Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. (Photo/Wikimedia Commons)
Last week I appeared on ABC Radio National’s Soul Search, in conversation with Professor Sander L. Gilman (Emory University, Atlanta).
Sander and I talked with the host Dr. Meredith Lake on topics of racism, antisemitism, representation of Jews, education, and my new book Gender, Orientalism and the Jewish Nation. The program begins by quoting Martin Luther King, who said that people are judged by the content of their character – not by the colour of their skin. During COVID-19, when prejudice has raised its ugly head, these themes are worth revisiting. The program is available for streaming via ABC RN’s site and iTunes.
Professor Gilman’s ideas influenced my understanding of the links between gender, nation-building and the body politic. He is a well-known Jewish intellectual, cultural historian and Professor of Psychiatry. Delving into Professor Gilman’s early work on the Jewish body helped me clarify the historical differences between attitudes regarding the Jewish versus the homogenised white (Christian) male body. In turn, these racialised narratives of difference, influenced the way I understood the oeuvre of Ephraim Moses Lilien (E. M.) (1874-1925), the focus of my book. E. M. Lilien also constructed images of men and women in the context of such dangerous ideas about imagined racial differences at the fin de siècle.
Gilman’s fiercely intelligent but funny book on the Jewish body stimulated my early interrogations about the place of women and particularly Jewish women in European life at the fin de siècle. I was hooked. Determined to reinsert the feisty, complex Jewish female into the narratives of antisemitism, race and misogyny, my book argues that the modern Jewish woman does not disappear from view at the turn of the twentieth century. At the very moment when masculinity was questioned, body politics dovetailed with anti-feminist and antisemitic attitudes to illness, race and sexuality. As a result, Jewish masculinity collapsed into abject femininity. As role models, and as visual markers of complexity and strength, Jewish women became harder to locate in these arguments.
Gilman’s latest work entitled Jews on the Move: Modern Cosmopolitanist Thought and its Others, clarifies the place of the Jew as a universal particularist in the modern era. My book on E. M. Lilien also concludes that he was as cosmopolitan as any male avant-garde artist working at the turn of the twentieth century. Today, audiences admire his particularistic universality. Lilien was a perfect example of the particularist cosmopolitan, or what I refer to as the cosmopolitan nationalist. As one of the formative members of the cultural Zionists or cultural nationalist movement under the guiding light of Martin Buber, Lilien and his fellow nationalists obtained significant integration among Central European visual culture in the pursuit of German modernism. Their efforts were plagued by conservatives who considered them barbaric ‘Asiatics’ and foreigners. In the end, World War One and antisemitism changed the dream of integration forever, but his images of strong Jewish men and women continue to reverberate in the modern Jewish psyche.
* * *
You can pursue these ideas further by buying a copy of my book in Australia here. In America and Europe you can buy it here.