The personal identity they wish to assume
That bit of Tuvel’s paper I reserved to take issue with later:
Generally, we treat people wrongly when we block them from assuming the personal identity they wish to assume. For instance, if some one identifies so strongly with the Jewish community that she wishes to become a Jew, it is wrong to block her from taking conversion classes to do so. This example reveals there are at least two components to a successful identity transformation: (1) how a person self-identifies, and (2) whether a given society is willing to recognize an individual’s felt sense of identity by granting her membership in the desired group. For instance, if the rabbi thinks you are not seriously committed to Judaism, she can block you from attempted conversion. Still, the possibility of rejection reveals that, barring strong overriding considerations, transition to a different identity category is often accepted in our society.
I don’t think that’s entirely right about becoming a Jew, and I don’t think it’s right about assuming a personal identity in general. I think it’s more complicated than that.
It’s more complicated than that in the case of becoming a Jew, for sure. Why? Because just for one thing it feels like what people call “appropriation” – and in this case (and others I can think of) that doesn’t feel exaggerated or unfair. I wouldn’t feel I could “become” a Jew because my relatives were never in danger of being sent to Auschwitz. That’s a barrier, a large barrier. I can imagine converting, if I were a very different person, but I have a hard time imagining myself claiming to be a Jew. It’s not mine to seize in that way.
But there is conversion, so some people do become Jews in a sense. Yes but only in a sense, because Judaism is neither necessary nor sufficient for being a Jew.
In a better world that wouldn’t matter. In a better world we could all switch identities as we needed or wanted to. But in a world with multiple histories of ethnic wars, mass migrations, religious wars, inequality, war crimes, invasions, colonialism?
I don’t think so. I think it’s more complicated than that. I think gender identity is more complicated than that too, for the same kinds of reasons.
Note that none of this means I think Tuvel shouldn’t have written the article or that Hypatia shouldn’t have published it or that the APA shouldn’t have selected it to be read at their convention earlier this year. Not a bit of it.
There is much disagreement among Jews as to who is a Jew. Differences of opinion regarding what ancestry to consider, which sect, whether conversion is valid, and so on. One anecdote involved an American Jew, born and raised in a Jewish family, who emigrated to Israel and joined the Israeli Army, only to be told he could not call himself Jewish because his mother was a convert. Jewishness is both a religion and an ethnicity, with people shifting between them as suits their arguments.
The question of whether Judaism is a religion, a culture, an ethnicity, or some combination, was a topic of debate among Jewish writers over the last few centuries. I was not aware of this until I read “How Judaism Became a Religion”, by Leora Batnitzky (I don’t promise to have the spelling correct), a book recommended to me by my brother a few years ago. The more I read, the muddier the topic gets.
Ophelia
Me too. And before I go any further, let me stipulate that I’m defining “gender” as a social construct consisting of attributes considered fitting or even inherent to one sex or the other.
One way gender identity is complicated is in the way that gender has historically been conceived as a hierarchy. Men are dominant, men are leaders; women are submissive, women stay home, women obey men. Men act, women respond. (A children’s book published in the 1970s said, “Boys invent things. Girls use what boys invent.”)
Stereotypes like these are weakening in the West, but they’re not yet dead, and gender expectations are perceived and internalized from babyhood on. But even when it’s framed as “complimentary” rather than hierarchal, gender is more than a subjective sense, even a profound, persistent one, that one was born to be Femme. It is still a set of norms and expectations in which human feelings and interests and qualities are doled out, considered appropriate or inappropriate for people to exhibit, based on sex. It would be nice if, when it comes to gender norms and expectations, we could all take what we fancy and leave the rest, but things are a lot more complicated than that–we internalize this stuff. It’s disconcerting, at the least, to see a system that limits peoples’ behavior being embraced by trans activists. While women are discriminated against and worse on the basis of our sex, seeing males claim womanhood (and even femaleness!) on the basis of ill-defined feelings seems more than a tad dismissive. Our objective sex is at the root of our historical (and current) oppression; gender has always been part of the apparatus that keeps us in our place.
In the U.K., there was a fascinating case a few years back in which a family claimed that an Orthodox Jewish school had discriminated against their son by not offering him a place. The mother had converted, but not as an Orthodox Jew. The matter went all the way to the Supreme Court.
