Marla Brettschneider

Heterosexual Political Science

queer theory as political scientists enables us to approach central questions of the discipline in new and productive ways. This work makes possible innovative theoretical investigation of core concepts in political science such as power, justice, freedom, equality, and democracy. Queer theory can deepen the study of power by focusing on the lives, experiences, and institutions of GLBT people and communities. In the process, new frameworks are developed for the study of political theory more broadly. When done well, queer theory draws on the fields interdisciplinarity by bringing political scientists into conversation with other scholars on key matters that are best not bound by disciplinary borders. Similarly, queer theory at its best draws on the multiple perspectives developed in fields such as post-colonial, ethnic and critical race, feminist, class and ability, religious, and cultural studies.

Engaging Jewish Feminist Diversity Issues: Seven Concepts and Several Questions

antisemitism is precisely this: That all Jews, no matter how progressive their politics, no matter what they suffer, are lumped together into a monolith that must be hated. Until my sister feminists of color express their repugnance for anti-Jewish hatred, they will make me distrust them for the antisemitism they practice, a racism that is as pernicious and vile as all the others that appear on the Internet hate sites.

Ritual Encounters of the Queer Kind: A Political Analysis of Jewish Lesbian Ritual Innovation

SUMMARY Jewish feminist and queer engagement in Jewish life and Judaism are transforming the practices and foundational orientations of traditional modes. Jewish feminist, queer ritual innovation in particular is inspired by an array of secular and radical critical theories as much as it is by the historic concrete experiences of a diversity of Jews in different Jewish communities. It is important to hold all of us who are involved in religious ritual innovation responsible to the knowledges we have developed and learned in critical theory or we risk, even with the best of intentions and creativity, re-inscribing some of the very problems of traditional ontological norms that we might have originally sought to disrupt and subvert. This article looks specifically at examples of new “coming out” rituals for Jewish queers explored over time in the Jewish Queer Think Tank: honoring them as well as offering tools from secular critical theory to assist our work in keeping them accountable to our aspirations to both love and fundamentally transform Jewishness. Here I redefine the function of religious ritual itself in political terms as an identity-producing performance. As such I utilize social constructionist queer theories (i.e., Shane Phelan and Judith Butler), anarchists (i.e., Emma Goldman), and those involved in radical theatre (i.e., Augusto Boal) to articulate the revolutionary potential of ritual innovation.

“Emma Said it in 1910; Now We're Going to Say it Again”: Firebrand Emma Goldman Continues to Spark Our Imaginations, Activism, and Political Theorizing

Two recent works on Emma Goldman demonstrate the need for contemporary feminists to mine the life stories and political legacies of our foremothers for how they might still assist us in the heady work before us today. Kathy Ferguson’s Emma Goldman: Political Thinking in the Streets and Vivian Gornick’s Emma Goldman: Revolution as a Way of Life share this important impulse. While they were both published in 2011, this impulse is just about all they share. Gornick’s biography of Goldman depicts the intensity and rebelliousness of Goldman as a historic and iconic figure. The book focuses on the sheer aliveness of the phenomenon that was Goldman. Here we have an accessible accounting of the life of this feisty Jewish anarchist feminist. The volume is well placed in the “Jewish Lives” series from Yale University Press, in partnership with the Leon C. Black Foundation. Gornick explains some of the politics, historical context, and important people in Goldman’s life in a way that keeps “Red Emma” at the center of the story. Goldman the thinker, the political analyst, and the strategist are downplayed in favor of exploring the ways that Goldman continued to renew the passionate fervor which propelled her commitments to anarchism and activism. The book presents Goldman’s impact in the context of her own lifetime, the political unrest of the 1960s and 1970s, continuing until today. Gornick approaches her subject with the sensibility of an artist, seeing the artist in Goldman in the ways she creates the drama of living the revolution. While popular in style, Gornick’s central theme is in line with academic feminist scholarship on Goldman, seeking to articulate the import of the personal on the political. This rendering attributes the concept of “the personal is political” primarily to the legacy of Goldman and this is the book’s primary theoretical assertion. This easy to read biography has three main sections. “Temperament,” introduces Emma Goldman, recounts her early years, and situates the firebrand in

A Symposium on the Political Thought of H. Mark Roelofs

and as practiced. A scholar keenly attuned to the ways that contradiction can be both productive and crippling, some of Roelofs’s most signal contributions come from his directly facing certain profound contradictions in American political thinking. This piece will focus on Roelofs’s attention to religion within his radical analysis of, and insight into, the promise and poverty of American politics. In his work, Roelofs situates religion as central to US politics. His innovative grasp on this matter enabled him to name a dominant political theoretical orientation as operative in US politics that is simultaneously split at its core. Given Roelofs’s standpoint, the religious tradition he sees as the center of (US) American political theory and practice, in fraught tension with what he names our foundational liberalism, is Protestantism. While Roelofs’s systematic explication of the ways that Protestantism struggles with liberalism at every level of US political life is one of his most prominent contributions to the study of American democratic thought, it is also where we find a crucial flaw in his thinking. It is common when one has an insight and is able to so carefully explicate it, that the very clarifying of the content of the insight then exposes new layers for analysis that the original work could not envision. I argue that this is the case with Roelofs’s political theory of religion in the US. A Political Theory of Religious Freedom Among the developments of the (US) American political experience widely and historically identified as pathbreaking has been the notion and practices of freedom of religion in the United States. Domestic scholars tend to note with approval US achievements of creating a union not consistently torn apart 420 Lori Marso et al.

Jonathan Friedman. Rainbow Jews: Jewish and Gay Identity in the Performing Arts. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007. x, 203 pp.

ernist and post-1945 Austrian writers (Bernhard, Bachmann, Jelinek), Vogel’s prototypical hero is immune to the seductions of Vienna and is haunted by attraction and fear in search of the highest degree of anguish. For Shaked, this macabre pleasure is the bond that unites Austrian Jewish writers who did not emphasize their Jewishness in their writings and contributed to new “secular literature” whose only remaining vestige of Jewishness is its use of the ancestral language (323). Vogel, however, wrote in Hebrew, and his novel, even if only by negation, does give a glimpse into Jewish identity that was shaped by processes of “self-hatred.” Gershon Shaked (1929–2006) was born in Vienna and immigrated to Israel in 1939 after the rise of Nazism. This biographical and cultural transition that influenced and shaped his oeuvre, both fiction (the novel Sons [Immigrants] appeared in 2001) and nonfiction, is also imprinted in his perception of the new tradition as a field of dynamic tensions: the secular that echoes the sacred, the Diaspora that reflects the homeland, and the foreign languages that reverberate with Hebrew. It seems that Shaked needed the “other place” in order to better understand the only place of Hebrew literature.

Challenging Liberalism: Feminism as Political Critique. By Lisa H. Schwartzman

In her book, Lisa H. Schwartzman engages several liberal theorists as well as some “postmodernists” from a feminist perspective. She makes use of a number of feminist thinkers to assist her in developing her arguments and clarifying her theoretical alliances. The author agrees with some liberal feminists that liberalism may be able to accommodate many feminist claims. However, she argues that even a reformed liberalism cannot meet the higher standard of being able to root “out problems that stem from systems of oppression” (p. 161). Schwartzman does not find that postmoderism, as she understands it, can meet this test adequately either. She claims, therefore, to offer an alternative method for a liberally informed feminist theory that seeks to end the structural domination of women based in the concrete experiences of women themselves. The book is tightly written and coherently argued. Each chapter is well organized and the prose is clear.