Description
Oxford UP Israel Has A Jewish Problem: Self-Determination As Self-Elimination by Dalsheim Joyce
Examining the production and assimilation of Jews as the nation in the modern state of Israel, this book shows how identity is constrained through myriad struggles over the meanings and practices of being Jewish. Based on years of ethnographic engagement, the book employs Franz Kafka's writing as a theoretical lens in order to frame the seemingly bizarre and self-contradictory processes it describes. While other scholars have explained Jewish identity conflicts in
Israel in terms of a dichotomy between the secular and the religious, this book suggests that such an analysis is inadequate. Instead, it traces these struggles to the definition of religion itself. It suggests that the problem lies in the way modern identity categories at once disarticulate
religion from nation and at the same time conflate those categories in the figure of the Jew.