Berlin’s Jewish Museum gave Judith Butler and Germans permission to indulge dangerous political impulses
(Frank Rumpenhorst/EPA/Corbis)
On May 31, the city of Frankfurt announced that
Berkeley professor Judith Butler would be feted with the Theodor W.
Adorno prize, named after the late German Jewish philosopher who taught
at the University of Frankfurt Am Main. Though she was ostensibly chosen
for her academic work, lauded by the prize committee as “one of the key
thinkers of our time,” many correctly inferred that the honor was
bestowed, at least in part, because of the gender theorist’s outspoken
political beliefs. Chief among these is a critique of “state violence”
as being anywhere and everywhere wrong. And by Butler’s lights, no state
is a worse offender than Israel.
In
recent years, the professor has become one of the most prominent
supporters in academe of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement
against Israel. In her latest book,Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism,
she explicitly calls for a one-state solution to the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict. While Butler’s anti-Zionism is of a piece
with a wide swath of the left-wing professoriate, hers is notorious for a
set of comments uttered at a September 2006 Berkeley Teach-In against
Israel’s invasion of southern Lebanon, in which Butler responded to a
question from a member of the audience frustrated with the “hesitation”
of some on the left to fully embrace Hamas and Hezbollah due to their
use of violence.
“Understanding Hamas, Hezbollah as social movements
that are progressive, that are on the Left, that are part of a global
Left, is extremely important,” she said. “That does not stop us from
being critical of certain dimensions of both movements. It doesn’t stop
those of us who are interested in nonviolent politics from raising the
question of whether there are other options besides violence.”
Butler has repeatedly attempted to walk this statement back. After the Jerusalem Postpublished a story airing criticisms of Butler, shortly before she was awarded the prize last month, the professor took to
the notoriously anti-Zionist MondoWeiss website to launch a 2,000-word
defense in which she attempted to paint her subjective description of
the Islamic terrorist groups as a normative one. Her point, she
stressed, was “merely descriptive.” “Those political organizations
define themselves as anti-imperialist, and anti-imperialism is one
characteristic of the global left, so on that basis one could describe
them as part of the global left,” she wrote. Her critics, she alleged,
were guilty of “taking the words of context” and “inverting their
meanings.”
But
nowhere in Butler’s original statement was there any censure of these
two organizations. Instead, Butler’s clarification wasn’t explicit
approval, but rather something more pernicious: the subtle inclusion of
violent reactionaries as part of a sphere of reasonable actors. As
Henryk Broder, Germany’s most famous Jewish journalist, sharply noted in
response to Butler’s statement: “[T]he SA and SS were also so-called
progressive social movements, which worked with sensational strategies
for a political solution to the Jewish Question, that caused Adorno to
flee Germany.”
Still,
some insisted that whatever Butler’s views on the Arab-Israeli
conflict, she was a deserving recipient of the prize named after one of
the founders of the neo-Marxist “Frankfurt School” of critical theory.
Writing in Ha’aretz, Eva Illouz, a sociologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, admitted to
being “dismayed and puzzled by Butler’s views,” but ultimately defended
her winning the award. “There is not a shred of doubt that few scholars
have had an impact as significant as Judith Butler, and this in various
fields, such as literature, philosophy, cultural studies, art history,
communications, cinema studies, sociology and anthropology,” she wrote.
“No one can ignore her staggering influence in renewing the critical
theory so dear to Theodor Adorno.” Given Adorno’s politics and
notoriously obscure language, it indeed seemed fitting that Butler—who
in 1998 won the “Bad Writing Contest” for “the most stylistically lamentable passages found in scholarly books and articles”—would receive an award named after him.
But
the real scandal wasn’t Butler being honored with the Adorno Prize on
Sept. 11, the late philosopher’s birthday. More significant was an event
that occurred several days later, in the German capital. On Sept. 15,
Berlin’s taxpayer-funded Jewish Museum hosted the academic for an event
titled “Does Zionism Belong to Judaism.” In the country where a boycott
of Jewish businesses led to the Holocaust, an American “academic superstar” called for a boycott of the Jewish state—and 700 Germans gave her a rapturous reception.
