Israel Has a Jewish Problem: Self-Determination as Self-Elimination

Examining the production and assimilation of Jews as "the nation" in the modern state of Israel, this book shows how identity is constrained through myriad struggles over the meanings and practices of being Jewish. Based on years of ethnographic engagement, the book employs Franz Kafka's writing as a theoretical lens in order to frame the seemingly bizarre and self-contradictory processes it describes. While other scholars have explained Jewish identity conflicts in Israel in terms of a dichotomy between the secular and the religious, this book suggests that such an analysis is inadequate. Instead, it traces these struggles to the definition of "religion" itself. It suggests that the problem lies in the way modern identity categories at once disarticulate "religion" from "nation" and at the same time conflate those categories in the figure of the Jew. The struggles over Jewishness that are part of the process of producing the ethnos for the ethno-national state call into question
the notion that self-determination in the form of the nation-state is a liberating process. Modern democratic nation-states are meant to liberate citizens because they are understood to be ruled by "the people" and for "the people." But if "the people" exists for the state and its projects, then there is little liberating about the formula of sovereign citizenship. Instead, self-determination becomes a form of self-elimination, narrowing the possible forms of Jewishness. The case of Israel demonstrates that the classic "Jewish Question" in Europe has been transformed but not answered by political sovereignty.


Author: Joyce Dalsheim
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 11/14/2019
Pages: 250
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.90lbs
Size: 8.30h x 5.60w x 0.90d
ISBN: 9780190680251

About the Author

Joyce Dalsheim is a cultural anthropologist in the Department of Global Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She has carried out extensive fieldwork in Israel/Palestine studying controversies over historical narratives, nationalism, religiosity, and the secular. Her previous publications include Unsettling Gaza: Secular Liberalism, Radical Religion, and the Israeli Settlement Project (OUP, 2011) and Producing Spoilers: Peacemaking and the Production of Enmity in a Secular Age (OUP 2014).



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