Ilan Gur-Ze'ev

The Morality of Acknowledging/Not‐acknowledging the Other's Holocaust/Genocide

Abstract The issue of producing and controlling the memories of the Holocaust is evaluated in this paper as a valid universal example of the struggle over self‐identity and the recognition of “the other” as a moral subject. The normal realisation of morality is presented as part of the denial of the others identity, knowledge and value. The dialectics of the memories of the Holocaust and the possibility of a non‐violent moral education is examined by questioning its treatment of the suffering of ‘others’ in the Israeli arena. The author concedes that practising the Holocaust, denying the Holocaust and refusing to recognise the genocides/holocausts of other peoples do differ, but maintains that they are to be evaluated as moral stages of one and the same level. The Israeli refusal to acknowledge the genocides/holocausts of other peoples is analysed as a testcase for the possibility of a humanist‐orientated moral education today.

Critical Education in Cyberspace

Critical educational thinkers who support recent advances in communicative technologies are of various ideological backgrounds: ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ postmodemists, neo-Marxists working within the framework of critical pedagogy, and those engaged in critical literacy, cultural studies, and feminist, post-colonialist, and multicultural discourses. Some conceive cyberspace as a: ... space of a total textual environment based upon text-based computing, giving rise to the notion of the virtual text, new forms of interactivity, and emergent discourses which collapse in formal communication and traditional forms of scholarship.’

Beyond Peace Education: Toward Co-Poiesis and Enduring Improvisation.

Is it possible that the essence of peace is negated in peace education? And is it possible that even against its own will peace education calls for the negation of its negation? In peace education no serious attempts have been made to elaborate its most central concepts. ‘Pacifism’, ‘violence’, ‘counter-violence’ and ‘emancipation’, ‘culture of peace’, among others, have still not been probed. Peace education, actually, is a serious threat to human edification. Peace for the eternal Jew, for the enduring improviser, is a condition of the one who found his way: an endless path of a nomad that has Love but no other ‘home’, dogma or quest for ‘home-returning’ into thingness, the continuum or the Same. He will never find and never search for ‘peace’ as an end of Diasporic existence and terminality of the suffering of the nomad. He will be at peace with his mission of avoiding history within history, of overcoming the temptation to be part of the collective ‘I’/consensus/pleasure machine/truth, and often he will be tired, ridiculed, punished or executed. But he will be also rewarded, each moment anew, for being at peace with his refusal of ‘peace’: he will be a freer and a richer improviser that his co-poiesis with the world, the Other, and he himself gives birth to Love. As such, the eternal improviser is mature enough to meet the alterity of other free nomads and Diasporic humans, as well as the gifts of other free-minded spirits. They too, as Nietzsche tell us, feel at home on the mountain, in the forest, and within their loneliness. But for the eternal improviser there is more and there is less than the rewards of the eternal Nietzschean nomad. This is so since the Nietzschean nomad is rewarded with presents and finally finds harmony in himself and the right path to the freedom of reason. The eternal improviser, however, is a more consistent Nietzschean than the Nietzschean nomad and is never appeased, domesticated or rewarded by any ‘home’. Homelessness, eternal Diaspora and improvisation worthy of the name cannot offer any ‘reward’ or rest in the (right) paved way, be it ‘external’ or ‘internal’, transcendent or immanent. Here counter-education reintroduces peace as a realization of Love and worthy togetherness with the cosmos, with the Other, with worthy suffering and with ones self.

The Nomadic Existence of the Eternal Improviser and Diasporic Co-Poiesis in the Era of Mega-Speed.

The history of transcendence and nomadism in face of the call for ‘home-returning’ is marked figuratively by four milestones: (1) the ‘era’ of immanence and dwelling in total harmony as a manifestation of self-sustained holiness; (2) the ‘era’ of relating to holiness by mediation of God, especially in the monotheistic religions; (3) the ‘era’ of killing-God-each-moment-anew as a path for regaining contact with holiness in Enlightenments progress and the deification of humanity; and (4) the ‘era’ of the exile of the killer of God and the forgetfulness of the holy imperative of the progressive deification of humanity and the sacred work of killing-God-each-moment-anew. These four milestones are paralleled by growing changes and speeding of (de)constructions as part of the de-positioning of the human as dweller of this world or, alternatively, as a genuine Diasporic nomad. The current change in the history of humans search for itself, its meaning and its telos is realized in an historical moment of change: from rapid changes into an arena of mega-speed, an era in which the sacred work of killing-God-each-moment-anew is replaced by the exile of the killer of God and the forgetfulness of the humanists telos within the immanence of the present dull anti-metaphysical moment within which the relations between space and time are transformed; both the quest for redemption/home-returning and the call for revolutionary progress and humans self-edification are forgotten, ridiculed, deconstructed and swallowed into the postmodern-neo-liberal system. Linear time and the quest for transcendence are overwhelmed by punctual time, end of historical consciousness, quasinomadism and the possibility to solve all human responsibility and shortcomings by plugging in to the pleasure machine. In face of this reality Diasporic philosophy and its improvised co-poiesis become relevant for the possibility of counter-education.

