What Is Happening in the Humanities? Theory, Politics, and Protest
Barry Scott Wimpfheimer
Barry Scott Wimpfheimer is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Law at Northwestern University.
Credit: Kurt Hoffman
In the last few months, I have had moments of feeling not Jewish enough and moments of feeling too Jewish. I was left off a university antisemitism committee out of a fear that I’d be too open to dialogue and compromise with pro-Palestinian colleagues in the humanities. On the same day the committee was announced, I learned that I’d been left off an email initiative by colleagues in the humanities who were petitioning for the university to acknowledge Islamophobia and validate the feelings of Muslim students. My identities as Jew and as humanities scholar were in tension.
This tension in my own life reflects a deeper intellectual tension facing all of us right now. In my humanities corner of the academic world, theoretical writing (“theory” for short) is a major component of scholarly practice. Many of the theories my colleagues and I employ in our work not only include but emerge from moral claims about power dynamics, oppression, and victimization. In my own work on rabbinic literature, I use theory to bring late ancient Jewish texts into conversation both with other literatures and with the human experience more universally. Theory allows me both to appreciate the rabbis as the subtlest of thinkers and to develop a view of their world that is inclusive of and sensitive to the experiences of populations the rabbis did not favor (non-rabbis, non-Jews, and women). But theory is also often employed by advocates against Israel, Israelis, and Zionists. And this puts pressure on Israel-supporting students on campus who have been trained within a theory-admiring mindset and use theoretical rhetoric frequently; they find themselves perpetually on the defensive and seemingly fighting against the very air that the academy breathes.
As a proud Jew and Zionist and as a humanities scholar who loves the American academy, I want to offer a closer look at this tension. In what follows, I will offer an overview of theory, call out the ways it is sometimes being used irresponsibly by activists, and redirect the theoretical discourse back to thinking through the history of Israel-Palestine.
In popular perception, elite institutions of higher education exist to discover or name “truths” that can then be disseminated to society at large. In this perception, knowledge is presumed to be a concrete, discrete entity like a dataset or a fact pattern. This perception is more accurate with respect to the “hard” laboratory sciences like physics or biology and significantly less accurate with respect to the humanities, with the social sciences falling in the middle of the continuum. Within higher education humanities in the United States—in fields such as literature, history, philosophy, and religion—we think of knowledge not as a concrete discrete entity so much as a mode of analysis or a way of thinking. Scholars in the humanities no longer see themselves, as their predecessors in the nineteenth century did, employing scientific methods to uncover truths about the history of texts, ideas, or society/culture. Rather, we use theoretical techniques to critique texts, ideas, or society/culture and to draw meaning out of them. Reasons for this transformation include general agreement that it is impossible to fully recover the original intent of an historical actor or author, as well as the feeling that while there is some value in aiming for objectivity, there is also a lot to be gained from acknowledging the existence of multiple subjectivities, including one’s own. Different readers always encounter and understand texts considering their own settings, values, and interests; in today’s humanities, we embrace this reality rather than pretending it is possible to read from a neutral standpoint.
Michel Foucault (1926-1984), one of the central figures in the new theoretical canon, once referred to Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) and Karl Marx (1818-1883) as “authors of discourse” whose contributions opened entire fields of analysis within which subsequent work operates. Indeed, contemporary humanities theory is dominated by post-Freudian and post-Marxist theorists who draw upon the work of these two figures. The Freudian legacy has added significantly to a richer understanding of the individual self, sex and sexuality, the role of desire in human achievement; and the conflict between human tendencies to coexist, on the one hand, and to wage war, on the other. The Marxist legacy has sensitized us to social stratification not just in socioeconomic terms, but in terms of other forms of capital; it has allowed Marx’s original class consciousness to become a useful tool for thinking about race, sex, gender, and religious identity. And the tendency towards theorizing and self-critique (and deconstruction) in both thinkers encourages scholars to acknowledge all of the above as elements of their own practices of research and writing—promoting ethical self-examination as a part of the work, when it’s done well.
