Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-4rdpn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-15T05:24:54.177Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

On Demonized Muslims and Vilified Jews: Between Theory and Politics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 June 2010

Joyce Dalsheim
Joyce Dalsheim*
Affiliation:
Anthropology and International Studies, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
*
Joyce.Dalsheim@uncc.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In this article I engage the work of three scholars, each of whom speaks to reactions to Muslims or interventions in their lives in the United States and Europe. Each is critical of these reactions and interventions, and traces them to inconsistencies in liberal thought and practice. My purpose is to interrogate their theorizing by applying it to the interface of liberalism with another religious Other, one that tends to generate far less sympathy in the predominantly secular and liberal academy: religiously motivated Jewish settlers in Israeli-occupied territories. The first scholar is Saba Mahmood, who recently argued against U.S. involvement in trying to alter the theology and practices of Muslims in the Middle East. The second is Judith Butler, who in a 2008 article addressed Muslims in the Netherlands, the problems of citizenship, and the right to religious freedom. Finally, Talal Asad has spoken to issues of violence, arguing that suicide bombing is really not so different from state violences perpetrated by the United States and Israel. Each of their arguments contains critiques of secular liberalism and the contradictory ethics and inconsistencies within liberal thought and practice, and each carries different but related implications. My intent is to begin to explore the possibilities of applying the analyses of these writers to the case of conflict between religiously motivated settlers in Israeli-occupied territories and left-wing, secular, and liberal Israeli Jews. Although this case mirrors broader representations of “Islam and the West,” it is rarely considered in comparison when such representations are deconstructed. The questions raised through this uncomfortable comparison will, I hope, contribute to broader conversations about the challenges and complexities of living together with differences that may be threatening if not altogether incommensurable.

Type
Research Article
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 52 , Issue 3 , July 2010 , pp. 581 - 603
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2010

