Plea for Palestine - Still

Over a year ago I published my only “political” post to date. It was really a memoir of my own experience in Israel/Palestine nearly twenty years ago. I make no apologies for wading into politics. The consoling notion that one can neatly divide religion from politics is certainly quaint, but it doesn’t seem possible without negating the integrity of either. Politics is often but scarcely ever merely tactical or pragmatic; it invokes transcendent values, ideals, and principles that command recognition, celebration, and even sacrifice. Religion is often but scarcely ever merely individual or ethereal; it enjoins laws, issues commandments, calls for a preferential option for the poor and degraded, and, at least when it’s working properly, disabuses you of the self-serving conviction that you can ever be well without all being well—that your salvation is just about you.

Nor do I think the politics-religion divide uniquely marks “modernity,” certainly not in this country. It’s transgressed all the time. Cory Booker spends portions of his 24+ hour “stand” quoting scripture. AOC upbraids Christian hypocrisy by appeal to her own Catholic faith. J.D. Vance cites the Catholic ordo amoris to justify anti-immigrant policies (a justification the Pope, just before departing this life, had to correct, as if settling accounts). Bishop Barron threatens legal action for being called a Trump supporter—just before joining Trump’s presidential commission on religious liberty and hopping on Tucker Carlson’s podcast for a little chat. Everyone’s a high-minded centrist until they’re not; everyone’s a violator of the politics-religion divide even if they don’t intend to be. There’s no point in pretending otherwise.

So I don’t.

---

But how to begin? What to say? Say nothing—that’s what many would counsel, as some did after I made that first Palestine post. My answer’s the same now as it was then: no. And nothing that’s happened since has done anything but confirm me in that resolve: the Palestinian death toll climbs to over 54,000 people (likely higher), the U.S. blocks a U.N. ceasefire resolution for the fifth time since Hamas’s horrific attack and Israel’s 20-month program of ethnic cleansing (in a Council vote of 14–1), the IDF destroys over 80–90% of Gazan homes and hospitals and schools and places of worship, Israel openly avows a strategy to starve Gaza’s population of nearly two million to incite unrest against Hamas (see #6 on this list), it kills around 226 journalists, it implements with total hypocrisy its own “widespread” use of Palestinians as human shields in what is known as the “mosquito protocol,” it kills children almost every day—including the recent killing of 9 out of 10 of Dr. Alaa Najjar’s children while she was working in the pediatric unit of Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis (and which pro-Israel pundits are still openly doubting; see 38:15 onwards)—in a word, all the elements that make it true to say, as Mirjana Spoljaric, president of the International Committee of the Red Cross said just a few days ago, that “Gaza has become worse than hell on Earth.”

Nor does all this seem unintended. As was documented fairly early on in the siege—in South Africa’s ICJ case, for instance—notable Israeli officials have spoken quite openly in ways that would usually be considered evidence of genocidal intent.

- PM Netanyahu: “You must remember what Amalek has done to you” (see e.g. Deut 25.19, Judg 6.1–6, 1 Sam 15.1–9).

- (Then) Defense Minister Yoav Gallant: Israel is “fighting human animals.”

- Deputy Knesset speaker Nissim Vaturi: Israel’s one goal is “erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth.”

These were remarks made within the first few months of the siege. American politicians from both parties made similar remarks in the early days, and still do. In March of this year the UN International Commission published a report documenting and accusing Israel of committing “genocidal acts” against the Palestinian population. Netanyahu called this “blood libel” and antisemitic. Less than a week later Israel unilaterally broke the ceasefire, killing over 400 Gazans in a single string of airstrikes, and continued a complete blockade of all humanitarian aid into Gaza that has lasted for over 77 days and has led to the starvation of many (especially the most vulnerable). About two weeks ago, less than two months after Netanyahu’s accusation that the whole world is antisemitic, thousands of Israeli protesters in an annual march on “Jerusalem Day” (May 28) chanted “death to Arabs” and “may your village burn” before they “stormed a compound in east Jerusalem belonging to the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, known as UNRWA.” “After this year’s march ended,” Julia Frankel reported, “Arab shopkeepers darted outside to begin scrubbing their shops, now covered with stickers reading ‘Gaza is ours.’”