Why
would the Jewish Museum give Butler a podium and allow her to advocate
for BDS, a campaign that even the unyielding Israel critic Norman
Finkelstein has labeled a
“cult” that seeks to “eliminate” Israel by hiding behind nonviolent
rhetoric? To understand the answer to that question, one must put
Butler’s visit in the context of slowly shifting German attitudes toward
Israel and Jews—as well as within Germany’s ongoing attempts to deal
with its past. “I have also wondered whether the use of my abridged
remarks about Hamas and Hezbollah itself was a kind of anti-Semitic
attack,” Butler told the left-wing German newspaper Jungle World in
2010 in response to those Germans who had criticized her for her views
on Israel. “I feel, in fact, again my vulnerability as a Jew in Germany,
when I am discredited in this way in the media.” With such rhetorical
feats, Butler transforms herself from an American intellectual into a
latter-day victim of anti-Semitism, and in so doing gives Germans who
might feel uneasy expressing support for the boycott of the Jewish state
license to feel like victims as well.
***
Controversy
leading up to the discussion at the Jewish Museum had already persuaded
the moderator, a journalist from the conservative Die Welt, to
drop out. The day before the event, the Jewish Museum was telling the
press that Butler would refuse to address her 2006 comments about Hamas
and Hezbollah. (Ultimately, a stern-faced man and woman sat beside the
stage, performing the commissar-like duty of screening questions
audience members had scribbled on slips of paper.) Nonetheless, hundreds
of Berliners–a quirky assemblage of chic gay men, butch lesbians, and
academic eggheads, most of whom were not Jewish, according to a
prominent member of Berlin’s Jewish community whom I spoke to at the
event—filled the glass-roofed atrium of the museum and a spillover room
where the conversation was simulcast.
Butler’s comments that evening largely reflected the arguments presented in Parting Ways.
In the book, Butler offers the standard, post-nationalist critique of
Zionism, which, like most post-nationalist critiques of Zionism, is
solely concerned with the nation-state of the Jews. At the root of
Butler’s anti-Zionism is an appeal to Judaism’s “diasporic tradition” of
living among non-Jews as the “ethos” for the post-Zionist, binational
state she seeks. Butler makes frequent use of her Jewish upbringing to
substantiate her political vision. Butler grew up in Cleveland to a
father raised Reform and a mother raised Orthodox; her maternal
Hungarian grandmother’s family was almost entirely murdered by the
Nazis. She attended Hebrew school as a child and Butler has brought up
her own son, raised with her partner, as Jewish.
But particularism of any kind bothers her. “I grew very skeptical of certain kind of Jewish separatism in my youth,” she told Ha’aretz in
a 2010 interview. “I saw the Jewish community was always with each
other; they didn’t trust anybody outside. You’d bring someone home and
the first question was ‘Are they Jewish, are they not Jewish?’ ” This
repulsion for parochialism informs her views on Israel, as if it is
Jews, and only Jews, who may be clannish. Butler seems to think that she
is refuting the Zionist project itself—that Zionism is incompatible
with pluralism, cosmopolitanism, and multiculturalism—when she writes
that, “If I show … there are Jewish values of cohabitiation with the
non-Jews that are part of the very ethical substance of diasporic
Jewishness, then it will be possible to conclude that commitments to
social equality and social justice have been an integral part of Jewish
secular, socialist and religious traditions.”
At
the museum event, Butler tried to ingratiate herself to the crowd by
hamming it up with an ersatz-Borscht belt routine to make her audience
feel more comfortable in their prejudices. Dropping the word tsuris at
one point, she looked at the audience with a coy smile: “You don’t know
what that word means?” she teased. Asked what she felt about the term
“anti-Zionism,” she quoted Franz Kafka as saying that “he couldn’t stand
Zionists, but he couldn’t stand anti-Zionists either.” This didn’t earn
the intended laugh, a fault she then attributed to “the lack of Jewish
humor in Germany,” which did. When Butler’s co-discussant Micha Brumlik,
a liberal German Jewish professor of pedagogy at the Goethe University
of Frankfurt, replied that her support for boycotting Israel has little
following among Jews worldwide, she insisted that “1,000 Jewish groups”
support BDS, an absurd allegation that no one in the audience
challenged.The message was clear: It’s OK for you Germans to start
complaining about Jews again. Indeed, as one German Jew in the audience
told me afterwards, “The German people love to hear someone hate
Israel.”