Much of the new theoretical canon is powered by moral judgment and empathy, and many of the leading theorists have been Jews whose Jewishness informed their theoretical work. The in-between status felt by modern Jews who were both intellectual insiders and cultural outsiders often gave intellectuals original insights that reframed central questions. The mid-twentieth century German critical theory circle that theorized the failures of the Enlightenment and the rise of totalitarianism was dominated by Jews (Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor Adorno) whose Jewishness afforded them an inside/outside perspective to critique their own societies and cultures; many of them experienced antisemitism personally in the context of the Holocaust. There was also a high concentration of Jews in French theory of the 1960s-1980s. Both Jacques Derrida and Helene Cixous were proud North African Jews who occasionally forayed into Jewish traditional texts. Emmanuel Levinas, whose theory can be characterized as a form of radical empathy with the experiences of the other, drew explicitly on Talmudic texts that he reread in terms of this empathy. Closer to our own moment, Judith Butler’s illuminating work on the performative nature of gender is colored by their experiences as both a queer woman and a Jew. But Jews are not the only ones to call upon their marginalized experiences in order to ground theory. Edward Said’s Orientalism (more below) is more compelling because of his standing as a Palestinian refugee. Frantz Fanon’s critique of racial and colonial prejudices draws strength from his experience as an Afro-Caribbean francophone who participated in the Algerian revolution.
In my own work, I’ve found the theories of Foucault and Derrida particularly helpful. Foucault’s work on power dynamics allows for insights into both small domestic power relations (e.g., how rabbis and their wives negotiated their religious behaviors) and larger social and institutional ones (e.g., how the rabbis produce rabbinic literature as an attempt to assert authority over contemporaneous non-rabbinic Jews). Derrida’s Deconstruction critiques the kinds of claims that were popular in the nineteenth-century model of scholarly “truth” as a discovered object. It then replaces such claims with models of information that must always be questioned or critiqued, even as they are relied upon to build arguments. I can use Foucault to think about the way the rabbis negotiated for power within a Jewish community that was not yet under the sway of rabbinic authority. A text that seems to assume rabbinic authority becomes, with this lens, a text about the rabbinic attempt to become authorities on Jewish practice. I can use Derrida to reread ancient rabbinic texts and center my readings on figures that those rabbis would have deemed marginal; I can also use Derrida to acknowledge the subjectivities of prior critical scholars—including myself—and the limits of subjectivity itself.
The current pro-Palestinian protests have been spearheaded by several groups, but the one with the highest profile is Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). This organization invokes Orientalism, the theory first articulated by Edward Said. Drawing on Foucault’s notion of discourse, Said identified an “Orientalist discourse” in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British and French literatures, especially in the ways that these majority cultures conceive their eastern others. He outlined Orientalism as a Western cultural movement that was heavily invested in depicting the “Oriental” (primarily South Asian populations and the inhabitants of biblical lands) as foreign and inferior. That is, descriptions of Eastern cultures and individuals in high literature and culture, education, and public policy—though widely accepted as “true”—were not descriptions so much as they were constructions, even inventions. One of Said’s insights was that cultural depictions are not only nonexempt from the political; rather, they are saturated with politics, nourishing and being nourished by it. Said’s work inspired theories of post-colonialism, which aim to center the experiences of colonized populations over and against the dominant accounts of British and French imperialism.
SJP also invokes the work of Fanon, who combined Marxist understandings of class with post-Freudian notions of individual desire and the collective unconscious to think about the place of the Black man in twentieth-century colonialist society. The language and ideas of such theorists contribute to SJP’s rigid articulation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a manifestation of colonialism, thus requiring that its members and supporters take on a mechanistic identification with Palestinians and adopt the rhetoric of Palestinian nationalism wholesale. Building on this, the toolkit distributed by the national leadership of SJP employs theory to demonize not just the Oslo Peace Accords, but diplomacy itself, as a colonialist weapon whose outcome was always prejudiced; the only proposed solution is Palestinian empowerment.
