Boundaries of Jewish Identity

10. The Contested Logics of Jewish Identity

203 10 The Contested Logics of Jewish Identity LaaDa BiLaniUK “Jewish like an adjective.” “Good bad Jews.” “Jewishness.” With these words we struggle to capture something that does not fit in the simpler naming,“a Jew.”Yet even the simple noun “Jew,” given here in English, is a field of struggle.1 Whether we consider the question of who is or is not a Jew, or the possibility of degrees of Jewishness, we come back to the centrality of language in the conceptualization and performance of identity. Language allows us to name, and thus to identify, feelings and practices. Even if we consider identity as physically embodied and genetically determined, the meaningfulness of phenotypes and genotypes emerges only through communication, with language as the unavoidable mediating link between physical and social states of being. Likewise, language mediates our spiritual identity, inasmuch as we must communicate to develop and articulate our individual spiritual selves into a social grouping, into a social historical trajectory . Often we take language for granted, for it is like breathing, and instead we focus on the “content” as somehow separate from, and more important than, the words. But just as breathing is to life, language is to identity; it makes us people and makes a sense of self and group belonging possible. It is worthwhile then to consider the parallels between theories of language and identity in grappling with the paradoxes that being Jewish, or being a Jew or non-Jew, presents. As the essays in this volume attest, there is a persistent, and perhaps unresolvable, tension between understandings of Jewish identity, some of which view it as predetermined, clearly bounded, and physically embodied and others as ideologically constructed, embodied through performance, and without clear boundaries.This divide parallels that found in studies of language between approaches that consider languages to be natural phenomena, existing as idealized discrete units 204 LaaDa BiLaniUK (labeled with names like “English,” “Hebrew,” and “Russian”), and those that view them as socially constructed, categorized through discursive and ideological processes, overlaid onto a complex dynamic field of practices. The opposition between these two overarching epistemologies—one that views language and identity as idealized, natural, and essential phenomena and the other that posits them to be ideological, social, and constructed through practice—is the basis for many of the conflicts and paradoxes of identity discussed in this volume. Idealist/naturalist/essentialist approaches assume that there are, a priori, such things as “languages,” entities existing independently from our ideological constructions and acts of labeling.These languages are seen as organic emanations of peoples, who are also seen as forming discrete, idealized entities. Nations, as discrete formations linked to discrete peoples, are understood as natural developments.This nationalist logic pervades contemporary thinking, inasmuch as countless practices are constructed around a belief in the naturalness of national and corresponding linguistic units. Labeled and institutionalized, languages as discrete entities have become deeply ingrained in our ways of knowing the world. However, ideological/social constructivist approaches take the opposite view, namely, that people’s beliefs, desires, and struggles are the key forces shaping the meanings and structures of language at the most basic levels. Studies of language ideology have shown that languages are constantly ideologically constructed, but to accept this idea we must struggle against the sense that we know what “English” (or another labeled language) is.2 The interdisciplinary essays in this volume suggest that we must also go through a similar process to see identities as something other than given essences. Susan Glenn illustrates this in her essay on the idea of “Jewish” looks when she quotes from a mid-twentieth-century sociologist’s observation that “while science ‘emphatically denies the popular notion of race,’ the public was still more inclined to trust the ‘clear-cut evidence’ of their own ‘senses,’ which told them that ‘it is often possible to tell a Jew from a Gentile, just by looking at him.’”3 The evidence of our senses is given meaning through our habitus, the lifelong accumulation of predispositions that frames how we interpret what we experience.4 Through habitus, social constructions are The Contested Logics of Jewish Identity 205 naturalized; they become part of our way of thinking, the window through which we see the world.Through habitus, physical embodiments of Jewishness were not only recognized; they were also learned and performed. Recurring patterns of physiology, posture, speech, or other behaviors become internalized as stereotypes...