In the Blood? Consent, Descent, and the Ironies of Jewish Identity

Abstract

Washington Post exposed the secret history of Secretary of State Madeleine Korbel Albright's family background. Because Albright's parents were Holocaust refugees and her grandparents were victims, much of the controversy focused on the conflict between one family's desire to escape history and the public's call for Albright to remember it.' But at the center of this particular storm lay another, equally controversial issue revolving around questions of descent and consent, blood and belief. If Albright reared as a Catholic and became an Episcopalian upon her marriage, asked novelist Louis Begley, was she really honor-bound to become, in her late 50s, all of a sudden, aJew? His answer no. And he argued that whether or not Albright or is not of Jewish origin should be, in our society, strictly her own business.2 The historian David Hollinger later echoed this view, insisting that anyone can ascribe Jewish identity to Albright by regarding her as a passive object, invoking in relation to that object one or more of the criteria by which she is a Jew. But in our post-ethnic age of voluntarism, argues Hollinger, she, as a willing subject, can affiliate as a Jew, and to whatever extent and by whatever means she chooses.3 Perhaps. But only if we ignore the centrality of blood logic to modernJewish identity narratives. AsJudaic Studies scholar Lawrence