A review by ralowe
Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism by Judith Butler

4.0

judith butler's usage of hanna arendt and emanuel levinas produces a theory of the incipient ethical moment of unwilled proximity as something fundamentally incompatible with the passionate anticolonialism of frantz fanon and half a dozen others. i'm reading steven salaita after this to really try to ground myself because i'm seriously thinking in my airheaded secular humanist mind, "why can't we figure out how to be together,"ќ and it's because of the unmitigated force of intrusion and its violent displacing effects that render any wistful and vague cosmopolitics unworkable, mostly because i'm not there, i'm no subject, body parts scattered, no shadow or substance or residence, long gone. this is precisely the kind of book that someone with butler's stature must write, because someone has to do"У"У or someone is often caught imagining of someone else somewhere who wind up having to do"У"У the work to get the colonizer off our backs. butler is up there, next to maybe rabab abdelhadi, in terms of academics who are brutally targeted by zionists. butler's work paves the way for the peculiar moment where we have elected officials who can make criticism of israel a talking point, and there goes my optimism again. fanon's anticoloniality oughta be easy, right? butler lets her hair down a little in the last chapter involving edward said and mahmoud darwish in the game. butler avoids mentioning the bund, or other jewish anti-zionist moments: the focus is just on the philosophy's most recognizable critics of israel's founding. hopefully the unfamiliar will glean that the state of israel is not coterminous with jewish people. but butler also sort of puts the good will behind all these endeavors in question by looking at hayden white's study of primo levi: is it possible to reason with trauma? has authoritarianism effectively and cynically weaponized the holocaust to label all its critics as anti-semitic? is the public capable of telling the difference between anti-zionism and anti-semitism?