Cosmopolitanisms and the Jews

Abstract

This book represents a collaboration between two scholars whose interests overlap for both personal and academic reasons. Cathy S. Gelbin was born in the German Democratic Republic, the daughter of a Jewish-American father and a German mother. Educated in Wall-time West Berlin and the United States, where she received her doctorate, she has taught in Germany and the United Kingdom and is now at Manchester University. Sander L. Gilman, of Russian Jewish descent, was her doctoral supervisor at Cornell and now teaches at Emory University in Atlanta. He has taught at numerous universities in North America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. Both are Jewish, both are self-labeled cosmopolitans, and both are actively engaged in trying to understand what such a status means for their work in light of their biographical trajectories. This project has brought them together to examine the history into which they, in complex and fragmentary ways, fit.The title of this volume evokes the multiple meanings of both cosmopolitan and Jew in the discourse about cosmopolitanism. Indeed, the term cosmopolitan is oftentimes contested as to exactly what type of cosmopolitanism can be denoted by that term. We can only speak of cosmopolitanisms as it is impossible easily to bring the distinctions between a "moral" cosmopolitism, such as that advocated by Martha Nussbaum, and the "utilitarian" cosmopolitanism of Peter Singer into the same conceptual category. The multiple, contradictory meanings of Jews constitute a well-known problem in postmodern theory since at least 1988 when Jean-François Lyotard published Heidegger et "les juifs," evoking the jew (lowercased in the English translation) as the mark of ineffable alterity rather than lived experience. Thus we write of "cosmopolitanisms and the Jews."We do not seek to provide an exhaustive exploration of the oftcontradictory meanings of these two categories but rather to provide both a historical framework for their multiple meanings through detailed analyses of viii Preface cultural products-novels, plays, poetry, philosophical essays-that illustrate the radical conceptual shifts associated with the notion of global mobility. Both authors are not only mundivagant but also define themselves as rooted in a specific national culture (or see themselves as suspended between these two experiential poles) and explored the complexity of cosmopolitanism in their works. Thus, we have taken the position that one of the functions of literature is to serve as a thought experiment for authors dealing, in our cases, with the questions of globalization, acculturation, migration, exile, national identity, and the like. We are quite aware that literature can have many other functions and can also be read in ways radically different than we have undertaken. Our project is a literary as well as a historical one. We hope that we have shown how relatively close readings of literary texts can be used to help frame the simultaneous contradictions and ambiguities of conceptual history, such as the history of the cosmo...