Are the politics of the Israeli state the ultimate expression of #IdentityPolitics? If so, some on the Left have some serious rethinking to do. #TonyJudt #authenticity As early as 1979, in an essay against methodological trends in the practice of social history, Judt opposed what he viewed as an academic cult of “identity politics”—the isolated historical study of womanhood, or indigeneity, or blackness. The academic pursuit of “cultural studies,” in his inelegant characterization, was “crap.” The historian viewed the provincial study of identity as an affront to “the goals of a liberal education,” as he wrote in a 2010 essay. Academic studies of identity, he continues, “[reinforce] the sectarian and ghetto mentalities they purport to undermine.” In Ill Fares the Land, a parting defense of a lost social democracy, Judt expressed nostalgia for a cosmopolitan public commons threatened by the privatization of goods, on the right, and the privatization of identity, on the left. dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/between-israel-and-social-democracy-tony-judts-jewishness
Posted on: Sat, 09 Aug 2014 08:05:40 +0000
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