Identity is Out!

In the past twenty-four hours, I've been told several times: 'no more identity!' Yesterday I was sent a review of the book I co-edited on the eighteenth century British proto-feminist, Mary Astell. The reviewer in the English Historical Review laments that my co-editor and I treated Astell as--get ready for this--a woman. Go figure! But to our reviewer, Astell is just a writer, and to call her a woman writer is to make 'invidious distinctions' showing our failure to move into a 'post-modern framework for discussing gender.' For postmodernists, apparently, androgyny is in. Gender is out!

It also turns out that my recent reference to Woody Allen's Jewish neshama has been construed as possibly racist and exclusive. Not believing in a DNA test for the neshama, I was careful not to make a genetic argument for the Jewishness of the soul, but rather argued for the Jewishness of a neshama on the basis of a link to tradition, history and Torah. Yet I was still taken to task for an unsophisticated and unnecessary distinction between Jews and non-Jews.

And then this morning, I received an e-mail from a friend about an academic project on which I've been working. He warned me, 'if you don't want to look like an orthodox apologist, you better avoid the distinction between Athens and Jerusalem, Truth and Emet.' Paul's notion that 'Jew is Greek and Greek is Jew' has become very popular in academic circles, so one can't talk about the particular languages that help shape Jewish identity without being accused of being parochial, unenlightened and narrow-minded.

Norman Podhoretz refers to this as the scandal of Jewish particularity. But it's become more than just that: a whole postmodern culture which is not only scandalized by particularity, but embarrassed by it.

A friend of mine, when I asked him about his Jewish affiliation, confided quietly: 'I am nothing.' This is an extreme version of the embarrassment of the particular, to be scandalized, embarrassed by the very possibility of one's own identity. It's a general cultural ailment, and Israelis anxious about their identity seem to suffer from it most. Robert Neslen's Occupied Minds, ostensibly a 'journey through the Israeli psyche', provides its own fantasy of contemporary Jewish identity, or really non-identity. Neslen writes that he had originally intended to conclude his book with an interview with 'some stoned Israeli on a beach in India'-someone who 'had lost any connection with Jewish identity.' But Nelsen ends instead with a picture of Israeli stoners 'playing on the beaches of Ras a-Satan in Sinai'-with fellow artists from Cairo and Lebanon, gathered to 'drop their used skins and learn from each other.'

Of course, sometimes those skins, the external markers of identity can be used perniciously--sexism, racism, all forms of prejudice. But the instinct to abandon identity-'I am nothing'-almost certainly has it's corollary dangers (some of which are detailed in Natan Sharansky's new Defending Identity). Without the starting-point of the self, and those external markings which do have real internal correlates, then all of our exciting explorations and openminded encounters with difference will come to nothing. As in Shakespeare's As You Like It, when Rosalind remarks to the cynical and jaded traveller Jacques:

A traveller! By my faith, you have great reason to be sad. I fear you have sold your own lands to see other men's; then to have seen much and to have nothing is to have rich eyes and poor hands.

When we sell our own lands-our inheritance-for the thrill of experiencing perpetual change, we risk losing ourselves in an ocean of undifferentiated experience. So we end up having seen much, but left sad and empty-handed, like Neslen's postmodern heroes stoned on the beach in India, wasted in the Sinai, tending towards oblivion.

? אִם אֵין אֲני לִי, מִי לִי