jewish studies
AMBIVALENCES
Joe Rich
Jon Stratton
Coming Out Jewish: Constructing Ambivalent Identities
Routledge $38.95pb, 341pp
0 41522208 7
CURIOUSLY, CULTURAL STUDIES, itself a relatively new field of inquiry -- described here as a 'site for thinking through the problems of cultural entanglement' -- has paid little attention to the phenomenon of Jewishness. This assemblage of essays, written for various purposes and at different times since 1995 and now felicitously reconfigured to expose a single, coherently developed thread of argument, is a worthy stab at filling the gap.
Focusing on the recent evolution of Jewish identity, it proffers an extraordinarily rich, crowded canvas representing the vibrant diversity of Jewish experience -- from the emergence of a Yiddish proto-nation in the Russian Pale to the American rabbinate's refashioning of the halachic definition of a Jew. Particular attention is paid to the role of 'ghetto thinking' and mimicry as defences against a hostile world as well as to the contrasting notion, borrowed from a gay context, of 'coming out' -- or proclaiming one's Jewishness.
The central contention and main organising principle is that Jewish identity today is an outcome of the modern rise and postmodern weakening of that misshapen offspring of the French Revolution, the homogeneous nation-state into which Jews (like everyone else) were expected to assimilate, a less messy, if less efficient, means than genocide of securing the desired uniformity. (Yet the impulse to European nation-statehood was arguably strongest in Germany.)
While religious minorities were deemed to be assimilable into the nation-state -- provided observance was confined to the private sphere -- racial minorities were not. But there was no consensus about the racial classification of Jews who were sometimes thought of as 'white' and sometimes (increasingly in the later nineteenth century) as 'non-white'.
More recently, assimilation has lost ground to multiculturalism and emphasis has shifted from race as an identifier to ethnicity defined in terms of culture, language and geographical origin. Yet the categorisation of Jews remains ambivalent -- in which respect a comparison with Gypsies might have been enlightening. Cultural practice among Jews varies significantly and they share neither a common language nor country of origin. Stratton argues that in Australia the Holocaust serves as a surrogate homeland. Still, Australian Jews have not fitted easily into an ethnic role: the New South Wales Jewish Board of Deputies initially declined to join that State's Ethnic Community Council. And while multiculturalism implies a blurring of ethnic boundaries through intermarriage, Australian Jews tend to be endogamous.
Stratton's analysis is incisive and rigorous, highlighting many fine heuristic distinctions both in the language of scholarship and the more fluid terminology of everyday rhetorical discourse. Although sometimes difficult to follow, due to the complexity of the material, it repays the effort. One never gets the feeling that the author has confused opacity with profundity. Clarity is enhanced by tight, logical organisation and the provision of signposts in the form of subheadings and strategically placed summaries, and by familiar, often autobiographical, examples which also enliven the narrative. Stratton has, himself, lived many of the problems he grapples with, particularly that of ambivalence. His family background left him feeling both Jewish and non-Jewish and, therefore, never quite knowing how to behave, a dilemma with which many, not only Jews, will sympathise. Not the least valuable contribution of this book is the potential for applying its insights to the experience of other groups.
Popular culture affords further elucidation particularly in the form of an acutely observed dissection of the television sitcom, Seinfeld, whose characters with their American-inflected Yiddish humour, Stratton convincingly contends, can be read as ambivalently Jewish and non-Jewish while its popularity reflects the interpenetration of Yiddish and American thought patterns. This bears out his thesis that American Jews feel more accepted than their Australian counterparts (partly because they are less endogamous). Australia's closest equivalent to Jerry Seinfeld was the (much earlier) offensively unambivalent 'Mo', whose unpleasant portrayal by Roy Rene bordered on anti-semitism.
The argument exhibits a broad scholarship, drawing on a range of meticulously acknowledged sources -- from Derrida's ruminations on his own circumcision to Darville's egregious representation of Auschwitz as a not entirely unmerited punishment for Jewish delinquency. But the precise illuminating function played by the theories invoked is sometimes obscure -- as when, a parallel is drawn between male equality in one Jewish utopian movement and Freud's mythological construction of society's origins in terms of brothers killing their father to gain access to the women in the primal horde.
Some assertions are inadequately supported. The claim that Australia lacks 'a great sensitisation to "Jewish looks"' is not established simply by the author's experience of being more often recognised as Jewish elsewhere. And although the abandonment of the White Australia Policy may have reflected a desire to escape international opprobrium while the adoption of multiculturalism was due to the manifest disinclination of European migrants to assimilate, it does not follow that the two were unconnected. The demise of White Australia may well have been facilitated by a recognition that the failure of assimilation had not damaged -- indeed, had enriched -- Australian life.
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