What
makes Butler’s call for binationalism so disingenuous is that she makes
it from behind a pacifistic mask. “If you say, ‘No, I’m not a Zionist,’
that seems to imply you are in favor of the destruction of Israel,” she
said at the Jewish Museum. “As long as the debate happens in this way,
it becomes an impossible debate.” But it’s not an “impossible debate”
for those honest about their desire to end Israel as the sovereign state
of the Jews. Whatever the metaphysical or religious arguments for the
Jewish state, the practical ones are clear—or at least should be to
Germans.
Which
is why it was not surprising when Butler’s invitation sparked a
confrontation between the Jewish Museum, which is funded by the German
government and run independently of the country’s Jewish community, and
the state of Israel. “We regret that the Berlin Jewish Museum decided to
hold a discussion event, which posed the question about the identity of
the Jewish state,” read a statement from the Israeli Embassy in
Berlin, issued the
week after Butler’s talk. “Similar discussions are not conducted about
any other state on the planet.” The Central Council of Jews in Germany
had earlier condemned the conferral of the Adorno prize upon an “avowed
Israel hater.”
Meanwhile,
museum director Michael Blumenthal, a German-born American Jew who
served as Jimmy Carter’s treasury secretary, insisted in a letter to
the Jerusalem Post that the Jewish Museum “takes no position on
political issues” and that “open discussion of differing views,
including controversial ones, is a good thing for democracy.” Blumenthal
may be able to duck the implications of hosting Butler under the banner
of free speech, but it’s not like the museum would host any speaker,
and by granting Butler such a platform it granted a measure of
respectability to her views.
***
Butler’s welcome at the museum is but the latest in a series of worrying developments for German Jewry. A recent report in Der Spiegel headlined
“Jews Question Their Future in Germany” surveyed a court’s banning
circumcision, a violent attack on a Berlin rabbi, Günter Grass’ widely
debated poem blaming Israel
for the onset of a world war, and increasing antagonism from the
country’s Muslims, concluding that “it’s easy to see that many Jewish
Germans feel ambivalent about a country that time and again makes it so
difficult for them to consider it their home.” Earlier this month,
Charlotte Knobloch, the former head of the country’s Jewish community
and a Holocaust survivor, wrote, “I seriously ask if this country still wants us.”
The most vivid and startling of these developments was the ruling this
past summer by a Cologne court that ritual circumcision—the oldest
continuously performed religious tradition in the West—amounts to the
mutilation of baby boys and should therefore be legally proscribed. “The
fundamental right of the child to bodily integrity outweighs the
fundamental rights of the parents,” the court ruled. While Chancellor
Angela Merkel has admirably condemned the decision, stating that
Germany risks becoming a “laughing stock” because of it, the
intolerance that the campaign to ban circumcision has unearthed toward
Jews (and Muslims) is no laughing matter.
Advertisements that show a
child protecting his genitalia with the plea, “My Body Belongs to Me!”
now plaster Berlin’s U-Bahn, essentially likening those who circumcise
their children to pedophiles, or worse. A recent article in Der Spiegel treated
the subject with shocking irreverence, putting Jewish deference to the
practice in the same category as Muslims who resorted to violence in
response to an anti-Islamic film broadcast on YouTube. “The bitter
debate over the circumcision of Jewish and Muslim boys in Germany
highlights the things that religious people can find just as abhorrent
as violence,” the magazine declared. “Even some German Jews feel that
the foreskin has such importance as a symbol of their belief that they
are seriously considering leaving Germany.” The controversy has led
Israel’s former Chief Rabbi Meir Landau–a Polish-born Holocaust
survivor—to remark, “It is an amazing thing (to see) German speakers discover they are sensitive to a baby’s cry.”
Jeffrey Herf, a professor at the University of Maryland and an expert on
how contemporary Germans deal with the Holocaust, says that the
celebration of Butler represents the victory of one German left-wing
intellectual tradition—that of Karl Marx and his “On the Jewish
Question”—over another, which regards the Jews as a distinct people who
have the right to national self-determination. “The intellectual and
scholarly world of Frankfurt/Main is one that has strong currents of
empathy and sympathy for Israel and strong traditions of analyzing and
criticizing anti-Semitism,” he wrote me in an email. “However, the
intellectual left in Frankfurt, especially since the late 1960s, also
has a strong and vibrant tradition of anti-Zionism and disdain for
Israel. The decision to give the prize to Butler is fully in tune with
that tradition.” While Adorno never wrote about Israel for publication,
some hints about his sympathetic views toward the Jewish State are
apparent in private writings and a handful of public remarks. Days
before the outbreak of the Six Day War, for instance, he spoke of his
concern that “Israel, the home of countless Jews who fled the horror, is
threatened.” “If Adorno were around today,” Herf told me about Butler’s
new prize, “I doubt he would be pleased or amused.”
