Jonathan Judaken

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Jonathan Judaken was the Spence L. Wilson Chair in Humanities at Rhodes College. [1] Judaken previously taught at the University of Memphis where he was the Dunavant Professor of History and Director of the Marcus Orr Center for the Humanities. His fields of expertise include European cultural and intellectual history, discussions of Jews and Judaism, race and racism, and post-Holocaust French philosophy. Judaken is a notable scholar of Jean-Paul Sartre and Sartre's relationship to Jews and Judaism and race and racism, as well as contemporary French Jewish philosophers.

Contents

Scholarship

Judaken is the author of Jean-Paul Sartre and the Jewish Question: Anti-antisemitism and the Politics of the French Intellectual, in which he argues that "representations of Jews and Judaism as persistent figures of alterity serve as a fecund site to interrogate and reevaluate [Sartre's] oeuvre, especially his conception of the role of the intellectual." [2] He is the editor of three volumes compiling scholarly contributions to the study of race and racism, existentialism, and the intersection between them: Race After Sartre: Antiracism, Africana Existentialism, Postcolonialism, Naming Race, Naming Racisms, and most recently Situating Existentialism: Key Texts in Context, which provides a history of the systemization and canonization of existentialism as a philosophical movement. [3] In addition, Judaken is U.S. consulting editor for the journal Patterns of Prejudice and has been a scholar in residence at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. He has held memberships in the Association for Jewish Studies, American Historical Association, American Academy of Religion, and the International Society for the Study of European Ideas. Judaken is a founding member of the International Consortium for Research on Antisemitism and Racism (ICRAR), an organization of European, American, and Israeli scholars aimed at "revitalising and reshaping the study of antisemitism." [4] In his scholarship on anti-Semitism, Judaken is critical of the concept of a "New anti-Semitism", arguing "there is not much empirical evidence to support the idea that a new alliance between Leftists and jihadists cemented together by anti-Zionism is emerging." Judaken has expressed support for the term "new Judeophobia", coined by Pierre-André Taguieff, as a better means of characterizing the recent upsurge of violence and hatred against Jews. [5]

Biography

Judaken was born in Johannesburg, South Africa on February 23, 1968. Judaken's youthful experience as a Jew living under South African apartheid, as a member of both a religious minority and the dominant racial group, helped to drive his career interest in subjects such as existentialism, racism and the so-called Jewish Question. [6] After immigrating to the United States as a teenager, Judaken received a B.A. in philosophy from the University of California, San Diego and an M.A. and Ph.D. in history from the University of California, Irvine. After completing a post-doctoral fellowship at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Judaken joined the history faculty at the University of Memphis in 1999. He left the University of Memphis for Rhodes College in 2011, where he was appointed the first Spence L. Wilson Chair in Humanities. In his capacity as Spence L. Wilson Chair, Judaken directs the Communities in Conversation program, which facilitates interdisciplinary lectures and events for Rhodes students, faculty and the general public in Memphis. In 2019, Judaken was selected as a committee member for Rhodes College's new Jewish, Islamic, and Middle East Studies Program, which houses three different minors in (1) Jewish Studies; (2) Islamic and Middle East Studies: and (3) Jewish, Islamic and Middle East Studies. [7] Judaken hosts the educational interview program Counterpoint on WKNO-FM, the NPR affiliate station for the Mid-South. [8]

Related Research Articles

Antisemitism is hostility to, prejudice towards, or discrimination against Jews. This sentiment is a form of racism, and a person who harbours it is called an antisemite. Though antisemitism is overwhelmingly perpetrated by non-Jews, it may occasionally be perpetrated by Jews in a phenomenon known as auto-antisemitism. Primarily, antisemitic tendencies may be motivated by negative sentiment towards Jews as a people or by negative sentiment towards Jews with regard to Judaism. In the former case, usually presented as racial antisemitism, a person's hostility is driven by the belief that Jews constitute a distinct race with inherent traits or characteristics that are repulsive or inferior to the preferred traits or characteristics within that person's society. In the latter case, known as religious antisemitism, a person's hostility is driven by their religion's perception of Jews and Judaism, typically encompassing doctrines of supersession that expect or demand Jews to turn away from Judaism and submit to the religion presenting itself as Judaism's successor faith—this is a common theme within the other Abrahamic religions. The development of racial and religious antisemitism has historically been encouraged by anti-Judaism, though the concept itself is distinct from antisemitism.

Some Christian Churches, Christian groups, and ordinary Christians express religious antisemitism toward the Jewish religion and the Jewish people.