Then there’s the recent investigative report by Zeteo on the popular Israeli Channel 14, which has featured several pundits openly declaring the most heinous intentions for Gaza. “I don’t sleep well unless I see houses collapsing in Gaza,” said host Shimon Riklin, “More, more, more towers, they shouldn’t have anywhere to return to.” “Did we need this disaster to happen in order to understand that the Palestinians are an unnecessary group…that it could be that they need a second Nakba?” said a pundit. “I don’t think there’s anyone in the State of Israel…who should take pity on these Gazans. Not on adults, not on the elderly, not on young people and not on children,” said another, followed by, “As far as I’m concerned, they should starve to death. What do I care about them?” And so ever drearily on.

All the while Biden and now Trump prioritized punishing and now deporting peaceful protestors on American college campuses without any due process and without any evidence that the targeted individuals have said or promoted antisemitic chants or writing or, well, anything other than opposition to Israel’s 20-month long siege of a starving population. On the contrary, several Jewish students have submitted sworn testimony on behalf of Mahmoud Khalil, for instance, who remains in prison to this day. Some, including an administrator at one of my alma maters, have for months now loudly condemned the recalcitrant and radical collegiate youths of today for expressing their coddled sense of entitlement in the apparently anti-American forms of free assembly, free speech, and protesting authoritarian powers who profit off the bipartisan war-machine. As with the J6-ers Trump pardoned, these same anti-social justice warriors have had little to nothing to say about the Israeli protests and destructive riots in east Jerusalem. These same people have also grown suddenly fond of the idea of the federal government dictating to private institutions what policies and ideas are permissible on those private campuses, under threat of financial and legal retribution. Makes all the years-long crowing about “cancel culture” and “big government” seem rather ridiculous, doesn’t it?

Still, what impels me to speak about all this is not primarily “political” in the restrictive sense. It is personal. Sitting there on a Zoom update given by Christian pastors from Gaza and Israel just a few weeks back, hearing how an elderly church pianist was shot in the head on church grounds by an Israeli sniper, listening to one pastor speak of the many family and friends he’s lost over the course of this massacre, witnessing all this even as these same people advocated nonviolent, peaceful, patient yet utterly frank truth-telling for the sake of justice and Christian love—I was reminded once more of my own personal and religious reasons for saying something, even if into the virtual void. That, in fact, is the only favor these pastors asked of us American Christians on the call.

---

Lately I’ve been reading quite a bit by the British-Jewish Hegelian philosopher, Gillian Rose, who has easily become my favorite modern philosophical and political thinker. She’s not the easiest read. That’s due in part to her occasionally impenetrable prose. The oddly ordered syntax strikes you as an AI-generated English translation of equally impenetrable German prose (one suspects an unconscious and unfortunate effect of reading ungodly amounts of German, which was manifestly Rose’s habit).

But the greater part is that Rose is so entirely committed to thinking from within what she calls “the broken middle.” This middle is stretched and broken between two opposing, premature absolutes: on one side, the absolute self-certainty that I possess the whole truth from the very beginning of my quest for that truth (crude rationalism/dogmatism); on the other side, the absolute self-certainty that having to begin at all in my quest means that I can never know the whole truth (crude anti-rationalism/postmodernism). Rose says the former takes up a “severe style” of thinking and speaking (i.e. “representation”), the latter a “facetious style,” and that each undermines itself in its own way.¹ The severe style of the rationalist lacks any irony: begin here, with my correct method, and you will arrive at the destination. The facetious style of the postmodernist is almost pure irony: begin here, begin there—begin as you like and you will see that you can never overcome the limitation of having had to begin from somewhere—so who cares about any inaccessible-because-unlimited whole? The severe style lacks any anxiety about beginning because it fears the beginning of any anxiety. Ironic, since that means the beginning of anxiety negatively determines and justifies insensitivity to the anxiety of beginning. The facetious style feels only the anxiety of beginning and so never really begins due to that anxiety.

Therefore—and here’s Rose’s point in both theoretical and political representation—only those who can cope with the beginning of anxiety can truly begin, i.e. can ever actually accept the anxiety of having to begin: to begin thinking, judging, being criticized, revising, thinking and judging again, and so on. One must simultaneously have enough knowledge of the whole to be sufficiently emboldened to begin and begin in the full knowledge that, since one had to begin, one does not yet fully know the whole. More, one must grasp that one’s very awareness of beginning in ignorance depends on one’s proleptic grasp of the whole—of one’s containing within oneself reason’s own beginning and end. Reason includes the very phenomenology of reason coming to know reason (i.e. self-consciousness); it includes the fragmentary stages and perspectives inherent to that process as essential moments of itself, of the whole. There is therefore no rational basis for an absolute opposition—an a priori judgment that one or any of reason’s a posteriori oppositional relations defines reason’s total content—between the whole and the fragment, even and precisely for self-conscious, “finite” beings like us. This, Rose notes, is all Hegel really meant by “absolute method.”²

See what I mean by “dense”?