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Alcalay, A. 1993. After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Anidjar, G. 2003. The Jew, The Arab: A History of the Enemy. Stanford: Stanford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Antoun, R. 2008. Understanding Fundamentalism: Christian, Islamic, and Jewish Movements. New York: Rowman and Littlefield.Google Scholar
Aran, G. 1991. Jewish Zionist Fundamentalism: The Bloc of the Faithful in Israel (Gush Emunim). In Marty, M. E. and Appleby, R. S., eds., Fundamentalisms Observed. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 265–344.Google Scholar
Aran, G. 1997. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Land: The Spiritual Authorities of Jewish-Zionism Fundamentalism in Israel. In Appleby, R. S., ed., Spokesmen for the Despised. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 294–327.Google Scholar
Arendt, H. 1968 [1948]. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt Brace.Google Scholar
Arendt, H. 2003 [1951]. The Perplexities of the Rights of Man. In Baehr, P., ed., The Origins of Totalitarianism: The Portable Hannah Arendt. New York: Penguin, 31–45.Google Scholar
Asad, T. 2003. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Asad, T. 2006. Trying to Understand French Secularism. In Vries, H. d. and Sullivan, L. E., eds., Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World. New York: Fordham University Press, 494–527.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Asad, T. 2007. On Suicide Bombing. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Beilin, Yossi. 2004. Shinui's Big Test. Ha Aretz Magazine (English ed., Tel Aviv): 2 Aug., p. 5.Google Scholar
Beinin, J. and Stein, R.. 2006. Histories and Futures of a Failed Peace. In Beinin, J. and Stein, R., eds., The Struggle for Sovereignty: Palestine and Israel 1993–2005. Stanford: Stanford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bosker, B., ed. 1978. Abraham Isaac Kook: The Lights of Penitence, The Moral Principles, Lights of Holiness, Essays, Letters, and Poems. Mahway, N.J.: Paulist Press.Google Scholar
Brown, W. 2006a. Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brown, W. 2006b. Subjects of Tolerance: Why We Are Civilized and They Are the Barbarians. In Vries, H. d. and Sullivan, L. E., eds., Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World. New York: Fordham University Press, 298–317.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Butler, J. 2008. Sexual Politics, Torture, and Secular Time. British Journal of Sociology 59, 1: 1–23.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Dalsheim, J. 2005. Ant/agonizing Settlers in the Colonial Present of Israel-Palestine. Social Analysis 49, 2: 122–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dalsheim, J. forthcoming. Unsettling Gaza: Secular Liberalism, Radical Religion, and the Israeli Settlement Project. New York: Oxford.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fabian, J. 1999. Remembering the Other: Knowledge and Recognition in the Exploration of Central Africa. Critical Inquiry 26, 1: 49–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Feige, M. 2003. One Space, Two Places: Gush Emunim, Peace Now and the Construction of Israeli Space. Tel Aviv: Magnes.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. 1972. The Archaeology of Knowledge. New York: Pantheon Books.Google Scholar
Freud, Sigmund. 1961 [1929]. Civilization and Its Discontents. Strachey, James, trans. New York: W. W. Norton and Company.Google Scholar
Goodman, Y. and Yonah, Y.. 2004. Introduction: Religiousness and Secularity in Israel—Possibilities for Alternative Views. In Yonah, Y. and Goodman, Y., eds., Maelstrom of Identities (Ma'arbolet HaZe'uyot in Hebrew). Jerusalem: Kibbutz HaMeuhad and Van Leer, 3–37.Google Scholar
Harding, S. 1991. Representing Fundamentalism: The Problem of the Repugnant Other. Social Research 58, 2: 373–93.Google Scholar
Juergensmeyer, M. 2000. Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Keane, W. 2007. Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Lavie, S. 1990. The Poetics of Military Occupation: Mzeina Allegories of Bedouin Identity under Israeli and Egyptian Rule. Berkeley: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lavie, S. 1992. Blow-Ups in the Borderzones: Third World Israeli Authors' Gropings for Home. New Formations 17: 24–43.Google Scholar
Lustick, I. 1988. For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel. New York: Council on Foreign Relations.Google Scholar
Lustick, I. 1993. Jewish Fundamentalism and the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse. In Silberstein, L. J., ed., Jewish Fundamentalism in Comparative Perspective: Religion, Ideology, and the Crisis of Modernity. New Perspectives on Jewish Studies. New York and London: New York University Press, 104–16.Google Scholar
Mahmood, S. 2006. Secularism, Hermeneutics, and Empire: The Politics of Islamic Reformation. Public Culture 18, 2: 323–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nagata, J. 2001. Beyond Theology: Toward an Anthropology of “Fundamentalism.” American Anthropologist 103, 2: 481–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Povinelli, E. 2001. Radical Worlds: The Anthropology of Incommensurability and Inconceivability. Annual Review of Anthropology 30: 319–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rabkin, Y. M. 2006. A Threat from Within: A Century of Jewish Opposition to Zionism. London: Zed Books.Google Scholar
Raz-Krakotzkin, A. 2005. The Zionist Return to the West and the Mizrahi Jewish Perspective. In Kalmar, I. D. and Penslar, D. J., eds., Orientalism and the Jews. Waltham, Mass: Brandeis University Press, 162–81.Google Scholar
Rodinson, M. 1973. Israel: A Colonial-Settler State? New York: Monad Press.Google Scholar
Said, E. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Random House.Google Scholar
Shafir, G. 1989. Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882–1914. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Shafir, G. and Peled, Y.. 2002. Being Israeli: The Dynamics of Multiple Citizenship. London, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shavit, Ari. 2004. The Coming Civil War. HaAretz Magazine (English ed., Tel Aviv): 1 Sept, pp. 6–8.Google Scholar
Shenhav, Y. 2003. The Arab Jews: Nationalism, Religion, Ethnicity. Tel Aiv: Am Oved.Google Scholar
Shohat, E. 1988. Sepharadim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Jewish Victims. Social Text 19, 20: 1–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shohat, E. 2003. Rupture and Return: Zionist Discourse and the Study of Arab Jews. Social Text 21, 2: 49–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Silberstein, L. J., ed. 1993. Jewish Fundamentalism in Comparative Perspective: Religion, Ideology, and the Crisis of Modernity. New Perspectives on Jewish Studies. New York and London: New York University Press.Google Scholar
Sivan, E. 1995. The Enclave Culture. In Marty, M. E. and Appleby, R. S., eds., Fundamentalisms Comprehended. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 11–68.Google Scholar
Walzer, M. 1997. On Toleration. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Yiftachel, O. 2006. Ethnocracy: Land and Identity Politics in Israel/Palestine. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Zertal, I. and Eldar, A.. 2007. Lords of the Land: The War for Israel's Settlement in the Occupied Territories 1967–2007. New York: Nation Books.Google Scholar