Those of us in the academy who employ and admire theory find ourselves today confronted by the weaponization of familiar tropes and language. This is a more intellectual version of a common rhetorical bind. Protesters against Israel and Zionism often rely on moral judgments delivered in terms that close discussion and make dissent inherently suspicious. The use of terms like “apartheid” and “genocide” to describe Israel’s behavior is an attempt to use familiar conceptual language as a way of moving public sentiment. Like a lawyer asking a defendant, “When did you stop beating your wife?” in court, using these concepts is a winning rhetorical strategy because it puts Israel and its supporters on the defensive from the outset.
Something similar happens with the use of academic theoretical terms. “Settler colonialism” is a term that has been around for some time (I’ve found an example of its application to Israel-Palestine already in the 1970s), but developed as a theory with work on Australia in the 1990s. The term describes a system of displacing indigenous residents and their culture and replacing them with an imperial satellite colony. While aspects of the term apply to the Israeli context (the landmass of Palestine was the subject of imperial jockeying, and there are natives who were displaced by arrivistes), there are too many differences (the large number of Israelis who originate outside the conquering empire, Jewish claims to nativity in the land, clashes between Zionists and the British before the establishment of the state) for the category to be all that useful to scholars. Because the framework must be adjusted so much, its explanatory power is effectively dulled. Yet, though a responsible academic would struggle to analyze the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the lens of settler colonialism (and any uncomplicated use would not survive peer review in a reputable academic journal), the term is now brandished as a rhetorical weapon against Israel. The implication of using the term in this way is that scholars have identified Israel as a textbook case of settler colonialism, and therefore, as a moral evil. Such an impression is magnified for those students who misunderstand theory to be a form of objective knowledge rather than a framework for analysis.
And it isn’t just academic theory pressuring students socially and intellectually. Many academics in the humanities who do very subtle and nuanced work in their own research areas eschew complexity when it comes to Israel. They talk about Israel as the last vestige of nineteenth-century Western nationalism and use it as a punching bag for all colonialist projects and their reverberations down to the present. Without knowing the region, the history of the conflict, or any specific cultural context (including Jewish collective identity), these scholars link Israel to the West, whiteness, and privilege while linking Palestinians to the Oriental, people of color, and the disenfranchised—and when such academics join protests, they lend credence to the misuse of theoretical vocabulary.
Activist scholars throw around statements about “Israeli colonialism” as though they are universally acknowledged facts rather than a post-colonial theory they are using as a framework within which to analyze. This then encourages a jump from the descriptive mode of academic analysis to the prescriptive mode of campus advocacy. If the situation were as black-and-white as the misuse of theory can make it seem, who would not take to the streets? But humanities theory is far better at description than prescription. What the humanities does best in general is to tease apart past events and existing texts and describe them in all their complexity. Theory offers a vocabulary and structure for doing that in conversation with others. Much of that theory is generated by and sustains moral judgments. But there’s a difference between a moral judgment undergirding a complex description and a moral judgment that translates into immediate action. Normative recommendations—do this, don’t do that—do not allow for complexity.
Having critiqued the misuse of theory, I’d like to demonstrate the utility of humanities discourse by modeling a theory-informed analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in general and the Israel-Hamas war in particular. I want to model what it could mean to think with theory in this context. This is an exercise in integrating my own two identities and redeeming an academic discourse that I love. At the outset, let me point out that I’m using theory to think with rather than reducing a complex object of research to a simple binary question of political support. I am not an expert on Israel-Palestine; as a deeply invested layperson, I offer the below as one model for using the tools of humanities to think productively about the conflict.
