Gendering the Arab-Jew:Feminism and Jewish Studies after Ella Shohat Shir Alon (bio) Setting out to write an essay about cultural theorist Ella Shohat's influence on Jewish Studies over the past 30 years, I couldn't help but wonder (perhaps a bit maliciously) what Shohat, who debuted in academia with an unprecedented study of Israeli cinema from a postcolonial feminist perspective,1 would say about the recent, so-called Jewish Studies film Footnote (2011). Given that it centers on quarrels between Jewish philologists, Footnote was a surprising success both in Israel and at international festivals, even nominated for an Academy Award.2 No doubt its depiction of the relationship between two generations of Talmud scholars, father and son, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem struck a (local and international) chord. Armed with a theatrical soundtrack and humorous voice-over, the film narrates contemporary Jewish Studies as an Oedipal struggle between Ashkenazi men over official recognition, embodied in the Israel Prize. Women are assigned supportive roles as wives and mothers (alas, they occasionally dare not to be supportive enough!). One scene in particular seems to give a knowing wink to the viewing Jewish scholar, as the soundtrack gives way to a squabble, overheard at a cocktail party, about Daniel Boyarin's feminized Jewish man.3 Nevertheless, the pleasure is somewhat bitter if that scholar happens to be a woman, since Boyarin is employed merely to enforce the story of Jewish modernity as a story of masculinity. Whether it is a masculinity gained or lost depends on what flavor of masculinity you favor, but what is certain is that women remain irrelevant to it.4 [End Page 57] It is only fitting that the plot of the film rises and falls on a dramatic philological inquiry into the word metsudah, "fortress," since it presents Jewish Studies as a bastion of white men surrounded by resolute gatekeepers. Women, Mizrahi Jews, or Jerusalem's Palestinians are absent from the university citadel on the hill. What we do see, again and again, are the expressionless security guards standing at every door, profiling those attempting to enter. These guards, ubiquitous in Israeli public spaces since the beginning of the Second Intifada in 2000, are the one visual reference in the film to Israel's ongoing regime of separation. To anyone working in the field of Jewish Studies, the film's image of the discipline is clearly anachronistic: the walls of the fortress have been breached (though not toppled). Work done over the past 40 years has introduced both new research approaches and new objects of study, in dynamic exchange with critical gender, race, and ethnic studies, as well as vital criticism of Jewish Studies' commitment to a Zionist telos. Ella Shohat's writing, taking place at the intersection of Jewish Studies and Middle Eastern Studies, postcolonial studies, feminist theory, and critical race scholarship, directly and indirectly inspired many of these changes. The recent publication of an anthology of her collected writing spanning the past 30 years provides an occasion to assess her influence on the field.5 It seems instructive to position Shohat's intervention alongside Boyarin's, since both have utilized postcolonial and feminist theoretical tools to present foundational and resonant challenges to Jewish Studies: both engage with Jewish identity against its immediate context—Christianity in Boyarin's case and Arab/Muslim culture in the case of Shohat; both associate Zionism, albeit in different ways, with a kind of colonial mimicry, an effort to whiten and westernize the Jew, with destructive psychological effects; and both identify gendered mechanisms of orientalization, demonstrating that the effeminate Jew and the effeminate oriental share the burden of the European gaze. Yet, there is also an important difference between the two: whereas Boyarin is invested in identifying Jewish difference (and therefore an ethical-political Jewish essence),6 Shohat strives to multiply Jewish histories and challenge the paradigms that partition Jews from Arabs, East from West, and modernity from tradition, and in this manner she threatens to dismantle the disciplinary boundaries of Jewish Studies and its coherent object of research.7 This is one possible reason why Shohat and Boyarin's interventions rarely interact in American scholarship. Critical seminars...
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Apr 3, 2019
Hyeran Kim-Cragg 
Open Access