Exchanges with Atalia Omer: ReOrienting Jewishness

Abstract

This introduction to the contributions of Atalia Omer, and to the commentators of her landmark book Days of Awe, starts with a question that might already be on the reader’s mind. Why is ReOrient: The Journal of Critical Muslim Studies exploring the lessons from an ethnography of American Jews? For those well-acquainted with the journal, this should not come as a complete surprise. Since its inception, ReOrient has been challenging disciplinary and identity silos in order to both understand global hegemonies, and to contest them. One of the crucial contributions of ReOrient is to constitute a critical space in which to deeply interrogate the reified binaries created by scientific positivism and by secularist narratives. The intellectual project of this journal enables us to ReOrient epistemological interventions, so as to collaborate in bringing in a decolonial future beyond the omnipresent “redemptive” modern/colonial “telos of the West” (Sayyid 2014: 11–14; Editorial Board 2015: 5–7). This forum seeks to explore how Omer’s sophisticated and ground-breaking “critical caretaking” of the social movements emerging in one of the centers of the world, led by one of the most allegedly uniformly “successful” Westernized populations, can help us break down geopolitical barriers (Omer 2019: 122–42). After all, before reading Omer’s innovative text, a reader may have difficulty disagreeing with the fact that Jews in North America (historically anteceded by British and Dutch Caribbean Jews [Rosenblatt, 2022]) have for centuries been a test case for an (often difficult) assimilation of normative Jewry into whiteness. In addition, since the Holocaust – when the center of Jewish normativity definitively left Europe – North America has become without question one of the leading spaces, along with occupied Palestine, of both Jewish Westernization and of the consolidation of a hegemonic model of Jewishness across the world. This is particularly important when many readers of ReOrient (including Omer, the commentators, Editorial Board members, and this writer) are deeply suspicious of theory that is universalized from centers of power/knowledge without considering geopolitical conditions. This is precisely where one of the crucial contributions of Omer’s book, subtitled Re-Imagining Jewishness in Solidarity with Palestinians, emerges with