Modernity, Culture and "The Jew"

This book provides a rich and wide-ranging analysis of Jewishhistory and culture, relating them to theories of modernity andpostmodernity and to recent debates on ethnicity andpostcolonialism. Issues addressed include psychoanalysis andgender, literary anti-semitism, (post)modernity and 'the Jew', andthe memory of the Holocaust. A Foreword by Homi Bhabha and anAfterword by Paul Gilroy place these concerns in an extendedmulticultural and postcolonial context.


The book examines the work of past and present cultural theoristswho have placed the figure of 'the Jew' at the heart of theirversion of modernity and postmodernity. Many of the essays locate'the Jew' at the centre of Western metropolitan culture. But theyalso explore the ways in which Jews have historically been excludedin order for ascendant racial and sexual identities to be formedand maintained. Cheyette and Marcus argue that there is a virtue inthe ambivalent positioning which characterizes Jewish history andculture both then and now.


The volume places a disruptive and uncontainable Jewish history andculture in the context of current debates about gendered, sexualand ethnic identities. It challenges postcolonial and postmodernrevisions of modernity which locate Jews in a dominantJudeo-Christian tradition or appropriate them to signify theuniversality of the modern subject. It will be of interest tostudents and scholars in Jewish studies, cultural studies, sociology, history, literature and philosophy.