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kosher-toasty · 11 days ago

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When Judith Butler Forgets How Identity Works

@squeeful replied on this post:

The issue is not in Butler’s work, like the work of the others mentioned, but that people, once supporting someone's work, think they must be right on other issues. Which is their intellectual immaturity, not a problem with the work

No, I actually have huge problems with parts of Butler's work - I'm just not willing to call all of it garbage because I think the concept of performative gender is important.

Butler's "work" on Jews, Jewish identity, Zionism, and Israel is pure @#&$ing excrement:

It's intellectually dishonest, academically anemic, and blatantly contradicts Butler's prior work on identity with a shameless reversal of their own theory for the purpose of condemning Jews who disagree with Butler's own fringe take on Jewish identity.

So let me explain exactly how full of shit Butler is on Jewish anything.

Why "Parting Ways" Parts Ways with Jewish Reality

Judith Butler made their name by challenging the idea that identity is fixed. In Gender Trouble, Butler asked us to think of gender not as a biological destiny, but as a performance - fluid, constructed, always in flux. That core idea reshaped entire fields, from queer theory to feminism to pop culture.

But when it comes to Jewish identity - especially Jewish identity in relation to Israel - Butler suddenly trades nuance for rigidity.

In Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism, (get your copy here at no charge) they argue that "true" Jewishness is universalist, diasporic, and ethically obligated to oppose the State of Israel.

Butler says that Jews are not just required to critique Israel - but to reject its very legitimacy and existence. According to Butler, Zionism is a betrayal of true Jewish ethics and Zionists are doing Judaism wrong. In short, Butler is saying that if you believe in Israel's right to exist, you're a bad Jew.

That's not just a bold or controversial claim. It's historically, ethically, and logically nonsensical, yet people take Butler seriously on this topic.

Judith Butler isn't an outlier, they're one of the most influential voices shaping how the academic left (and by extension, much of progressive activism) understands Jews - and Butler doesn’t just misrepresent Judaism, Jewishness, and Israel. Butler erases the lived experience of millions of Jews.

Butler's Deliberate Misrepresentation of Judaism and Jewish Ethics

Judith Butler argues that Jewish ethics demand a rejection of nationalism - and therefore, of Zionism. They lean on figures like Levinas, Arendt, and Benjamin to claim that Judaism carries a moral duty to stand with the stateless, the exiled, the outsider.

There's a kernel of truth in that. Jewish tradition does emphasize care for the stranger and caution around power. But turning that into a blanket rejection of Jewish nationalism is a selective reading dressed up as principle. It's like claiming Buddhism forbids self-defense because it values compassion - technically clever, morally incoherent, and contextually blind.

That's how Butler presents their performance of Jewishness, by presenting selected works of selected Jewish thinkers, putting words in their mouths about Jewish national self-determination, then pretending that no other views exist (or are acceptable) within Jewish thought.

Bizarrely, this makes Butler's performance of Jewishness more restrictive, narrow, and intellectually dishonest than literally any I've ever encountered.

Butler preaches "Jewish tradition" like they can define it in a syllabus, telling their class what real Jewishness is.

Contrary to Butler's syllabus, Jewish ethics are much more than Levinas and Arendt. They're also Maimonides, Heschel, Soloveitchik, Spinoza, Buber, not to mention talmud. Jewish ethics is a diverse, often contradictory canon full of arguments about community, power, land, survival, and sovereignty.

Butler not only pretends this vast body of literature doesn't exist, but pretends that texts are the sole source of Jewish identity and ethics.

Jewish ethics and identity don't live in books, but in people. The overwhelming majority of Jews - across denominations, geographies, and politics- regard support for the Jewish state as an expression of their Jewish ethics. Safety after slaughter. Dignity after diaspora. Responsibility after ruin. Never again.

Butler doesn't just critique Israel, Butler claims Israel violates Judaism itself

...as if Judaism were a TED Talk on borderless cosmopolitanism instead of a 3,000-year conversation shaped by exile, return, law, myth, trauma, and survival.

Butler's erasure of Jewish history is antisemitic.