To honor theory’s commitment to understanding power relationships and magnifying the visibility of marginal communities, I must begin by acknowledging that Palestinians are and have been suppressed since at least 1948. The social, political, and economic exclusions, discriminations, and degradations which they as individuals and as a people have experienced and continue to experience are clear. And yet, it is necessary to add nuance to our analysis by carefully distinguishing among different Palestinian populations (e.g., Israeli Arab citizens, West Bank residents, Gaza residents, refugees abroad) and being sensitive to the variety of explicit and implicit injustices committed against all these populations.
Israel is, of course, a central cause of Palestinian oppression, but Israel is not a monolithic entity. Israel as government or as society is a plural, dynamic entity that harnesses and represents competing energies, including, and surpassing, its political parties. Israel is represented by both the actions of its army and the arguments and rulings of its Supreme Court. Israel is likewise represented by its non-governmental entities, from right-wing settlers seeking to maximize Israeli control of the West Bank to left-wing Palestinian allies in human rights NGOs, in academia, and in media.
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Even accounting for its internal plurality, Israel is not solely responsible for Palestinian suffering. There is blame to go around. Looking back to the founding of the state or to its origins in Herzlian Zionism, one realizes the need to include the Western colonial powers who “discovered” and settled “primitive” worlds in Africa, Asia, and the Americas from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. The specific villain in the context of Israel-Palestine is the British, who received the mandate for Palestine from the League of Nations after the defeat of the Ottomans in World War I.
Throughout their mandatory period of control, the British vacillated between Arab and Jewish/Zionist entreaties, offering often contradictory pledges in response to these competing nationalisms. This ongoing situation led to increasing conflict between the two sides, and the British departure created a vacuum that only violence could fill. The United States entered the picture after the Holocaust, as Americans wanted to resolve the Jewish refugee crisis by maximizing the resettlement of Jews in Palestine (rather than the United States). U.S. governmental interests both during and after the Cold War then played a strong role, leading to a close relationship between America and Israel that often ignored or supported (tacitly or otherwise) the suppression of Palestinians, broadly construed. The rise of the religious right and the strength of Jewish lobbies in domestic U.S. politics further buttressed this favoritism. We are currently witnessing a change on the U.S. domestic front as Black Americans and a strengthening Muslim-American lobby are providing counterpressure to this longstanding support.
Neighboring Arab countries and the Islamic Republic of Iran have also contributed to Palestinian suffering. The Kingdom of Jordan has struggled to balance its concern for Palestinians outside its borders against the needs of its citizens and its own integrity as a government. For example, since 1988, Jordan—which, uniquely among Israel’s neighboring countries, absorbed many Palestinian refugees in 1948—has arbitrarily stripped nationality from many Palestinians who originally lived west of the Jordan River and had been naturalized as Jordanian citizens between 1954 and 1967. Egypt, meanwhile, was the original military administrator of the Gaza Strip; it is the Egyptian model of refugee camps without citizenship rights that Israel inherited in 1967 and has since perpetuated. Neither Egypt nor Syria has ever welcomed or absorbed significant numbers of Palestinian refugees. And then there’s Iran. Though the leaders of Iran are fundamentalist Shi’a Muslims, they have supported Palestinian (Sunni) groups that attack Israel. Iranian antipathy towards Israel is a function of Israel’s pre-1979 support of the Shah; its control of Jerusalem (offensive to Iran religiously); and its threat to Iranian Muslim rule because of Israel’s alliance with the United States, Israel’s status as a Western-style democracy with nuclear weapons, and the shadow war that Iran and Israel have conducted for over a decade. With or without explicit Iranian directions, Hamas acted on October 7 to prevent Iran’s isolation from regional realignment with the normalization of Israeli ties to Saudi Arabia.
Any theoretically informed analysis of the conflict must also include the role that Palestinians, both historically and presently, have played in the conflict. Theory should insist on it. Again, we need to start with the era of European imperialism. The political and intellectual revolutions of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century modernity introduced the political notion of citizenship as part of a post-Cartesian commitment to the subjective agency of every human being. This agency became the grounding for social contract theory, leading up to Kant’s transformation of morality from something revealed to something emerging from the (hypothetical) human agent, namely, the categorical imperative.