As
a new generation of Germans–unshackled by the sense of postwar guilt
that was eventually instilled in German society—comes to the fore, it is
the latter tradition Herf describes that seems to be gaining power. A
January 2009 poll, taken during the last Gaza war, found that half of
Germans saw Israel as an “aggressive country,” a third only believed
that Germany had a special responsibility toward Israel, and 60 percent
believed that Germany had “no responsibility” at all. Mathias Döpfner, CEO of
the Axel Springer media conglomerate, which requires its employees to
sign a contract obliging them “To promote the reconciliation of Jews and
Germans and support the vital rights of the people of Israel,” says
there exists among many Germans “a need to put [Israel] on a moral level
that is close to its present enemies, Iran, Syria, or whatsoever.” He
attributes this to “a kind of subconscious compensation for historic
trauma”— and to prove his point he cited the infamous maxim, “The
Germans will never forgive the Jews for the Holocaust.”
Then
there was Günter Grass’ poem, “What Must Be Said,” which, though widely
denounced by the German commentariat, gave voice to a view that is held
by a considerable number of Germans. “My sense is that were Israel to
launch a military strike on Iran, what remaining sympathy there is in
Germany for Israel would evaporate almost overnight,” German author Hans
Kundani, wrote in the Guardian earlier this year. The “public is all behind Grass,” the German journalist Georg Diez told the New York Times.
Grass’
fundamental conceit—that Israel, and not the countries threatening to
wipe it off the map, will be responsible should war erupt once again in
the Middle East—is the same as Butler’s. Both rely on naïve and
simplistic conceptions of “imperialism” and “anti-imperialism” and on a
belief that power inevitably leads to oppression. Take, for instance,
Butler’s reaction to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. “I think Bush said that
after ten days, that the time for grieving is over and now is time for
action,” she told Ha’aretz in
2010. “At which point we started killing populations abroad with no
clear rationale.” To Butler, there was “no clear rationale” for
overthrowing the Taliban and punishing the people who killed 3,000
Americans; to her, such actions are tantamount to the random murder of
whole swathes of innocent people. Butler—who, as a Jew, is uninhibited
in what she can say about Israel in Germany—has said what Grass declared
in his poem: Israel is the problem. The Israeli “state violence” she
complains about exists in a vacuum; Iran’s march to nuclear weapons does
not concern her, and the violence of Hamas and Hezbollah is all but
ignored.
Following
World War II, many Germans internalized pacifism as a fundamental
political value, and it is this central belief—as well as the ability to
sit in judgment of the Middle East from comfortable, prosperous
Europe—that informs much of German attitudes toward Israel. Joschka
Fischer, the erstwhile left-wing student activist who rose to become
Germany’s first Green Party foreign minister in 1998, used to say that
there were two principles that formed his political consciousness:
“Never Again War” and “Never Again Auschwitz.” But when the possibility
of genocide returned to the European continent during his tenure, in the
form of Serb ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, these mantras came into
conflict. If preventing another Auschwitz on European soil required war,
the breed of German leftists embodied by Fischer argued, then it was
the duty of the German left to get over its aversion to force and
support war.
As
the Iranian regime, which denies the Holocaust while promising another,
continues its nuclear weapons program unabated, the German penchant for
peace may once again be confronted by reality and historic obligation.
“I am very worried,” Döpfner replies when I ask him what German public
opinion would be in response to an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear
facilities. “I think there would be no public understanding for that.
There would be fierce criticism, and I hope that the German government
would understand its historic responsibility.” An irony of Germany’s
admirable confrontation with its horrific past is that many Germans have
learned their history so well they have learned the wrong lessons—and
Judith Butler validates their grave misinterpretation. That Berlin’s
Jewish Museum lent a platform for such views betrays precisely the
history it is meant to impart.
**
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