The Question of Others: Reflections on Anthropology and the ‘Jewish Question’

Abstract

In this essay I interrogate the place of the ‘Jewish Question’ in contemporary anthropology, based on ethnographic research conducted with Jewish Israeli non- and anti-Zionist left-wing activists. I engage with Jonathan Boyarin’s proposal for ‘Jewish ethnography’ (Boyarin 1996b) via reflections on the ways in which anthropology has failed to incorporate ‘Jewish theory’ as a theoretical other of its disciplinary premises. Exploring the irony of Israeli activists’ artistic and leisure practices, I argue that there is am ambivalent self-mockery at the heart of their attachments to Jewishness. I analyse this with reference to the theories of Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, and Emmanuel Levinas, who have similarly placed in question the stability of ‘Jewish identity’, and thus what it might mean to do ‘Jewish theory’, in relation to histories of European racism and colonialism. Ultimately I place in question the ideas of both ‘Jewish ethnography’ and ‘Jewish theory’ with a critical perspective on how Jews are seen to present a problematic otherness for anthropology not similarly conceptualised vis-a-vis other ‘Others’.