Scholars have studied and debated Muslim attitudes towards Jews, as well as the treatment of Jews in Islamic thought and societies throughout the history of Islam. Parts of the Islamic literary sources give mention to certain Jewish groups present in the past or present, which has led to debates. Some of this overlaps with Islamic remarks on non-Muslim religious groups in general.

A number of organizations and academics consider the Nation of Islam (NOI) to be antisemitic. The NOI has engaged in Holocaust denial, and exaggerates the role of Jews in the African slave trade; mainstream historians, such as Saul S. Friedman, have said Jews had a negligible role. The NOI has repeatedly rejected charges made against it as false and politically motivated.

The history of antisemitism, defined as hostile actions or discrimination against Jews as a religious or ethnic group, goes back many centuries, with antisemitism being called "the longest hatred". Jerome Chanes identifies six stages in the historical development of antisemitism:

  1. Pre-Christian anti-Judaism in Ancient Greece and Rome which was primarily ethnic in nature
  2. Christian antisemitism in antiquity and the Middle Ages which was religious in nature and has extended into modern times
  3. Muslim antisemitism which was—at least in its classical form—nuanced, in that Jews were a protected class
  4. Political, social and economic antisemitism during the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment Europe which laid the groundwork for racial antisemitism
  5. Racial antisemitism that arose in the 19th century and culminated in Nazism
  6. Contemporary antisemitism which has been labeled by some as the new antisemitism

Religious antisemitism is aversion to or discrimination against Jews as a whole, based on religious doctrines of supersession that expect or demand the disappearance of Judaism and the conversion of Jews, and portray their political enemies in Jewish terms. This form of antisemitism has frequently served as the basis for false claims and religious antisemitic tropes against Judaism. Sometimes, it is called theological antisemitism.

New antisemitism is the concept that a new form of antisemitism which developed in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, tends to manifest itself as anti-Zionism and criticism of the Israeli government. The concept is included in some definitions of antisemitism, such as the Working Definition of Antisemitism and the 3D test of antisemitism. The concept dates to the early 1970s, although the identification of anti-Zionism with antisemitism has "long been de rigueur in Jewish communal and broader pro-Israel circles".

<i>The Culture of Critique series</i> Trilogy of books by Kevin MacDonald

The Culture of Critique series is a trilogy of books by Kevin B. MacDonald, an antisemitic conspiracy theorist, white supremacist, and retired professor of evolutionary psychology. MacDonald claims that evolutionary psychology provides the motivations behind Jewish group behavior and culture. Through the series, MacDonald asserts that Jews as a group have biologically evolved to be highly ethnocentric and hostile to the interests of white people. He asserts Jewish behavior and culture are central causes of antisemitism, and promotes conspiracy theories about alleged Jewish control and influence in government policy and political movements.

The Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and Racism is a research institute at Tel Aviv University in Israel.

<i>Anti-Semite and Jew</i> 1946 book by Jean-Paul Sartre

Anti-Semite and Jew is an essay about antisemitism written by Jean-Paul Sartre shortly after the Liberation of Paris from German occupation in 1944. The first part of the essay, "The Portrait of the Antisemite", was published in December 1945 in Les Temps modernes. The full text was then published in 1946.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Racial antisemitism</span> Prejudice and discrimination against Jews based on race or ethnicity

Racial antisemitism is prejudice against Jews based on a belief or assertion that Jews constitute a distinct race that has inherent traits or characteristics that appear in some way abhorrent or inherently inferior or otherwise different from the traits or characteristics of the rest of a society. The abhorrence may find expression in the form of discrimination, stereotypes or caricatures. Racial antisemitism may present Jews, as a group, as a threat in some way to the values or safety of a society. Racial antisemitism can seem deeper-rooted than religious antisemitism, because for religious antisemites conversion of Jews remains an option and once converted the "Jew" is gone. In the context of racial antisemitism Jews cannot get rid of their Jewishness.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert S. Wistrich</span> Professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1945–2015)

Robert Solomon Wistrich was the Erich Neuberger Professor of European and Jewish history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and he was also the head of the university's Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism. Wistrich considered antisemitism "the longest hatred" and viewed Anti-Zionism as its latest incarnation. According to Scott Ury, "More than any other scholar, Wistrich has helped integrate traditional Zionist interpretations of Jewish history, society, and fate into the study of antisemitism." Other researchers have reproduced much of his work without questioning its founding assumptions.