One of the central questions for the Supreme Court (and in the lower courts that heard the case) was whether Judaism was a race/ethnicity for the purpose of race discrimination legislation. Although there were dissenting judgments, the Supreme Court held that the school had unlawfully discriminated against the son and (if I recall correctly) all the judges agreed that Jewishness was an ethnicity.
At trial, the judge found himself in the uncomfortable position of having to look at the Nuremberg laws.
There’s a short summary of the case on Wikipedia, with a link to the full Supreme Court judgment at the bottom of the page. Apologies in advance for my inability to use HTML.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_(E)_v_Governing_Body_of_JFS
Oh – I see the site dId the HTMLing for me. Jolly good.
I was told that the difference is between “being Jewish” – which depends on your birth lineage and is a racial/ethnic distinction; and “being Judaist” – which is about your religious belief.
So you “are Jewish” if you have the right lineage, but you can believe in any religion or none as you choose and that doesn’t affect your Jewishness. Conversely, you can “be Judaist” no matter who your parents were (but there are still the aforementioned hurdles w.r.t. getting accepted by their religious authorities.)
The trouble is figuring out which of those things people are actually talking about when they say “Jews”.
Outside of the actual Jewish community, I doubt many people think about that at all. Jews is a blanket term that covers anyone Jewish, whether born or converted. Anti-Semitism seems to me is more about a racial quality, and therefore should exclude Judaists, but I don’t imagine most people understand that subtlety at all.
Right, but what people think about it inside the Jewish community is the point. It’s the point of the rage at Tuvel: she failed to consult the relevant communities! The view from inside the community is what makes something “appropriation.” It’s what identity politics is about, for good and ill.
And that’s just the problem. I have never once been part of a community that actually agreed on everything. So exactly who has the right to “give permission”? (I was reading a theatre book recently that insisted we receive permission from a community not our own before we ‘appropriate’ anything of theirs). I wrote a play with black characters, working with a mentor who was black. He encouraged me, he assisted me, and he told me I should submit it…but he added the caveat that I should never tell them I’m white. Why? Because as one person, he gave me permission, but he doesn’t speak for everyone, so those people who disagree with shame me if they find out. Which has already happened…
So who determines on the proper “view from inside the community”? It appears to be whoever shouts the loudest, or has the most hours to spend raging away on Twitter, or has the meanest temperament.
@8: That’s the question isn’t it? Who gets to be the gatekeeper of identity? Religious conversion generally has a formal process sanctioned by the institution — I can become Catholic or Jewish or Baptist just by jumping through the prescribed hoops in good faith (and even if Judaism-as-a-whole is not monolithic on the question, I could at least be accepted by a particular synagogue). But there is nothing except informal consensus of a large and diverse group of people that could grant acceptance into Blackness or Womanhood. It might be in some sense unjust of the community to withhold such acceptance in particular cases (and Tuvel’s paper explores that subject), and the process is subject to manipulation by individuals with their own agenda, but there’s not much anyone can do about that.
Yep. In short…”it’s complicated.”
This was part of the issue in the monstering of Amanda PL – how clear was it that the entire indigenous “community” thought she was appropriating indigenous sacred art and wrong to do so? Not clear at all. It hardly ever is. It’s an issue with feminism, since not all women are feminists. It was an issue in the Civil Rights movement.
But we are told that we must accept those who choose to identify as a woman, while being told we must not accept those who choose to identify s a person of color. Meanwhile, white people can get themselves on the Indian rolls by finding a Native American ancestor within the proper genealogical time frame, and claim benefits slated for people who have suffered oppression, while themselves enjoying the privileges that come from being white. And be accepted, because genealogy.
We definitely have a schizophrenic approach to identity. (Not meaning anything abelist here; merely using the original Greek concept of split mind).
Exactly. See latest post. There’s a massive contradiction in the middle of all this.
Re ” white people can get themselves on the Indian rolls by finding a Native American ancestor within the proper genealogical time frame”, the same can be said regarding claims of being black. If Dolezal could turn up a black ancestor a few generations back, she’d have broader acceptance. The difference with Native Americans is there are laws and formal rules.
That’s overstating it; there are sometimes laws regarding blackness, even recently, like for this woman who was white and wanted to be listed as such on her documents, but she had a black ancestor too close in her lineage.
http://people.com/archive/raised-white-a-louisiana-belle-challenges-race-records-that-call-her-colored-vol-18-no-23/