Final Reflections

Schver zu sein a yid (It's hard to be a Jew).¹ This pithy Yiddish expression embodies the exasperation, and also humor, of centuries of Jewish identity. The struggle of being (zu sein) relates mostly to the physcial existence of a people in exile, often despised and just as often the victim of economic hardship coupled with the burden (in Hebrew, the yoke‚'ol) of a demanding tradition. It is telling that the rabbis define the mitzvoth (ritual commandments) simultaneoulsy as an object of servitude (a yoke) and a sign of freedom (in reference to the Tabets of Law they say, "do not read engraved [ḥ arut] but free [ḥ erut]").² The humor in this phrase schver zu sein a yid is that this difficult state is not understood by the Jews as a sign of rejection (by God) but just the opposite (in Yiddish, pum fakert). This difficult state is precisely what confirms their chosenness. The tradition relates that God places Jews in exile to prepare them for redemption. So the difficulty in being a Jew is precisely the blessed condition of being a Jew.

But of course today the situation has changed somewhat. Jews have a state of their own, with all its complexity. Is it a Jewish state or a state of the Jews (how does one finally translate Herzl's Zionist manifesto Judenstaat?).³ And what would be the difference? Or, how is Jew-ish different than Jew? And today well over 90 percent of Jews live in democratic countries where they are free to practice, or not practice, their religion in any manner they choose.⁴ While antisemitism still persists, the threat is arguably quite different than it was in other more perilous times in Jewish history. So today, what does schver zu zein a yid actually mean? In the wonderful essays in this volume scholars from various fields have weighed in from historical, theological, and cultural perspectives on the question of Jew, Jewishness, and Judaism. Below I offer some of my own reflections.

The difficulty of being a Jew, or being Jewish, or practicing Judaism has a long history. Of course, the very notion, or nature, of the Jew is already "difficult" as David Nirenberg documents in his Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition and Cynthia Baker shows in her new book Jew.⁵ Baker's comment that the Christian essentially creates the term "Jew" (not Jews, Judeans, or Israel, which were operative before the Christian intervention) is quite jarring. And whether the argument can sustain criticism from various scholarly corners remains to be seen. But her argument is suggestive and compels us to look more closely at the genealogy of a term we take for granted: Jew. And Nirenberg's Anti-Judaism asks a different but related question in that he too gestures toward a distinction between Jew and Judaism. Why did anti-Judaism exist in places where no Jews lived, espoused by people (Shakespeare, for example) who never met a Jew? Is anti-Judaism related yet not identical to antisemitism (which does appear to focus on the Jew and not Judaism)? And if so what might be the differences? The essays in this volume were written before Baker's book and after Nirenberg's and yet each arguably exists inside an orbit created by both Baker and Nirenberg; in Baker's words, this "conjunctive disjunction, a space where unity and difference, belonging and alienation hover in a delicate—and sometimes indelicate—balance."⁶ Bodies, gender, sexuality, politics, progeny: liminal categories that make the Jew, and her identity, far more elusive that we might have imagined.⁷

One of the things I gleaned from this impressive collection is the complex nature of binaries that non-Jews use to describe the Jew and that the Jew uses to describe the non-Jew and thus the Jewish self. It makes one wonder whether the term "Jew" may be little more than a binary marker and thus deconstructing it might require first erasing or bracketing it as such. Jew/gentile (goy), like Japanese gaijin, situates the self (individual and collective) against all others. Gaijin, from the words gaikoku (foreign...