Transnationalism and the Jews directly relates ideas about transnationalism and cultural pluralism to Jewish historical experience. It shows how the Jews and ‘Jewishness’ has been a problematic issue for cultural thought since the Enlightenment, and how this problem produced the alternative ideas of culture and identity that are widely accepted today.
It argues that Jewish experience and ‘Jewishness’ helped produced the modern concept of transnationalism and cultural pluralism.
Transnationalism and the Jews directly relates ideas about transnationalism and cultural pluralism to Jewish historical experience. It shows how the Jews and ‘Jewishness’ has been a problematic issue for cultural thought since the Enlightenment, and how this problem produced the alternative ideas of culture and identity that are widely accepted today.
It argues that Jewish experience and ‘Jewishness’ helped produced the modern concept of transnationalism and cultural pluralism.
Transnationalism and the Jews: Culture, History and Prophecy
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Transnationalism and the Jews: Culture, History and Prophecy
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Overview
Transnationalism and the Jews directly relates ideas about transnationalism and cultural pluralism to Jewish historical experience. It shows how the Jews and ‘Jewishness’ has been a problematic issue for cultural thought since the Enlightenment, and how this problem produced the alternative ideas of culture and identity that are widely accepted today.
It argues that Jewish experience and ‘Jewishness’ helped produced the modern concept of transnationalism and cultural pluralism.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783481415 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 08/30/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 190 |
| File size: | 463 KB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Over the past 10 years, he has published widely on cultural theory, Orientalism, and Jewish history including The Israeli Memory Struggle. History and Identity in the Age of Globalization (2007) and Lived Space (with Kirstine Sinclair, 2011) as well as edited volumes and articles in both English and Danish.
Read an Excerpt
Transnationalism and the Jews
Culture, History and Prophecy
By Jakob Egholm Feldt
Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd.
Copyright © 2016 Jakob Egholm FeldtAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78348-141-5
CHAPTER 1
Transnationalism and Cultural Thought
For quite some years now, 'transnational' or 'transnationalism' has been a buzzword in cultural studies, cultural history as well as in wider historical research. It seems that 'transnational' has occupied a vacancy between 'national' and 'global' in historical conceptualizations of the proper space within which to delimit studies. The adoption of transnational as a central concept in a variety of cultural studies and historical research is basically a result of the recognition that the nation is no longer, and has maybe never been, an adequate box for studying a social, cultural or economical field. Most things simply come from somewhere else, or are so intimately related to things outside of the nation-box that we can't really understand them before 'crossing borders'.
Even though everything crosses borders, global has not and cannot replace the national as the new and more meaningful space for a number of reasons, the most important being the fact that the nation-state and the nation as a cultural, political and social unit keep having a crucial impact on all local and global matters. The nation is plainly unavoidable as a historical subject and object in cultural studies and cultural history, but yet the nation is being passed through and criss-crossed by virtually all historical developments of the modern world. 'Transnational' can, as a concept, avoid making implicit and explicit false dichotomies between the local, the national and the global. It both questions and recognizes the integrity of the nation in the sense that it always makes sense to ask as Moshe Rosman, 'How Jewish is Jewish history?' Or ask Shakespeare 'What's in a name?' Such questions should be asked in the full awareness that there is a Jewish history, and in the general awareness that there is something in a name. But what is it? Does a history in itself carry characteristics and identities that enable us to say things like 'Jewish history is a history of suffering' or 'Roma history is a history of dispersal'? Are these identities mere representations, discursive constructions, social roles or literary constructs created by historians? The awareness that there is something in a name is grounded in the recognition that objects that are assembled under various proper names speak. Things tell us who they are and what they want – or at least partly so.
'Borders' are often national, and in this prosaic sense, transnational points to one of the most significant features of the modern world, namely that people, ideas and things cross these borders. The problem with the prevailing use of 'transnational' is not that it is wrong as a plain description, but that it unties 'transnational' from central aspects of the important histories that gave it meaning. At the present moment, transnational is mainly used in historical research to conceptualize the fact of border crossing. Armenians, Jews, Indians, Kurds and Muslims are grouped together under the umbrella of 'transnational' in fundamentally the same way as business expatriates, scientists or poor migrant workers because their social and cultural organization is 'transnational'. Sheffer also points out that virtually every phenomenon that exists via relations across national borders can be described as transnational.
In cultural studies, transnational can also be conceived of as more than national border crossing if we consider the prefix 'trans' as indicating in-betweenness. This in-betweenness should be understood much more radically as a fundamental liminality. It is a twilight zone where categories are mixed. What you see is not what you get. 'Trans' points to chimerian and monstrous identities that cross natural dividing lines between ontological zones. In cultural history, these crossings have been considered uncanny or sources of extraordinary insights that could be achieved by particular people with gifts or dispositions, or simply people whose job it was to stand on the threshold between zones. Shamans, witches, mystics, midwives or executioners are cultural studies classics, but others could be added to this list, namely moving people: migrants, vagabonds, Gypsies and Jews.
