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Thinking through and beyond “Competitive Memory” and Hierarchies of Suffering

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2018

Steven Robins
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Abstract

The entry point for my response to Bryan Cheyette’s thought-provoking essay on the difficulties of bringing together Jewish studies and postcolonial studies is a discussion of a recent national controversy in South Africa that, at first glance, seems to endorse Cheyette’s cautionary tale about how “actionism” tends to negate nuance and critical engagement. The response draws on this controversy to make some tentative observations about why Cheyette’s argument does not adequately acknowledge the consequences of the profound political, ideological, and economic transformations of post–World War II Jewry.

Keywords

Jewish studiespostcolonial studiescompetitive memoryentangled racial historieshierarchies of sufferingSouth Africa
Type
Opinion Paper (Paradigm Response)
Information
Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry , Volume 5 , Issue 1 , January 2018 , pp. 98 - 105
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2017 

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References

1 Bryan, Cheyette, “Against Supersessionist Thinking: Old and New, Jews and Postcolonialism, the Ghetto and Diaspora,” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Inquiry 4.3 (2017): 424–439 Google Scholar.

2 Willi Goetschel and Ato Quayson, “Introduction: Jewish Studies and Postcolonialism,” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 3.1 (2015), 10 and throughoutGoogle Scholar.

3 Mbanjwa, Bheki and Padayache, Kamini, “Jewish Board Takes BLF to Equality Court,” Cape Times, September 7, 2017 Google Scholar. This bizarre mention of “SA cannibals” refers to recent reports of cannibalism in rural parts of South Africa.

4 Zondi, Nolwandle and Akoob, Rumana, “Mngxitama on Holocaust tweets: I’m just paraphrasing Helen Zille,” Mail & Guardian, Aug 25, 2017, 22:30, https://mg.co.za/article/2017-08-25-mngxitama-on-holocaust-tweets-im-just-paraphrasing-helen-zille Google Scholar.

5 Zondi and Akoob, “Mngxitama on Holocaust tweets.”

6 Ibid.

7 “Jewish Board Takes BLF to Equality Court.”

8 Rothberg, Michael, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009)Google Scholar.

9 Ibid., 1.

10 Finkelstein, Norman G., Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering (London: Verso Books, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Finkelstein’s Holocaust Industry has become part of a wider critique of the ways in which Jewish suffering and victimhood have been appropriated for ethno-nationalist narratives linking the Nazi genocide to Israeli nationalism and Zionism. An example of this is “The March of the Living,” which starts in Auschwitz and ends with a redemptive ritual of Zionist pilgrimage in Jerusalem.

12 Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization, 23.

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16 In reflecting on the historical grounds for claiming a “non-competitive” approach to memory of collective suffering, Heidi Grunebaum (personal communication, September 2017) makes the important observation that Jews “became white” in a post-Holocaust world through the various repressions of Jewish difference within Euro-American Jewish thought. She refers here to the different historical trajectories of Arab and North African Jews or Ottoman Jews, which, after Holocaust and the founding of the Jewish state, have produced a kind of bifurcation of Arabness or African-ness and Jewishness. Grunebaum notes that the work of intellectuals and artists who live this “double consciousness”—for instance Ammiel Alcalay, Ella Shohat, and Sami Chetrit—are peripheral if not absent from Jewish studies during the post–World War II period. In other words, Jewishsness is itself contested, multiple, and heterogeneous in ways that complicate competitive memory and ethno-nationalist narratives of collective suffering and victimhood.

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21 Jay Gould, Stephen, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: Norton, 1981)Google Scholar.