Bonhoeffer and Politics

This talk addresses the religio-racial transformation of “the whiteness project” through the machinery of antiracism and anti-antisemitism. It turns to the mid-twentieth martyr-theologian and ethicist Dietrich Bonhoeffer, glimpsing this machinery in his late writings to imagine a postfascist Western future. That future entailed subjecting Jewishness to whitening, thereby figuring Jews no longer as targets (traditional supersession) but now agents (a new supersessionism) of Christian (post)colonial empire. This is Bonhoeffer’s unwitting renewal of “the religion of whiteness” (W. E. B. Du Bois), where in its distinction from and yet relation to “white people” whiteness is a locution for planet-wide racial capitalism. Imagined now as racially “plastic,” Jews are hailed into the West’s civilizational project while Jewishness becomes a site for Western post-Holocaust self-renewal. With the term “Judeo-Christianity,” I sketch how this maneuver works in Bonhoeffer’s Ethics to illuminate the religio-racial terms of the present, including the current crisis in Palestine.