Caricaturing Zionism and Erasing History

Let's define Zionism clearly, since Butler doesn't. Zionism is the belief that the Jewish people - like all peoples - have a right to national self-determination in a portion of their indigenous homeland. That's it.

To hear Butler describe it, Zionism is a colonial project - an unjust seizure of land, an inherently violent ideology, and a corruption of Jewish values.

If you know Jewish history, that reading collapses immediately, and that's no accident. Butler relies on the reader being ignorant of that history.

Jews are indigenous to the Land of Israel. Our liturgy, language, and law all trace back to it. The diaspora happened because we were violently expelled from our homeland, not because we left voluntarily. When the modern Zionist movement emerged in the 19th century, it did so in response to relentless persecution - not a craving for empire.

Butler erases that history. There’s no mention of the pogroms that shaped early modern Zionist thought. There's no engagement with the Holocaust survivors who built Israel's institutions. There's no space for Mizrahi Jews who fled state-sponsored antisemitism across the Middle East and found refuge in Israel. There's no acknowledgment that the Jewish return wasn't a settler-colonial endeavor, but a survival imperative. It was, as Haviv Retiig Gur puts it, a refugee and rescue operation.

Butler only permits Israel to be seen through the lens of power - ignoring that it was born in weakness, under siege, and remains the only country in the world whose existence is regularly debated on moral terms.

Erasing Arab Agency, Legitimizing Terrorism

When discussing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Butler never confronts the fact that Hamas - a genocidal, explicitly antisemitic organization - governs Gaza. There's no mention of how many peace offers Israel has made. There's no mention of how Israelis (of all religion and ethnicities) live with the trauma of intifadas, bombings, kidnappings, and rockets.

In fact, Butler has worked hard to legitimize Hamas.

For Butler, Israel is a villain by default - and Zionism becomes a heresy against Judaism.

That's not analysis. That's dogma. And it isn't even Jewish dogma.

The Identity Double Standard

Here's where Butler's nose is crammed most thoroughly up their own posterior.

Judith Butler has spent decades showing how identity categories are socially constructed, context-dependent, and always in motion. Gender, in Butler’s framework, is not what you are, but what you do - and how others interpret it. Right?

But when it comes to Jewish identity, Butler flips the script.

Suddenly, Jewishness is a fixed thing - and only Jews who perform it in a particular, Butler-approved, anti-Zionist way are doing it "right." Everyone else, 90% of Jews, are heretics and apostates.

Jewishness, in Butler's view, is historically and ethically defined by its diasporic condition, which entails living among non-Jews. This means that "the Jew can never be fully separated from the question of how to live among those who are not Jewish."

Despite arguing that they're claiming to be using Jewish ethics to make a Jewish case against Jewish national self-determination...this argument hinges partly on Edward Said, partly on falsehoods, and partly on pure bullshit:

It came as a surprise to me, and also a gift, to read one of Edward Said’s last books, Freud and the Non-European, not only because of the lively reengagement with the figure of Moses it contains, but because Moses becomes for him an opportunity to articulate two theses that are, in my view, worth considering. The first is that Moses, an Egyptian, is the founder of the Jewish people, which means that Judaism is not possible without this defining implication in what is Arab. Such a formulation challenges hegemonic Ashkenazi definitions of Jewishness. But it also implies a more diasporic origin for Judaism, which suggests that a fundamental status is accorded the condition by which the Jew cannot be defined without a relation to the non-Jew. It is not only that, in diaspora, Jews must and do live with non-Jews,and must reflect on how precisely to conduct a life in the midst of religious and cultural heterogeneity, but also that the Jew can never be fully separated from the question of how to live among those who are not Jewish. The figure of Moses, however, makes an even more emphatic point, namely, that, for some, Jew and Arab are not finally separable categories, since they are lived and embodied together in the life of the Arab Jew.

Just to scratch the surface of Butler's bullshitting here (please add more in the replies!):

Moses, in Exodus, is not by any stretch of the imagination Egyptian.

The Egyptians of that era were not Arabs.

If Jewish identity is dependent on relation to Arabs, how did Jews define themselves for thousands of years before the Arab conquest reached the Levant in ~630 CE?

