The Postcolonial Jewish Question - by Mendel Kranz (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A history of how decolonization shaped Jewish political identity in late-twentieth-century France.

In The Postcolonial Jewish Question, Mendel Kranz shows how France's colonial history fundamentally shaped contemporary debates among Jews in France about racism, discrimination, and minority politics during the late twentieth century. As the wider country confronted the legacies of the Holocaust and the decline of its colonial empire, Jewish thinkers questioned the boundaries of their own political identity and challenged prevailing paradigms of Western universalism. This book traces how prominent and lesser-known thinkers--including Albert Memmi, Emmanuel Levinas, Alain Finkielkraut, and Wladimir Rabi--as well as organizations like the Colloque des intellectuels juifs de langue française engaged with issues of oppression, nationhood, and communal identity, and the ways that colonialism and its afterlives shaped those discussions. Kranz reveals how the Jewish question itself changed shape through confrontations with postcolonial politics. In doing so, he calls for a reassessment of the parameters of the Jewish question amid colonialism's enduring legacies in the present.

Review Quotes

"In a magisterial essay of intellectual history, Kranz carefully traces the twisted process by which French Jewish republicanism and universalism were increasingly constrained by Western boundaries, breaking with the tradition of anticolonialism. Kranz's critical gaze is both refreshing and enlightening."

"In this gripping intellectual history, Kranz carefully reconstructs the entanglement of post-Holocaust French Jewish political identity with the Algerian war, Zionism, and French xenophobia and Islamophobia. His insights about the tensions in postwar French Jewish thought between difference and universalism, Third World solidarity and conservatism, and anti-Zionism and Zionism are poignant and very pertinent for our time."

About the Author

Mendel Kranz is assistant professor at Middlebury College.