Yet Rose’s main concern is also eminently practical and thus, I think, easily accessible. Beginning from any of the many broken middles of our era is real work—it is “love’s work.”³ The severe style avoids this difficult work by playing the part of the enlightened centrist whose methodological maturity secures some sort of elevated neutrality, which needn’t condescend to the level of the childish parties at war. Simply follow these steps, etc. The facetious style avoids this difficult work by playing the part of the loyal partisan whose identitarian credentials are everywhere and always on display, even if it means becoming numb to inconvenient suffering or becoming a conspiracy theorist in the face of facts that undermine one’s own story about one’s own identity.

But love’s work refuses these temptations. For love remains corrigible while never relinquishing its longing for the whole truth, which is exactly what increases the plausibility that its longing for the whole will not degenerate into violence. Love’s work can therefore also tell the truth that each style tries to suppress in the other. It needn’t suppress truths about structural or systemic injustice against particular groups in their particular histories for the sake some easy abstraction (e.g. libertarianism). Nor need it suppress truths about very concrete and discrete and complex injustices for the sake of some other yet equally easy abstraction (e.g. identitarianism):

For politics does not happen when you act on behalf of your own damaged good, but when you act, without guarantees, for the good of all—this is to take the risk of the universal interest. Politics in this sense requires representation, the critique of representation, and the critique of the critique of representation.⁴

It is in this specifically Rosean spirit that I make my replies to the charges below: my plea for the Palestinians is simultaneously a plea for the infinite dignity of every person and every group that together make up the whole of humanity.

---

One critical message I received after publishing that initial post read as follows:

While I hope for a speedy end to the War in Gaza and so to the immense suffering of the Gazans, I was disturbed by a number of elements in your “Plea for Palestine” – especially the equation of the Gaza War with the Crucifixion. The overlapping theological grammars of Christianity and Judaism should rightly mean that a Christian theologian can make a plea for Palestinian freedom that resonates more deeply to Jewish ears than the plea of a secular writer, not one that is radically more alienating. In rejecting missionizing, Reinhold Niebuhr rightly put it that “practically nothing can purify the symbol of Christ as the image of God in the imagination of the Jew from the taint with which ages of Christian oppression in the name of Christ have tainted it.” In this vein I take it as not too controversial to suggest that framing the Gaza War as a Crucifixion will never help call the Jewish people to moral self-reflection. To the extent that the history-laden charge of deicide is here mobilized to lower the Jewish state in the eyes of Christian readers, regardless of how alienating to Jews – that is still more disturbing, no matter how much stipulated opposition to antisemitism.

With wishes for the imminent beating of all swords into plowshares,

Anonymous [my redaction]

That was sent on May 15, 2024. I’m unsure what the author would say now, over a year and some 30,000 deaths later. And of course, I certainly do not mean to ignore or downplay the well-documented and specifically Christian forms antisemitism has taken these past two millennia. I regard Pope Innocent III’s (Lateran IV’s) decision to force Jews to display a “Jewish badge” to be reprehensible, as were the wanton slaughter of Jewish villages during the Crusades, as were the accusations current in 1870s Germany that set wicked precedents for the tragedies of the twentieth century. I have very often lauded and defended the Catholic Church’s obvious reversal at Vatican II in its teaching on the Jewish people, along with the consequent liturgical changes reflective of that reversal. Nevertheless, I cannot accept the sort of cynical gatekeeping my critic here engages. What follows are four points in response to the charge that my theological framing is antisemitic. I sent them back to the critic a year ago but received no reply. Here I reproduce them in enlarged form to reflect developments since then.

1. It is antisemitic to tie Jewish identity intrinsically to the current State of Israel’s actions. This is not to deny the critical importance of the State of Israel as a symbol of Jewish sovereignty, belonging, and security. I think an Israeli state should exist. Most but not all “leftists” do. I disagree with those who don’t. It’s also why I have no qualms saying the October 7 attacks were acts of terrorism, even though I realize how “terrorism” has been constantly misused to delegitimize the causes and conditions of resistance to various occupations (the U.S.’s included). But I also think Israel’s ongoing ethnic cleansing perpetrates acts of state-sponsored terrorism. I see zero contradiction in saying both at once, and I see no merit in pretending the proportions here are equal. It’s not even close.