The only Ashkenazim I'm aware of who sought hegemonic definitions of Jewishness were the antizionist Bundists like Butler.

The assertion that seeing Moses as Egyptian says something about Ashkenazic conceptions of Jewishness is such a non-sequitur that it boggles the mind how an editor approved this being published.

Falsely asserting that the Moses of Exodus was Egyptian does not in any way imply a "more diasporic origin of Judaism", even if we took it to be true...which it isn't.

Butler actually asserts, despite scriptural, archeological, textual, historical, and anthropological evidence, that there were no non-Jews living among or near the Jews of ancient Israel. If this assertion was honest, we'd be appalled by the depth of her ignorance of Exodus and history.

And that's what's most infuriating about it: it's clearly, knowingly dishonest.

Butler is completely full of shit and making an argument they know damn well is intellectually dishonest and unsupportable. Butler started this book from a conclusion that Zionism is evil and worked backwards to find Jewish sources to distort into supporting that view, erasing and distorting 3,000 years of history, practice and belief. This book is one of the most shameful pieces of bullshittery I've ever seen.

We haven't even gotten to Butler's most and hypocritical, self-contradicting rhetoric.

If you're a Jew who believes in the dignity of diaspora, Butler says you're authentic.

If you're a Jew who believes in the dignity of sovereignty? Butler says you're morally suspect.

This is a total betrayal of the intellectual commitments on which Butler's career was built.

You can't defend gender self-determination, nuance, and fluidity while denying Jews the right to define their own individual and collective identity.

You can't champion multiplicity for everyone else and then enforce ideological purity tests on Jews.

You can't build a theory of liberation that demands Jews stay stateless.

Butler's issue isn't really one of Jewish identity. Butler's problem is with Jewish agency.

Why This Matters

This isn't just a philosophical dispute.

Butler's framework from this piece of shit book has spread far beyond the academy. It shows up in campus politics, activist circles, and social media discourse where Jews who support Israel - even critically - are cast as oppressors, collaborators, or frauds. Butler provides the justification.

It shapes a generation of progressives who have been taught that antizionism is the ethical Jewish position and that Jews who disagree are colonialist oppressors. It turns lived Jewish identity into a problem Butler solved by rehashing pieces of Bundism and Soviet antisemitism - but the Jews are a people to be understood and enfranchised as other peoples are: in all their complexity, fluidity, and nuance.

Butler creates moral cover for antisemitism. When an LGBTQ+ Jewish student is told they're "white" and "colonial" for supporting Israel's existence, that’s Butler's legacy at work. When a progressive space demands Jews check their Zionism at the door, that's Parting Ways in action.

We can - and should - critique Israeli policy.

Butler isn’t offering critique - Butler is offering disqualification, an eliminationist perspective which is nakedly antisemitic on it's face.

That's not justice. That's erasure.

Parting Thoughts on Parting Ways

I'm a Jew. I come from a community that has survived exile, pogroms, ethnic cleansings, the Holocaust, and 2,000 years of statelessness. Zionism is not a political ideology to me or the vast majority of the world's Jews who identify as Zionists. It's a lifeline.

It's the belief that Jews - like all peoples - deserve to exist, to belong, to build, to falter, to argue, and to thrive in a place of our own, the place which birthed our civilization.

I don't need Judith Butler to validate that - but I do need to call out the intellectual dishonesty of a conveniently inconsistent theory that makes room for every identity - except that of Jews.

The moment Jews demand dignity on our own terms, as Butler says other people should demand dignity on theirs, Butler parts ways.

I'm not discarding everything Butler has written or said (I haven't read everything they wrote), but every bit of their "work" on Jewish identity is excrement which deserves contempt and derision. It is bad faith, sloppy, pseudo-intellectual polemics of the very worst sort.

Butler is performing an inauthentic, fringe sort of Jewishness in order to insist that the 90% of the world's Jews who don't share Butler's view that Israel must he destroyed...aren't truly Jewish.

This is immediately discernable as bullshit to any Jew who knows anything about their own heritage.