Core Participating UW Faculty:  Gad Barzilai (Jackson School/LSJ); Richard Block (German); Susan Glenn (History); Noam Pianko (Jewish Studies/Jackson School); and Michael Rosenthal (Philosophy).

Until the events of 9/11, much of liberal political theory in the West, especially in the United States, relegated religion to the private sphere.  It was often assumed that Europeans and Americans had solved the problems of the wars of religion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries through the development of the structures of liberalism in its various forms.  What remained were essentially technical problems.  Which form of liberalism was superior?  Would the separation of church and state or some form of a state church with tolerance extended to other religious communities better resolve religious conflict?  How could the successful North Atlantic model be exported to other, less-developed political communities?  Should human rights be enforced through the United Nations and the overthrow of despotic regimes or should liberal democracies install liberalism through justified force?  However, these liberal projects have run into endless problems.  Some Third World peoples have denounced human rights as a new form of colonialism.  Immigrant groups have resisted attempts to assimilate them as part of liberalism..  What had once seemed like a problem that could be resolved through time and diligent effort was now seen by some as an intractable and tragic “clash of civilizations.”

Many Jewish intellectuals realized that the Enlightenment would not solve the problems of religious minorities.  Each new solution offered produced new problems.  Classical liberalism demanded that a communal religion transform itself into a essentially private one in a public sphere still dominated by Christian culture.  Marxism defined the “Jewish Question” and suggested that its “solution” would be the overthrow of the bourgeois state and the end of all religion, but the price of liberation was the complete dissolution of Jewish identity.  Nationalism advanced the interests of a particular ethnic group through the creation of a territorial state, but did not leave any room for the Jews who had no land of their own and were deemed parasitic on others.  Indeed, Jews became the ever problematic and even dangerous “exception” to ideological regimes, which itself justified extraordinary measures to normalize them, place them into zones of containment, or simply eliminate them as a people altogether.  What happened to the Jews—the measures taken to deal with their exceptional state—indeed became the exemplar of how to deal with other difficult peoples, and sadly we have seen other groups become subject in predictable ways to the same fate. 

It would be wrong to think, however, that Jews were merely passive victims of these processes.  As Europe and North America transformed themselves into democratic nation states Jews became citizens, a juridical status that entailed a double relation to the state.  On the one hand, Jews were subjects, that is, under the yoke of a new and specific form of sovereign power.  But whereas pre-modern forms of government had essentially excluded Jews altogether from power, emanicipation meant that Jews also had a chance to exercise forms of sovereignty in new ways.  Jews were often able to participate in government and help shape their own fate.  And a central part of this double-relation to the experience of the modern world has been the rebirth of Jewish political theory.  Jews have found new ways to consider their political situation through the use of their own tradition and texts but also in dialogue with secular theories.  As Jews have been given the opportunity to act as political agents, theorists have sought to make sense of and evaluate their options—from reestablishing sovereignty through Zionism to embracing the possibilities of Diaspora—in synergetic and innovative ways.

The purpose of our proposed seminar series, then, is three-fold:  1) to explore Jewish perspectives on the central paradoxes and limits of modern liberalism and the nation-state; 2) to see what is unique about the Jewish experience of modern politics in the last hundred years or so; and 3) to find out what this experience has in common with other ways of negotiating the nation-state and the modern world order.  We propose to talk about the Jewish experience not so much as historians but primarily as political theorists, whose goal it is to offer a critique, both normative and practical, of existing political structures on the basis of an informed historical and sociological understanding of the present.  And we hope to stimulate this conversation through bringing to campus a series of speakers whose own work critically considers the problem of modern Jewish political experience through a variety of disciplines.

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