Theory builds on and complicates these assertions. Freud’s analysis of the psyche calls human agency into question and suggests that an individual can be the site of conflicting agencies. Marx’s theory of society calls into question the true freedom of human agency within a classed society. Post-Marxist theories pick up on this and demand not only attention but also agency for the “Oriental,” the “sub-altern,” and the “intersectional.” Renowned theorist Gayatri Spivak’s founding post-colonialism essay is titled, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Her question simultaneously calls attention to the multiple layers of oppression within colonized populations and to speech as a metaphor for agency. If we recognize the agency of even the lowest members of the social hierarchy, we commit to hearing what they have to say. Considering the foundational role for agency and autonomy in contemporary theory, how can Palestinian speech and action be ignored by those who employ theory to lambast Israel?
It is hard to overstate the impact that Foucault has had in the humanities, social sciences, and law. Several of Foucault’s studies introduced terms (knowledge/power, governmentality, genealogy, biopower, episteme, and discipline) that have launched mini-discourses of their own in several different fields. He transformed our understanding of power from a static entity (something that someone has, e.g., a state actor) to a dynamic relationship between two or more agents (something that is always being negotiated). The implication of this insight is that even when analyzing the most imbalanced of relationships, a subtle thinker must consider the role of the disempowered party in producing or enabling that relationship. Orientalism, post-colonialism, and intersectionality all build on this aspect of Foucault’s work. To invoke any of these theories without also interrogating the role of the Palestinians is to use theory badly.
Talking about the Palestinian role might seem like victim-blaming. But while accusing someone of “victim-blaming” is a winning rhetorical argument in popular morality, it cannot preclude our ability to think through complex issues. Theoretical thinkers push themselves to ask difficult questions and go down uncomfortable paths.
Teasing apart Palestinian political identity from other aspects of cultural identity is a difficult task that mirrors efforts to distinguish between Jewish and Zionist identities. Palestinian national ambitions were first fomented in the years before World War I, in part as a response to Zionism. These grew stronger as they worked to oppose Zionism and Jewish immigration under the British mandate. One could argue that Palestinian nationalism was first constituted as a reaction to the existential threat Zionism represented. That is, Zionism helped to build its own opponent, as the two movements sought control over the same resources. And multiple actors stepped forward to embody themselves as the leaders of the Palestinian reaction to Zionism and the British. In the 1948 aftermath of the November 1947 United Nations partition, area states (Egypt, Syria, Transjordan, Iraq) entered the region to fight against the newly declared Israel’s forces. This coalition, which was somewhat reprised twenty years later in the Six-Day War, suggests that resistance to Israel has been as much ethnic/religious as it has been national/political. Also, the participation of these allied countries, some of whom had significant populations of Palestinians, complicates the simplistic picture of Palestinian Arabs as disempowered victims.
A conversation about Palestinian agency must wonder why Palestinian leadership has at different times refused to accept diplomatic overtures towards statehood, utilized resources for terror rather than economic and political well-being, and failed to sustain a functioning, non-corrupt democracy. There are answers to these questions that I can hear voiced by a campus protester: “The Palestinians refuse diplomacy because of its implicit bias, terror is the only option given the military disadvantage, and the economic conditions of extreme poverty make it hard to govern democratically and without corruption.” These answers are not without some merit, but a theorist would note that the issues cannot and should not be reduced to single causes, and these types of answers are also ways of absolving oneself of responsibility. Palestinian refusals of overtures toward statehood have also been driven by a visceral revulsion to the notion of recognizing Israel; terror is a release valve for psychological frustration; money and power are universal human lures that may be particularly tempting for people who have been raised in an environment deficient in both resources and rights.