Sports Education Facing Globalizing Capitalism

From its very beginning sports activity became – already within the framework of the modern nation-building project, establishing national ethos, and constituting effective colonization of the Other – a central element of the effort of the modern system to create, represent, and consume the modern body and soul and to create the healthy-conquering national ‘we’. And yet, when true to its essence, sport represents the impetus of Love of Life. As Love of Life it raises the human from lower levels of existence to their supreme goal within the forms of constant self-elevation. Sport as a global commodity is manufactured and consumed locally, serving and representing both ethnocentrism and false universalism in the form of globalization. It is of vital importance for sports success as a worldwide commodity to function in the service of local passions and as a manifestation of the negation of the otherness of the Other. Without local rivalries, hate, and chauvinism, the worldwide reception and production of sport would not have been so successful.

Judaism, Post-Colonialism and Diasporic Education in the Era of Globalization

Diaspora is a cultural situation in which a group of people have a dual cultural alliance, dual cultural allegiance – to a cultural or cultures in the place where they are and to a culture or cultures in another place to which they are related by etiological memory, other strategies to read the past like shared values, shared religion, and so on. So Diaspora is a very precise term to describe a particular kind of culture in synchronic time. It does not necessarily have to be based on a particular history. The sense of dual cultural allegiance and dual cultural alliance – before a person, yes, there was a language and history and praxis in the place where he or she is and also an alliance with others somewhere else. That particular dual cultural situation is what can be understood as Diaspora. It produces double consciousness, it is the first of the fruits: the ability to be critical. Critical not necessarily in a formal manner like the Frankfurt School but some sense of distance or some sense of reflection that comes between a human and his or her identity.

Diasporic Philosophy, Counter-Education and Improvisation

Counter-education that addresses seriously the challenge of loss, exile, and the deceiving ‘home-returning’ projects accepts that no positive Utopia awaits us as ‘truth’, ‘genuine life’, ‘worthy struggle’, ‘pleasure’ or worthy self-annihilation. Loss is not to be recovered or compensated; not for the individual nor for any kind of ‘we’. And yet, Love of Life is the home of the Diasporic in the Socratic sense of Eros as an attracting absence of the beautiful. Counter-education should invite the Diasporic to the hospitality of Love of Life. Such hospitality calls for overcoming conventional morality and the other imperatives of the ethnocentric ‘we’, its self-evidence, its normality, the counter-violence of the oppressed and its normalized patriotic citizenship. The determination for Diasporic life and the possibilities opened by Diasporic counter-education is always ironic. It is never at home. The heart of improvisation is this movement within co-poiesis as a togetherness offered by Love of Life. It gives birth to the totally new. To the wholly unexpected that the Diasporic human faces its hospitality as alterity and togetherness symbolized by the Orcha; a form of non-instrumental nomadic playfulness that manifests erotic responsibility to Life at its best. Improvisation manifests the dialectics of response-ability and respond-ability. It is not ‘constructive’ nor is it merely ‘negative’. It is far from a manifestation of ‘resistance’ to oppression or suffering and loss. In the context of Diasporic counter-education it plays a special role as part of Love of Life and co-poiesis that challenges the matrix of whose manifestations traditional critical pedagogy is part and parcel.

The Possibility of a New Critical Language from the Sources of Jewish Negative Theology

A new critical language is possible yet its becoming is not guaranteed. Its roots and sources should be diverse, universal and Diasporic. Jewish negative theology is ultimately Diasporic and could become one of its edifying sources. Diaspora is not only an intellectual state, not necessarily collective but communal. One of the things that makes the notion most vital is the possibility and the cultural technology of generational continuity in the absence of a majority. It is true that there is always a danger of sentimentalism. A great deal of post-Enlightenment terror, both in the sense of individual terror, and eventually organized violence, has to do with the inability of an isolated organism that is aware of its own mortality to achieve some kind of equanimity with the fact of its own mortality. One of the key driving forces of the symbolic aspects of almost all human cultures until now has been to strengthen a real, not just a sentimental force, in structuring identificatory practices such that the organism does not, in the first instance, understand existence as starting with its birth and ending with its death, but almost in the first instance understands existence as being a continuity and a cycle, inflected by its own mortality. This mortality and the endurance of Life in face of the prospects of worthy life is the gate for a new understanding of transcendence, critique and emancipation. Today the most vital power of enriching the critical language is the new anti-Semitism. The prospects of an alternative revitalization of the critical language and the possibility of a language that challenges the exile of holiness and transcends critique is here addressed in light of the Jewish tradition.

The production of literacy in the Israeli culture industry

Abstract Zionist education is a manifestation of the efficiency of the violence of colonising education which for a century was targeted at internal (Jewish) communities, their memories and interests, as well as at the identity, memories, narratives and fortunes of external rivals. The current change in the stance of the Hebrew language reflects social, cultural and political transformations, which determine the end of Zionism. The paper presents a critical reconstruction of new literacies in Israel. The production of the new literacies does not reflect enhancement of reflective competence or the empowering of emancipatory sensitivity and responsibility. On the contrary, it serves and reflects the logic of the market, and its changing needs within the framework of a post-modern culture industry. The possibility of a non-repressive literacy is addressed within the framework of a counter-education, which does not disregard the new possibilities and limitations set by the post-modern reality.