Judeo-Christianity (and Palestine); or, Late Modernity's Whiteness Project

This talk situates Bonhoeffer’s posthumously published Ethics in the wider context of Western responses to fascism at the midpoint of the 20th century. Riveting my attention is the limits of those responses, including Bonhoeffer’s own, and what they mean for us now. I am especially interested in how the limits of the mid-20th century responses to fascism and authoritarianism — again, including Bonhoeffer’s response — casts light on the rise of authoritarianism in many Western countries today, including the United States, as well as how it casts light on such global conflicts as the current war in Gaza and the crisis of Israel-Palestine more generally.

At the pinnacle of the mid-twentieth century responses to fascism is UNESCO’s 1950 Statement on Race. An agency of the United Nations, UNESCO was tasked with rethinking race in the aftermath of the Nazi horror. Comprising it were leading social scientists of the day, including the renowned Jewish anthropologist Franz Boas, African American sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, and French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss. Still holding onto the category of race but redefining it as fundamentally malleable or “plastic” and therefore racial groups as changeable and educable, the UNESCO race statement sought to reeducate the public at large, especially a Western public, away from static or fixed understandings of race or what nowadays we call essentialist understandings of race. This was the error, so the reasoning went, of such fascist regimes as Adolf Hitler’s in Germany. In proposing racial plasticity rather than racial essentialism, the UNESCO statement advanced the idea that races can change and develop. As scholar of African American Studies Barnor Hesse (see, "Discourse on Institutional Racism") and literary scholar Sonali Thakkar (see, _The Reeducation of Race_) expose in their studies, the UNESCO 1950 Statement on Race set the terms of Western liberalism’s post-World War II antiracism orientation.

What’s most interesting for my purposes about UNESCO’s statement is that it offered Jews as the prime instance of racial plasticity. They are the bodily site at which race can be kept in place but rethought in an antiracist and anti-antisemitic direction. This now benevolent posture toward Jews via (their) racial plasticity allows for a possible reeducation (Thakkar) of the Western soul. It allows for a new Western “soul-making” project (Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak), one premised on liberal antiracism and anti-antisemitism that, in effect, conjoins Jewishness and the West.

And yet, this discursive and historical conjuncture that saw the emergence of a reconfiguring of race to supposedly overcome fascism and antisemitism was also the moment that refused to embrace anticolonialism as central to the emerging antiracism and anti-antisemitism orientation. That is, this is also the historical moment of the settler colonial birth in Palestine of the modern state of Israel (1948) as a place to receive European Jewry after the attempt to exterminate Jews in Europe. The contradiction here is that the antiracism meant to resolve antisemitism (and fascism) was, in fact, part of a moment that transplanted and enacted (post)colonial racism in Palestine. It was a moment that reinvented racism through anti-antisemitism to relieve the guilt of the West. In this way, Western liberal antiracism, which had at its core a guilt-relieving anti-antisemitism, and the rise of the modern state of Israel in Palestine to receive Jews in effect ousted from Europe, arguably, repressed and ultimately did not address the fascism within the West itself. Instead, it offshored it into Palestine.

Though a number of thinkers such as Frankfurt School theorist Theodor Adorno and black radical tradition thinkers such as George Jackson and Angela Davis have wrestled with the new terms of racial fascism and fascist freedom, few have taken seriously the theological and religio-racial terms of the mid-twentieth century renewal of the Whiteness project, or what W. E. B. Du Bois called “the religion of whiteness” (see "The Souls of White Folk" in _Darkwater_). Crucially, whiteness here is secondarily about the people phenotypically designated as white and more about a planetary power structure. In short, whiteness is a synonym for racial capitalism, an apocalypse against the earth itself.

This talk addresses the specifically theological and religio-racial transformation of “the whiteness project” through the new protocols of antiracism and anti-antisemitism. That is, it considers how Bonhoeffer helps us glimpse the theological transfiguration of modernity’s whiteness project as part of his efforts to imagine a postfascist future. I get at this by considering Bonhoeffer’s posthumously published _Ethics_. Specifically, I’m interested in how Bonhoeffer symbolically situates Jews as no longer targets but now agents of Christian (post)colonial empire. This maneuver is key to what I argue is his (to read him charitably) unwitting renewal of a planetary Whiteness project. This is the new mode of Christian supersessionism within the whiteness project: Jewishness is now symbolically and civilizationally Christian. It is a supersessionism that works through the kind of racial “plasticity” ascribed to Jewishness in the 1950 UNESCO race statement wherein Jewishness is exiled from and yet plastically annexed to the West’s civilizational project. Under the rubric of “Judeo-Christianity,” a shorthand term that I use for this merging of (European) Jews to the Christian West, I sketch how this maneuver works in Bonhoeffer’s _Ethics_.

I have a few specific aims. First, I aim to expose the limits of liberal antiracism. That is, I’m interested in how liberal antiracism can and often does maintain whiteness as a political-theological and civilizational project. Second, I want to account for the theological terms and conditions by which fascism has reemerged from repressed hibernation. Crucial here is how Christian supersessionism modified into an anti-antisemitism orientation that allowed Jewishness to be symbolically sutured to the whiteness of the West. Along the way, I offer some parenthetical remarks that help us understand that what I will be sketching in this talk are the theological-conceptual and religio-racial terms of the ongoing crisis in Palestine. The texts that will allow me to display my argument are “Ethics as Formation” and “Heritage and Decay.”