Anti-Judaism describes a range of historic and current ideologies which are totally or partially based on opposition to Judaism, on the denial or the abrogation of the Mosaic covenant, and the replacement of Jewish people by the adherents of another religion, political theology, or way of life which is held to have superseded theirs as the "light to the nations" or God's chosen people. The opposition is maintained by the appropriation and adaptation of Jewish prophecy and texts, and the stigmatization of the very people who transmitted those texts. There have been Christian, Islamic, nationalistic, Enlightenment rationalist, and socio-economic variations of this theme, according to Nirenberg.

Anti-Judaism in Early Christianity is a description of anti-Judaic sentiment in the first three centuries of Christianity; the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd centuries. Early Christianity is sometimes considered as Christianity before 325 when the First Council of Nicaea was convoked by Constantine the Great, although it is not unusual to consider 4th and 5th century Christianity as members of this category as well.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anti-Zionism</span> Opposition to Jewish ethnonationalism

Anti-Zionism is opposition to Zionism. Although anti-Zionism is a heterogeneous phenomenon, all its proponents agree that the creation of the modern State of Israel, and the movement to create a sovereign Jewish state in the region of Palestine—the biblical Land of Israel—was flawed or unjust in some way.

African Americans and Jewish Americans have interacted throughout much of the history of the United States. This relationship has included widely publicized cooperation and conflict, and—since the 1970s—it has been an area of significant academic research. Cooperation during the Civil Rights Movement was strategic and significant, culminating in the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The "three Ds" or the "3D test" of antisemitism is a set of criteria formulated by Israeli human rights advocate and politician Natan Sharansky in order to distinguish legitimate criticism of Israel from antisemitism. The three Ds stand for delegitimization, demonization, and double standards, each of which, according to the test, indicates antisemitism. The test is intended to draw the line between on one hand legitimate criticism of the State of Israel, its actions and policies, and on the other hand antisemitism hidden behind a facade of anti-Zionism. The three Ds test is intended to rebut arguments that "any criticism toward the State of Israel is considered antisemitic, and therefore legitimate criticism is silenced and ignored." This test was adopted by the U.S. Department of State in 2010, but later replaced by the Working Definition of Antisemitism in 2017.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David Nirenberg</span> Historian

David Nirenberg is a medievalist and intellectual historian. He is the Director and Leon Levy Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. He previously taught at the University of Chicago, where he was Dean of the Divinity School, and Deborah R. and Edgar D. Jannotta Distinguished Service Professor of Medieval History and the Committee on Social Thought, as well as the former Executive Vice Provost of the University, Dean of the Social Sciences Division, and the founding Roman Family Director of the Neubauer Family Collegium for Culture and Society. He is also appointed to the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, the Joyce Z. and Jacob Greenberg Center for Jewish Studies.

Allosemitism is a neologism that encompasses both philosemitic and antisemitic attitudes towards Jews as the Other.

Anti-antisemitism is opposition to antisemitism or prejudice against Jews, and just like the history of antisemitism, the history of anti-antisemitism is long and multifaceted. According to historian Omer Bartov, political controversies around antisemitism involve "those who see the world through an antisemitic prism, for whom everything that has gone wrong with the world, or with their personal lives, is the fault of the Jews; and those who see the world through an anti-antisemitic prism, for whom every critical observation of Jews as individuals or as a community, or, most crucially, of the state of Israel, is inherently antisemitic". It is disputed whether or not anti-antisemitism is synonymous with philosemitism, but anti-antisemitism often includes the "imaginary and symbolic idealization of ‘the Jew’" which is similar to philosemitism.

References

  1. ↑ "Rhodes College | Faculty & Staff". Archived from the original on 2013-01-19. Retrieved 2013-01-28.
  2. ↑ Crane, Richard (January 2010). "Sartre's Jewish Mirror" . Retrieved 29 January 2013.
  3. ↑ Judaken, Jonathan; Bernasconi, Robert (2012). Situating Existentialism: Key Texts in Context. Columbia University Press. ISBN   978-0231147750.
  4. ↑ "ICRAR - International Consortium for Research on Antisemitism and Racism". 11 September 2022.
  5. ↑ Judaken, Jonathan (4 February 2013). "Anti-antisemitic Hitmen and the New Judeophobia". Huffington Post.
  6. ↑ "Professor Judaken". Archived from the original on 2012-02-04.
  7. ↑ "Jewish, Islamic and Middle East Studies | Rhodes College". www.rhodes.edu. Retrieved 2020-04-23.
  8. ↑ "Counterpoint" . Retrieved 28 January 2013.
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