We must also talk about Hamas and what it did on October 7. One can theorize about the history of Palestinian identity or of Palestinian nationalism. One can debate whether the charters for Fatah, the PLO, or Hamas are fair representations of the beliefs of their leaders, their followers, and voters, and/or Palestinians in general. There is no debating the semiotics of October 7. It speaks hatred in the loudest possible register. Terror was the objective, and civilians were the target. Hamas provoked Israel knowing that Palestinian civilians would bear the brunt of Israel’s military response. And during that response, Hamas has cruelly withheld resources from Palestinian civilians, both to provide for its own (a group that does not include civilians unaffiliated with the organization) and to use the suffering of these innocents as (winning) arguments in an international propaganda war.
Finally, theoretical examination must also fan out to include the United States. While most people are thinking about Orientalism and post-colonialism in the context of Israel-Palestine, one could also use these theoretical tools to analyze the relationship between the United States and Israel. Israel’s significant dependence on the U.S. politically, militarily, and economically makes that relationship worth thinking through under the framework of empire and colony (though here, too, one needs to balance the utility of the theoretical framework against the difficulty of its application to a relationship that is only similar to—but not actually—that of empire and colony).
Some of the recent tension between the President of the United States and the Prime Minister of Israel over the decision to enter Rafah can be understood with reference to Freud. In such an understanding, we might say that though Israel is dependent on the U.S., it has long denied this reliance and is now testing the limits of that relationship as a child tests its parent with the knowledge that it can rely on parental support even after transgression. Though the U.S. usually treats Israel as a Western ally, we can also see occasional moments of Orientalism, as when American leaders sometimes describe Israeli leaders as “hotblooded,” “hotheaded,” or otherwise irrational. That these characteristics are often described as “Middle Eastern” rather than specifically “Israeli,” only further supports their fundamentally Orientalist nature.
Humanities scholars have employed theory to criticize Israel for some time; many were active in the Boycott, Divest, and Sanction (BDS) movement as it was first building momentum in the 2010s. Two of the first organizations to sign on to a boycott of Israeli institutions were the American Studies Association (ASA) and the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA), both of which committed themselves to the principles of BDS in December 2013. While the ASA invokes the language of racism in its declaration of support, the NAISA chooses to frame the conflict as involving the colonization of indigenous land. Both organizations seem to be exporting the central theoretical dynamics of their subject areas in North America to the Middle East. Yet neither organization has boycotted U.S. academic institutions. There appears in this case to be a profound psychological displacement in which Israel is made the bad object to be shunned in punishment for Western sins. The French theorist Rene Girard years ago identified a similar dynamic at work in medieval antisemitism: expulsion, oppression, and massacre of the Jews was a psychological release valve for the troubles of Western European society. To be clear, I am not asserting that BDS is unjustified, that it is ineffective, or that it is inherently antisemitic. I am calling out hypocrisy and identifying its root cause as displaced disempowerment in the domestic context. And I’m noting that displaced disempowerment has also been the fuel powering historical antisemitism.
One of the things that I have found encouraging about academia throughout this conflict is that even passionate academics in the throes of political argument are occasionally able to concede points against the interests of their own positions. In those moments, I get a glimpse of the notion that academics are interested in working collaboratively and responsibly to improve our collective understanding of the world.
I’ve been on sabbatical and out of the classroom for the past year. I’m eager to return because the classroom is a special space carved out for doing deep and theoretically informed analysis. I’m looking forward to talking to my students about current events and hearing how the events of the past few months have informed their developments as scholars and as people. We live in a polarized political and cultural climate in which the tendency is to find fellowship with like-minded peers who can confirm our own thoughts and feelings. The humanities classroom is one of the last places where people encounter new ideas and frameworks as well as the life experiences of other human beings, both in the flesh and on the page (or in the cloud). It is incumbent upon humanities academics not to allow theory to be absorbed into the slipstream of our zero-sum political climate and popular culture. We have the tools to combat simple-mindedness and pure partisanship; let’s try to use them properly.
