This symposium on Parting Ways is just out in the print version of the journal Political Theology. It includes contributions by Sarah Hammerschlag, Larisa Reznik, Martin Kavka, Vincent Lloyd, and myself with a response by the author, Judith Butler.

There is something uncomfortable about the entire exchange. At points frustrated by the political polemics roused by her book, Butler would clearly have preferred to have focused the discussion around purely philosophical problems raised by Levinas, Benjamin, Arendt, Darwish, and her readings of them. But there seems to have been no way to get past the problem of Jewish identity, given the polemical contexts that stage her readings. It has been suggested to me by a dear friend that Butler did not seem to want to theorize Jewish identity, i.e. her own Jewish identity, which she takes as a given matter of biographical fact.

What I would suggest is that…