The Jewish Conscious Pariah in the Age of Twenty-First Century Anti-Genderism

This paper considers the extraordinarily thorny question of the place of the Jew, and of the feminist Jewish ethnographer, in studying European anti-genderism. Flanked, from one side, by everyday antisemitism which few in Europe are willing to recognize, especially on the left; and, from the other side, by an apparent embrace of Jewish heritage and contemporary rightwing Israeli intellectuals by radicalized conservatives in Europe, for whom anti-genderism is a “symbolic glue” (Kováts and Põim 2015) linking together a European rightwing coalition, the feminist Jewish ethnographer must doubly wrestle with her role and position as researcher. Drawing from the work of Hannah Arendt, whose scholarship is often quite superficially cited in contemporary political analysis, the paper seriously considers whether Arendt’s idealized vision of the Jewish “conscious pariah” is the right ethical position from which a contemporary Jewish scholar can engage with the study of European anti-genderism. In Arendt’s typology of secularized Jews in Europe, unlike the Jewish “parvenu,” who sought total integration into European life through denial of her Jewishness, the “conscious pariah” recognized her Jewishness, and accepted a degree of social isolation as the price for a frank acceptance of her incomplete belonging to devotional religious life, and to secular public life. This position, according to Arendt, afforded a unique critical position for thinkers whose insider/outsider position lent them a distinctive, if uncomfortable, vantage point to critically analyze society. However, Arendt’s writings reflected the position of twentieth century (and nineteenth) century Jewish thinkers in Europe, at a time when it would have been inconceivable to imagine a form of political Catholicism which embraces the “Judeo” part of the “Judeo-Christian civilization” in the name of “protection” of the putatively natural division between the sexes. The paper thus weighs how to bring the position of the conscious pariah into the twenty-first century, and whether and how it is possible to repurpose the conscious pariah role for articulating a double critique against anti-semitism and anti-genderism in Europe.