But I regard it as a perhaps unwitting species of historic Christian antisemitism to demand, apparently in principle, that whatever one says of the State of Israel and its Western accomplices in this ethnic cleansing must amount to a judgment on all Jewish people. Here the critic makes the same equation and generalization Christian antisemites have made for other ends. Yet what could be more slanderous, more disempowering, indeed more antisemitic than stipulating that we abysmally lower our expectations of the moral probity of the Jewish people to the point that we must assume they would require complicity in atrocity as the price of their friendship? How could such a radical and universal judgment on the character of a whole people be anything but racism by “racecraft”?⁵ There is exactly no inherent feature of Jewish identity that renders all Jewish people more prone to capitulation in such injustice. If the critic wishes to maintain that Israel is not committing ethnic cleansing or genocide, or that they’re simply justified in all the measures they are announcing and enacting—fine, then dispute the facts of the situation. But do not stipulate in principle that one cannot oppose Israel’s actions without being antisemitic. Such a cynical axiom both dilutes real (and yes, increasing) antisemitism and is itself a species of antisemitism. This is just what Rose deemed pernicious in what she called “philosemitism,” which, she argued, idealizes the “Jewish Other” (of the Western metaphysical/political tradition) and thereby drains it of its own vitality as a living, dynamic, and complicated tradition and people.⁶

I once had a friend whose childhood was genuinely miserable. I knew it from personal experience because I’d stayed at his house on occasion. He constantly downplayed the effects of his own trauma. He vowed never to become his mother, the source of his trauma. Years later he threatened and sometimes committed domestic abuse. And yet he blamed his outbursts and lapses on everyone but himself, since, of course, he was just a victim reclaiming his agency and self-determination, you see. But no, I didn’t see. So we clashed. Even after his wife would seek safety in our home during his more belligerent spells, he would insist that I was in the wrong for harboring her. One day, at my wits’ end, I asked point-blank: “What exactly do you want from me?” “I want your support,” he replied. “But what do you mean by ‘support’—I should never voice any disagreement, never be honest about what I think you’re doing?” “Yes, exactly. Just listen and support me.” I didn’t realize it at the time, but that was as much a confession of his own shame as it was an impossible demand: he knew that he would not and did not want to change, and so he forged the rule that, if we were to stay friends, I must simply comply without protest with whatever he’s doing. That’s a damning self-indictment, and it’s an impossible, immoral demand.

I refuse to think of the Jewish people in such demeaning terms. I refuse to believe that they are doomed, as it were, to engage in what the American-Jewish psychiatrist, Robert Jay Lifton, called “false witness.” Having worked with survivors of Hiroshima and Vietnam, and then postwar Nazi doctors, he noticed the tendency in individuals and groups alike to cope with their own “death anxiety” by turning it towards the death of others. “That’s what false witness is. It’s deriving one’s solution to one’s death anxiety from extreme trauma, in this case in an extreme situation, by exploiting a group of people and rendering them victims, designated victims for that psychological work.” And what “is perverse is that one must impose death on others in order to reassert one’s own life as an individual and a group. It’s perceived as meaning,” as inherently necessary to preserve the significance of one’s identity through death—i.e. to attain immortality in the face of the trauma of death. “So my view,” he added, “is you cannot kill large numbers of people except with a claim to virtue.”⁷

Working from the broken middle means, in this case, refusing the temptation to imagine that the abused cannot and do not often become the abusers, as if both things cannot be true of the same person or group—indeed, as if both are not very often mutually-causing.⁸ This also allows us to recognize as evidence of real antisemitism the recent and repulsive murders of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Lynn Milgram and recognize as evidence of real anti-Palestinian prejudice the murder of 6 year-old Palestinian-American Wadea Al Fayoume, who was stabbed 26 times, near Chicago, one week after the October 7 attacks and whose mother couldn’t attend his funeral due to her own injuries from the same assault. Antisemitism is on the rise and it is bad. Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian prejudice is on the rise (now with official government support) and it is bad. And Israel, as even many Israeli academics are now openly admitting, is carrying out ethnic cleansing and genocide in Gaza.