It is fascinating how such identities, which move between ontological zones, have shifted from being identified with danger into being identified with progressiveness and avant-gardism. In the course of the twentieth century, these mobile identities have moved from being something that good people should keep away from or at least treat with caution to victims of the oppressiveness of normality. Power drove people who controlled order to persecute the in-betweens, while little everyday people followed up or stood by out of fear. Our cultural studies and cultural history heroes became these border-crossing people who lived and worked in the magic cracks in the social and cultural order. They became vantage points or watchtowers for historians from where to see order, violence, normality, cosmology and sexuality in history as well as cultural critics from whom researchers and intellectuals have borrowed legitimacy to criticize and take on a mantle of progressiveness. The prefix 'trans' in transnationalism simply means going between categories in much the same way that 'transvestite' means going between gendered clothing roles or 'transgender' means living between genders. Transnational then means to walk in other nations cultural and historical garments, or does it? A Jew will never become a real German or a Muslim will never be really Danish, or would she? They can dress up as though they are, but if you scratch the surface, you will find a truer nature behind the façade. Ultimately, transnationalism is in this perspective a kind of perversion because it turns things upside down. Jews are not Germans and Muslims are not Danes. Or, viewed from the vantage point of the in-betweens, this not being quite at 'home' is our hope for the future, because it enables us to see ourselves in the eyes of another. In-between is the location of the intellectual, the prophets, the victims, the ones who reflect a superior morality in the twisted mirror image of our selves. The priority of in-betweenness as a vantage point for seeing the world is relatively recent. It reflects a fundamental shift in root metaphors that we use when we describe the natural order of things. Do we describe the lives, experiences and perspectives of people from a sedentarist standpoint or from a mobility perspective? Does everything come from somewhere else, or does everything belong somewhere?
The becoming of transnational as something progressive, as a concept for the future, is fundamentally related to a rethinking of what culture is and what culture does for people. This rethinking was not abstract and purely theoretical but solidly grounded in specific situations for specific people. It reflected personal migratory experience, historical analysis as well as political hopes for the future in a world where people and things move increasingly freely. We find here an intersection of experience and theory, between the particular and the universal.
* * *
The 'transnational' concept was given a great deal of its fundamental semantics by Randolph Bourne when he published his article 'Trans-National America' in The Atlantic Monthly in 1916. Bourne's article is turned against two things: first, against the Great War raging in Europe, and second against the popularity of 'the melting pot' as a metaphor for American society. The title of Israel Zangwill's famous play had since its opening in 1908 integrated into popular discourse as a suitable metaphor for the American cultural and social experience. Immigrants from all over the world were melted into Americans.
The concept of transnational had a purpose in Bourne's perspective. It should show Americans that America is about something new and different than Europe, and it should defeat the melting pot as the leading metaphor for American society. In this sense, transnational was both a tool for new recognitions and perspectives and a rhetorical weapon against opponents in the American cultural and social discussion of the period. As I will argue, this ideological and normative semantics is still inherent in the use of transnational in the recent re-invigoration of the concept.
Bourne's concept of transnational and his ideological transnationalism were borne out of two important American cultural and social experiences at the beginning of the twentieth century. The first one is the massive immigration of Europeans to America in the period between 1880 and the Great War, and the second is the resulting cultural and social conflicts in America over American cultural identity and the American mission and vision to the world. To Bourne and many other progressive American intellectuals, the Great War became the primary sign of the need for new global visions as well as a sign of Europe's cultural failure. America's role in the world was, or ought to be, in the progressive perspective to devise routes to the future, routes to peace and democracy. These American experiences of cultural and social change and new ideas of America's unique contribution to the world led to heated disagreements among the progressives over questions of how to act on their shared ideas. The most significant of these discussions was over whether or not America could and should promote democracy by engaging in the war, or if war in itself was antithetical to democracy and peacemaking. Randolph Bourne was on the pacifist side of this controversy contrary to John Dewey, a leading progressive figure.
This American intellectual discussion was closely related to Europe's cultural and historical heritage in an American immigrant interpretation. Here I think of cultural and historical heritage in a sense derived from Reinhart Koselleck as an Erfahrungsraum, which is constantly being reinterpreted and reorganized in the face of new pressing human experiences. New interpretations of the Erfahrungsraum in the face of contemporary experiences serve as the basis for new visions or wishes for the future in Koselleck's perspectives, new visions and wishes for what he called the Erwartungshorisont. Thus, this is not a discussion of what the 'European cultural and historical heritage' really is in a Rankean sense, but a discussion of what it means to particular people with particular experiences, and how they manage to generalize and collectivize their interpretations and experiences. Eventually, the political, teleological and theological un-determinacy of history vis-à-vis what the future brings opens the Erfahrungsraum for re-appropriations of historical actors and events suitable for contemporary experience. History is established by meticulous study of facts and the application of reasoned arguments, but the questions of which facts and what reasoned arguments are relative to contemporary experience and sensibilities. To Bourne and many other progressives in America, the mass immigration of the period as well as the Great War were crucial test cases to whether or not America was something significantly different than Europe: whether or not America represented a truly new Erwartungshorisont.
