Holocaust: Selected Essays, Steven of Being a Jew, a Way of Being a Luel and Paul Marcus, eds. (New Person,” in Jewish Identity, D. York, 1984), 179–93. Goldberg and M. Krausz, eds. 44 Jean-Paul Sartre, Search for a [Philadelphia, 1993], 26). Method (New York, 1968), 106. 42 In fact, Sartre had a special 45 See Stuart Charmé, Meaning and appreciation for the ways that Myth in the Study of Lives: A religious images were often used Sartrean Approach (Philadelphia, as the best expression of authen- 1983), chap. 1. tic struggle against injustice and 46 See Stuart Hall, “Ethnicity: oppression. In Black Orpheus, for Identity and Difference,” Radical example, Sartre wrote apprecia- America 23, no. 4 ( June 1991): tively of African religion as an 19. authentic expression both of 47 Sartre criticized the idea of the cultural identity and of political self as substantial in his early protest against European work The Transcendence of the Ego colonialism. Sartre’s appreciation and developed this view further of the messianic theme in in Being and Nothingness. Judaism in his interviews with 48 Bethamie Horowitz, “Connec- Benny Lévy also stems from his tions and Journeys: Shifting support of the ethical critique of Identities Among American injustice and oppression that he Jews,” Contemporary Jewry 19 saw in Judaism’s vision of a (1998): 63–94. transformed world. Similarly, he 49 Webber, “Modern Jewish would have likely been interested Identities,” 82. in recent Jewish feminist 50 Leonard Fein, Where Are We? The religious thought as an effort of Inner Life of America’s Jews (New Jewish women to find an authen- York, 1988), 43. tic way to assume their identities 51 Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity as Jewish women. Women who and Diaspora,” in Identity: simply accept the traditional role Community, Culture, Difference, of women in Judaism would have Jonathan Rutherford, ed. seemed doubly inauthentic to (London, 1990), 225. 52 In the 1960s, Albert Memmi said group that are used to define “a he heard that in the United pure Jewish cultural essence.” See States “being Jewish has ceased to their “Diaspora: Generation and [155] be inconvenient.” It is less a the Ground of Jewish Identity,” question of bad faith than of Critical Inquiry 19 (Summer Contempo- “bad taste” to hide one’s Jewish- 1993): 721. rary Jewish ness. Memmi, The Liberation of the 63 See Fran Markowitz, “Plaiting the Identity Jew (New York, 1966), 20. Strands of Jewish Identity,” • 53 See Hillel Schwartz, The Culture of Journal for the Comparative Study of Stuart Z. the Copy: Striking Likenesses, Society and History 32, no. 1 ( Jan. Charmé Unreasonable Facsimiles (New York, 1990): 182–87. 1996). 64 Finkielkraut, The Defeat of Mind, 54 Jean-Paul Sartre, What Is Litera- 112. ture? (New York, 1965), 159. 65 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, lxv. 55 Finkielkraut, The Imaginary Jew, 66 Joseph Margolis, “Talking to 114. Myself,” in Goldberg and Krausz, 56 Ibid., 168. eds., Jewish Identity, 334. 57 Ibid., 166. 67 “Word-landslayt: Gertrude Stein, 58 Ibid., 168–69. Allen Ginsberg, Lenny Bruce,” in 59 Ibid., 38. People of the Book: Thirty Scholars 60 Handler and Linnekin, “Tradi- Reflect on their Jewish Identity, tion, Genuine or Spurious,” 289. Jeffrey Rubin-Dorsky and Shelley 61 Finkielkraut, The Imaginary Jew, Fisher Fishkin, eds. (Madison, 169. Wisc., 1996), 386. 62 Ibid., 179. Daniel and Jonathan 68 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 136. Boyarin make a similar point 69 Bendix, The Search for Authenticity, regarding the “diasporic” quality 9. of Jewish identity, i.e., its disrup- 70 Miriam Peskowitz, “Beauty tion of the traditional categories Routines,” Tikkun 12, no. 2 of identity such as land, nation, (1997): 59. race, religion, and language