2. Many Jews are denouncing Israel’s actions; this doesn’t negate their identity. In fact, for many, condemnation of ethnic cleansing positively flows from their Jewish identity and their Jewish faith. I happen to think it almost a unique genius of Judaism, something Christianity did and still should learn from its own Jewish roots, to regard justified self-criticism and intramural confrontation as inherent to the struggle to remain faithful to tradition, to covenant, to God. Rose’s “broken middle” is therefore not just Hegelian; it is Jewish. So when I read a particularly myopic doctoral student and messianic Jew claim that all criticism of Israel is really just disguised antisemitism, I think this person betrays not only Christianity but Judaism.

The charge of antisemitism now silences and suppresses Jewish voices who may or may not practice the Jewish faith. For decades now the most vociferous critics of Israel’s (U.S.-backed) occupation and brutalization of Palestinians have been secular Jews: Norman Finkelstein, Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, and still further back in history. Many activist groups engaging in direct action right now are primarily or entirely Jewish: Code Pink (Medea Benjamin), Breaking the Silence (ex-IDF soldiers now speaking on behalf of conditions in Palestine), Jewish Voice for Peace, Bend the Arc: Jewish Action, among others. Many lesser-known but significant Jewish voices have been the most prominent of Israel’s critics on the American left, first of Biden and now of Trump: Bernie Sanders, Amy Goodman (Democracy Now!), Sam Seder (Majority Report), Sam Adler-Bell (Know Your Enemy), among many others.

Very recently the British-Israeli journalist Rachel Shabi called the UK media “a disgrace” for their general silence on Israel’s bombardment and programmatic starvation of Gaza. Ten days ago Ellen Schrecker, an American-Jewish scholar of American history (specializing in McCarthyism) was on Democracy Now! for an interview about Trump’s unprecedented attacks on higher education. The cynical use of antisemitism to justify authoritarian measures is revealed, for instance, when Trump calls Harvard’s president, Alan Graber, an antisemite, even though Graber is Jewish. Goodman points this out and Schrecker quips, “Well, of course, we’re all anti-Semites, as long as we feel that maybe you shouldn’t be killing babies in Gaza every day.”

Are all these Jews antisemitic? Nonsense, and not a little insulting. At this point it’s worth observing that the same people who just six months ago were waging their war on “wokeism” and “identity politics” are now making even the caricature seem moderate. And they are exacerbating what they claim to oppose. As over 200 Jewish academics from around the world put it in an open letter published six weeks ago: “By singling out Jews as a homogeneous group to be protected at the expense of other marginalized groups and minorities, the [Trump] administration is in fact fostering anti-Jewish sentiments.”

3. The ongoing atrocity is not only Israel’s disgrace, it is a broadly Western disgrace. The US, the UK, Germany, France, and the general American international order that views Israel as, in Nixon’s (in)famous remark, “America’s cop on the beat in the Middle East” – this entire coalition is responsible. Palestinians are not merely the Jewish politicians’ victims; they’re just as much our own. Which is why I ended my first piece not merely by comparing their slaughter with that of the Crucified, but with a direct plea to my own government to cease aiding in this ongoing crucifixion that they’re supporting and promoting. Israel’s leaders couldn’t and wouldn’t do what they’re doing without the support of the nations. So the idea that my depiction is antisemitic overlooks the non-Jewish superstructure I also indict. True, now many European leaders are beginning to oppose Israel’s actions publicly, even Germany. But until any of them put words into action, it all sounds like the first dawning awareness of the inevitable reckoning to come and an attempt to preempt that judgment in some small, stupid degree.

4. I will not deny that Christ suffers in all victims. I’m sorry if this offends, but Christ’s identification with all victims, regardless of the ethnic identity of their victimizers, is not really an optional conviction for me, nor should it be for any Christian. As I said, I’m aware of the way this has been weaponized by Christians against “the Jews,” in a distortion of John’s sense. I acknowledged this very thing in the first piece. But I do not accept the proscription in principle of Christ’s absolute solidarity with all victims; that he appropriates as his own personal suffering and death every single suffering and death in this hellish world. It is not as if Christ ceases to be martyred in the 17,000 + Gazan children lying dead on the ground, or chopped up in labeled boxes, or festering in mass graves at Al-Shifa, or rotting under the rubble even now, just because it was the State of Israel who put them there (1,309 have died just since March 18 of this year). This is a lesson I learned not only from Jews, some of whom are personal friends, but also from the entire tradition of liberation theology that the likes of Niebuhr never quite comprehended. Christ either dies in and with all victims or he did not die at all. There is no such thing as a death of Christ that is not always already everyone’s death (2 Cor 5.14), and thus no one ever suffers and dies apart from Christ’s own suffering and death; for “Adam” was “a type of Christ” (Rom 5.14). If that offends some, so be it. It remains the truth, and for Christ’s sake, I will not be intimidated into silence about it. Therefore I join Rev. Isaac Münther in saying it. It was he and not I, after all, who first said it and whom I quoted. But he’s right.