THE TRANSNATIONALIST AGENDA
Randolph Bourne had both local and global agendas with his 1916 coining of transnationalism, and he gave the concept of transnational both analytical and normative value. Transnational should at the same time resolve a specific American culture conflict between new immigrants and 'old' North-eastern protestant American culture, and it should work as a beacon of light leading the way to a more peaceful and democratic world. Bourne argued that if we take America as a social laboratory, we will find that the melting of different nations and cultures into one 'melting pot culture' is not really democratic and representative of popular wishes, because the dominant national group or class will define what people are being melted into. At the same time, the people who were up for melting (immigrants) did not come to America to become somebody else; they came to be able to live as they wish in freedom and democracy.
We found that the tendency, reprehensible and paradoxical as it might be, has been for the national clusters of immigrants, as they became more and more firmly established and more and more prosperous, to cultivate more and more assiduously the literatures and cultural traditions of their homelands. Assimilation, in other words, instead of washing out the memories of Europe, made them more and more intensely real. Just as these clusters became more and more objectively American, did they become more and more German or Scandinavian or Bohemian or Polish.
Bourne pointed to what looks like a paradox. When immigrants came to America to become Americans, they cherished and nurtured their national and cultural heritage even more. They became more Norwegian in Minnesota than they were in Norway. Analytically, Bourne unlocked this paradox by re-defining and modernizing the meaning and purpose of the national cultural heritage of people. Instead of being mutually exclusive and automatically leading to political sovereignty for each specific nation, a nation and its cultural and historical heritage is a natural, sentimental common bond between people. People use the nation for togetherness, for the happiness and security of living together with people who share traditions, languages, tastes and social codes. This is fundamentally good because, on the bottom line, it stimulates the communities that are existential to real freedom and real democracy, in Bourne's and his associates' views. The ontological condition of this perspective is both liberal and pragmatic: each nation must grant other nations the same freedoms and recognize that other nations' feelings are equally strong and equally justified. In a nutshell, European nationalism led to war and discrimination, while American (trans)nationalism should lead to transnational solidarity.
Also significant for today's transnational perspective in history and cultural analysis is Bourne's priority of the migrant or the colonial over the native. To Bourne and his interpretation of early-twentieth-century world experiences, the moving person is the one who seeks freedom, justice, and new social frameworks for the future. Moving people, migrants, are at a vantage position, and they are a potential for the future. The 'indigenous' and the idea of indigenous superior rights in common national thought do not really make sense any more.
We are all foreign-born or the descendants of foreign-born, and if distinctions are to made between us they should rightly be on some other ground than indigenousness. The early colonists came over with motives no less colonial than the later. They did not come to be assimilated into an American melting-pot. They did not come to adopt the culture of the American Indian. They had not the smallest intention of 'giving themselves without reservation' to the new country. They came to get freedom to live, as they wanted. ... In their folkways, in their social and political institutions, they were, like every colonial people, slavishly imitative of the mother-country.
Transnationalism is accordingly both an analytical perspective, emphasizing the national community as essential to modern man in the sense that it provides cultural, historical and social networks for people that precondition 'the pursuit of happiness', and a normative perspective, claiming that it would be good if people were to exchange national ideas with transnational ones. In the analytical perspective, Bourne thought pragmatically and refused to recognize the national community as indigenous or primordial. Instead, the national community is interpretive, social as well as hereditary. It is the cultural and social space wherein we align our personal experiences to our peers and wider collectives, and the most essential quality to it is that everybody does it. Paraphrasing Bourne's transnationalism with Koselleck's concepts, the learning of the Erfahrungsraum of modern man is grounded in the experience of mobility and a lack of scripts for the future. The Erwartungshorisont is endlessly open for purposes of the future of Man.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Transnationalism and the Jews by Jakob Egholm Feldt. Copyright © 2016 Jakob Egholm Feldt. Excerpted by permission of Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd..
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Table of Contents
Introduction /1 Transnationalism and Cultural Thought/ 2 Judaism, Zionism and Pluralism/ 3 The Jewish Land/ 4 The Genius of Adaption/ 5 Theodor Herzl, Cosmopolitanism, and Jewishness/ 6 New Futures, New Pasts/ 7 Judaism in Civil Space. Mendelssohn, Enlightenment, and the Question of Jewish Civility/ Bibliography/ IndexInterviews
CSA, ACS, ICA, Association for Jewish Studies