What do you call it when Jeremy Corbyn walks into a Seder? Jewishness, Gustav Landauer (1870–1919) and ethical subject-formation
Author(s)
Publication Name
Publication Date
Abstract
Then UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn’s attendance at a Passover Seder organised by the radical leftist group, Jewdas, in April 2018, led to a brief but vitriolic controversy involving Anglo-Jewish umbrella organisations concerning who qualifies to speak as a Jew. This article uses this controversy to engage with Judith Butler’s attempt to address this question, suggesting that in decentring Zionist claims to Jewish subjectivity she fails to take account of how different Jewish subjectivities are formed, and thus ends up proposing a ‘good Jew/bad Jew’ binary that dissolves Jewishness into universal humanism. Drawing on the work of the German-Jewish mystical anarchist Gustav Landauer (1870–1919), the article proposes a different way of understanding subjectivity that retains ontological inherency as a plausible precondition for ethical solidarity. As such, the article’s argument has implications not merely for a reworked understanding of Jewish subjectivity but for the politics of subject formation more broadly.
Topics
Genre
Geographic Coverage
Copyright Info
his article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
Original Language
DOI
Link
Link to article, What do you call it when Jeremy Corbyn walks into a Seder? Jewishness, Gustav Landauer (1870–1919) and ethical subject-formation
Bibliographic Information
What do you call it when Jeremy Corbyn walks into a Seder? Jewishness, Gustav Landauer (1870–1919) and ethical subject-formation. 2021: https://archive.jpr.org.uk/10.1177%2F0725513620985638
