Exploring Semitic feelings

Devorah Baum draws on pop culture and psychoanalysts to contend with Jewish stereotypes and emotions

By GLENN C. ALTSCHULER
THE AUTHOR says we should embrace ‘feeling split’ feelings and identities. (photo credit: TNS)
THE AUTHOR says we should embrace ‘feeling split’ feelings and identities.
(photo credit: TNS)
Historian Yuri Slezkine once declared that “the Modern Age is the Jewish Age... Modernization is about everyone becoming urban, mobile, literate, articulate, intellectually intricate, physically fastidious, and occupationally flexible.” Not entirely insiders or outsiders, and feeling, at times, threatened, Slezkine adds, Jews can be considered “model moderns.”
In Feeling Jewish (A Book for Just About Anyone), Devorah Baum, a lecturer in English literature at the University of Southampton, applies this claim to seven prevalent stereotypes about the emotional excesses of Jews: self-hatred; envy; guilt; hysteria; paranoia, mother love; inauthenticity. Although Jewishness animates her analysis, she demonstrates that lots of people share these feelings.
Critical literary theory is Baum’s preferred methodology.
Readers will have to contend with Sigmund Freud and Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida. Some readers, no doubt, will characterize more than a few of Baum’s claims – including her suggestion that a caregiver who tells a child she is cold, hot, hungry, or thirsty “comes close to the torturer” – as “bafflegab.”
That said, Feeling Jewish is an immensely informative, interesting and important book. Drawing on novels, movies, memoirs and psychoanalysts, Baum teaches us to avoid the binaries typically associated with feelings and to embrace “feeling split.” Our feelings, she writes, “can never be fully determined because, as with our words, no one has sole authority or mastery of them.”
We can learn a lot about ourselves “through some effort of interpretation, rendering their origin, their meaning, their status, and even their privacy a source of negotiation, uncertainty, doubt.”
Consider, for example, Baum’s treatment of self-hatred.
Whether it is directed at Uncle Toms, Log Cabin Republicans or Jews, she reveals that the label is often difficult to pin down.
These days it tends to be applied to Jews who are critical of the Israeli government; a century ago, Zionists were deemed self-hating for their contempt for non-national and religiously observant Diaspora Jews.
Usually leveled with ferocity by Jews against Jews, Baum indicates that the accusation, citing playwright David Mamet’s equation of self-loathing with the “wicked son” in the Passover Haggada, is intensified by identification.
When self-hatred is directed inward, it can reflect alienation from oneself, a feeling sometimes associated with the ambivalent assimilation of immigrants, but also with an existential angst associated with modernity. Franz Kafka, Baum reminds us, “connected the void within himself” to his Jewish inheritance, which he described “at once as entirely meaningless and unassailable.”
Kafka fantasized, however, about stuffing all Jews, including himself, into the drawer of a laundry chest and suffocating them, and he opined that with their posterior insect legs, Jews “were still glued to their father’s Jewishness, and with their waving interior legs they found no new ground.” Was he, Baum asks, turning “toward an all-powerful Other with the projected power to ‘please tell me who I am?’” Baum’s deconstruction of Mother Love is equally provocative.
Jewish moms, she writes, get a double whammy. They are the objects of contradictory motifs within a single misogynistic, antisemitic stereotype: dangerously bad and superhuman, self-sacrificing mothers, they inflict guilt, smother, and thwart the formation of their children’s identity.
The stereotype stimulates resentment: in men, because “they fear female power and authority through maternity” and in women because “they fear female victimization and disempowerment through maternity.”
Baum reads into the record the uphill efforts of authors Tillie Olsen and Grace Paley to depict Jewish mothers as sources of strength and positivity, “whose paths have not been determined for them or before them.” At the same time, she understands that Philip Roth’s mother was on to something when she told a journalist, asking whether she was a model for Sophie in Portnoy’s Complaint, that “all mothers are Jewish mothers.”
To further complicate things, with an admittedly “extreme formulation,” Baum sees the animus directed at the Jewish mother as a special case within the Western unconscious. Judaism, she writes, is both the Other, scapegoated, like Jewish mothers, “for being the source of everyone’s unknowability and everyone’s doubts in a world where no identity holds up amid continuous separations,” and “the mother of a global Christian culture.”
A book with quite a few “extreme formulations,” Feeling Jewish ends with a “somewhat simple but still potentially painful proposal.”
Feelings, Baum reminds us, especially in their “uncomfortable, disruptive, unsettling, and wandering nature,” can be “Jew-ish.”
Just about anyone, anywhere, whatever his or her “biology, belief, or background,” can feel them. Feelings, as Baum understands them, do not necessarily convey “laws or lessons, not knowledge or technique, not treasures or truths, not rights or responsibilities.”
We should not necessarily follow, perform, or trust them.
We can and should “strive, as best we can, to feel them.”
And, I would add, we might well emulate Baum’s bold and bracing book by interrogating our feelings, complex and contradictory though they may be, and try to understand what they tell us about ourselves and our world. 
The writer is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin professor of American studies at Cornell University.


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