---

Upon publishing that memoir piece, I realized that I’d strangely forgotten a key anecdote I’d planned to include. Perhaps it’s better that I do so now.

Some of the Arab Christian teenagers from Nazareth were invited to attend a conference in Tel Aviv (I think). When they returned a few days later, one of them, who worked with me at Nazareth Village, seemed palpably distraught.

“How was the conference?” I asked. Her face grew still more downcast.

“Wait, what’s wrong?” I followed.

She struggled to express herself. This wasn’t normal: she was generally gregarious and could speak several languages better than I can speak English. At length I drew it out of her. The conference, it turned out, was organized and run by American Evangelicals of some stripe. On the last night, during a revival-like worship service, the American speaker ended his sermon by asking all non-Jewish (i.e. Arab) Christian teens to find a Jewish Christian teen. The soft synth-keyboard pad seemed to conjure an appropriately pious mood, like the barely audible murmurs of a soothsayer.

“When you’ve found a Jewish believer, I want you to surround them—in a circle all around them,” he dictated.

My friend said that she and the other Nazareth teens thought it was a weird joke. When they realized it wasn’t, their stomachs sank.

“Yes, Lord,” trembled the voice from stage, “we thank you for your true believers, your people.”

Eventually the several hundreds of teens formed a bubbling array of circles in front of the stage. At each nucleus stood a single Jewish Christian teen.

“Now I want you on the outside of the circle to bend your knee and reach out toward the center. Place your hand somewhere on the Jewish believer—could be the hem of their jacket or shoulder.”

“And if you can’t reach them,” the American instructed, “just put your hand on someone in front of you, someone in an inner circle.”

At this point, my friend said, the feel of everything—the music, the speaker, the sheer image of it all—caused her limbs to shake.

“Now ask the Jewish believer to pray for you—for us all,” he added with renewed vigor. “Their prayers are more powerful than ours!”

My friend couldn’t continue the report, and I wasn’t about to insist otherwise. All I recall now is the look on her face. It was as if she’d witnessed some unspeakable horror from which she hadn’t quite recovered. These teens, as I stressed last time, undergo the typical teenage angst over their identity. But they’re addled even more by the fact that they are Arabs who are not Muslim, Christians who are neither Jewish nor non-Arab, and Israelis who are not Jews. This event was a horror for her psyche.

Last I heard, some years back now, she had gone off to university, left any form of Christian faith, and was hoping her success in her career would lead her far from home. I don’t know where she is today.

That image—Messianic Jews at the centers, non-Jewish Christians at the peripheries, at a huge spectacle within the State of Israel while American Evangelicals, despite the optics, really run the show all the while—it’s very hard not to see in it some kind of dark sacrament, some kind of crucial symbol for dynamics dictating things to this day.

And there I was, a callow and uncomfortable and well-meaning American Christian, listening to all this, hearing all this, imagining all this so vividly in my mind’s eye—only to find myself at a loss for words, without the slightest sense for how to begin from there. That too is an symbol.

1. Gillian Rose, The Broken Middle: Out of Our Ancient Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 133-46.

2. Gillian Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology (London: Verson, 2009 [orig. 1981]), especially chapter 1 against the “methodism” of the Neo-Kantians and the self-defeating absolute skepticism of many political leftists influenced by certain (anti-Hegelian and pro-Heideggerian) strands of critical theory; and Mourning Becomes the Law: Philosophy and Representation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 70–1 and 98–9.

3. Gillian Rose, Love’s Work: A Reckoning with Life (New York: NYRB Classics, 2011 [orig. 1995]). The subtitle is crucial.

4. Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law, 62 (emphasis original).

5. See Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life. 2^nd edition (London: Verso, 2012).

6. See The Broken Middle, chapter 6; Mourning Becomes the Law, chapters 2 and 4; and of course Judaism and Modernity: Philosophical Essays, especially chapter 1.

7. Robert Jay Lifton in Cathy Caruth, Listening to Trauma: Conversations with Leaders in the Theory and Treatment of Catastrophic Experience (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 13–15; see too Robert Jay Lifton, The Broken Connection: On Death and the Continuity of Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979), chapter 21.

8. Lifton, The Broken Connection, chapter 12; similar point made by Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law, 5.